If they have oil, the military will get there in a year and a half.

Where do we sign up for the UNSC?

Sending all but certain corpses seems to be something NASA would do. You can only eat your own waste so often over a near-eon.

Don't really get all the fuss since it's fairly obvious there are going to be a ton of those worlds. Hundreds of millions at least within the Milky Way.

Maybe some closer than 20.5 lights but eh, it's a start.

As for throwing mass out of Sol system? lol, maybe not until the 22nd century at the earliest at considerable odds, gets closer to even money by the 23rd.

It's a more difficult problem than it looks and the variance is in finding a technological shortcut.

Red dwarves are a hell of a lot more stable and sustainable than our sun is though.

how much do you think condo's go far on these "goldilocks" planets?

is there sufficient internet connection?

It is still so long that you will get overtaken by an even better technology half of the way there, and given 100k years or whatever the laser ship claims i can easily see some kind of sci fi space folding device being invented or summit like that.

Working out how to send some kind of high power radio wave to reach the various planets (assuming normal ones cant) would a better idea imo.

Not only is there water on the planet, the poker players really are fish! Who knew?

Surely a nuclear fusion powered spaceship could get there in good time? Don't get all this sail/laser chat.

An ion drive 2 stage after using chem rockets to break orbit would probably be the best system we have right now and that would still take like 100k years or more. 20 lightyears only seems a short distance when you dont know what a lightyear is, lol.

Re: aliens
Why does extra-terrestrial life need to have an earthlike environment? Life on earth likely started in a pretty random way, so there's no reason there can't be completely different life elsewhere not based on carbon and water. Or maybe I've watched too much Star Trek, but I'm envisioning crystal guys or clouds of gasses or other stuff we'd probably never even recognize as life.

Re: us using this new planet to live on
Dream on.

20 lightyears away means, even if we did get people on the planet for a while (lol) it would take 20+ years for their communication to get to Earth. Like, a radio conversation would take 20 years between transmissions from Earth to Gliese 581g. There won't be any Neil Armstrong walking around talking with the entire world watching (or if there is, the TV waves will take 20 years to get here )

VASIMIR engine could get us there much quicker although still would likely be a suicide trip.

Imagine this conversation:

802,010 AD:
"Houston this is Dirk Stevenson with Apollo nine million, we have just made landfall on Gliese. This is one small step for man, one... hey what did Neil Armstrong say again? Over"

802,030 AD: "Congratulations crew, this is John Myers at NASA, we've just received your transmission. He finishes with 'one giant leap for mankind' but anyway it's too late for that, you've been there a long time, how are things? Over"

802,050 AD: "I'm sorry John we do not copy, can you repeat that? Over"

802,070 AD: "John is no longer with us, he succumbed to cancer. I'm Doug. Nevermind about the previous transmission, please, for the love of God tell us what it is like over there. What is sustaining you? Are there indiginous life forms that you have procreated with? You know, that sort of stuff. Over"

802,090 AD: "It's pretty cool up here. You should come visit us. Dirk died years ago but - hey I was going to ask you guys... if I press nine, five, one, five, nine, nine, nine, five, five, five, nine, nine, nine, nine, five, one, five, nine, nine, nine, five, five, nine, five, one does it sound like 'Mary Had a Little Lamb'? Over"

Well if this gets you guys thinking more about aliens then all the better. When its finally revealed in the next few years that aliens have been visiting us for thousands of years, and are in our atmosphere this very second, many will be shocked and a few won't.

LOL @ Prohorn.


Im surprised it took me 2 days to find this thread. Pretty cool stuff. Makes me wonder how many Goldilock planets we will have found by the time Im on my death bed.

Last time I was there it was a prison

Didn't Einstein say, when asked about the speed of light, that it would take all the energy on the planet for our civilization to even create a ship that could travel at that speed?

That's pretty wild. I wonder how long it would operate for. But it sure seems like traveling at the speed of light is sort of difficult. Those possibly further-advanced Gliesians need to meet us here and knock back a coupla tall cold ones on our turf.

From what I remember, it was theorized that we could get close to the speed of light but that it was impossible to achieve lightspeed. I have no real sources just tons of stuff Ive watched on History channel about space and Einstein.

As you get close and closer to the speed of light you gain more and more mass, so that the only things that can go the speed of light are things with no mass, such as, say, light. Even a significant fraction of light speed would require an unthinkable amount of energy, plus there would be significant time dilation.

Liquid water..It really is amazing to think about the small window temperature wise that liquid water exists at...It is the obvious thing to try to find.
Surely, it is not impossible for life to be born in steam or ice but then we might not even know what we are looking for, let alone something else. Life in some sense seems to be another state of liquid water as we define life..
I think a problem with this whole idea though is if the earth was really "dead" and an alien civilization landed here..I'm not sure they would be able to tell that rocks were not alive. I could easily see humans being fooled into thinking that pebbles and stones on a beach are "alive" on an alien planet with water.
I somewhat subscribe to the idea of the multiverse but it can't be a desirable property of a universe that "life" from other planets can run into each other immune system wise. We happen to have the good fortune of living in a universe that contact with aliens is not possible.

Dear everyone,
You're not as smart as you think you are.

Yes, this includes you.

obviously, but only an idiot would post this.

Do you just string random words together? I hadn't even read your above post when I made my post.

Jesus christ this is stupid:

The whole point of leaving a solar system that fast is to leave the idiocy behind. The time dilation is a communications problem, it's not a huge issue if you're the one moving like a bat outta Sol. Personally and philosophically.

The problem isn't one of speed, it's one of lifespans. Solvable anyway.

Of course, you could hit line drives indiscriminately along the Orion arm with minds distilled into photons but there remains the problem of a receiver.

Hard to avoid the necessity of a sub-light option initially then.

Easy to laugh at a species that can't even get rid of its own waste properly.

time dilation will not be a communications problem once we have an ansible