The Entire Trip to the Nearest Star in Real Time – No Cuts (4K HDR)（原声文稿）

Welcome aboard Captain.

You are sitting in Minda, the fastest ship in the universe, capable of a proper acceleration of 1.61 million g.

We are 150 million kilometers from the Sun, as far out as the Earth.

The Sun is right behind us. You can see it on the rear camera on your panel.

Straight ahead lies our destination, Proxima Centauri, 425 light years away.

We will accelerate for the first half of the journey up to 99.99% of the speed of light and far beyond at the halfway point, only 12 micrometers per second slower than light.

Then we decelerate at the same rate, estimated time of arrival, 10 minutes of ship time or four years and three months of earth time.

Initializing engine preheating.

Engines preheated and ready.

Ignition in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Ignition.

What? Am I going backwards? No, Captain. You are seeing the aberration of light.

The ship is basically vacuuming up the light ahead of it, light it would otherwise miss.

And that makes the stars appear to shift towards the direction we are traveling.

Where did the sun go?

At first, the same aberration made the sun look bigger.

But the Doppler effect stretched its light into the infrared, out of the range the human eye can see.

Ahead of you, the opposite is happening.

The starlight is getting blue shifted and brighter.

Soon, it will cross the visible range too, into the ultraviolet, which your eyes can't see either.

I have put a telescope view on your left screen, so you can watch what is happening ahead.

Soon the cosmic microwave background will shift into the visible range.

It will be bright enough to damage your eyes, so be careful.

There it is. A red glow from the point ahead of us. That is the Cosmic Microwave Background.

We are already past Saturn's distance from the Sun and about to pass Uranus's.

The peak of the Cosmic Microwave Background is crossing the visible range now, from red to violet and into the ultraviolet.

We We are reaching the peak of the cosmic microwave background's visible light. From here on, it fades.

The acceleration phase is nearly over, preheating the decelerator engines.

The deceleration burn has to be timed precisely.

At the halfway point, if we kept accelerating, we would reach Proxima Centauri in just 13 seconds.

That is the exponential nature of relativistic travel.

Once we start braking, those 13 seconds stretch into exactly 5 minutes, and we arrive just as our speed relative to Proxima drops to 0.

Deceleration in 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Ignition.

Soon the peak of the cosmic microwave background will come back into the visible range.

Your eyes are still adapted to the earlier glare, so hopefully it won't feel as bright this time.

Here it comes, the Cosmic Microwave Background, back in the visible range. The view is clear of the Cosmic Microwave Background.

What you see ahead of you is our destination, Proxima Centauri.

Shouldn't Proxima be a red star? It is.

Right now, its light is blue-shifted by our speed.

As we keep slowing down, it will slowly shift back to its true color.

Deceleration complete in 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Engines off. Congratulations Captain.

Captain, you have reached your destination, Proxima Centauri, 425 light years from the sun.

You can see home on your display.

That bright star in the middle is the sun. Why did it take only 10 minutes? Did we travel faster than light? No. We haven't broken the rules of special relativity.

At every moment, our speed relative to Proxima Centauri stayed below the speed of light.

But at our speed, space itself was Lorentz contracted.

It shrank while we accelerated and stretched out again while we braked.

At the midpoint, Proxima was only 19 light seconds away, about 5.7 million kilometers, or 15 times the distance to the moon.

Had we kept accelerating, we would have reached it 13 seconds later.

year. Instead, we braked, and for almost four minutes, it stayed nineteen light seconds ahead.

So how far could I go?

Relativistic travel is exponential.

Had we kept accelerating for the full ten minutes, we would now be fifteen million light years away, six times farther than the Andromeda Galaxy, and fifteen million years would have passed on Earth.

In principle, This ship could reach any galaxy closer than about 16 billion light years within a human lifetime.

Beyond that, not even light can keep up with the expansion of the universe.

But if you ever decided to go home, millions or billions of years would have passed on Earth. You might not find anyone alive there.

Is there anywhere you would like to go, Captain?

Let's set a course for the center of our galaxy.

Warning, at the center of our galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A star.

It could be an interesting place to visit, but also a dangerous one. Please confirm the coordinates. Confirmed. Coordinates confirmed.

Next destination, Sagittarius A star, 26,700 light years away.

Hello guys, I really hope you have enjoyed this video very much because it was an absolute nightmare to produce and I'm really glad that it's already out there.

This one required a lot of tools to make.

Like Julia for rendering the realistic sky frame by frame, Blender for cockpit and its illuminations, Manim for holograms, Python for HUD, Roadmap and sound timings, Levenlabs for ship AI voice, DaVinci Resolve for this AeroCut Adobe Audition for audio work and After Effects for combining all of this and rendered HDR video out of it.

And this one is really tricky if you don't have a powerful computer.

Moreover, I don't even have a true HDR monitor here.

So I don't even know if it's rendered correctly, so hopefully it is. And hopefully it was worth it.

And if you enjoyed this video very much, I would really appreciate any help.

You can either buy me a coffee or become my Patreon.

I would really appreciate it, since I'm exhausted.

Thank you very much and let me know if you would like to see a continuation, a trip to the center of our galaxy. See you there.