Nasa Hunting for liveable planets

Wow I never thought I would see this in my life time. Nasa is actually looking for earth like planets in hopes to inhabit them. Global warming could me more serious than we think.



Source

AlBeMeT

Thumbs up to NASA! Along with the news of water on a distant planet, it seems space travel could seep back into society.

I'll be following this one closely.

makes sense , Earth is gonna run out of natural resources at somepoint, to survive as a race , rather than go all soylent green , we either need to live IN space or find another home .

NASA is not looking for planets to move to, simply do to the fact that
even if there is a hospitable planet in the nearest star system to our
own (Alpha Centauri), even traveling at near the speed of light it would
take a little over four years just to get there, and considering that it
would require either gargantuan amounts of energy, or a very long time
at more doable energies to even reach .9c.

However, if/when we develop FTL technology like space-warping drives,
wormholes or Hyper-drives it would take a considerably less amount of
time, though I do not expect that we will have those for at least 50 years.

[edit on 4/12/2007 by iori_komei]

But who's to say they they don't know how to achieve FTL travel ?
I know that's a way out there response but the amount of tech that's withheld from the public we just don't know what they have sat there or that there currently working on.

Well, considering the military is generally only 25-50 years more
advanced than the general public, depending on the technology,
it's unlikely they have it.

Add to that, FTL technology is pretty useless to the military, unless there
was an aggressor alien species that was directly trying to attack us, but
even than, if there was, we would know about it, as they would not try
to hide there presence from the public, they would attack our major
cities and such.

They are interested in space propultion that uses no external fuel:

public.fh-wolfenbuettel.de...

Or uses it in a way that goes 100's of times farther than would normally be true:

www.hpcc-space.de...

So we could do it in 8 years at half the speed of light? I would be willing to give up 20 years of my life to get there, li ve there, research and hopefully coeback in one peice! Or if humanity depended on it.. would years and years of travel be so bad? All we need is the fuel.

EDIT: Ok maybe not 20 years. Thats a long time unless you took all your friends and family with you and a man has needs

[edit on 14-4-2007 by fiftyfifty]

Actually, it would take more like 9 years, as Alpha Centauri is a little
more than 4 light years, and you would be traveling slower than light.

Another interesting thing to, if you were traveling at .9c, even though
it would take nine years to an outside observer, only a few months would
actually pass on the spaceship.


The one big problem is that actually accelerating a ship to .9c
requires huge amounts of power, of which we are just not capable of
right now, though I suspect in 40-60 years we will have the necessary
technology to accelerate a ship to .5c, though it would take
additional time to accelerate it to that speed.

While this works with stars within 20LY of Earth, if you send a ship to
a star say 120 light years away, it's possible that by the time the ship
reached there, there would already be a human colony since in the time
the ship was traveling, better, faster technology had been developed.