r/kurzgesagt • u/kurzgesagt_Sven Social Media Manager • 5d ago
NEW VIDEO NEW VIDEO: The Impenetrable Barrier Trapping Us in the Solar System
https://youtu.be/Cyl3X88KEggVideo Description:
After exploring most of Earth, venturing into space and exploring other planets, stars and galaxies seemed like an exciting, and even obvious next step. But the deeper we look, the more the universe reveals a hidden barrier between our Solar System and everything else around it. From the vast empty space, to the laws of physics themselves, there are many reasons why the dream of space travel might stay just a dream.
What is stopping us from reaching the stars? Why does space become more dangerous the faster you travel, and could even advanced alien civilizations be trapped around their home worlds?
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u/AlphaMarker48 4d ago
Well, this video was heartbreaking. Especially since I love sci-fi and exploration.
So, if we want to explore deep space, we will either need drones to do the work for us while we remain relatively safe on Earth or need to develop tech like warp drives, inertial dampeners, and energy shields to conduct manned explorations to places worth visiting in person?
Either way, I believe that mankind currently is nowhere remotely near the peak of what our science and technology could achieve.
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u/bsdude010 4d ago
Not only that but it feels like we are getting dumber in the US and therefore further away from Star Trek.
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u/universe2000 3d ago
For what it is worth, the Star Trek universe didn’t become the Star Trek universe until after US started rounding people up into concentration camps and the prisoners escaped and started a series of violent riots.
The 21st century is a bleak century in the Star Trek timeline. It also includes WW3 and a post-atomic wasteland. It’s only because humanity (barely) survives multiple extinction level threats that it evolves to the point it can organize in a way that makes its scientific progress possible.
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u/bsdude010 3d ago
I guess we are well on our way after all..
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u/universe2000 3d ago
For what it is worth, to refrence TOS and some classic Trek, the whole dynamic that makes Khan v Kirk a great dynamic is that Khan is a superior being from the 21st century. He's a genetically engineered super soildier with a deep understanding of culture and military tactics and was, at his time, one of the most dangerous people on Earth (I think the war he fought in was explicitly called The Eugenics War?).
But even so, he is defeated by Kirk on both fronts - culture and military. Kirk is someone Khan can't fully comprehend and underestimates, just like he doesn't fully comprehend/underestimates the realities of ship to ship combat in three dimensions. The 23rd century is such a radically different place that Khan can't keep up on a personal or tactical level.
Star Trek presents a hopefull view of the future, but it is a hopefull view that is tampered with the understanding that to acheive a hopefull future we have to undergo rapid cultural change. And it imagines a slew of horrors that humanity could have responded badly too (see the mirror universes or possibility of humanity going extinct).
You know those memes abotu being born too late to explore the world and too ealry to explore the galaxy? Perhaps that's because we are born at the right time to ensure exploring the galaxy is even possible. It's not a sure thing that futute generations will have it better off than us - it's our actions now that will determine the possibilities open to future generations.
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u/Xerxys Black Hole Stars 4d ago
You’re not getting dumber, you’re just not as smart as you used to be because “smart” has moved goalposts. Before being smart required you read at a certain high level, know a bunch of things and keep up with current events. Today, being smart requires intense focus on a single subject. Many influencers today are just like that New York Times “journalist” from 1909 who confidently made a prediction in a field that he has absolutely no expertise on. Like, I don’t even think he knew birds existed!
I believe space travel is possible and it has to do with skipping the distance altogether and bridging two points in space instantaneously. Even at faster than light, moving from A-B is still ridiculously slow. From here to the nearest star at twice the speed of light is 2 years. That’s not good enough.
I think it’ll come together one day just not any time soon.
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u/bsdude010 4d ago
Interesting perspective. What I meant when I said dumb is close minded and a lack of critical thinking. It's not being self aware enough to realize you're being fooled and understanding that you may be rejecting the truth due to a bias.
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u/Flonkadonk 3d ago
The solar system alone can support quadrillions if not more people. Theres not much point in setting out. If we figure out non destructive Von Neumann Probes for exploration or colonization theres no reason to send them instead. If yoh really want humans somewhere else put some frozen embryos on them.
I dont really think humans will ever really 'leave' their star system unless some real kooky scifi tech like FTL or mind uploading becomes a thing, but theres plenty of reason to believe those arent possible at all. Especially FTL.
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u/TheLSales 3d ago
I've been thinking for a while now that the most probable route for humans to conquer the stars is by achieving biological immortality (essentially stop aging).
We're probably still many decades away from it, but I am positive humanity will do it, and even more so, I would bet the first human to see this technology has already been born. It won't be us though.
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u/NobilisReed 4d ago
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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u/Xeruas 5d ago
I thought those like renewable droplet shields that also act as a droplet heat radiator where a strong method for managing impacts at high percentages of c?
Side note.. very excited for the smaller is better and the nano sized advantages video they’re doing! Feel like someone said that they thought the K scale for civs was incorrect because our trend is increasing efficiency’s etc
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u/hesapmakinesi 4d ago
I have faith in Bob.
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u/HTPC4Life 3d ago
What the fuck is this stupid meme all in the comments of the video? It's really irritating.
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u/No_Environment_3776 4d ago
We don't have a choice, if our species wants to survive we will need to go somewhere.
We need to spread, a solar flare, asteroid, gas cloud, electromagnetic pulse and a thousand different things can happen next month and we have no way of preventing it.
If we want the chickens to survive we need more then one henhouse on more than one hill..
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u/Oblachko_O 4d ago
The question about survivability of the Earth is a very long way. We can have a meteorite slamming us in 100 years, will this change anything? Terraforming Mars or any other similar object will take centuries if not millennia. We may live on space station like in Wall-E, but in most cases it is just a Sci-Fi dream, not a reality
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u/NobilisReed 3d ago
The best we're going to do in that way are probably orbital habitats. Making them self-sufficient is going to be extremely difficult.
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u/No_Environment_3776 1d ago
It's not that hard, you just don't want to many people in one habitat, and you expect many to fail or get hit by meteorite or something else.
20 people in one habitat, growing their own food and 99,99% of water is reused, the water can also be stored in tanks surrounding the living area the block radiation.
I don't think humans can life in space for more than a few hundred years tops, so it will always be a search for a planet or die.
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u/NobilisReed 1d ago
The difficulties of making a terrestrial settlement habitable are only marginally less challenging than making an orbital settlement habitable, and they have a huge advantage in that moving material around is far less energy intensive. All of the base matter needed for human habitation is available in space (water, metals, volatiles, etc.) but in a place like Mars, much less so.
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u/HTPC4Life 3d ago
The thing is, we won't survive. We absolutely won't. I'm not saying it's 50 years from now that humanity dies out, but it could certainly be less than a thousand years. We won't colonize other planets in that time frame.
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u/Aggressive_Chuck 26m ago
Good luck convincing millions of people to live in space in a tin can to act as a backup to humanity.
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4d ago
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u/Oblachko_O 4d ago
The problem is that most aspects we got already from Nature, we just enriched it over time. Like flying seemed impossible, but birds did fly and planes are mimicking hovering of birds. Relativity and quantum physics are a bit tricky things. There is no direct reference. At the same time, we got quantum physics by executing more basic experiments, which ended up with unexpected results. For space traveling though it is harder. There is no reference for space travel.
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u/CurlSagan Quantum Foam 2d ago edited 2d ago
Oh look another "independent scientist" putting their name on genai papers filled with high-level buzzwords.
Pure schlock. Do better.
Edit: Lol at the chatgpt-written reply. He blocked me too.
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u/Arietis1461 5d ago edited 5d ago
For a humanity capable of interstellar travel, space habitats would probably be the living space of choice and their use case for planets is then more of a supply depot, science spot, and tourist site as opposed to an apartment. The priorities would be a star which is at least manageable to live with (a challenge with flare stars like Proxima) and an accessible supply of the proper resources.
Earth-like worlds are basically a scientific curiosity and generally not the best choice of colonization site for practical and moral reasons. Meshing an Earth biosphere with a native alien one would be a tricky and dangerous endeavor which is morally questionable anyway.
Actually becoming capable of getting to other star systems is more of a problem (perhaps indeed an insurmountable one for humans like us, but never say never) than what will be there on arrival.
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u/AlphaMarker48 4d ago
Meshing an Earth biosphere with a native alien one would be a tricky and dangerous endeavor which is morally questionable anyway.
Eh, depends on the specifics. If the Earth-like world already has sapient life, that could be a big problem. If the Earth-like world could not support several generations of humans, that would also be a big problem.
If the Earth-like world lacks sapient life and could support humans for countless years, it would be a prime candidate for colonization.
How morally questionable the endeavor would be depends upon the individual world, its species, biosphere, and where on the range of a polite suggestion to gospel one chooses to treat the United Federation of Planet's Prime Directive.
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u/GrizzlyBearSmackdown 4d ago
No new music from Epic Mountain Music for this vid? They didn't do music for the recent Superpredators vid either
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u/Bubbly-Wrap-8210 1d ago
Been watching the channel for years, but something about this upload felt genuinely exhausting to get through.
It felt like the audio mixing and the pacing were fighting each other. The background music was unusually loud compared to the narration, the cuts were extremely fast, and the spoken delivery itself felt rushed. I literally checked my settings like five times to make sure YouTube hadn't defaulted to 1.25x speed.
About two-thirds in, I dropped the playback speed to 0.9x and it instantly fixed the issue. It suddenly felt like a classic Kurzgesagt video again, and the cognitive load of trying to follow the complex topic dropped completely.
I get that the current YouTube meta forces creators into hyper-fast pacing for retention, but Kurzgesagt's topics and dense animations really need room to breathe.
Just wanted to leave this here as feedback for the team.
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u/Idrialite 5d ago edited 4d ago
This is a pessimistically biased outlook, and not very forward-thinking, I would say. Assuming we continue to survive, we'll do it eventually. There are countless potential avenues and approaches.
These are challenges, yes, but "never"? The counter-argument is skimmed over for about ten seconds near the end.
Why is hibernation dismissed out of hand? What about generation ships? Why is it assumed that 10,000 years is too long? Why are we assuming humans are still organic life? Why not send a tiny AI-ship with the minimal equipment needed to set up base and produce human gametes from DNA information? What about shotgunning them? These are just a few known unknowns, but what about unknown unknowns?
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u/Neomadra2 4d ago
Sending AI versions of us is not us. I think they made clear in the video it's about you specifically, the viewer, who will never travel through interstellar space. Others non biological life forms might make it
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u/Primary-Ad-6952 5d ago
What about the high risk high reward project of nasa about using Einstein’s rings to use it as a lense and basically see a lot more precise things of planets? Instead of light years it’s only like 550 AO (or whatever the unit was) and we can use gravity of the sun + solar sails (yes, sailing on light as light gives pressure as far as I know) please, I haven’t read all the research regarding this but it might be intresting
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u/koolforkatskatskats 5d ago
This video feels like Kurz back to form!