MagnaCool--Habitable Exoplanet!

[DRoseDARs]

One century is not centuries plural. Subluminal journeys of a century or so are not unreasonable. Thinking we'll get anywhere outside our system within the next few decades is.

Again, generational ships allow colonists to live their lives and prepare their children for a new life on a new world. If Earth develops FTL in the meantime, there's no reason they can't stop and pick up the colonists on the way. There's also suspended animation to consider, which would greatly decrease the amount of resources necessary to support colonists during the voyage, but it would also reduce their ability to prepare for the planet or respond to emergencies.

[Seeker]

At 50% C (Orion doable), that's an 80 year round trip.

Let's say a human lifespan of 160 years within the next century, why not?


Of course, there would be a fork of a lot of downtime to fill...but the annals of sci-fi are filled with this stuff.

[Ãskallin]

Imagine spending your whole life on a spaceship going somewhere just because your parents were stupid enough to sign up for it...
I would be pissed of at my parents if they did something stupid like that.

[Eli]

Originally posted by DRoseDARs
One century is not centuries plural. Subluminal journeys of a century or so are not unreasonable. Thinking we'll get anywhere outside our system within the next few decades is.

Again, generational ships allow colonists to live their lives and prepare their children for a new life on a new world. If Earth develops FTL in the meantime, there's no reason they can't stop and pick up the colonists on the way. There's also suspended animation to consider, which would greatly decrease the amount of resources necessary to support colonists during the voyage, but it would also reduce their ability to prepare for the planet or respond to emergencies.

Generational ships? A decade from now, maybe Bigelow will manage to have a relatively cheap LEO station, maybe SpaceX will cut launch prices in half if they actually manage a 100% successful launch anytime soon. Probably we'll have a JPL nuclear powered robot on Mars. What generational ships? We're not even at the stage of galleys that can only travel adjacent to land squares, and we're progressing very slowly.

I'm talking about a simple probe, who's job is to get there and orbit the planet, transmitting data back. That way we don't need a round trip, but we do need very efficient communications.

When you have a permanent human population of more than a 1000 farther out than LEO, then you can start dreaming about generational ships.

[Maquiladora]

I say we nuke the entire planet from orbit, only way to be sure.

[Seeker]

...unfortunately if you give up your mission and astronaut training HAL will delete your Holodeck girlfriend program....


We have ways to motivate the next generation....

EDIT: IMO, even a probe must be a round trip I don't think we can retrieve that kind of sophisticated data from so far away remotely.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Seeker
At 50% C (Orion doable)

Errr...no.

[KrazyHorse]

EDIT: IMO, even a probe must be a round trip I don't think we can retrieve that kind of sophisticated data from so far away remotely.

What kind of data? A probe with a decent sized parabolic dish (1 meter diameter) operating in optical frequencies would be able to send stuff at dialup speeds from 20 ly for less than a kilowatt (from back of the envelope calculation)

[KrazyHorse]

(assuming a diffraction limited transmitter and a Hubble-like receiver)

[Sandman]

Generational ships are a hellish concept. Just freeze the colonists and be done with it. You only need a small number anyway.

This planet would be a pretty weird place to live. No seasons, no day, no night, just a dark half and a light half. It's easy to imagine it being a completely sterile place, with all the water locked up as ice on the dark side, whilst the light side is a scorched desert.

I suppose vulcanism, a thick atmosphere or massive oceans could disturb this equilibrium. There's at least one large planet nearby which may be enough to stir things up.

[Geronimo]

Habitable moons are more likely to be of interest for humans there.

OTOH I think a lot of the current interest focuses on the prospect of indigenous life in this system. A tidally locked ocean covered planet could be quite conducive to development of life regardless of how uninviting it seems for human habitation.

[Ned]

KH, is there anyway to "probe" the planet with a signal from earth?

[Last Conformist]

Originally posted by Seeker
At 50% C (Orion doable), that's an 80 year round trip.

Even if the engine could achieve that (which I'm fairly positive it cannot) you'd be history as soon as you hit the tiniest grain of dust.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Last Conformist
Even if the engine could achieve that (which I'm fairly positive it cannot) you'd be history as soon as you hit the tiniest grain of dust.

Which argues for a "spread spectrum" approach to spacetravel, does it not? Divide whatever you want delivered into numbers of smaller packages and reassemble them at the end with errors and ommissions (caused by space dust) filled in using error correction techniques.

[DRoseDARs]

Originally posted by Sandman
Generational ships are a hellish concept. Just freeze the colonists and be done with it. You only need a small number anyway.

There are no known ways or processes of doing this successfully with Humans short of killing them and freezing their corpses. And you need more than a handful of colonists for a successful colony: Not just the practical consideration of having a diverse genetic pool (remember, it took a looong time to get to the planet without FTL), but also having enough people to actually run the colony in the first place.