101–110 of 391 posts
"just 12 light-years away" I love the "just". I know it's nearby on galactic scales but it's practically about 450,000 Earth years away with current technology :-)
I smiled as well but with a slowly but steadily accelerating ship we can reach half the light speed and get there in 50 years. It put things in the realm of "possible" which is amazing.
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Tidal locking means that the denser side of the lighter body always faces the heavier body, and the less-dense side of the lighter body already faces away from the heavier one. The moon is tidally locked to the Earth, which is why it has a dark side.
There is no dark side in the moon. There is a far side.
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> I know it's nearby on galactic scales but it's practically about 450,000 Earth years away with current technology :-) If we had the political will, the Orion design could get people there in, what, 200 years, and that's with '70s technology.
> If we had the political will It takes more than that. We need political maturity and stability. There is no way we can send people today on a 200 years journey and be sure they will both make it and be able to create a somewhat stable society on the other side. Also, that would be a earth level effort, another thing that is seriously irrealistic right now. The very best we can achieve right now is the ISS and that'…
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Just going to Mars will significantly increase your risk of cancer, unless we find smart ways to repair our genetic material as we go.
Well, for the journey itself the problem has a simple solution - more shielding. Then of course we have to answer the question of how can we get ships into orbit when they are full of shielding, but that's not insurmountable. The bigger issue is actually living on mars - as romantic as that idea is, human habitation on the surface is really dumb, the radiation level is not insignificant, so anything long term would e…
If regular travel becomes a reality, you wouldn't shield the launch vehicle, but the cycler[1].
Our current era is a few hundred years of real, directed technological development. A few thousands years either side of that and who knows what we'd be looking at, but you imagine that - hopefully - the general progression of technology is forward.
So if they were inhabited, what happened to them? Are they exactly at our level of development? Earlier? Hopefully. Because later poses some real big questions - does technology top out about where we are now - no FTL travel, no really big radio transmitters or stellar engineering? No probes to nearby star systems? Did they even make it past the nuclear age, or avoid wrecking their climate?
One thing's for sure - if there's really 2 habitable planets, with liquid water, then we've got a hell of a target to point James Webb at when it launches - an infrared spectrum star should mean any plant life is well optimized to towards the redder end of the spectrum - we should see some type of chlorophyll.
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And imagine you're the first ship to arrive only to find out a) that the planet is not habitable and there were some wrong assumptions about it b) that the planet is already occupied by a different form of life and there's no warm welcome to us
This is also assuming A) Human engineering can create something that can last 200+ years of space travel. We don't even build houses anymore that can feasibly last 100 years. 2) People don't go mad and kill each other or do a mutiny III) Any number of stray objects from asteroids to rogue planets that just slams into the ship and causes major malfunctions d) Food and life support sustainability I mean... there are SO…
Being that close also offers us a better ability to examine it. The nearer the star, the more arc-seconds (or tiny fractions thereof) the star will appear in telescopes. 12ly is ridiculously close! It also tells us something interesting. If we presume there's nothing special about our little corner of the universe, then the distance to the nearest potentially habitable planets gives us an estimate of how many habitab…
This seems like the birthday problem in statistics [0] - that if you have 30 people, it's likely that two people have the same birthday.
However, the problem that could also exist (in our corner of the galaxy) that everyone else has a birthday far away from ours, and nobody else shares a birthday on the same day with anyone else. (in other words, we happen to be the two people who share the same corner of the galaxy, but everyone else is far away and separate - i.e. no other clustering).
Not disagreeing with you, and it does give us hope, but randomness is a bch that can make everything look different from how it actually is.
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And imagine you're the first ship to arrive only to find out a) that the planet is not habitable and there were some wrong assumptions about it b) that the planet is already occupied by a different form of life and there's no warm welcome to us
This is also assuming A) Human engineering can create something that can last 200+ years of space travel. We don't even build houses anymore that can feasibly last 100 years. 2) People don't go mad and kill each other or do a mutiny III) Any number of stray objects from asteroids to rogue planets that just slams into the ship and causes major malfunctions d) Food and life support sustainability I mean... there are SO…