Feb07
Earth-Like Exoplanets
on February 7, 2013 at 8:03 amRight next door?
Maybe it’s more motivation to develop interstellar propulsion, but we’re still a long way from it, and thirteen light years is still a long way away.
Right next door?
Maybe it’s more motivation to develop interstellar propulsion, but we’re still a long way from it, and thirteen light years is still a long way away.
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There are two ways to get to the stars — fast and slow. The first requires exotic propulsion, the second doesn’t. However most everyone believes the second impractical because slow travel means either too long for science to be beamed back, too long for people to handle, or a faster craft being sent later. But all three of those objections can be addressed if the payload are frozen humans (either embryos or suspended animation) and if the purpose were to be to establish a human civilization at distance for the purpose of having an insurance policy against human extinction.
This would be the Embryo Space Colonization to Avoid Potential Extinction (ESCAPE) Mission. The scientific development of the necessary technologies is more advanced than most realize.
I can give you mars starting with one $300m ship. ESCAPE depends on technology that regular travel between planets and living in space gives you.
First things first. Should we ignore the keiper belt or oort cloud as well?
I would think that a tide locked planet would be unlikely to bear life. It would be possible that a moon orbiting a gas giant in close enough to a red dwarf could carry life. Such a planet in that kind of orbit would be more likely to have even surface temperature.
Answer me this. Are any of Jupiter’s moon’s habitable, or are they smack in the middle of the Jovian radiation belts and you would get fried?
You’d get fried quickly on Io, Europa, or Ganymede. Radiation levels are lower at Callisto but still dangerous in the long-term, AIUI.
Not sure what the relevance of this is, since not all gas giants have strong radiation belts. Saturn’s belts are pretty weak, for instance.
It’s close enough they could get there and we could hear back before I die.
That’s close enough for me.
13 light years is just an average.
The nearest one could be as close as Proxima Centauri – one third the distance.
Quite. Let us examine Proxima Centauri. It is 4.24 light years from the Sun.
The Oort cloud supposedly lies around 1 light year away from the Sun.
It is reasonable to assume there would be an analogous to the Oort cloud around Proxima Centauri.
So the distance between the star systems is not the same as the distance between the stars. I would guess it is almost half that amount.
The Oort cloud is supposed to have volatiles. In other words it may have hydrogen and quite likely deuterium as well. So it should have both water and fusion fuel.
These other supposedly more distant systems may in fact be reached in a voyage with stops along the way. In my view it is not the total distance which is relevant to the expense or impossibility of the mission but the distance between stop and resupply points.
I think a robotic mission to the nearest sites would be possible given our current technology.
However given that we have not even explored the Kuiper belt or the Oort cloud yet I would say such a mission is still quite some time on the making.
By all means, research the propulsion systems. But until we have colonies on several rocks in our own solar system, it’s premature to think about sending people to other stars… even frozen peoples.
Besides, although the aliens appreciate the free lunch, they prefer slow roasted to corpsicles.