RE: Earthlike planet discovered!
September 29, 2010 at 10:59 pm
(This post was last modified: September 29, 2010 at 11:01 pm by TheDarkestOfAngels.)
(September 29, 2010 at 10:16 pm)theVOID Wrote: GrantedThis si still awesome news, especially considering the relative ease in which this planet was discovered.
No kidding.
If it really is an M-type planet (or even a close approximation of one), then only good things can follow.
What's great news about it is that if we can build a ship fast enough, we won't need a star-trek level ship to reach it. A ship that can travel even half the speed of light (for a one-way 40 year journey) would be more than enough to reach it within a lifetime (and a very nice retirement for an initial crew of 20-year-olds.)
The implications are only better if you consider near-light travel in which the lorentz factor can cut the journey much shorter (for the crew making the trip.)
Still - in stellar terms - the possibility of an "M-Class" planet so close to us is beyond amazing. It's in the territory of "ths is better than we could have possibily hoped."
I would like to propose to NASA that 'habitable' planets be classified as "Roddenberry-Class" planets.
(Lucas can have the classification of a hot methane-based gas giant.)
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
