@dwight, exactly. But @yak only cares to see a few feet beyond his nose, figuratively speaking.

So the wild dogs and the mountain lions were working together?

Wormhole travel would be the only practical way to travel to Super-Earth. You can travel the speed of light all you want, but if it still takes light itself 36 years to travel, that's still 36 years for a crew. It'd be like trying to drive a Ferrari to the Moon.

The upshot is, that with Einstein's theory of time compression, to the crew of an FTL starship, the trip would only be perceived by the crew to only take less than a half-hour, yet by the time they get there, nearly 40 years will have passed on Earth. Wormhole travel could eliminate that and make trips back and forth from Earth to Super-Earth instantaneously much like a Star Trek transporter. Or really more like the Karl Urban movie "Doom".

Just pack lots of weapons and plenty of ammo if you plan a trip to Super-Earth any time soon. Put it this way, think and ask yourself WWTPD? (what would the Predator do?)

WWTPD- LOL I'm gonna start using that

A spaceship sent now would likely be overtaken by our starships of the future.

@georgethetroll

yea most likely... unless it used a nuclear reactor to power a prolonged propulsion system... but NASA moved so slow they barley ever tested the thing let alone start to build one of the orbital prototypes we where planing during the Apollo missions, or again during the "most likely postponed" mars missions.

pizza hut on the other hand is moving to fast.. they already have plans and are budgeting for a moon restaurant. :P doubt they will have customers.. for a while.

virgin galactic will most likely have the first attempt at intergalactic travel... (thats just based off of money invested and excludes disasters.)

Kruge: "Oh yes. New cities, homes in the country. Your woman at your side, children playing at your feet, and overhead, fluttering in the breeze, the flag of the Federation. Charming."

We need to take care of home first.. before we go waste another planet. Doubt anything like that will ever happen.

If we are to survive as a species, we will make it happen. Head out to other habitable planets before our sun begins to expand into a red giant and burns up Earth in it's wake. We can planet hop into the far flung future taking over planets in a 'V' - like expansion of the 'human' race,..

Let's run this by Stephen Hawkins for his recommendation. Thanks.

Stephen has already stated, 'Abandon Earth, or die,...'

I think it is arrogant to say that Earth is magnificent. Unless you think that stuff like the Fukashima meltdown and constant war is magnificent.

Meebs, the Fukushima meltdown was just plain messy. Now, Hiroshima and Nagasaki...THAT was magnificent! Anyway, if you are dissatisfied with Earth, feel free to leave it at any time.

Meebs - You're speaking about humanity, Earth itself IS a beautiful and magnificent place.

"Unless you think that stuff like the Fukashima meltdown and constant war is magnificent."

It's not the only thing we do, Meebs...

And Fukashima was the result of an act of Nature. That likely happens elsewhere, as well.

Thanks you Guys !! I have One more Comment on this subject.

As Humanity we can not put our heads down in the face of our failures and ignorance, for if we do, then we will go nowhere and may even in up going extinct, "We Must" hold our heads high and continue moving forward in the presence of our mistakes, that is the only way we learn as Humanity and the only way we can make a better place for all Humanity.

Tom And Lyn

Anyway, if you are dissatisfied with Earth, feel free to leave it at any time

Nothing lasts forever, and our sun is already middle aged. The habitable length of time remaining on the planet Earth, being even much shorter than that if you take into account of the expansion of the Sun as it ages, roasting the atmosphere as it nears,.

They said the same exact thing about the sound barrier. It's just another speed number to be broken, nothing more. There's no scientific laboratory tests to conclude that anything that reaches the speed of light converts into energy; just theories, and that theory was debunked by Steven Hawkings, himself (see: History of the Universe).

If the light speed barrier can be broken (and I am firmly convinced that it cannot) and we as a race are so smart, why haven't we done it yet? I am amused that you see it as merely a trivial feat, accomplished as easily as boiling an egg.

So the Atomic and Hydrogen bombs were merely firecrackers? The atomic and nuclear masses were only accelerated to a very small fraction of the speed of light and that speed was geometrically increased when the masses met and only a small amount of the masses were converted to energy. I am sure you know how they are designed and how they work. I can't think of another device that demonstrates the conversion of matter into energy in a more visible manner. Particle accelerators do the same but masses and energy levels are so minute, they can be said to be barely there at all.

Someone like me could never refute a Hawking, but he is a theoretical physicist. Such people are incredibly smart, can do the math but they are not correct about everything. He has had to correct some of his earlier work every now and then due to his own misinterpretation and I respect him for that and for the body of his work. But eventually someone will come along in the near or far future and rewrite Hawking as Hawking did Einstein. But even then he was uncertain and has gone back and forth on Einstein.

I think the trick will be more figuring out short cuts through space-time. While this may seem like a far off thing to discover, as we get into space more and more as a species and begin doing more and more research in space, we will be able to discover new technologies that no one every would have thought possible before. Tell someone in 1869 that in 100 years man kind would set foot on the moon and see if you don't get laughed at. Never doubt humans ability to find solutions to problems that seem impossible.

@The8o8Observer - why haven't we broken the light speed barrier yet? Holy jeez, we only started getting planes off the ground 90 years ago, and the sound barrier is a relatively low speed (340 m/s). Breaking the speed of light will take a lot more than retooling a combustion engine. Give it time.

"When mass reaches the speed of light all of it turns into energy"

(Sigh.) It doesn't work like that. The closer you get to the speed of light, the harder it becomes to get still closer. It's like trying to climb over a mountain that gets steeper and closer to perfectly vertical, the higher you get. You never reach the peak. (and yet that doesn't mean there isn't 'another side,' but that's still speculative.) Simple acceleration won't do it, no matter how much energy you have to propel you.

If there were some 'magic' velocity that's close to c, where you 'turn into energy,' there would always be some other frame of reference (in this case, someone slightly slower than you) where this magic velocity is maybe just a thousand miles per hour.

So what is it?

Lightspeed itself, however, will always be measured the same, by all observers, no matter how fast they're going, even someone who, with respect to me, might already be at .999999 c. But if he shines that flashlight ahead of him...he'' measure it leaving at c. Period.

Based on "Project Daedalus", it is believed that a nuclear pulse propulsion spaceraft could achieve relativistic speeds, of > 1/10 c, so a trip to the Alpha Centauri system would take roughly 40 years.

At these speeds, wouldn't the effects of time dilation make it feel like < 40 years had passed? Still seems like it would have to be a one-way ticket. An unmanned probe would make much more sense.

Futuristically speaking...How about the idea of initially sending a craft into space that is capable of propelling another craft that is large enough itself to propel another craft and so on and so on??.... Because there is nothing to slow any of them down (aside from other meteors and what not floating in space), each one would gain in speed excelling to its top speed and propelling the next craft on forward. Now...where the first craft may gain , for example, 20000mph (or whatever it is they can reach in speeds), the next would launch/propel out going 20000 but added on to the already travelling speeds of 20000 to equal 2x's the intial speed. Each one faster and faster!!

Reaching any speed is possible in space, it's all a matter of time and money. Hopefully they put enough time into the idea of Space Brakes!!!

the speed of light cant be broken... but fortunately quantum mechanics has ways around it. ex if we can find a way to alter mass then the equation e=mc^2 changes and the speed barrier is then flexible(might not be possible but we don't know where mass comes from yet),

also wormholes which are a more viable option can be produced the only problem is that the theoretical models need two ends so either a second wormhole would need to be created by a ship that travels near light speed or we would need to find a different solution, possibly using the ability for atoms to instantaneously travel to our advantage.

Yes, but we really need to colonize another planet soon, since we've pretty much run out of aboriginal people to enslave, rape, and slaughter on this one.

Such is the nature of our species, to over breed and destroy our home. Time for us to act like the bees and swarm to another planet, and another...

Do you think we are a virus?

Excellent observation Unit Toad.

The tech we will develop to GET to that new planet should enable us to have a very small impact on the environment of the new world. Also, if we are able to settle MULTIPLE planets, we can keep the population each to an easily manageable level.

Actually, as long as those MULTIPLE planets contain sufficient resources, the population on each is more likely to expand exponentially until THOSE planetary resources become a problem to the inhabitants. What makes you think that future human populations on other worlds will be able to control themselves any better than the present world population can?

I know this is totally off topic, but I would imagine that if we were to settle on multiple planets, we would evolve differently on each planet. In several hundred years, we would probably be totally different from each other, depending on which planet we lived on.

Carrieberry - It would take more than several hundred years, maybe after 1,000 years or so we'd start seeing some different adaptations.

TM - Depending on the initial colony size, it would take a few thousand years to match Earth's current population. The tech we will have discovered and invented within that time frame would be quite incomprehensible to our minds now. Also, planets like the one described in the article would be able to support a much larger maximum population.

Although, beyond a defense budget having the purpose of designing weapons simply to kill other human beings, it's primarily used to prevent wars. And to save people from being killed, like in WWII. This has probably saved all of us from disaster a time or two. Think of the defense budget as part of the scientific research funding budget, because without it we wouldn't be able to conduct any research.

If we stopped going to war all the time maybe we could use some of that money for more research funding, both through the NSF and defense research.

One reason we're doing nothing is we don't know what to do. It takes a *lot* of energy to accelerate a mass to anywhere near the speed of light. If I'm figuring it right, it would take almost a year at 1g (which would be a nice rate of acceleration, since it would give you the equivalent of Earth gravity for that year); and of course a similar time to decelerate at the other end.

The Saturn V that took men to the Moon had a first stage burn of about 2 1/2 minutes, a second stage burn of six minutes, and a third stage burn of around nine minutes (actually two burns adding up to that). Granted, the acceleration during those burns was considerably more than 1g, but there's a big difference between thrusting for 17 minutes or so, and thrusting for two years. The amount of mass you'd expel through the engines over the space of that year would be enormous--and of course you'd have to accelerate much of that mass for a large part of that year, so you could use it later in the year (not to mention the mass you'd use to decelerate), unless you could somehow suck in mass as you fly along through interstellar space (a Bussard ram jet, for instance).

Obviously you're not going to get there with our present kind of rockets, and nobody really knows what kind of engine would get you there.

All that said, I agree that if we never try, we'll never succeed. But I suspect it would be best to first figure out how to get people around our solar system, where the problems--while great--are not so overwhelming.

All that said, I agree that if we never try, we'll never succeed. But I suspect it would be best to first figure out how to get people around our solar system, where the problems--while great--are not so overwhelming.

Yup, this would be the logical first step. I think the next necessity on the path to traveling to new systems is larger and larger amounts of zero G research. The engines we'll be using to get there will be operating in space, they need to be tested in space. Much easier to have the entire facility that is going to make the things already in orbit, rather than sending each new design up on a rocket.

If the plant on the edge of habitability is 3.6 times the mass of Earth, what is its surface gravity?

We'd really need to know the radius of the planet in order to calculate that, since the acceleration due to gravity is equal to (GM)/R^2, where G is the gravitational constant (6.67384 x 10^-11 m^3/kgs^2), M is the mass of the planet in question in kilograms, and R is the radius of the planet in meters. If we assumed it had the same radius as the earth, its gravitational acceleration would be simply 3.6 times that of Earth. More likely, however, it will have a radius that is commensurately larger in proportion to its mass (assuming it's similarly made of rocky material), so we could expect its gravity to be reasonably similar to that of Earth.

dubina (which means "cudgel" or "blockhead" in Russian): Terra Incognita had the right idea, however, he was a little off in specifics. If we assume the same (or very similar) mean density as Earth, then its total volume would be 3.6 times that of Earth 1.53 times that of Earth but, because radius (and diameter) goes up only as the cube root of volume, then its radius would only be about 1.53 times that of Earth. Because gravitation acceleration decreases as the inverse square of radius but increases linearly with total mass. this results in a final figure of about 1.53 times the surface gravity of the earth, or about 15.0 meters per second per second versus Earth's surface gravity of about 9.8 meters per second per second. Mathematically, this is the same as saying that, given identical density, surface gravity increases in proportion to the cube root of the total mass.

oops, there was a serious typo in that last post, here is corrected copy:

Terra Incognita had the right idea, however, he was a little off in specifics. If we assume the same (or very similar) mean density as Earth, then its total volume would be 3.6 times that of Earth, but because radius (and diameter) goes up only as the cube root of volume, then its radius would only be about 1.53 times that of Earth. Because gravitational acceleration decreases as the inverse square of radius but increases linearly with total mass. this results in a final figure of about 1.53 times the surface gravity of the earth, or about 15.0 meters per second per second versus Earth's surface gravity of about 9.8 meters per second per second. Mathematically, this is the same as saying that, given identical density, surface gravity increases in proportion to the cube root of the total mass.

Exactly, but I wasn't "off" in the specifics, since I didn't labor to mention them. I wanted merely to drive home the point that for a mass only 3.6 times that of Earth (assuming similar planetary composition) that the acceleration due to gravity wouldn't be too dissimilar, in contrast to what others (e.g., Arkansas Annie at #11.0) had been erroneously asserting.

What I didn't see in the Kaltenegger, et al. set was the need for planetary system "sweeper," as Jupiter provides in our system. A large central planet keeps all the system formation remnants and debris (meteors, asteroids, comets and other objects) from continually impacting the inner planets. A relatively stable planet surface appears to be requisite for an opportunity to life to develop.

So a planet with a lot more surface area and close to the same grav as Earth? My mind races at the possibilities! Sign me up to for that colonization effort, I want to go explore that rock!

@Alan

I wonder if maybe the people who estimate habitability should take surface gravity more into account. We might be able to extract water and fuel for heating and/or cooling, but I wouldn't care to make a 30 light year trek to be eternally heavy.

Or, on second thought, I might get used to it and end up looking like Conan?

Let's see...Pandora, big, tall blue people. Pandora must have been smaller than Earth? But humans and big tall blue people moved as though they were subject to 1 g. Sigorney Weaver wasn't muscular like Ahnold.

Cameron's screenwriters should have been more astute.

Sigh. It is no fun to know stuff.

Until we get a peek at how life develops on other planets, it would be hard to say exactly how gravity affects height. How low does the gravity have to be before we become Na'vi-tall? Then there are other things to consider. For instance, some dinosaurs were huge, and they lived on the same planet we do. The difference in the dinos' case was oxygen concentration, or so I've heard.

@ThaPyngwyn

If so, we will not say soon. I, personally, will never know or say. Alas. But fun to think about.

Anyone who Disneylands on a large planet 30 light years from Earth will, by necessity, have been incubated along the way, probably at some point before Disneylanding, born in a high-g environment to be ready for what might soon be in store. Thus, mission planners would have to know and accomodate the immigrant's (unEarthly) bioligical needs and physical characteristics along the way.

We may not say soon, but someone will have to sort that out before we go.

Dubina - Actually Pandora's gravity was weaker than Earth, which is why that colonel ( the one with the scars on his face ) was lifting a crap load of weight (he comments about the weak gravity). And yes, if you lived in the constant higher gravity environment, your body would adapt to it.

Wrong. Read my previous post. Its surface gravity is most likely no more than 1.5 times that of the earth. In other words, if you weigh 160 Lbs here, you'd weigh 240 Lbs there. That might be tiresome but hardly "crushing".

And you'd also adapt over time to the gravity there, though it may require some additional consideration for any craft entering the atmosphere.

Yes Alan You Are Correct, But Like You said In A previous post, it would surly be a good workout for some of us to lose a little weight. hahaha LOL

Yea, but it also means that they've seen "I Love Lucy" reruns several times over. I figure that there is an invasion force on its way as we speak. I'm sure they want to destroy every living creature on the planet.

60 years ago, they were discussing whether humans could withstand passing the speed of sound, now they are discussing hypersonic weapons. While I don't agree with interfereing in others affairs, our defense industry has brought us many wonders, most of which save American lives or don't put them in harms way at all. Hopefully, they will be given the opportunity to develop the technology needed to travel this far.

I find it amazing that Sci-fi has brought about amazing advances that the writers never get credit for. Like the tricorder in Star Trek. If you don't live in a box, there is an app for that.

With or without the a-holes?

Jack, you are wrong! When we DO find a planet that is REALLY like Earth, then not only is it still all BS, but the BS will have in fact DOUBLED.

Who cares if we can't reach it! Just start broadcasting signals in that direction. We'll have to wait 40 years (minimum) for a response, assuming they're listening but how incredible would it be if something out there answered!

Forty years later:

"We're sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service."

Just send them to the moon instead.

The communications delay on Apollo lunar missions was a few seconds, not minutes.

In addition to ChrisMcK's correction, yes, it will take 2N years for communications to go back and forth if you're N light-years from Earth. But that has nothing to do with inter*planetary* colonization, where the distance are on the order of light-minutes, or light-hours at most. It's inter*stellar* travel that would put you light-years from home.

All that said, I don't see why even multi-year delays would prevent colonization. You just have to control the spaceship locally, not remotely. (What kind of a spaceship that would be is a different question!)

Humanity has grown up, at least a little, since the time of Columbus. Think of the collective social progress we've made from 1492 to 2011. While there would always be some danger of certain elements on Earth wanting to colonize and enslave an inhabited planet, it would be the duty of the entire human race to prevent our explorations into space from going in that direction. By now I think we've realized many, but probably not all, of the evils of which we are capable.

Possibly. But given that intelligent life has existed for only tens of thousands of years out of the Earth's billions of years, it's far more likely that there is no intelligent life on this planet.

Calm down and take your meds

Matt-2631617 have you ever met a Islamic terrorist? Yeah me either. Do a little research and realize that many things don't add up. Start with 9/11. It totally looked orchestrated. The media can paint even you as a terrorist and get the whole country to believe it.

And how do Islamic terrorists differ from Christian terrorists, like The Tea Party?

One God, one delusion. Samey-samey-same.

they think where ugly idiots... and the "howdy-do" (old TV show) is boring them to death