habitable planet found.

[inflames07]

Re: habitable planet found.

Given it's 21 million light years away, we could get there in about 310 days ^^ About half that if you could get your speed up to 184000.

Are you kidding me? It takes 6-8 years just to get something to pluto.

EDIT: My bad, 10 years

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/01/13/pluto.mission/index.html

[dead_juggalo]

Re: habitable planet found.

What if I get hit by a car once I get out of the house! Better stay at home.

I agree with you. That is a very big risk.

[Reach]

Re: habitable planet found.

Are you kidding me? It takes 6-8 years just to get something to pluto.

EDIT: My bad, 10 years

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/0...ion/index.html

I stated specifically what speeds you would have to travel at to get there in 310 days or less (97.8%c)

Also, in my last post I said it would take more than 350,000 years to get there given our current propulsion systems, so yes, I am well aware that we have nowhere near the ability to get to this place yet XD Getting there in less than a year is purely hypothetical, given we had the ability to travel at the speeds I said.

[Maid]

Re: habitable planet found.

It seems we need to find a different method of traveling. Which might pose problematic.

[JsPapp26]

Re: habitable planet found.

... nor send messages at the speed of light...

Uhm, we do this everyday.
Radio, X-Rays, etc, etc.

"Light" isn't just visible light. It includes everything in the electromagnetic spectrum, all of which moves at the same speed.

[marxandlennon]

Re: habitable planet found.

One of the big questions is, even if we could get humans to this planet, would they even stay human? I mean, you're dealing with a completely new set of environmental issues, and that means we would evolve differently than we would on earth...who knows, we may end up with a completely different species after a few hundred thousand years of colonization...

that'd make a cool sci fi novel...

[AuraSage]

Re: habitable planet found.

The problem of this issue is the lack of technology. Is it possible to create a spaceship that can travel fast enough to reach the new planet in less than a year. You can't expect to be staying in the same place for more than a month, or maybe a year.
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[sharpnova]

Re: habitable planet found.

Our planet is not dying and the only thing we're doing in the category of making it uninhabitable is overpopulating it.

However, the idea of exporting people to another planet to save this one is absurd. We couldn't build enough ships fast enough to ship human beings off this planet at even a tenth the rate that human beings are born.

The whole point of interplanetary colonization is to spread the human race far and wide throughout the universe so that if some global catastrophe occured (more likely natural than man-induced) then even losing all the human beings on one planet would not be enough to halt the survival of the species.

We would send the absolute best and brightest on the first expeditions. Further colony ships would have lower restrictions on who could go.

It takes bright minds to settle a new world. It would likely be decades before they had a self-sustaining agricultural society. It also takes hardy and motivated people to dedicate their lives to such work. So the smart but weak and the strong but stupid would have to stay behind as well.

Different religions and political organizations would also be vying for control of the first ships. That part would be a catastrophe.

Assuming the atmosphere and surface conditions were truly suitable to human life (or at least within some tolerable range of suitability) the difficulty would probably be more to do with the trip there.

Cryogenics is not panning out and therefore we would need ships with somplex life support and agricultural systems. There would be a hell of a lot of technical difficulties and political instabilities on those multi-decade possibly multi-century journeys. There would possibly be some skirmishes or wars had on these ships during travel and the likelihood of one faction or another gaining control of propulsion or energy systems mid-flight and using them as barter/leverage to gain control of the whole mission (and possibly blowing up or disabling the ship mid-journey) would be pretty high.

All in all, I don't think humans will make it and if they do, no one on THIS website would be going on the first journeys. Except for maybe someone like me.

[sharpnova]

Re: habitable planet found.

One of the big questions is, even if we could get humans to this planet, would they even stay human? I mean, you're dealing with a completely new set of environmental issues, and that means we would evolve differently than we would on earth...who knows, we may end up with a completely different species after a few hundred thousand years of colonization...

that'd make a cool sci fi novel...

My guess is our technology level is sufficient that if we made it to the planet, evolution wouldn't be playing that great a role in our developement as a species.

[nathanj]

Re: habitable planet found.

planetary travel will probably not happen for hundreds if not thousands of years. *popped your bubble*