Astronomers spot most Earth-like planet yet

[Anomalocaris]

Yeah, well, since our star will go boom in 5 billion years, taking 10 billion years to get there will probably take too long.

The Earth will be a dead planet far, far sooner than that. Probably less than 600 million years.

Other biochemistry based study suggest life has the capacity to evolve to sirvive in condition to be expected during much of earth's remaining existence before the sun turn red giant. Some life will still be here in 3 billion years.

But higher multicellular life probably won't survive more than half billion years unless it is through technology and wholesale geoengineering.

[Cinjin]

I figured it out. It's all so simple. We use the movies Independence Day and Event Horizon as a scientific guide for our journey out of the solar system. First, we hijack one of the many alien ships currently flying around our planet. If we have to, we either wait for one to crash in some desert or hire Will Smith to chase one down in an F-15. We then torture the aliens at Abu Ghraib Prison until they agree to show us how to jump through worm holes.

We then put the aliens on display in a public zoo to make piles of money off of their misery and make Laurence Fishburne our new kick-ass worm-hole space captain. Once we've figured out how to travel through space we will land on that planet and give it a generic name like Earth ... maybe we can call it Dirt. After we've murdered all the indigenous people of that planet we can move right in and immediately begin squabbling over which nation gets what part. Obviously, we'll need to have a major world war to decide which Earth nation gets which portion of Dirt but I'm sure in doing so, the rich white people will end up on top regardless.

Once we've settled on into our nice neat little divided countries, we can begin to really exploit the planet the way we have this one. We can immediately begin mining fossil fuels and building an absolutely ungodly amount of carbon emitting super corporations that make nothing but nuclear weapons, SUVs and bio warfare chemicals. We will of course continue ignoring any harm done to the natural habitat and make sure that we act concerned while we do nothing about rampant global warming. Now that we've had earth to practice on, I think it'll take a relatively small amount of time to move in, crush the natives, start some wars, poison the water, kill the wildlife, heat up the planet, cut down the rainforest, burn down ....... meh, you know what ....

Fuck it ... lets just save a lot of time and nuke it from here.

[Minimalist]

I wonder what my 401k will be worth by then?

[Angrboda]

Yeah, well, since our star will go boom in 5 billion years, taking 10 billion years to get there will probably take too long. Even if we froze ourselves so we wouldn't have to worry about evolutionary changes to the descendents of the original crew.

A generation ship or generation starship is a hypothetical type of interstellar ark starship that travels across great distances between stars at a speed much slower than the speed of light.

Since such a ship might take centuries to thousands of years to reach even nearby stars, the original occupants of a generation ship would grow old and die, leaving their descendants to continue traveling.

[FlyingNarwhal]

Yeah, well, since our star will go boom in 5 billion years, taking 10 billion years to get there will probably take too long. Even if we froze ourselves so we wouldn't have to worry about evolutionary changes to the descendents of the original crew.

A generation ship or generation starship is a hypothetical type of interstellar ark starship that travels across great distances between stars at a speed much slower than the speed of light.

Since such a ship might take centuries to thousands of years to reach even nearby stars, the original occupants of a generation ship would grow old and die, leaving their descendants to continue traveling.

That actually sounds pretty cool, I wonder if the people on board would ever forget what their mission was though. I would also wonder if over generations some kind of religion forms on the ship that is shaped by their mission.


Anyways, solar sails anyone?

[JesusHChrist]

I propose naming the planet Kolob, just to piss everyone off.

You can't prove it's *not" the planet Kolob, now can you?

I'm sure with sufficient post-hoc rationalizations, there is something in the dusty old book of moron indicating Kolob is a mere 500 light years away.

[Marsellus Wallace]

[downbeatplumb]

Close enough to exile xtain fundies to in the foreseeable future.

Why fuck up another planet?

Shipping all the fundies elsewhere is what all great societies do.

[Rampant.A.I.]

[Anomalocaris]

But at a very high speeds , 50% the speed of light , Time will go slower by 50% in that ship and 100 years would go by and for that ship it would only be 50 years passed away.

Imagine if that ship goes with that speed of 99% the speed of light .

Uh, no. Time dilation is not linear. Lorenze factor is one over the square root of one minus the ratio between the square of the speed of the traveler and the square of the speed of light.

At 50% speed of light will go slower by only 15%. At 99% speed of light time will still only go 7 times slower.

With a ship capable of 99% speed of light, almost 75 years will still elapse onboard in the time it takes to cover 500 light years, and passenger born on the day of the launch and living a normal human life span will still barely get from earth to this new planet in time to die of old age, assuming his wonder ship didn't take too much of his life in accelerating at launch and deccelerating on arrival.