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[Max™]

*gets blown away by 300 kph woosh*

[i2amroy]

Have you ever seen a ten year old sail?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

That is a racing sail for an opti. I used to sail those. The top racers would change their sails every year.

<---Joke---
 *Wooosh*
   Maniac

(FYI, that was a joke, as in reinterpreting the statement as "have you ever seen 'a ten year-old' sail (a ship)", instead of as "have you ever seen 'a ten year-old sail' (for a ship)").

[Bralbaard]

It seems we have another destination for our bay12colonists:

https://palereddot.org/proxima-b-is-our-closest-neighbor-better-get-used-to-it/

 

Seriously, this is about as good as it gets. Not only is this one of the best habitable planet candidates that we have found among the thousands of worlds that we know of, but it orbits the nearest star from the sun!

It has to be stressed that we still know almost nothing about this planet. It could be as hellish as venus or as frozen as mars depending on what type of atmosphere it has, but what we do know looks very promising.
Interstellar travel may be impossible with todays technology, but spending the effort to make such travel possible is a lot more atractive if you know something good is waiting for you on the other side of the void.

Amazing stuff!

[Mephansteras]

Nifty!

[martinuzz]

Pretty awesome find indeed. The planet would be suffering from high X-ray radiation levels though from the dwarf star, and magnetic eruptions that can blow away atmospheres, so we shouldn't get our hopes up too high of finding life there.

[LordBaal]

I bet there's tall blue aliens over there.

[Bralbaard]

Pretty awesome find indeed. The planet would be suffering from high X-ray radiation levels though from the dwarf star, and magnetic eruptions that can blow away atmospheres, so we shouldn't get our hopes up too high of finding life there.

Well personally I'm not expecting us to find life anywhere. (Based on the fermi paradox and how *incredibly* complex even the most simple life forms need to be from our current understanding). It would not hurt to find habitable planets though, if empty, we can use them. Inhabited worlds would pose ethical questions.

[Nirur Torir]

Interstellar travel may be impossible with todays technology, but spending the effort to make such travel possible is a lot more atractive if you know something good is waiting for you on the other side of the void.

But we've had the technology for decades! It's just an engineering, political, and sociological problem.

Orion nuclear pulse drive

At 0.1c, Orion thermonuclear starships would require a flight time of at least 44 years to reach Alpha Centauri, not counting time needed to reach that speed (about 36 days at constant acceleration of 1g or 9.8 m/s2).

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I wonder what kind of analysis you'd get if you gave an exoplanet researcher an anonymized version of the Earth and Sun, changed the other planets, and asked them to assess habitability.

[origamiscienceguy]

Interstellar travel may be impossible with todays technology, but spending the effort to make such travel possible is a lot more atractive if you know something good is waiting for you on the other side of the void.

But we've had the technology for decades! It's just an engineering, political, and sociological problem.

Orion nuclear pulse drive

At 0.1c, Orion thermonuclear starships would require a flight time of at least 44 years to reach Alpha Centauri, not counting time needed to reach that speed (about 36 days at constant acceleration of 1g or 9.8 m/s2).

Is that from earth's perspective or the ship's perspective? Special Reletivity would be important here.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The ship's perspective. There's no reason to measure Earth's relative perspective; it's not like they're coming back.

[mainiac]

The time dilation at .1c is only ~1% IIRC.  Doesn't matter much when you just arbitrarily picked the value .1c in the first place.  Oh and you'd be decelerating as much as accelerating so it would all be a wash in the end.

[origamiscienceguy]

1% of 44 years is pretty significant for a human.

[mainiac]

The only humans experiencing the perspective would be people on earth caring about the minutae of the trip.  The people on board wouldn't experience it.

[origamiscienceguy]

The only humans experiencing the perspective would be people on earth caring about the minutae of the trip.  The people on board wouldn't experience it.

What I'm saying is would the trip take 44 earth years (about 43.5 years for the ship), or 44 ship years (about 44.5 years for earth)