What Actually Happens If You Reach The Edge Of The Solar System — Transcript

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1. 0:00You are strapped into a seat that
2. 0:01stopped being comfortable about 4 hours
3. 0:03ago, and the engine behind you has just
4. 0:05shut down. That silence is the important
5. 0:07part. The burn is finished. The number
6. 0:10on the screen in front of you says you
7. 0:11are moving faster than any human being
8. 0:13has ever moved, and nothing in front of
9. 0:15you is going to slow you down for a very
10. 0:17long time. You are heading for the edge
11. 0:19of the solar system. The first thing
12. 0:21that surprises you is how boring it
13. 0:23looks.
14. 0:24There is no tunnel of light, no sense of
15. 0:26speed, no rushing. Out of the window,
16. 0:29the stars sit exactly where they were
17. 0:30yesterday. The only thing that tells you
18. 0:32anything is happening at all is Earth,
19. 0:35and Earth is already smaller than it
20. 0:36should be. You watch it for a while,
21. 0:39blue, white, unmistakable.
22. 0:41Then a few days pass, and it is the size
23. 0:43of a coin, then a marble, then it stops
24. 0:46being a place and becomes a light.
25. 0:48Somewhere around week two, you catch
26. 0:50yourself looking for it and not finding
27. 0:52it immediately. That is the moment the
28. 0:54trip becomes real, not the launch, not
29. 0:57the burn. The moment you have to search
30. 0:59the sky for your entire species. You
31. 1:01pass the orbit of Mars without seeing
32. 1:03Mars. This disappoints you more than you
33. 1:05expected. Space is mostly not where the
34. 1:08things are, and the odds of a planet
35. 1:10happening to be in the same neighborhood
36. 1:11of its orbit as you are extremely poor.
37. 1:14You cross one of the most famous lines
38. 1:16in the solar system, and the view does
39. 1:17not change at all. The asteroid belt is
40. 1:20worse. You were braced for it. Everyone
41. 1:23is braced for it. In your head, there
42. 1:24was a wall of tumbling rock, and you
43. 1:27weaving through it with your jaw
44. 1:28clenched. What actually happens is that
45. 1:31you cross the entire asteroid belt and
46. 1:33never see a single asteroid. The rocks
47. 1:35are there, millions of them, and they
48. 1:37are separated by distances so absurd
49. 1:40that missing them is not a skill, it is
50. 1:42the default.
51. 1:44This is your first proper lesson about
52. 1:46the solar system. It is not a crowded
53. 1:48place with dangerous gaps. It is an
54. 1:50enormous emptiness with a few objects in
55. 1:52it, and you are going to spend months
56. 1:54being reminded of that. The next thing
57. 1:56to change is not outside. It is the
58. 1:58conversation.
59. 2:00At first, talking to mission control was
60. 2:02normal.
61. 2:03Then there was a pause. Then the pause
62. 2:05got long enough that you started
63. 2:06planning your sentences around it. By
64. 2:08the time you are past the belt, you say
65. 2:10something and you wait, and you go and
66. 2:12eat, and you come back, and the answer
67. 2:15is there.
68. 2:16Nobody is talking to you anymore. People
69. 2:18are leaving you messages. There is a
70. 2:20difference, and you feel it long before
71. 2:22you admit it. Jupiter is the first place
72. 2:25that actively tries to hurt you. You
73. 2:27approach it from a distance that feels
74. 2:29safe and is not. Jupiter has a magnetic
75. 2:31field so violent that it traps charged
76. 2:34particles into belts of radiation, and
77. 2:36those belts extend far beyond anything
78. 2:38you would sensibly call the surface.
79. 2:40Your course is planned to keep you out
80. 2:42of the worst of it. Plans and radiation
81. 2:44have a complicated relationship.
82. 2:47For a stretch of days, you live in the
83. 2:48most shielded part of your ship, which
84. 2:50is a space roughly the size of a
85. 2:52wardrobe, surrounded by your own water
86. 2:54supply. Because water is heavy, and
87. 2:56heavy things stop particles. You sleep
88. 2:59badly. You eat in there.
89. 3:01You watch the dosimeter numbers climb in
90. 3:03a way that is not immediately dangerous,
91. 3:05but is absolutely being written down for
92. 3:07later.
93. 3:08Then you are past it, and the numbers
94. 3:09settle, and you come out, and the sun
95. 3:11looks wrong.
96. 3:12It is still the brightest thing in the
97. 3:14sky.
98. 3:15It is no longer a disk that hurts to
99. 3:16look at. It has become small, hard, a
100. 3:19brilliant point rather than a face.
101. 3:22Out here, sunlight is roughly a 25th of
102. 3:25what it is at Earth. Your solar panels,
103. 3:27which were the obvious and elegant
104. 3:28solution for the first stretch of the
105. 3:30journey, are now decorative.
106. 3:32You switch fully to the nuclear source
107. 3:34that has been sitting quietly in the
108. 3:35back of the ship, and from this point
109. 3:37on, every watt of power and every degree
110. 3:39of warmth you have comes from a lump of
111. 3:41decaying material and a very old idea.
112. 3:45Cold is the background condition now.
113. 3:47Not the cold of space, which is a
114. 3:49misleading phrase, but the simple fact
115. 3:51that nothing is warming you except your
116. 3:52own machine, heat becomes something you
117. 3:55budget. You notice which parts of the
118. 3:56cabin your hands avoid. Your body has
119. 3:59been keeping its own notes. Months
120. 4:01without weight do measurable things.
121. 4:04Fluid shifts upward, so your face looks
122. 4:06puffy in a way you have stopped
123. 4:07noticing, and your legs look like
124. 4:09someone let the air out of them. Muscles
125. 4:11that are not asked to fight gravity stop
126. 4:13pretending they need to be strong. Bone
127. 4:15density can fall, and it does not fall
128. 4:18evenly, and it does not always come back
129. 4:20the way you want it to.
130. 4:21Your eyesight can change, and for some
131. 4:23people that change does not fully
132. 4:25reverse.
133. 4:26You exercise because the schedule says
134. 4:28so. 2 hours a day strapped to a machine
135. 4:31going nowhere at high effort, which is
136. 4:33the most accurate description of your
137. 4:35entire life at the moment.
138. 4:37And underneath all of that, the
139. 4:38radiation continues. Not the dramatic
140. 4:41Jupiter kind, the steady kind. Out here
141. 4:44you are outside the magnetic shield that
142. 4:46Earth quietly held over you for your
143. 4:47entire existence, and high-energy
144. 4:50particles from the rest of the galaxy
145. 4:51pass through the hull and through the
146. 4:53water and through you constantly. One
147. 4:56particle is nothing. The dose is a
148. 4:59number that only becomes meaningful
149. 5:00across years, and that is exactly the
150. 5:02problem, because years is what you have.
151. 5:05If you're enjoying this video, please
152. 5:07hit the subscribe button. It genuinely
153. 5:09helps keep the channel alive.
154. 5:11Saturn comes and goes. Then Uranus. Then
155. 5:14Neptune, and with Neptune something
156. 5:16changes that you were not prepared for.
157. 5:18The sun stops being the sun. At
158. 5:21Neptune's distance, it is a thousand
159. 5:22times fainter than it is at home.
160. 5:25It is still the brightest star in your
161. 5:26sky by an enormous margin, but that is
162. 5:28the word your brain reaches for now, a
163. 5:30star.
164. 5:32Noon does not exist here. There is no
165. 5:34day. There is a permanent, gorgeous,
166. 5:36freezing twilight, and you are living in
167. 5:38it. You start leaving a light on.
168. 5:41Past Neptune, you enter the Kuiper Belt,
169. 5:43and it does to you exactly what the
170. 5:44asteroid belt did, only slower and
171. 5:47colder.
172. 5:48Billions of icy bodies, Pluto among
173. 5:50them, and you sail through the entire
174. 5:52region without seeing one of them with
175. 5:54your own eyes. The instruments log
176. 5:56things, you do not.
177. 5:58This is where the trip stops having
178. 6:00landmarks.
179. 6:01Everything up to now had a name, a
180. 6:03planet, a belt, a moment. From here, the
181. 6:06only thing that changes is the number on
182. 6:08the distance display, and that number
183. 6:09becomes so large that it stops meaning
184. 6:11anything emotionally. You look at it, it
185. 6:14has gone up, you feel nothing. Your
186. 6:16messages home now take hours in each
187. 6:18direction. You ask a question at
188. 6:20breakfast and the answer arrives after
189. 6:21dinner, and by then the question has
190. 6:23stopped mattering. People stop sending
191. 6:25you news because news is stale before it
192. 6:27lands. They send you recordings of
193. 6:29ordinary things instead, a kitchen, a
194. 6:32dog, weather. You watch them more than
195. 6:35you should. And then, quietly, far
196. 6:37beyond anything with a name, you hit the
197. 6:39first real boundary. The sun does not
198. 6:42just make light.
199. 6:43It blows a wind, a thin stream of
200. 6:45charged particles racing outward in
201. 6:47every direction, and that wind carves a
202. 6:49bubble in the galaxy. For your entire
203. 6:51journey, you have been inside that
204. 6:53bubble, and now you are near the place
205. 6:55where the wind finally slows down and
206. 6:56piles up against everything outside.
207. 6:59This is called the termination shock,
208. 7:01and it is one of the strangest
209. 7:02experiences available to a human being
210. 7:05because crossing it feels like
211. 7:06absolutely nothing. There is no wall, no
212. 7:09shutter, no view.
213. 7:10The only way you know it happened is
214. 7:12that your instruments tell you the
215. 7:13particles around you have changed their
216. 7:15behavior. The solar wind has stopped
217. 7:17rushing and started crowding. You sit
218. 7:19there, perfectly still, having crossed
219. 7:22one of the great frontiers of the solar
220. 7:23system, holding a cup.
221. 7:25Beyond it, the region is messier. The
222. 7:28magnetic field out here is tangled and
223. 7:30unsettled, and the protection the sun
224. 7:32was still weakly offering you begins to
225. 7:34thin out. The galactic radiation
226. 7:36creeping into your ship ticks upward
227. 7:38again.
228. 7:39And then comes the one that counts.
229. 7:41The heliopause, the place where the
230. 7:43sun's influence finally loses to the
231. 7:45rest of the galaxy. Inside it, the
232. 7:47particles around you mostly came from
233. 7:49your own star. Outside it, they mostly
234. 7:51did not. You cross it, nothing happens.
235. 7:55There is no edge.
236. 7:56That is the thing nobody tells you. You
237. 7:58have traveled for years to reach a
238. 8:00boundary that turns out to be a slow
239. 8:01gradient in a plasma you cannot see.
240. 8:04Detectable only because a machine says
241. 8:05so. You expected a threshold. You got a
242. 8:08change in a graph. Behind you, the sun
243. 8:11is a single bright star among many. If
244. 8:13you did not know which one it was, you
245. 8:15could lose it.
246. 8:16And here is the part that actually
247. 8:17breaks you.
248. 8:18You have not reached the edge of the
249. 8:20solar system.
250. 8:21Because the sun's light gave up long
251. 8:23ago, but the sun's gravity did not.
252. 8:26Somewhere far out beyond you, wrapped
253. 8:27around everything, is the Oort Cloud, a
254. 8:30vast shell of icy bodies still loosely
255. 8:32held by your star. That is the true
256. 8:34gravitational edge. To reach the
257. 8:35beginning of it at your speed would take
258. 8:37you something in the order of centuries.
259. 8:39To pass through the whole thing and be
260. 8:41genuinely free of the sun would take
261. 8:43tens of thousands of years.
262. 8:45You are traveling faster than any human
263. 8:47has ever traveled, and you will die of
264. 8:49old age having crossed only a rounding
265. 8:51error of the distance.
266. 8:53So, you do the only thing left to do.
267. 8:55You keep going. Your supplies are
268. 8:57finite, and your course is fixed.
269. 9:00Because turning around out here is not a
270. 9:02decision, it is a fuel budget you do not
271. 9:04have. The ship keeps its own quiet
272. 9:06routine. The power source keeps
273. 9:08decaying, a little weaker every year.
274. 9:10And one day, the heaters will be running
275. 9:12on less than you would like, and you
276. 9:13will start closing off sections of the
277. 9:15ship to keep one room warm. You will
278. 9:17keep sending messages. The delay will
279. 9:19grow into days.
280. 9:21And eventually, you will send one, and
281. 9:22nobody will answer, and you will never
282. 9:24find out whether that is because
283. 9:26something happened to them, or because
284. 9:27something happened to your antenna.
285. 9:29That is what actually happens if you
286. 9:31reach the edge of the solar system. You
287. 9:33do not arrive anywhere. You do not break
288. 9:35through anything. You get the most
289. 9:37extraordinary view in human history. You
290. 9:39cross an invisible line that behaves
291. 9:41like weather, and you discover that the
292. 9:42solar system does not end. It just gets
293. 9:45quieter, and colder, and emptier, and it
294. 9:48keeps holding on to you long after it
295. 9:49has stopped giving you any light.
296. 9:52You wanted to find out where the sun
297. 9:53lets go. It does not.