Thursday, October 1, 2009

Wanted: Technology To Save Our Species

When "you" discover that the Sun will destroy you at an unknown time in the future unless you move somewhere else, some people will say "lets talk about that somewhere else and how to get there fast", and some people will say "why worry about that now".

This says a lot:
... the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which has been traveling outward from the Sun for 31 years ... launched in 1977, is moving at a speed of 38,000 miles an hour. Even at this considerable speed, the spacecraft will still take 30,000 years to reach a distance equal to that of the nearest star.
(Science Daily). The nearest star is only 4.2 light years away, has no habitable planets around it, and it would take "30,000 years" [74,000 years by other calculations] to travel there. We have trouble travelling a few days to the moon and setting up a colony (it hasn't been done BTW).

Thus, our current technology does not allow us to find another habitable planet and colonize it, which we must do in order to avoid extinction as a species (because our star is going to disintegrate us along with all the inner planets out to Mars).

The NASA Kepler mission is looking for habitable planets or habitable moons of planets in the 50-500 light year range. You know, up to a million years of travel for Voyager 1 & 2 type space vehicles (see Tenet 3(b) basics).

Anyone ready to drop the silly fossil fuel technology and the song "Fly Me To The Moon", and get serious about developing the new physics?

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