Are We Meant to Leave Earth? Why Humanity May Have No Choice but to Go to Space
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Why times can differ in your player
So on Earth, you know, if you went to a high enough mountain and let's say there wasn't any atmosphere because that just gets in the way and you fired off a bullet, probably at around eight kilometers a second, eventually, if you didn't step out of the way, the bullet would come around and hit you in the back of the head, sort of 90 minutes later or thereabouts, because the bullet would have entered an orbit. On Mars, the dust is not only abrasive, it's also chemically quite reactive. There are things called perchlorates that form on the surface of Martian soil, and they're essentially oxidants and they're pretty aggressive. It's like, you know, putting your your oven cleaner uh on your skin or in your lungs. The bullet that you just drop out of your hand will fall at exactly the same rate as the bullet that you fire out of your rifle.
Of course. the bullet that you fire out of your rifle will travel uh uh a a greater distance horizontally, um, but it the amount of time it will take to to hit um the surface will be the same. A thought experiment of trying to go to Alpha Centauri with a chemical rocket. And it turns out if you want to do that in any reasonable amount of time, let's say 100 years, right? Yeah, 100 years is commensurate with a human lifetime.
Um, you could imagine building an enormous interstellar chemical rocket. Well, it turns out that the amount of rocket fuel you would need or propellant is some enormous factor greater in mass than the mass of the observable universe to do that. So you could build a chemical rocket and get to Alpha Centauri in, you know, 40,000 years, 50,000 years. In fact, we've pretty much done that with the Voyager probes. Um but anything quicker than that and chemical rocket
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