Welcome to the Science Mondays segment! Each week here on Geek Alabama, Science Mondays will feature stuff from the world of science and science related content. Our goal here at Geek Alabama is to hopefully have you learn something useful and fulfilling. Science is a geek’s best friend, and we love featuring science content here at Geek Alabama.
Four light-years from Earth, low in the southern sky, sits the closest star system to our own: Alpha Centauri. To the naked eye it looks like a single point of light, but it is actually three stars, including a near-twin of our own Sun, circled by at least one world roughly the size of the Earth. It is the nearest shore across the ocean of night, the one place beyond our solar system we might ever dream of reaching.
And yet the journey there may be one of the most terrifying things our species could ever attempt. The distance is so vast that with the fastest spacecraft we have ever built, the crossing would take longer than all of recorded human history. In this documentary, we explore what it would truly take to reach the nearest star, what might be waiting for us if we ever arrived, and the quiet, unsettling truth that Alpha Centauri forces upon us, that we can see other shores glinting across the dark, and may never be able to reach a single one of them.
Sit back, and let us cross the gulf to our nearest neighbor.
Categories: Science Talk Stuff
