VOICE-OVER:
In 1962, this rocket
would have blasted a two-ton payload all the way into outer space.
That was when we lived on a planet that was an oblate sphere. Life
on a dinner plate seems to be different: while the gravitational
attraction anywhere on the surface is a constant, we can’t get away
from it. In fact, anything we fire straight up will come back down
again. Not even a nuclear rocket can escape: according to JPL
scientist Dan Alderson, escape from a Magellanic disk would require
a speed of over one thousand six hundred miles per second. That is
because this disk masses many times more than a star—in fact, it
has a mass fifty thousand times greater than our own
sun.
What stops it
collapsing into a sphere? Nobody knows. Physicists speculate that a
fifth force that drove the early expansion of the universe—they
call it “quintessence”—has been harnessed by the makers of the
disk. But the blunt truth is, nobody knows for sure. Nor do we
understand how we came here—how, in the blink of an eye, something
beyond our comprehension peeled the Earth’s continents and oceans
like a grape and plated them across this alien disk.