Unless totally new physics is discovered we definitely don't have the technology to star travel in any meaningful "colonization" sense. The best we might muster in the next 100 years would be to "seed" another star system with some kind of bootstrapping nanoprobe.
First things first. There is a known vast habitable zone in our own solar system. There are also resources we can anticipate accessing in asteroids and off moons. The most logical colonization will occur with artificial structures around our own sun. And right now we can't anticipate that will lessen stress on population of earth, as it is way too expensive to get out of our gravity well to move any significant number of people (billion+). We will have to form our own solutions on earth even as we grow civilization off of it.
Eventually Earth will be just a small backwater planet where we originated with trillions living off world. Earth will retain significance more as an archeaological, spirtitual, historical, and vacation spot even as it is becomes economically insignificant.
Space/Science » in reply to Thoughts on Gliese 581c, et al.
"we have the technology to get there" NOT
The whole thread (31 posts)
- Thoughts on Gliese 581c, et al.
- re: Thoughts on Gliese 581c, et al.
- Here's an artist's depiction
- Finally a Planet in the Habitable Zone.
- I don't believe interstellar colonization is possible
- Thought-provoking indeed
- "we have the technology to get there" NOT
- Exoplanet hunters' Graal:Earth's twin
- Odds of advanced intelligent life on a (relatively) nearby habitable planet are extremely remote.