Alpha Centauri

And therefore, the heavier you get, you slow yourself down, not being able to achieve any speed faster than the speed of light.

So they, they did, they do have a fix for that, but this is an interesting chart here that shows the difference between if you're going to Alpha Centauri, if you were to travel there at the speed of light, it would take you 4.2 light years to get there.

With warp drive technology, weeks to months.

With wormhole technology, minutes to hours.

Right?

Oh, I, I could also say on the physical level, I'm hybridized with Alpha Centauri humans.

Um, so there are some slight differences, um, that make me a little unusual on Earth.

Um, but I'd be very average by Alpha Centaurian standards.

So there's that connection also.

So Antarian and Centaurian.

[laughs]

Yeah.

Things they can go verify.

If we were to jump off planet and say, "Oh, this guy served on Jupiter or Alpha Centauri," whatever, you know, these wild stories, no one, no one can prove that one way or the other, and then you're just-

Right

... you're just telling a story.

So, you know, we have to ask ourself, if we are getting to these other planets, if we're aware of these other planets, and we're not going through a portal or a jump hole, how is it possible? Because, you know, the biggest issue is that physics proves is that you cannot travel faster than the speed of light because as you increase in speed, you increase in mass because it gets hotter, and therefore you-- the heavier you get, you slow yourself down, not being able to achieve any speed faster than the speed of light.

So they, they did-- they do have a fix for that, but this is an interesting chart here that shows the difference between if you're going to Alpha Centauri, if you were to travel there at the speed of light, it would take you four point two light years to get there.

With warp drive technology, weeks to months.

With wormhole technology, minutes to hours.

Oh, yeah.

You're in Alpha Centauri

already.

Yeah, and they're

I alighted on the burning star nearest to our Earth.

This star is called, by our astronomers, Alpha Centaurus, and it is said to be twenty trillion miles away.

This star is much greater than our Sun.

and is the centre of a system of worlds larger and more numerous than those that compose our solar system you cannot imagine my surprise when i reached alpha centaurus and found that it was inhabited by a class of human creatures who were created to live and flourish in fire their customs and habits are so strange that i am not capable of giving an intelligent description of them I know that it is inconceivable to us how life can be developed and sustained in the midst of a burning sun, and I have found that these beings in turn could not conceive how life can exist in a cold world like ours.

These creatures have no digestive organs.

They live in part on the chemical action produced by fire-breathing.

If they were to get away from the heat, this chemical action would cease, and therefore death would be as certain to them as being enveloped in fire would spell death to us.

In our eyes their bodies are misshapen, composed of elements most of which are not found in our world.

In the immensity of space, the sun with all his revolving planets is not even as a drop to the ocean or a grain of sand to the composition of the earth.

there are millions of other suns of larger dimensions with larger attendants wheeling around them in the illimitable fields of space those stars which we erroneously call fixed stars are the centres of other systems vastly greater vastly grander than the one of which our earth forms so insignificant a part of course to us numbers of them appear even when viewed through the most powerful telescopes only as mere luminous points but that is owing to the immensity of distance between them and ourselves but the number that is visible to us even with instrumental assistance can have no comparison with the number that we cannot see there is no limit to that number away in what to us may be called the background of space are millions billions uncountable myriads of invisible suns regulating and illuminating countless systems of invisible worlds and beyond those invisible suns and worlds is a region which thought cannot measure and numbers cannot span the finite mind of man becomes dazed dumbfounded in contemplation of magnitudes so great and distances so amazing we stand not bewildered but lost before the problem of interstellar space its length breadth height and circumference are illimitable boundless the great eternal cosmos without beginning and without end in order to get some idea of the vastness of interstellar space we may consider a few distances within the limits of human conception we know that light travels at the rate of one hundred eighty six thousand miles a second yet it requires light over four years to reach us from the nearest of the fixed stars travelling at this almost inconceivable rate and so far away are some that their light travelling at the same rate from the dawn of creation has never reached us yet or never will until our little globule of matter disintegrates and its particles its molecules and corpuscles float away in the boundless ether to amalgamate with the matter of other flying worlds and suns and stars the nearest to us of all the stars is that known as alpha centauri its distance is computed at twenty five trillion miles it takes light over four years to traverse this distance it would take the empire state express never stopping night or day and going at the rate of a mile a minute almost fifty million years to travel from the earth to this star the next of the fixed stars and the brightest in all the heavens is that which we call sirius or the dog star It is double the distance of Alpha Centauri.

That is, it is eight light-years away.

The distances of about 70 other stars have been ascertained, ranging up to 70 or 80 light-years away.

To be exact, the rate is 186,400 miles per second.

To get an idea of the immensity of the distance of the so-called fixed stars, let us take this as a base of comparison.

The nearest fixed star to us is Alpha Centauri, which is one of the brightest as seen in the southern heavens.

It requires four and one quarter years for a beam of light to travel from this star to To Earth.

For full access to our archive, visit patreon.com slash oldtimeretroradio.

On the eve of his wedding, Jeff Coffin is drugged after his bachelor party and awakens aboard a deep space freighter bound for Alpha Centauri.

It is a 15-year voyage, and Jeff's insistence that he has been kidnapped meets the hard rules of interstellar service and a skeptical crew.

From NBC Radio's X-1, this is Shanghai'd, Episode 16, first broadcast September 1, 1955.