Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri — the nearest stars are 25 trillion miles away, and our fastest spacecraft would need 6,600 years to get there. Tonight we try to make that journey anyway.

You'll climb seven walls between us and the nearest star: speed, the rocket equation that turns fuel against itself, the energy of a small city poured into one tiny probe, dust grains that hit like bombs, cosmic radiation, centuries of time inside a generation ship — and the hardest part of all, stopping when you arrive. Along the way: Project Orion and its nuclear pulse ship, Project Daedalus, Breakthrough Starshot's light sails, Einstein's time-dilation loophole, Proxima b and its violent flares, a planet that turned out never to exist, and why the first people to leave for the stars might be overtaken by those who leave after them.

A calm, science-based space documentary made to help you drift off to sleep. Gentle narration, slow cosmic visuals and soft ambient music.

🎧 Best with headphones and the screen dimmed.

⏱ CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro

1:38 The Star Next Door

2:35 The Man Who Found Proxima

4:29 If the Sun Were a Grapefruit

5:43 How Far Voyager Really Got

7:21 Wall 1: Speed

8:38 The Fastest Machine Ever Built

10:53 Wall 2: The Fuel Trap

14:25 Project Orion: A Ship Pushed by Bombs

16:44 Wall 3: Energy

18:17 Project Daedalus

20:50 The Tortoise Engine

22:58 Sailing on Sunlight

25:08 Breakthrough Starshot

27:18 Wall 4: The Deadly Emptiness

30:50 The Ship That Eats Space

32:02 How We Measured the Gap

34:56 Wall 5: Radiation

38:45 The Antimatter Dream

40:21 Warp Drive

41:58 Wall 6: Time

44:38 The Biosphere 2 Warning

47:45 Overtaken by the Future

51:04 Einstein's Loophole

55:47 Wall 7: Stopping

58:56 Braking With Starlight

1:00:22 Proxima b

1:02:38 The Flare Star

1:04:30 A Giant Near Alpha Centauri A

1:05:16 The Planet That Wasn't There

1:10:01 Red Dwarfs Will Outlive Us All

1:11:57 Imagine You're On Board

1:15:15 The Sky That Doesn't Change

1:16:09 Letters Across the Years

1:18:30 Arriving at Two Suns

1:20:26 Our Sun From Another Star

1:22:27 The Stars Are Coming to Us

1:24:47 Where the Voyagers Will Drift

1:26:11 Our Voices Already Arrived

1:30:41 The Signal From Proxima

1:32:13 The Sun as a Telescope

1:36:31 Our Nearest Neighbors

1:39:57 Is the Galaxy Closed to Us?

1:42:55 The Seven Walls

1:49:17 Light That Made the Journey

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✨ Sleep well, and see you among the stars.

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