Can We Travel To That Exciting New Exoplanet?

An anonymous reader writes "The news last week that exoplanet Gliese 581g may be in the 'Goldilocks zone' and could therefore hold liquid water and alien life got everyone all excited, with good reason. A potentially habitable planet — and only 20 light years away! But to put things in perspective, here are a couple of estimates on what it would take to travel to Gliese 581g. One scientist puts the travel time at 180,000 years based on current space flight technology, while another explains that it could be quite quick if we build a matter-antimatter drive, and can figure out how to bring along 530 times as much mass in fuel as is contained in the ship and cargo itself."

Comments

Re:You are correct, but

[BitZtream]

These are fundamental physical limits of mass and energy we're talking about.

Assuming we're right in what we're calling fundamental physical limits ...

The arrogance of humans still blows me away, we think we actually know how things work ... even though just a basic glance at a history book will show you that we're wrong A LOT, we generally have never gotten anything 100% right, which means theres a really good chance what we think of as 'limits' are in fact not in any way a limit.

We have one group of brilliant people saying you can't exceed the speed of light, ever, ever, never, no way, can't be done.

Then we have another group of brilliant people saying that in fact during the big bang it happened.

One of those groups is wrong, throwing out a rather massive chunk of understanding about how the universe as we know it was formed.

Seems pretty reasonable that the silly things we call 'limits of physics' now are more than likely wrong as well.

Then you go ahead and throw in 'visiting aliens' ... because they some how manage to pull it off, but we can't? Thats just a retarded statement.