The Impenetrable Barrier Trapping Us in the Solar System
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
A barrier no one can cross 0:00
You will never leave the solar system, and probably neither will anyone alive today, or perhaps any human ever. There is an invisible barrier, made of dust and nothingness, that seems impossible to overcome for carbon based animals like us. This may apply not just to humans but to any alien civilization, none of which might ever venture into deep space in a meaningful way.
Space is far too big 1:03
Human brains evolved to judge distances like right here or over the next hill, so grasping the true size of space is nearly impossible. The fastest humans have ever traveled is 40,000 km/h, set by Apollo astronauts in 1969, while the Parker Solar Probe now reaches 635,000 km/h using gravity assists from Venus. Even imagining a ship that fast, reaching Mars would take two weeks, Pluto about a year, and the heliopause a few years more, but reaching the true edge of the solar system, the Oort cloud, would take 2,500 years, roughly the span from the founding of the Roman Republic to today. Beyond that lies nothing at all.
Pushing toward the speed limit 3:00
There is no known way to travel faster than light, teleport, or freeze people for the journey. But fusion or antimatter propulsion could plausibly push a ship to about 20 percent the speed of light, fast enough to reach the Oort cloud's edge in eight years and Alpha Centauri in twenty. At that speed, though, even a single iron atom striking the hull carves a damage track tenths of a millimeter deep, a grain of dust hits like a grenade, and a golf ball sized rock releases more energy than the Hiroshima bomb, meaning the fastest safe speed may already be close to a hard limit.
Nearby destinations are disappointing 7:33
Even with a fast ship, a crew reaching Alpha Centauri after twenty years would find deadly, uninhabitable planets, worth studying scientifically but a poor reward for such a journey. Within a realistic 40 year lifetime of travel at 20 percent light speed, humans could reach only about 8 light years away, and our solar system sits in an unusually empty pocket of the galaxy. Our stellar neighborhood, a bubble 25 light years across containing 34 stars and 6 brown dwarfs, holds only two other sun like stars, and nearby Earth like candidates such as GJ1061 d offer no guarantee of being anything but a second Mars. Truly promising, breathable worlds could lie thousands of light years off, requiring journeys of centuries even at high speed, and it remains hard to imagine, without real science fiction technology, how a connected civilization could sustain itself across such distances. The video closes by noting that predicting technology's future is famously unreliable, citing an 1903 New York Times editorial that guessed powered flight was a million years away, just 69 days before the Wright brothers flew.
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