Astronomers spot most Earth-like planet yet

[Anomalocaris]

Speculation about this sort of thing is fun, right enough, but that's all it is. We're never, EVER going to reach extra-solar planets, we're NEVER going to colonize any place other than Luna or (a bare possibility) Mars.

At this point, the theoretical physics don't even exist for things like wormholes, warp drive, generation ships and so forth. Even if they did, can you seriously see the world's governments allocating the money and resources for the engineering to make these things practical? Try telling the billion Africans we'll have round by then that they need to get by on even fewer calories so we can build starships. Expect your engineers to be lynched and your research facilities to be reduced to rubble by angry, hungry mobs.

Earth. That's it, folks. The only planet we have, the only one we're ever going to have.

Boru

You are religious, in every negative meaning of the word, in your pessimism.

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While I agree with you in spirit, and space travel will likely never be Star Trek, in 1970, we sent manned missions to the moon. Since 1997, we have sent four unmanned but increasingly complex rovers to Mars, culminating in a seriously proposed (albeit with dubious dates of launch) potential manned exploration.

The technology exists to send a manned mission to Mars tomorrow, the trouble is in allocating some of the budget toward space exploration.

In 2010, we had a $1.03 trillion military budget to the $18.724 billion budget for NASA.



The problem is not starving masses, it's where the money is being spent. If those figures were reversed, or even halved, we would have easily been able to launch a colony ship to Mars, 4 years ago.

When I mentioned starving masses, I was referring to starships, not interplanetary travel. I agree that the technical aspects of a manned trip to Mars are possible (though daunting), but I think you're being overly optimistic in saying you could launch 'tomorrow'.

But so what? Assuming you could get your crew to Mars alive and healthy, that's not really colonization in any meaningful sense, anymore than the Apollo missions amounted to lunar colonization.

Boru

If a colony is meant as in a world you can live on as you do on earth, you are right.

The estimates I've seen for terraforming mars to its closest possible approach to unassisted liveavility will all take tens of thousands of years to accomplish, and would require earth achieve a level of social, governmental, and ecological stability to see it through over this period.

A case can probably be made that on the whole, it would be cheaper, and accomplish our abjectives sooner, if we were to wait until we find reasonably earth like planet, and then build a low speed cryogenic ship to take thousands of years to get there to colonize it, then to attempt to terraform mars to the point when we can consider mars a self-sustaining colony with a breathable atmosphere.