Gilese 581d - so excited ... until I reached the end :(

I have a passing fascination with space exploration - by this, I mean I get excited, but I have next to no technical understanding of astronomy or space exploration.

So, you can imagine my excitement when I read about a planet, with earth like attributes, a "mere" 20 light years from Earth.

So excited, in fact, that I emailed the story to all my staff, to share in my excitement ...

Gliese 581d - the exoplanet which could be a haven for life

Read more ...

I then read the very last paragraph, and my heart sank

A spaceship travelling close to light speed would take more than 20 years to get there, while our present rocket technology would take 300,000 years. Read more: www.smh.com.au...

I thought you were worried about the red dwarf orbiting it, I read that about the planet somewhere. If a pole shift happened to that planet the dwarf could slam into it.

hahaha, yeah, you gotta remember what a "light year" is. For perspective, the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second or 671 MILLION miles per hour.

reply to post by MJZoo


I'm googling it now ... it takes light 1.2 seconds to travel from earth to the moon.

But it takes 20 YEARS for light to reach Gilese 581d ... oh dear.

A light year is usually rounded up to 6 trillion miles. You will see calculations that range close to 5.87 trillion but inexplicably forget about that .25 additional time in our year, 365.25 days. So the better figure of a light year is 5,878,625,373,183 (or 5.9 trillion) miles, or 9.46 trillion kilometers where astronomers use base ten for a quick ballpark figure of easy math head calculations which at that point really doesn't make a discussion totally off base.

I also find a smidgen of humor when someone states 5,878,625,373,183, or 5.8 trillion miles, like, don't they see 878 is closer to 9 than 8?!!

Thanks for this post OP, I to share your feelings about space exploration it will be our future or we wont have a future. Sadly we need to be spending more money on space exploration so the human race can survive into the future but it seems most of our money goes for wars. It will take lots of money and some good scientists to develop the technology and ships we will need to explore our solar system and then beyond. star and flag