Potentially habitable "Super-Earth" is among 50 newly discovered exoplanets

reply to post by ModernAcademia


I for one will be taking all the dogs I can! Mother Earth sure would be happy but I would imagine the next planet would not be very ecstatic about our arrival.

....don't usually do short posts but 'beam me up scottie' !

Cool thread. I'm all for exploration, but surely we must tread carefully. Slowly, surely and safely. What would humans do if they saw someone in their neighbourhood mooching about ? I know one thing , if we had the capability, we would watch them and follow them about, if we could covertly do so. Maybe even follow them home to see if they are a threat.

I can't help but get excited at the thought of space exploration, but it could turn very ugly very quickly if the rest of the universe isn't such a nice place. We'd be like babies crawling about in traffic. I wonder if humans are the only race in the universe who have not transcended violence and division ?

Sorry to add a bummer to this cool thread, I prefer a cautious approach I guess Safety first.

Nasa should send a probe right away. The probe should be equiped with a nuclear propulsion system which will let the probe accelerate to 50 percent the speed of light fairly quickly.

Assuming the probe can be accelerated to that speed within a year, and deccelerate in the same duration, it will take 36 / 0.5 + 2 = almost 75 years to reach that system.

Given that the system is 36 light years away, we can have the first signals from the probe in 111 years. Not bad, in my opiinon. I think we ought to try, because 111 years is not that much: in a few generations, we would have the first images from an Earth-like planet in another solar system.