シャドーイング練習: How to Move the Sun: Stellar Engines - 動画で英語スピーキングを学ぶ

レッスンを作成中...
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Nothing in the universe is static.
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In the Milky Way, billions of stars orbit the galactic center.
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Some, like our Sun, are pretty consistent, keeping a distance of around 30,000 light years from the galactic center,
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completing an orbit every 230 million years.
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This dance is not an orderly ballet, more like a skating rink filled with drunk toddlers.
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This chaos makes the galaxy dangerous.
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Our solar neighborhood is constantly changing, with stars moving hundreds of kilometers every second.
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Only the vast distances between objects protect us from the dangers out there.
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But we might get unlucky in the future.
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At some point we can encounter a star going supernova, or a massive object passing by and showering Earth with asteroids.
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If something like this were to happen, we would likely know thousands, if not millions of years in advance.
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But we still couldn't do much about it.
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Unless we move our whole solar system out of the way.
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To move the solar system, we need a stellar engine, a megastructure used to steer a star through the galaxy.
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It's the kind of thing
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that might be built by an advanced civilization with Dyson Sphere
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level technology that's thinking about their future millions of years ahead of time.
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But how do we possibly move the hundreds of thousands of objects in the solar system?
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The good news is we can ignore all of that.
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We only need to move the sun, or the other stuff is glued to it by gravity and will follow it wherever it decides to go.
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There are lots of ideas about what a stellar engine might look like and how it would work.
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We've picked two grounded in our current understanding of physics that could be built in theory.
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The simplest kind of stellar engine is the Shkadov thruster, a giant mirror.
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It works on the same principle as a rocket.
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Like rocket fuel, the photons released as solar radiation carry momentum.
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Not a lot, but a bit.
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For example, if an astronaut turned on a flashlight in space, it would push them backwards very, very slowly.
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A stellar engine will work a little better than a flashlight because the The sun produces a lot of photons.
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The basic idea of the Shkadov thruster is to reflect up to half of the solar radiation to create thrust
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and slowly push the sun where we want it to go.
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In order for the Shkadov thruster to work, it must be kept in the same place, not orbiting the sun.
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Although the sun's gravity will try to pull it in, it would be supported by radiation pressure which props the mirror up.
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This means the mirror would have to be very light, made of micron-thin reflecting foil from materials like aluminium alloys.
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The mirror's shape is important too.
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Enveloping the sun in a giant spherical shell wouldn't work because that would refocus light back to the sun, heating it up and creating all sorts of unpleasant problems.
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Instead, we use a parabola, which sends most of the photons around the sun and in the same direction, which maximizes thrust.
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To prevent accidentally burning or freezing Earth with too much or too little sunlight, the only safe place to build a Skadov thruster is over the Sun's poles.
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This means we can only move the Sun vertically in the plane of the solar system
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and one direction in the Milky Way, which limits our travel options a bit.
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But that is basically it.
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For a civilization capable of building a Dyson Sphere, this is a relatively simple endeavor.
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Not complicated, just very hard to build.
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At full throttle, the solar system could probably be moved by about 100 light years over 230 million years.
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Over a few billion years, it gives us near complete control over the sun's orbit in the galaxy.
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But in the short term, this might not be fast enough to dodge a deadly supernova.
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That's why we thought we could do better.
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So we asked our astrophysicist friend if he could design a faster stellar engine for this video.
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He did and wrote a paper about it that's been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
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You can find it in our sources document.
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We're going to call our new stellar engine the Kaplan thruster.
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It works a lot like a traditional rocket.
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Shoot exhaust one way to push yourself the other.
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It's a large space station platform powered by a Dyson sphere that gathers matter from the sun to power nuclear fusion.
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It shoots out a very fast jet of particles at nearly 1% the speed of light out of the solar system.
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A second jet pushes the sun along like a tugboat.
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The Kaplan thruster requires a lot of fuel, millions of tons per second.
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To gather this fuel, our thruster uses very large electromagnetic fields to funnel hydrogen
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and helium from the solar wind into the engine.
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The solar wind alone doesn't provide enough fuel though.
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And that's where the Dyson Sphere comes in.
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Using its power, sunlight can be refocused to the surface of the sun.
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This heats small regions to extreme temperatures, lifting billions of tons of mass off the sun.
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This mass can be collected and separated into hydrogen and helium.
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The helium is burned explosively in thermonuclear fusion reactors.
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A jet of radioactive oxygen at a temperature of nearly a billion degrees is expelled
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and becomes our primary source of propulsion from our stellar engine.
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To prevent the engine from just crashing into the sun, it needs to balance itself itself.
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To do this, we accelerate the collected hydrogen with electromagnetic fields using particle accelerators and shoot a jet back at the Sun.
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This balances the thruster and transfers the thrust of our engine back to the Sun.
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In as little as a million years, this engine can move the Sun by 50 light-years, more than enough to dodge a supernova.
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At full throttle, the solar system can be completely redirected in its galactic orbit in 10 million years.
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But wait, won't we use up the Sun this way?
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Fortunately, the Sun is so massive that even billions of tons of material will barely scratch the surface.
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In fact, this megastructure will actually extend our Sun's life since lower-mass stars burn slower,
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keeping the solar system inhabitable for many more billions of years.
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With a Kaplan thruster, we could turn the entire solar system into our spaceship.
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For example, by orbiting backwards in the galaxy and colonizing hundreds or thousands of stars as we pass by them.
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It may even be possible to escape the galaxy entirely and expand beyond the Milky Way.
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Stellar engines are the kind of machines built by civilizations thinking not in terms of years or decades, but eons.
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Since we know that our Sun will die one day, a stellar engine could allow the far future descendants of humans
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to travel to other stars without ever having to venture into the terrifying dark abyss of interstellar space.
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Until we build a stellar engine, we're adrift and subject to the whims of the galactic sea.
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We may not like where it leads us.
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Maybe our descendants will set sail and become an interstellar species for millions of years to come.
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This was our last video for the year 12,019 of the human era and what a year it was.
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So much stuff happened everywhere to so many different people.
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Calendars and holidays are just imaginary, but they help us to cut our lives into pieces pieces that our brains can handle.
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We're leaving 12019 behind with a weird mixture of disillusion and hope.
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The world is screwed up, but we can fix it.
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In a few days, this year will be over, and we'll get to try again.

このレッスンの語彙とスピーキングのポイント

この動画には、シャドーイング用の文が90文、単語が1298語あります。 音声の長さは8:29です。 話す速さは1分あたり約153語で、日常会話に近い自然なペースです。 英語の頻出3,000語に含まれる単語は79%だけなので、語彙は難しめです。

この動画の重要語彙

動画に出てくる覚えておきたい単語15語を、発音と意味つきで紹介します。

単語発音意味
orbit 名詞/ˈɔɹ.bɪt/軌道
galaxy 名詞/ˈɡæl.ək.si/銀河, 銀河系
sphere 名詞/sfɪɚ/球, 球体
mirror 名詞/ˈmiɹɚ/鏡, 姿見
rocket 名詞/ˈɹɑk.ɪt/ロケット, 噴進弾
ton 名詞/tʌn/トン
radiation 名詞/ˌɹeɪ.diˈeɪ.ʃən/放射, 輻射
civilization 名詞/ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/文明
hydrogen 名詞/ˈhaɪdɹəd͡ʒ(ə)n/水素
thrust 動詞/θɹʌst/押す, 突く
reflect 動詞/ɹɪˈflɛkt/跳ね返す, 反射する
collect 動詞/ˈkɑlɪkt/集める, 収集する
fusion 名詞/ˈfjuː.ʒən/核融合
dodge 動詞/dɑd͡ʒ/よける, 身をかわす
particle 名詞/ˈpɑɹtək(ə)l/粒子

注意したい発音

話し手はwe're, couldn't, doesn'tなど、短縮形や弱形を9回使っています。聞こえたとおりの短い形で発音しましょう。

  • 「th」の音: thrust /θɹʌst/, gather /ˈɡæðɚ/, thin /ˈθɪn/, thruster /ˈθɹʌ.stɚ/, throttle /ˈθɹɔ.tl̩/
  • 「sh」と「zh」の音: radiation /ˌɹeɪ.diˈeɪ.ʃən/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, fusion /ˈfjuː.ʒən/, shell /ʃɛl/, flashlight /ˈflæʃˌlaɪt/
  • 長い単語(アクセントの位置に注意): radiation /ˌɹeɪ.diˈeɪ.ʃən/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, electromagnetic /ɪˌlɛk.tɹoʊ.mæɡˈnɛ.tɪk/, complicated /ˈkɑm.plɪˌkeɪ.tɪd/, accidentally /ˌæk.sɪˈdɛnt(ə)li/

この動画での練習方法

  1. まず声を出さずに動画を最後まで聞き、知らない単語をメモします。
  2. まず0.75倍速で一文ずつシャドーイングし、慣れてきたら通常の速度に戻します。
  3. 自分の声を録音して元の音声と比べます。orbit, galaxy, sphereなどの単語に特に注意しましょう。

シャドーイングとは?英語上達に効果的な理由

シャドーイング(Shadowing)は、もともとプロの通訳者養成プログラムで開発された言語学習法で、多言語習得者として知られるDr. Alexander Arguelles によって広く普及されました。方法はシンプルですが非常に効果的:ネイティブスピーカーの英語を聞きながら、1〜2秒の遅延で声に出してすぐに繰り返す——まるで「影(shadow)」のように話者を追いかけます。文法ドリルや受動的なリスニングと異なり、シャドーイングは脳と口の筋肉が同時にリアルタイムで英語を処理・再現することを強制します。研究により、発音精度、抑揚、リズム、連音、リスニング力、そして会話の流暢さが大幅に向上することが確認されています。IELTSスピーキング対策や自然な英語コミュニケーションを目指す方に特におすすめです。

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