Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
Уровень B2· 734 слова
The latest limited Edition Pin is here. Now available on the kurzgesagt Shop. You will never leave the solar system.
Nobody alive today will. And maybe no human ever. Locked in by an invisible barrier, impossible to overcome for carbon based animals like us.
And not just us – there may be millions of alien civilizations in the universe, none of them ever able to venture into deep space in a meaningful way.
Ok but how can this be? We've made countless videos imagining how the exploration of the galaxy and beyond should just be a question of time.
Sort of mandatory for civilizations at a certain point. But there is a catch: We are pushing up against fundamental physics.
What is this barrier, made of dust and nothingness? And why is it so hard to overcome? You Don’t Understand How Large Space Is.
We Don’t Either. Conceptualizing the size of space is impossible for our ape brains that evolved to understand distances like “right here” and “over the next hill”.
Space is so absurdly huge that we just check out and just hear “very far”. “Very far” and “A million times very far” feels the same but it is not.
To help our brains, let us start with what makes us cross distances: speed. The fastest a human ever traveled in space were Astronauts at 40,000 km/h, returning from the Moon in 1969.
Not bad, but way too slow. The fastest thing humans have ever built by far is the Parker Solar Probe, which at this moment uses a physics cheatcode, hurling around the gravity well of Venus, accelerating to get closer to the sun.
After seven years of doing this, the probe is shooting through space at a breathtaking 635,000 km/h.
Fast enough to go around the world in 4 minutes or to cover the distance from Earth to the moon in 36.
