It’s the unicorn of fairy tales, which everyone talks about but no one has ever seen…it’s a shell of debris enclosing our solar system. It is a swarm of bees buzzing around the Sun, it is a dynamic system of large cometary nuclei lazily revolving around our star with periods of tens of millions of years…
Just try to think about it… Billions of huge blocks of ice slowly gravitating in the darkness of sidereal space like invisible icebergs, faintly illuminated by a Sun that at that distance comes at most to shine like Jupiter seen from Earth.
Hundreds of billions of icebergs completely invisible from Earth, not only individually, but also as a “Cloud”: any optical technique-radio, infrared, radar-is indeed powerless to reveal them. And even sending exploratory probes from down there to transmit information to us is beyond current possibilities; it would be an undertaking with the same requirements as an interstellar mission. Even when, as with Voyager, the gravitational field of Jupiter was exploited to impart escape velocity from the Sun to the probe, it would take millions of years to reach the Oort Cloud.
We would never make it, one would be inclined to say, resign ourselves.
Yet, the colonization of the Oort Cloud represents an unprecedented opportunity for humanity in our journey to the stars. Not only does it offer us the chance to explore new worlds and deepen our understanding of the universe, but it also brings us closer to the ambitious goal of reaching the nearest star.
In this video, we will explore why the progressive colonization of the Oort Cloud would be beneficial to our species and analyze the technological steps needed to make this dream a reality.