New Planet Discovered At Nearest Star Alpha Centauri

Holy shit, this is a fucking monumental discovery

damn we need to step up starship tech asap

>>68878
Please note that Obama has stopped all American manned spaceflight. If it weren't for Russia, we wouldn't be able to get to the space station. Bush had funding for the Constellation program, but Obama canceled that.
Hillary will not take us back to space. She is more Obama, maybe on steroids. Trump might take us back to space, he is into building things.

>>68905
We're transitioning to the private sector. SpaceX is doing some pretty cool things.

I studied physics in undergrad and i grew to become numb to these headlines. It seems like everyday we're finding the newest most earth-like planet yet. This however is pretty cool because Proxima centauria is our closest fucking star. So we've found a new home right? Not quite yet.

Just because a planet is in the 'habitable zone' doesn't mean the planet is habitable at all, it just means it's in the ring where liquid water COULD be found on the planet. It could have toxic gases and oceans, constant tectonic movement leading to unstable ground and/or volcano explosions or any number of completely unimaginable things that would make it hell-on-earth so to speak.


Well let's stop being pessimists for a second and think about what being our closest star actually means. Can we travel there soon?

First let's consider the speeds. The fastest humans have ever gone is 40,000km/h.

"The current human speed record is shared equally by the trio of astronauts who flew Nasa’s Apollo 10 mission. On their way back from a lap around the Moon in 1969, the astronauts’ capsule hit a peak of 39,897km/h" http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150809-how-fast-could-humans-travel-safely-through-space.

With this in mind, and to gain some perspective, let's imagine traveling to mars. In july 2018 we're apparently going to be pretty close to mars at only 57 million km. http://www.universetoday.com/14824/distance-from-earth-to-mars/

57,000,000km / (40,000 km/h) = 1425 h = 59 days which is about 2 months!

That's not very long at all... But keep in mind that 40,000 km/h was the fastest that Apollo 10 ever went. It obviously had to accelerate and decelerate.

Next let's talk about this planet.... (1/2)

>>68915


So let's try and get a lower bound for how long it would take to visit this planet. The planet is 1.3 parsecs away.

1.3 parsec = 4*10^13 km

4*10^13 km / (40,000 km/h) = 1,000,000,000 h

So at the max speed appolo 10 hit, it would take 1,000,000,000 h = 114,000 years

Well... that's not very comforting.


What about an unmanned voyage? Like a satellite or some shit.

To my surprise, the fastest thing we've ever launched was voyager 1. Around 2013 it was clocked at 17030 m/s [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Exit_from_the_heliosphere]

17030m/s=61,000 km/h

so this time it would take about 650,000 h = 75,000 years

Not much better realistically. Well I'm the wrong guy to ask about the future of propulsion technology, but maybe later i'll go on /sci/ and see what they're saying


(2/2)

>>68895
>Holy shit, this is a fucking monumental discovery
I want to think someone at NASA said exactly this

Apparently the planet is tidally locked, i.e. same side always faces sun. This would make it very hot on one side and very cold on the other. Interesting

>>68924
the article just said that was a possibility

>>68906
What incentive does a corporation have to search for life? None. Private space exploration will be all about mining.

>>68916
What of we traveled in the speed of light?

>>68978
it would take about 4,2 years

>>68964
Yeah man, if I was a company interested in mining space rocks I wouldn't even bother with an earthlike planet if I stumbled upon it. Virtually limitless resources, a whole new world to explore, maybe even better materials than we have here. Nah I'd leave that gay shit for the nerds back at nasa.

>>68905
Please note that congress is the one who voted to stop funding nasa

We would need a very large ship that can host thousands of people.

It would need to be able to sustain itself with air, water and food and electricity.

It also must have the things needed to populate a planet, all the necessary machines and shit.

The ship would orbit the inhabitable planet and stay there until landing is possible.
Over time the ship itself would be disassembled and turned into a larger base on the planet.

We won't be seeing this planet anytime soon with our own eyes. But those Starshot probes might check the planet out in our lifetime.
An earthlike planet that close to us us definitely reason to fund the Starshot project.
Doubt it will have life though. Reminder that Venus, Mars and Mercury are also "Earthlike" so people should stop getting their panty wet everytime they hear that. Its most likely a rocky wateland. Might be a viable candidate for future terraforming though

>>68964
>>69013
Not to mention water, one of the most important resources for man.

Send probes please

PLEASE

by the time manned interstellar missions are genuinely feasible, the probes will be there and able to tell us if there is life or not

>>68905
>>68906
>>68964
NASA is handing off LEO transportation duties to private industry because LEO transportation is no longer a scientific or technological frontier. NASA wants to focus on research and exploration, not on being a delivery/taxi service. It doesn't need to own the vehicles that deliver people and supplies to LEO any more than it needs to own the trucks and ships and planes that move its parts and equipment around on the Earth.

Since the end of the Shuttle program in 2011, NASA has kept a man in space for a continuous year for the first time, pioneered a new method of landing large vehicles on Mars, discovered evidence that liquid water once flowed across the surface of Mars, discovered more than a thousand exoplanets, taken measurements from instruments located outside our solar system for the first time, used ion propulsion to move a satellite from orbit around one extraterrestrial celestial object to orbit around another for the first time (previous multi-target missions were fly-by only), discovered a subsurface saltwater ocean on Ganymede, produced images of more distant objects than ever before, etc, etc.

NASA is not handing over its scientific research duties to private industry. It is handing over logistical work that it figured out how to do decades ago so that it can focus on scientific research. In another decade not only the vehicles but also the space stations in LEO will be privatized, and NASA will be able to move the frontier of manned space flight further outwards.

SpaceX may well beat NASA to Mars, but that is because it's run by a billionaire whose dreams are more important to him than profit, and that makes it an exception to a long term trend on NASA being first, not an indication of future trends. It would be great if the future will full of visionary billionaires dedicating their fortunes to scientific progress, but that seems fairly unlikely.

>>68916
>>68915
nevermind i forgot that /sci/ is utter shit

>>68915
The idea that the speed of a modern interstellar probe would be similar to an Apollo or Voyager mission is pretty silly. We could easily achieve many times that. Your overall point is right, though. We can't reach high enough speeds with current technology to send a probe 4 light-years within a human lifetime.

>>69118
and honestly acceleration is not the only issue that's between us and successful interstellar probes. There's also the problem that hitting interstellar dust at near light speed would fuck up the probe, and we currently don't have any shielding that's both strong and light enough to be a viable option. not to mention deceleration, the astronomical difficulty of targeting, and the fact that current nuclear technology probably isn't robust enough to power the trip.

we probably won't be finding a second home in our lifetime, /news/, the best we hope to do is lay a solid foundation for the next generation to do so.

unless we become advanced enough ecologically to terraform. there's actually some hope for that.

>>69134
>>69134
>unless we become advanced enough ecologically to terraform. there's actually some hope for that.
We can barely understand/manipulate our own atmosphere what makes you so optimistic about creating an atmosphere on another planet.

>>69015
No need, see various concepts at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryo_space_colonization

>>69022
Future large telescopes may be able to characterize any atmosphere, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Extremely_Large_Telescope#Science_goals expected first light 2024.

>>69040
>Send probes please
Probably will come to nothing but Hawking and billionaires Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner are behind this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot

>>69057
nice overview

>>69118
If we really wanted to, we could start construction of a generation ship tomorrow. I'm sure something like 200-400 people would be willing to sign up, no questions asked.

>>69013
>>69030
It's 4.2 light years away. It's not going to be like how profit motivated gold prospectors and fur traders explored north America. Getting any resource back to Earth from there will not be profitable.

>>69174
You seem to lack reading comprehension. We were talking about how the space exploration market will play out when technology will be advanced enough.

>>69135 This.

I never understood why advocates for going to Mars, etc... are always like "Yeah, we can just terraform that shit!" We know nothing about terraforming a planet. As >>69135 said, we don't even fully understand how the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere interact to produce Earth's habitability.

The likely time-scale for achieving immense change on a planetary level requiring massive energy and mass inputs is thousands if not tens of thousands of years. Humans have yet to prove themselves far-sighted enough for such a project.