Intro to Space Sciences - 2nd Grade Edition

Intro to Space Sciences - 2nd Grade Edition

Chapter 12: Traveling Really Fast In Space

Have you ever wondered how our ship goes so fast? In the last chapter, we learned that solar bodies are really far apart. They can be millions of light-years away. That's a long way to walk! And yet, we'll be at our new home very soon. How can this be? How can we travel to a new star in just one person's lifetime?

The answer is: we use a very special engine in our ship, and it does all the walking for us!

A very smart scientist named Dr. Malcolm McCreedy invented our engine. He called it the &quot;Limnal Drive&quot;, because it uses a whole ocean of light as its fuel.

When you see things with your eyes, you see lots of colors: blue, red, yellow, even white! But there are lots of colors that you don't see, too. These colors live in the tiny spaces between other colors. We can't see them, but we know they're there because math tells us so.

Very smart people have known about this hidden energy for a long, long time: even our ancestors knew about it—before the Little Bump even happened! But nobody knew how to use it. Not until Dr. McCreedy!

Dr. McCreedy found a very clever way to use this energy. He knew that if you push a lot of it in one direction, it will pull other things with it! If you push hard enough, it will pull very heavy things — even space itself!

But…what happens when you pull space ? Let's find out!

Have you ever thrown a ball while in a zero-gravity chamber? You probably saw the ball go flying! But did you notice that you moved too…in the opposite direction ? Why the heck did that happen?

It turns out, the universe has certain laws, and it works really hard to maintain them! A long time ago, a man named Sir Newton figured out the first of these laws while throwing apples around in a zero-gravity chamber.

And guess what: we found a lot more laws just like that one ! Boy, Sir Newton would be impressed!

Now, instead of throwing an apple, what if you threw lots and lots of this special light energy? Well, I bet the universe would have to sit up and take notice ! And what if you didn't even need to throw the energy yourself? What if it was just waiting to burst out in all directions ?

So what does the universe do, and how does that make us travel so fast? Tune into Chapter 13 for the answer!