We would need something akin to Star Treks 'Prime Directive' before we head out to other planets.

Otherwise history will repeat.

Originally posted by Arkady
let's nuke it, I bet there's terrorists on Gliese 581 that would probably appreciate us liberating their oil and expanding their freemarket.

Don't be insane. We need the land.

Perhaps they could use some blankets?

Originally posted by _Highlander_
We would need something akin to Star Treks 'Prime Directive' before we head out to other planets.

Otherwise history will repeat.

We have a prime directive already...

SURVIVE at all costs

So, in a nutshell, 2012 is real.

I did a few calculations.

If this planet is 20.3 lightyears away and we have a travelling spead of 40,000km/h, then it will take us 547,721 years to reach there. Thats roughly 3 times the time that our species Homo sapien has currently existed for. In that time we would probably evolve to survive in a metal spaceship on lazy boys and would certainly die when we got there due to the hostile environment. Either that or we would have invented teleporation by then anyway and would arrive to find that the whole of earth just teleported across and we have been sat in a box for half a million year for no reason. They could stick some cameras in the ship and make a big brother future series, where you get ejected into outer space when evicted for peeing in the shower. Id watch it.

Unfortunately we might cook up something like a warp drive sooner the we would enact an idea such as the prime directive. Power without perception. Before we let ourselves out of the pen, we should hope that we calm down a little first. Otherwise we will be eating macca's on other planets, which really, is a terrible state of affairs.