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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.
Would it not make sense to communicate first? Radio at 20 light years is a 40 year round trip. You never know, somebody might answer with instructions on how to get there quicker.
Hey! That's given me an idea for a great film. Is Jodie Foster available for the lead?
You were lucky. We had to cobble a planet together out of dust in an protoplanetary disk!
I am officially gone from
I read somewhere that they might be intentionally ignoring us until we develop warp capability.
Probably the best bet is to copy it from visiting aliens, if any ever bother to visit.
Meanwhile in a neighboring star system,
"Probably the best bet is to copy it from visiting aliens, if any ever bother to visit."
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Trust a slashdot reader to miss the entire point and squabble over an irrelevant number.
No, it doesn't. Protein needs are easily met on a vegan diet; the only vitamin that can really be troublesome is B12, which is made by bacteria and so doesn't need to be synthesized.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
(he means Researched the Horseback Riding technology after Animal Husbandry)
You're forgetting that the volume is proportional to the cube of the radius, while gravity is proportional to the inverse square of the radius. So, while gravity doesn't increase linearly with mass, it's not constant either:
4x mass -> 4x volume -> 4^(1/3)x radius -> 4/4^(2/3)x gravity
So, gravity would be increased about 1.6 times. You should apologize to him if he weighs 380 pounds, not 500. :)