The Most Earth-Like Planet is Only 500 Light Years Away

Most estimates place that there are an average of 200-400 billion stars in a galaxy, and 200-400 billion galaxies in the universe. To average it out, you are saying that our solar system is a 1 in a 9x10^25, or 1 in 90000000000000000000000

ummm yes... any other questions?
 
nealric said:
We are further from being able to travel 500 light years than the cave men were from getting to the moon.
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We are already technologically capable of going ~10% the speed of light via nuclear pulse propulsion. The obstacles are life support and ship maintenance for the voyage. I don't think it's inconceivable that we could build those sort of ships in the next few centuries and work our way outwards. They wouldn't try to go 500 light years in one trip, they'd make comparatively short hops from star to star with each voyage taking a few decades.

With that in mind, even if we are never able to achieve relativistic speeds we could still cover 500 light years in a few thousand years at 10% the speed of light. Humans have been around for a million years or so, we're 'closer' to the stars than our cave men ancestors were to the moon.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
They wouldn't try to go 500 light years in one trip, they'd make comparatively short hops from star to star with each voyage taking a few decades.
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the problem is, by the time that first ship got there.... there'd already be a civilization there started by later, faster ships....
 
Are there plans for the planet to be bought by Facebook?
 
inerlogic said:
looks a bit bigger than earth so.... stronger gravity....
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No, not necessarily. The planet Saturn is much more massive than the Earth, yet the gravity at the cloud tops is about 1g. Saturn is big and has 95x Earth's mass, but it's much less dense than the Earth, at the cloud tops of Saturn you're very far away from it's center of mass.

If the new planet is mostly water or ice then the surface gravity could be quite low. If it's rocky with a lot of heavy elements the surface gravity could be intense.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
We are already technologically capable of going ~10% the speed of light via nuclear pulse propulsion. The obstacles are life support and ship maintenance for the voyage. I don't think it's inconceivable that we could build those sort of ships in the next few centuries and work our way outwards. They wouldn't try to go 500 light years in one trip, they'd make comparatively short hops from star to star with each voyage taking a few decades.

With that in mind, even if we are never able to achieve relativistic speeds we could still cover 500 light years in a few thousand years at 10% the speed of light. Humans have been around for a million years or so, we're 'closer' to the stars than our cave men ancestors were to the moon.
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Sure, we have a theoretical method of getting to 10% of the speed of light, but we have no theoretical method whatsoever of traveling 90% of the speed of light, which would be necessary to travel there in even a remotely human timescale. In fact, barring a real revolution in physics, such travel will always be impossible. People just assume away a revolution, but I think it's a lot less likely that most would like to admit. Newtonian mechanics still pretty accurately describes physics at non-relativistic or quantum scales. It has been going strong for hundreds of years. Einstein's work just gets more strongly confirmed.

The space colonies idea pre-supposes that a human civilization could survive thousands of years in deep space. Even if such an ability is ever possible, it's absurdly beyond our capabilities. And even if we did develop such capabilities, what would it even mean to us today that our distant ancestors may one day go there?

The amount of handwaving required to seriously contemplate a 500 light year journey is about as much required to do so with a billion light year journey. Either way it requires an absurdly massive leap in technology and a revolution in our understanding of physics. Might as well just hope we discover a wormhole.

A caveman chucking a spear on top of a mountain was about as close (distance wise) to getting to the moon than Voyager 1 is to traveling 500 light years- the only difference being that Voyager may eventually get that far having reached escape velocity.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
We are already technologically capable of going ~10% the speed of light via nuclear pulse propulsion. The obstacles are life support and ship maintenance for the voyage. I don't think it's inconceivable that we could build those sort of ships in the next few centuries and work our way outwards. They wouldn't try to go 500 light years in one trip, they'd make comparatively short hops from star to star with each voyage taking a few decades.

With that in mind, even if we are never able to achieve relativistic speeds we could still cover 500 light years in a few thousand years at 10% the speed of light. Humans have been around for a million years or so, we're 'closer' to the stars than our cave men ancestors were to the moon.
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Would add to the above that even with exotic propulsion, you still run into the tyranny of the rocket equation. To go faster, you need more fuel, but as you add more fuel, you add more weight, which requires more fuel. This gets even worse when you get to extremely high velocities.

Our current rockets travel within a velocity range that can be mostly arrested by the gravity of the body we are approaching. But a spaceship traveling at 10% of the speed of light would just fly right past another solar system without an equivalent amount of fuel to slow it down. Imagine the logistical difficulties of the Apollo mission if you needed to get a fully fueled Saturn V into orbit around the moon. It would have required a spacecraft that would have dwarfed the Burj Khalifa (tallest building in the world). Now imagine that, but 1000 times worse, and you have an inkling of the difficulties of interstellar travel.
 
It's interesting and all, but It's still mostly speculation and even if we knew for sure that it was an earth like planet capable of sustaining life.... The fastest man made object ever made was the Helios II probe that travelled at a bit less than 170,000 mph. It would take more than 1.7 million years at that speed to reach it.

Near light travel is far flung future stuff. Even with some massive technology boosts in the future, I doubt we are even thousands of years away from setting foot on that planet. After all, we are talking about someplace where it would take nearly a millennia to radio a question and get a response (if there were someone there to send it).
 
nealric said:
Sure, we have a theoretical method of getting to 10% of the speed of light, but we have no theoretical method whatsoever of traveling 90% of the speed of light, which would be necessary to travel there in even a remotely human timescale.
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The space colonies idea pre-supposes that a human civilization could survive thousands of years in deep space.
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I'm not really sure we're on the same page here. Why do you need to travel 90% the speed of light? Who's talking about spending thousands of years in deep space?

You don't go 500 light years in one trip. It doesn't seem unreasonable that we could build nuclear pulse propulsion-based ships (or something a little more advanced) capable of 50 year journeys in the next few centuries. Such a ship could reach, say, Alpha Centauri in 40 years. They go there, set up a colony or outpost, and a new generation of colonists continues on to the next star(s). By making these relatively short jumps we could slowly work our way out to stars 500 light years away in a few thousand years, less than the time it took for our ancestors to get from Kenya to the Moon.

If you build new ships at each colony you could have an outpost at every star in the Milky Way in a little over a million years, about as long as our species has been around so far. Colonizing is what we do, we made our way from Kenya around the globe to the southern tip of Argentina with our feet and canoes.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
We are already technologically capable of going ~10% the speed of light via nuclear pulse propulsion..
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All theoretical at best. The fastest man made object has only achieved less than 0.03% of the speed of light and that used the gravitational pull of the sun to hit that speed.
 
griffinhart said:
All theoretical at best. The fastest man made object has only achieved less than 0.03% of the speed of light and that used the gravitational pull of the sun to hit that speed.
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You mean Jupiter. The Voyager probes used chemical propulsion and a gravity assist from Jupiter to achieve solar escape velocity. Using the sun to escape the sun would be like jumping off a cliff to reach earth orbit. :p

The biggest design issue with Orion-style nuclear pulse propulsion is the shock dampener for a manned variant, but there don't seem to be any insurmountable problems. Fusion propulsion is even better. The US actually onsidered constructing an Alpha Centuari probe in orbit as one of the uses for Reagan's Space Station Freedom. That would have been a 100 year mission.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
We are already technologically capable of going ~10% the speed of light via nuclear pulse propulsion. The obstacles are life support and ship maintenance for the voyage. I don't think it's inconceivable that we could build those sort of ships in the next few centuries and work our way outwards. They wouldn't try to go 500 light years in one trip, they'd make comparatively short hops from star to star with each voyage taking a few decades.

With that in mind, even if we are never able to achieve relativistic speeds we could still cover 500 light years in a few thousand years at 10% the speed of light. Humans have been around for a million years or so, we're 'closer' to the stars than our cave men ancestors were to the moon.
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The fastest actual real-world application for space travel that has been approved and might be put to use is what, 25 miles per second unmanned? (the Jupiter/Juno Project if memory serves.)

Orion was our biggest nuclear endeavor, and it only achieved 3-5% the speed of light on paper. Even if we magically had enough anti-matter to boost Orion via the antimatter catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion idea (and it is an idea, not to be confused with theory or hypothesis), simple dust in space would shred anything we have ever observed or built at those velocities. I chuckle every time I read science fiction trying to tackle this by spraying a fine mist of hydrogen in front of the vessel to diffuse debris -- try spraying water out of a car window on a freeway in front of the car for a good example of what is going to happen.

The speculative "warp drive" originally proposed by Miguel Alcubierre even if there were enough energy and exotic conditions to do such a thing, we'd have no way of shutting it down due to no one being on the same reference frame -- and it still doesn't travel at 10% the speed of light within our available energy means, even in local reference frame inside the bubble.

You are right about one thing though, no mix of nuclear energy and ion propulsion will get us there reliably enough even for a generational world ship of fiction. 10% the speed of light is about 29,979,246 miles per second in contrast to our proven 25 miles per second theoretical.

We can't even readily send robot overlords to conquer, because the flight time of a radio signal is just far too great!
 
nealric said:
Would add to the above that even with exotic propulsion, you still run into the tyranny of the rocket equation. To go faster, you need more fuel, but as you add more fuel, you add more weight, which requires more fuel. This gets even worse when you get to extremely high velocities.
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Or a fuel which is more energy-dense. Like antimatter.

But once again, we dive into technology which only exists in theory/fiction.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
You mean Jupiter. The Voyager probes used chemical propulsion and a gravity assist from Jupiter to achieve solar escape velocity. Using the sun to escape the sun would be like jumping off a cliff to reach earth orbit. :p

The biggest design issue with Orion-style nuclear pulse propulsion is the shock dampener for a manned variant, but there don't seem to be any insurmountable problems. Fusion propulsion is even better. The US actually onsidered constructing an Alpha Centuari probe in orbit as one of the uses for Reagan's Space Station Freedom. That would have been a 100 year mission.
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No I mean Helios II. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_2_(NASA) It still holds the record for the fastest spacecraft.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
No, not necessarily. The planet Saturn is much more massive than the Earth, yet the gravity at the cloud tops is about 1g. Saturn is big and has 95x Earth's mass, but it's much less dense than the Earth, at the cloud tops of Saturn you're very far away from it's center of mass.

If the new planet is mostly water or ice then the surface gravity could be quite low. If it's rocky with a lot of heavy elements the surface gravity could be intense.
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Well they give the mass and radius, 1.11 times the mass of Earth and 1.1 times the radius. Assuming for a second that these are accurate, the acceleration due to gravity is going to go as 1/r^2 so comparing to earth 1.1 / 1.11^2 or about 91% Earth's gravity at the surface.

While this is definitely a cool find, all the "we should go there" people need to reign it in and not jump to any conclusions about the place. Yeah it's in the habitable zone, which mean that water can possibly exist in a liquid state but it depends upon other factors as well.

The big thing is the atmosphere, now being as the surface gravity is weaker than Earth's it goes to say that it will hold less of an atmosphere than Earth. It's distance from the star is a bit of a double edged sword too, from a total energy input nature it's "farther" than Mars which isn't a good thing. CO2 that would be in the early atmosphere would be perfect to keep the planet warm and allow liquid water, but the existence of liquid water will start to absorb the CO2 and bind it to various rocks removing it from the atmosphere reducing the greenhouse effect. Then if it has an evolution of bacteria like we had with cyanobacteria transforming CO2 into O2, that might be the tipping point to reduce the greenhouse effect so much as to not allow water to exist in a liquid state due to it being too cold. So the planet would be either a CO2 covered Venus like planet, or a tundra covered ice world.

That goes nothing to say how old the planet is, red dwarfs stay on the main sequence for a time longer than the age of the Universe, so if it's a 10B year old planet it probably cooled down enough such that it's magnetic field is all but non existent which would allow the stellar winds from the star to erode the atmosphere, and then we just have a big ass Mars like world.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
I'm not really sure we're on the same page here. Why do you need to travel 90% the speed of light? Who's talking about spending thousands of years in deep space?

You don't go 500 light years in one trip. It doesn't seem unreasonable that we could build nuclear pulse propulsion-based ships (or something a little more advanced) capable of 50 year journeys in the next few centuries. Such a ship could reach, say, Alpha Centauri in 40 years. They go there, set up a colony or outpost, and a new generation of colonists continues on to the next star(s). By making these relatively short jumps we could slowly work our way out to stars 500 light years away in a few thousand years, less than the time it took for our ancestors to get from Kenya to the Moon.

If you build new ships at each colony you could have an outpost at every star in the Milky Way in a little over a million years, about as long as our species has been around so far. Colonizing is what we do, we made our way from Kenya around the globe to the southern tip of Argentina with our feet and canoes.
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A colony where? Alpha Centari, as far as we know, does not have any planets more habitable than deep space. Given the proximity, it seems like we would likely have discovered them if they existed. That proposal is like trying to cross the Pacific Ocean by swimming with the proposal that we can just set up a rest platform halfway to Hawaii.
 
nealric said:
A colony where? Alpha Centari, as far as we know, does not have any planets more habitable than deep space. Given the proximity, it seems like we would likely have discovered them if they existed. That proposal is like trying to cross the Pacific Ocean by swimming with the proposal that we can just set up a rest platform halfway to Hawaii.
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There don't appear to be any gas giants there, but more terrestrial planets are possible. The one unconfirmed candidate around Alpha Centauri B is right on the edge of what we're currently capable of detecting. If there aren't any planets then pick another nearby star. You don't even necessarily need a planet, asteroids could work just fine. I suspect we'll be hollowing out asteroids before we send out colony ships to the stars anyway.

It is entirely possible to row from San Francisco to Hawaii, and at least a few ancient Polynesians made the trip from Oceania to South America. I wouldn't recommend trying to swim the Pacific, and I wouldn't recommend swimming to Alpha Centauri, either.

griffinhart said:
No I mean Helios II. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_2_(NASA) It still holds the record for the fastest spacecraft.
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I see what you mean. You're right, forgot about those. I'm thinking about ships leaving the solar system, not ships with a really low perihelion. :)
 
DeathFromBelow said:
There don't appear to be any gas giants there, but more terrestrial planets are possible. The one unconfirmed candidate around Alpha Centauri B is right on the edge of what we're currently capable of detecting. If there aren't any planets then pick another nearby star. You don't even necessarily need a planet, asteroids could work just fine. I suspect we'll be hollowing out asteroids before we send out colony ships to the stars anyway.

It is entirely possible to row from San Francisco to Hawaii, and at least a few ancient Polynesians made the trip from Oceania to South America. I wouldn't recommend trying to swim the Pacific, and I wouldn't recommend swimming to Alpha Centauri, either.



I see what you mean. You're right, forgot about those. I'm thinking about ships leaving the solar system, not ships with a really low perihelion. :)
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But what's there that an interstellar spacecraft needs on those asteroids? So you get some metal... how does that form the basis for a colony :confused:
 
I find all the theoretical talk of long-distance space travel by man hysterical. Even if you could, in theory, travel at velocities necessary to reach another world outside this solar system, what makes you think you'll be welcome there? If there's intelligent life in the universe capable of interstellar travel and they already know about earth and human civilization in particular, what kind of example has man been setting, especially for the last two centuries? Even Stephen Hawking believes any potential extra-terrestrial life would most likely be hostile. It may be fun to speculate about traveling to other worlds, but man needs to clean his own house before trying to go visit the neighbors.
 
bloodhawke83 said:
.00001seconds on Warp 10. :D
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Well its basically zero since its a tangent towards a curve approaching infinity. The amount of energy however to meet that tangent is also a curve approaching infinity so its merely a theoretical concept not a probability of any knowable kind.

Warp drives are so far out of our reach that its not even worth considering their existence in the traditional sense for the next 100 years. Even we create a sonic warp bubble in the lab (which NASA is trying to do) we have no way to protect the occupants inside the vehicle from the massive radiation that is created in the process of folding space so aggressively. Even then we have no real energy source that is within realistic measure of using. The only kind of fuel that that meets the efficiency requirements is Anti-Matter since its efficiency of energy transfer is 100 percent once it comes into contact with regular matter.

Even then how we would collect sufficient quantities? We don't even have a gram of it from decades of using particle accelerators. It would also cost , at current collection rates , around $25 Billion dollars a gram making it the most expensive and impractical fuel imaginable. We would need far more than a gram to do anything interesting with it other than make a single very powerful bomb.

So considering Warp drives at all is not really worthwhile for now. Far more likely we will be using a hyped up version of an Ion Thruster to get to near light speed in the next 80+ years to get to our nearest neighboring solar system.Its unfortunate that we are so far away
 
Phoenix333 said:
I find all the theoretical talk of long-distance space travel by man hysterical. Even if you could, in theory, travel at velocities necessary to reach another world outside this solar system, what makes you think you'll be welcome there? If there's intelligent life in the universe capable of interstellar travel and they already know about earth and human civilization in particular, what kind of example has man been setting, especially for the last two centuries? Even Stephen Hawking believes any potential extra-terrestrial life would most likely be hostile. It may be fun to speculate about traveling to other worlds, but man needs to clean his own house before trying to go visit the neighbors.
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Well if history has taught us anything is that he visitor ends up conquering the natives, and that's not even restricted to humans. So we got that going for us :D

That said who says there will be others there? Or there has to be something there? The age of exploration saw a huge increase in technology for traveling once there was word that there's something worth going over there for.
 
Godmachine said:
Well its basically zero since its a tangent towards a curve approaching infinity. The amount of energy however to meet that tangent is also a curve approaching infinity so its merely a theoretical concept not a probability of any knowable kind.

Warp drives are so far out of our reach that its not even worth considering their existence in the traditional sense for the next 100 years. Even we create a sonic warp bubble in the lab (which NASA is trying to do) we have no way to protect the occupants inside the vehicle from the massive radiation that is created in the process of folding space so aggressively. Even then we have no real energy source that is within realistic measure of using. The only kind of fuel that that meets the efficiency requirements is Anti-Matter since its efficiency of energy transfer is 100 percent once it comes into contact with regular matter.

Even then how we would collect sufficient quantities? We don't even have a gram of it from decades of using particle accelerators. It would also cost , at current collection rates , around $25 Billion dollars a gram making it the most expensive and impractical fuel imaginable. We would need far more than a gram to do anything interesting with it other than make a single very powerful bomb.

So considering Warp drives at all is not really worthwhile for now. Far more likely we will be using a hyped up version of an Ion Thruster to get to near light speed in the next 80+ years to get to our nearest neighboring solar system.Its unfortunate that we are so far away
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Right. The problem with getting to relativistic speeds (which is to say, sufficiently high velocities that Newtonian mechanics starts to break down) is that it requires relativistic amounts of energy. You need those speeds for any meaningful interstellar travel.

Forget the next 100 years. I'm skeptical we will come up with anything like a usable warp drive in the next 10,000 years. In fact it's entirely possible that such a device is impossible to EVER create. At best, I could see a Voyager-like probe traveling to Alpha Centari launched sometime in the next few hundred years. It would probably take nearly 100 years to get there and only have the capacity for a flyby (not orbit). Even that would stretch the boundaries of human planning.

Intergalactic travel is an even more unlikely problem to be solved. It effectively requires the invention of time travel to accomplish on a human time frame because it requires faster than light travel.
 
I think we will become cyborgs/robots with uploaded human memories, and thus able to "live" long enough for time travel (and shut down for extended periods) prior to warp drives.
 
Intergalactic travel won't happen on this planet for the foreseeable future for one simple reason. It's not even a technological problem. It's a money problem. Intergalactic travel won't happen because there is not a politician out there that would sign a bill that permitted such a vast amount of money spent on a project that, even if fantastically successful, will not directly benefit them during their lifetime let alone their political career.
 
SilverSliver said:
Intergalactic travel won't happen on this planet for the foreseeable future for one simple reason. It's not even a technological problem. It's a money problem. Intergalactic travel won't happen because there is not a politician out there that would sign a bill that permitted such a vast amount of money spent on a project that, even if fantastically successful, will not directly benefit them during their lifetime let alone their political career.
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I doubt we will even get to Mars in my lifetime for the very same reason.
 
SilverSliver said:
Intergalactic travel won't happen on this planet for the foreseeable future for one simple reason. It's not even a technological problem. It's a money problem. Intergalactic travel won't happen because there is not a politician out there that would sign a bill that permitted such a vast amount of money spent on a project that, even if fantastically successful, will not directly benefit them during their lifetime let alone their political career.
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I disagree. There is enough political support for space exploration, but I don't think there is a single scientist, let alone, politician that thinks any kind of space probe or craft traveling to any other solar system is a practical goal and worth the billions it would cost for a project that would certainly fail. It would take advanced Ion thrusters 73,000 years to reach the nearest neighboring solar system, and millions of years to the newly discovered planet. Man went from the first cave paintings to the computer age in 40,000 years.
 
only 500 huh....it might as well be 50000...in our lifetime we'll never get there.and I'm "only 40"
 
interstellar-space-flight-requirements-130701b-02.jpg
 
Blue_Scholar said:
Actually I was stating that it was only a matter time that someone will make that reference about it.

:D But yes, yes I am fully aware of the technical canon concerning hyperspace; what a parsec means in a GFFA or how it is explained away in relation to the real world measurement by the detail oriented and overly pedantic as I will demonstrate:

*Puts nerd glasses on*

Ahem, the Falcon wasn't particularly the "fastest ship in the galaxy" as Han gloated. Not in a sense of propulsion or ability to warp space (hyperspace is already in varying states of warp, if you will), rather the Falcon's sophisticated NAV computer could calculate jumps into hyperspace that were at a much smaller distance that would otherwise put ships into great danger but not so with the Falcon; it is a smuggler's ship after all and naturally it is very important for it to escape without being followed.

Now, the "Kessel run" being particularly hazardous because of black holes became a sort of standard for intrepid pilots to navigate and boast about and generally create legends around. What exactly is a "Kessel run" has never been fully explained in the canon as far as I know, but the Falcon and its navigation computer could jump to hyperspace to it, from it or through it in the least amount of distance in this case, "parsecs", twelve of them to be exact. ;)
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Which is a sad state of affairs, because the optimal path through a gravitational field given interactions of a few black holes is close to simple enough to solve by hand, depending on how much time you want to put into it.
 
Godmachine said:
The only kind of fuel that that meets the efficiency requirements is Anti-Matter since its efficiency of energy transfer is 100 percent once it comes into contact with regular matter.
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Eh... not quite. While yeah you get complete annihilation, efficiency isn't just what energy you get out of it, it's what useful energy you get out of it. Hell a gas engine is technically 100% efficient, just most of the energy is not very useful and gets wasted as heat. Antimatter annihilation produces two gamma ray photons going in opposite directions, so how do you use that to make your ship go forward? Aim it at some fuel to heat it up and shoot it out the back? You'll lose when the fuel hits the ship and warms it up a bit. Some sort of explosion that pushes the ship forward? At best you'll get 50% of the blast pushing the ship forward.
 
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