S21 Ep108: Supernatural News/Parashare: Martian Mysteries, Grave-Digging Games, & Maine Monsters Edition w/Jessi Doyle

There's a firm that wants to tackle the Fermi paradox by sending a probe to Alpha Centauri.

Uh, kind of a different spin on things.

You know, the whole idea of there's nothing out there except for us, because by all means, we've, we've looked at things through telescopes, and if nothing's come to land on your front lawn and shake your hand, well, then there can't be anything out there, [laughs] just by elimination, is kind of a weird paradox, to say the least.

But the highly ambitious interstellar mission aims to send a spacecraft on a one-way trip to our closest neighboring star system.

That's pretty ambitious.

That is quite ambitious.

Yeah.

Uh, the question of whether we are alone in the universe remains one of the biggest philosophical conundrums of our time.

While it seems almost inconceivable that our civilization is alone in the cosmos, the fact that remains, and still remains, that we have yet to see any evidence to the contrary still exists.

The Fermi paradox, which highlights the contradiction between the likely existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the fact that we still have never encountered any, seems to suggest that either there are no aliens out there, or they are so rare that it is unlikely we would ever come across them.

Now, in a new, in a renewed effort to tackle at least one aspect of the Fermi paradox, scientists have proposed an audacious mission to Alpha Centauri, which is our nearest neighboring solar system.

Now, we're gonna get an idea of how far of a flight that actually is.

It would be a mission unlike any ever, uh, an- any ever undertaken before, in particular because the destination is more than four light-years away.

Now, that's not four years away, that's four light-years away.

Mm-hmm.

We don't have anything that travels in light-years.

No, we do not.

We do not have anything that travels at such a speed, so it's gonna take a very, very long time for this to get there.

Yeah.

Uh, it's a distance that seems unfathomable to cover with today's technology.

Now, the proposed spacecraft, dubbed the Fermi Explorer, would spend the first 12 years essentially building up speed within our own solar system before heading into interstellar space.

The actual journey to Alpha Centauri would take a whopping 77,000 years.

My gosh, and so, and we're assuming whatever we build this out of is gonna last that long.

So this would almost have to be an unmanned space journey, Jess, because there's no human that's gonna last that long.

Well, yeah.