first habitable exoplanet found

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Good point. Which means we will really be limited in speed for manned mission. To shield X-rays and Gamma-Rays one would need to build massive vessels which will make transit a near light speed even more difficult. My guess is that if we do not develop Alcuibre space warping technology we can forget about serious star travel. Which means we had best learn to live in our solar system and treat it right so we can last as long a possible as a species (maybe a few million years).

ruveyn

No, it's "only" about 20 or 21 light-years. Our generations may not visit, but future generations might.

I was thinking of "Sleeper ship" technology - IF it could ever be invented.

True. Velocity would have to exceed 0.9c to be even remotely effective, but the energy costs would make relativistic velocities extremely difficult to achieve and maintain.

I gave up on Star Trek when Berman took over ST:TNG. The original series was much better, and the latest "reboot" seems even better.

Even so we are not going there. We can't even get to Proximi Centuri which is "only" four l.y. from us.. The fastest vehicle ever launched by earthlings made speeds of about 60,000 mph. That is very slow.

And forget about sleeper ships. There is no way to preserve complex animals intact by freezing or any such trick. Even if single cells can be preserved the coherence of the entire organism is is lost.

We will have to be satisfied by looking at distant stars and planets with our instruments.

ruveyn

Last edited by ruveyn on 19 May 2011, 3:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

on the subject of "looking at distant stars and [their] planets" - anybody out there in WPland know just what sort of telescope would be powerful enough to do just that? even the mighty hubble could only get a relatively few blurred pixels of pluto-


so how much bigger a 'scope would it take to see pluto or even the planets of a next-door solar system, in surface-feature-revealing detail?

If we had a base on the far side of the moon, we'd eliminate atmospheric effects and block radiation from earth. Our current telescopes would work a lot better, but I don't know how much difference it would make relative to the energy from distant planets.

I'm hoping for advances in technology that would allow sleeper ships, but I also do not expect such technology to come about in my lifetime.

That's why I play Traveller.

Unless you become one of the brightest minds on the planet and receive the gift of longevity/eternal DNA regeneration for being so smart .

It's my life goal. +100 years to my life in 50 years time and by the time I get old again they'll have DNA regeneration sorted out allowing a select few people to live forever. (Noway will normal people get it, overpopulation is a b***h already) ^.^

That's similar to a question I had the other night when I first hit this thread. I wanted to find a close up of another star and couldn't find a single such picture anywhere. You'd think that we could get something rather detailed of the Centauri stars, if nothing else, but apparently we can't right now. There were 'artist depictions' but no image with resolution capable of capturing aspects such as spots or flares.

Surface revealing detail on an expolanet? That's a pretty tall order.

But Gemini North did image planets around HR8799 a couple of years ago using their adaptive optics system and the NIRI imager:

Gemini HR8799 Press Release

So the quick answer is that to image an exoplanet at all, you'd need an eight meter telescope at a site with really good seeing, an adaptive optics system, and a high resolution camera. That's to see the planet at all, which is not nearly as easy as it might sound.

To get surface revealing detail would take a lot more. Even the Thirty Meter Telescope and the 42m ELT would have a hard time pulling off something like that. I haven't seen anything in their instrument line-up that would suggest anyone is trying to go there.

As far as imaging the disk of a remote star, Betelgeuse was imaged using ESO's VLT and their adaptive optics imager, NACO. It's blurry, it's not impressive looking, but it's a heck of a feat for a ground based telescope to pull off. The Wikipedia page on this particular observation put it this way: The limiting resolution of the image is the equivalent of picking out a tennis ball on the ISS. They did a pretty darned good job, considering.

a multi sattelite hundred meter telescope using reflective cloth on the other side of the moon, ahh.

i've recently read that even a hundred-meter 'scope would be too small, that the only thoeretical way to directly image an extrasolar planet with surface detail, would be to make an interferometry array out by jupiter, the width of a planetary orbit. could this be done with our present level of technological development?

no idea but that does sound like a mighty big telescope (yes i know it isnt a telescope in the physical sense of a single construct)

besides using reflective cloth would likely be hindered by the solar wind, even though you tension the fabric, a too large sail would be just that.

here is a blog that often features science-based articles on what interstellar flight would really require:

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/

the problems to be solved are immense--not in theory impossible. however, i find the mindset that can only see another world in terms of our own needs & desires, increasingly repugnant to me. i do not want a mcdonald's on mars or the moon. the real difficulties to be solved are within us, & we are a very long way from even having the self-awareness to understand this, for the most part. i am glad other stars are so far away. perhaps we will never reach them. if we do, i hope we will not try to fill another planet with our cities, our garbage, our bad entertainment, & our age-old enmities...

what a planet like this one offers us is something like what learning a different language can teach. if there is air (of a sort) & water (in quantity) it will still be immensely different from the landscapes we know on earth. even more so, the life--if it has formed there--. some of my speculations on this world in particular can be found down the page here: http://exonamesociety.forumotions.com/t ... uper-earth

i figure the solar day there should be more than a month long, maybe two; & its gravity, at least 2 1/2 times earth's. (see #5 here:

http://springtail.blogspot.com/2010_06_ ... 1874720736 )

not what i call "habitable" but then, we haven't needed words for now to describe such places, harsh but maybe not barren, & severe but for all that, one of life's rare outposts...

Here is a link to a website called Atomic Rockets. It is a very well-though out website devoted to the concept of space travel. They even have a page on why There Ain't No Stealth In Space!

Here is the page on interplanetary travel that covers Slower-Than Light space travel.

Enjoy and Learn!