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While we have never been closer to becoming an interplanetary species, any hopes humanity has for inhabiting planets beyond our solar system – let alone solar systems beyond it – remain a distant dream. However, as this stunningly-rendered CGI animation from the Stockholm-based director Erik Wernquist shows, while human-transporting spacecrafts that might traverse the vast distances between planets and even stars are still quite far off, they’re theoretically possible. Commissioned by the Limitless Space Institute in Texas, which seeks to ‘advance human exploration beyond our solar system’, the video features the US aerospace engineer Harold ‘Sonny’ White describing three potential modes of interstellar space travel at three different levels of speed and sophistication.
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Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
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Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
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Biology
Beetles take flight at 6,000 frames per second in this perspective-shifting short
9 minutes
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War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
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Physics
What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search
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Information and communication
An animation built from road signs is a whirlwind study of flash communication
2 minutes
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Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
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Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes
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Biotechnology
It’s our responsibility to engineer corals that can weather the world we’ve created
11 minutes