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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."
That is one HELL of an assumption. Considering that the fastest space vehicles ever created took 3 months to travel a mere 8 light *minutes* (somewhere around one-16000th the speed of light), the assumption that we will ever reach even a significant fraction of the speed of light with a vehicle created anytime in the conceivable future is a bit of an overstretch to say the *least*. At the speed of the Helios probes, that journey to this planet would take over 300,000 years, BTW. So even McConville's 180,000 year estimate is a bit optimistic.
And that's not even throwing in the navigation difficulties (that's going to require some epically precise calculations), the damage such a long trip would inflict to the craft with radiation and micrometeorites, the need for braking when you get there, etc.
Interstellar space is a big VAST empty that few people appreciate. When I was a kid, all the science fiction and popular misinformation made it sound like the next solar system started right at the edge of our own. It was only when I got older that I realized that our solar system is just a tiny dot in a huge sea of lonely empty. The scale of distances between solar systems is difficult for the human mind to even appreciate.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Technological limitations aside, this is the first time in several hundred years that we have had a further shore to sail to... a place where no man has gone before, as the saying goes.
That has to count for something.
For me this is the most profound discovery in the history of us. Without hyperbole. The only thing I can see superseding it is, of course, the confirmation of life itself out there.
I think we need a further shore... and I'm glad I lived to see a new one.
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
You are correct, but just a mere few hundred years ago the fastest we could move was a dozen or so miles in a day. I am optimistic that if we don't manage to destroy ourselves we'll find means of providing energy and types of propulsion that would seem like magic to us today (kudos to A.C. Clarke for the reference).
Trust a slashdot reader to miss the entire point and squabble over an irrelevant number.