RE: Seven temperate terrestrial planets around the nearby ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1
February 24, 2017 at 7:51 am
(This post was last modified: February 24, 2017 at 7:52 am by Jehanne.)
(February 24, 2017 at 7:38 am)ignoramus Wrote: We're never gonna leave this rock! Let's just embrace that simple fact!
If by some chance we do, it'll be so far into the future, we probably couldn't even be called homo sapiens by them.
Eventually, our World is going to die, and so, if we want to survive as a species, even if we evolve in an entirely different direction over time, we'll need to pack-up and move on. Mars may have enough water to be habitable for a short period of time (500 million years at most), but it will take millennia of effort to colonize it. Inevitably, small interstellar spaceships will have to be constructed to ferry some groups (100 or so) of human beings to other stars, as they pass close by ours. The only way that I could see this happening would be to construct some sort of high-speed sling-shot device that would rapidly accelerate a spacecraft beyond the escape velocity of the Sun; after that, it could perform course corrections, and finally, use its on-board rockets to slow itself down. This may be technologically impossible to do, of course. It all depends on whether our species will start cooperating with itself.
