Oh, sweet! I really hope the EM drive pans out.

Since my teens we've gone from "no exoplanets anywhere" to "found some gas giants" to "found some rocky planets" to "found some Goldilocks planets thousands of lightyears away" to "fuck me there are planets everywhere" and now "there might be a rocky Goldilocks planet orbiting our next-door neighbour star".

_b

It's still too far away.

Dafuck, Proxima Centauri is literally the closest star to us that's not called the Sun. If the shit hit the fan we could conceivably get there.

How long do you think until we have the technology to get us there?

Just randomly. When I got to "New posts" and "Go to last post" it takes me to the end of page 2, rather than this page.

Did it for all 3 comments. Weird.

^^^
Ditto.

EDIT:
Call me when they've confirmed an Oxygen/Nitrogen atmo.

so ... why hasn't this been discovered before?

Gee I dunno, I guess someone just didn't point his binoculars in the right place.

It's not even vaguely realistic at the moment. We need a major propulsion breakthrough and many other tech discoveries. Hundreds of years away.

Ab must have found a wormhole in the back of his wardrobe.

Some drunken calcumalations on that shit;

Distance 4.24 light years is about 3x10^8 * 60 seconds * 60 minutes * 24 hours * 365 days * 4.24 = 40.114 x 10 ^ 15 meters

Which is 40.114 trillion kilometers.

Fastest man made thing in space appears to have been Juno when it got pulled towards Jupiter at around 265,000 km/hr. Thats 6.36 million km per day, and 2.3214 billion km per year.

So taking that very generous velocity as the present day tech, it would take a space taxi over 17,000 years to reach there.

Seems slightly out of reach.

It would be a matter of sustained acceleration over a long period of time. The only thing limiting speed is our ability to accelerate and if/how the ship stops once it gets there.

No dickhead. They've been monitoring countless stars for this phenomenon for decades, yet it's only now they notice the same effect on our closest neighbour?

1950s technology.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proj...ear_propulsion)

Thing is, those are both pretty fucking serious limitations.

Having said that, I still really like localroger's Passages Into the Void, which, if you read the whole thing, gives some interesting scenarios for humans colonising the galaxy. Dreams are free, I suppose.

'technology' which has not been tested ( with nukes ), nevermind perfected.

edit: for some reason it double posted. Perhaps some correlation with double vision, double shots, or something.

It's Ab's fault.

Stopping is a significant problem - it requires sustained decceleration equal to the acceleration time. And another headache is that we'd need highly exotic shielding to protect from particles of dust etc in the interstellar medium . When you're travelling at a decent fraction of c, colliding with such stuff would be disastrous.

Yes, but I don't think we are talking about todays technology. Within 10-20years, we could have that down to 100 years, and another 10-20 we could have that down to 3 years.

As far as near-future tech goes, VASIMR is a great contender, as is NEXT.

What I wonder is could a ship be captured by the gravity of the star, so complete deceleration isn't required?

A flyby wouldn't require complete deceleration either.

Not quite the same, but:
What is Aerobraking?

I'm picturing a scenario in which the Earth faces some sort of existential external threat at a solar-system level - Melancholia-style wandering planet, for example - and it comes down to "we have to get a group of people and a whole bunch of genetic material not only off-planet but out of the solar system or everything on Earth is rendered extinct".

Those are the sorts of situations where I like to imagine the resources and brainpower of the Earth would come up with a get-us-to-Proxima-Centauri solution within years or decades.

So in 40 years we can exceed the speed of light you reckon?

I noticed that too and well, maybe. I wouldn't anticipate it happening, but it's could.

I can't imagine the state of science and tech in 40 years, given the last 40.

Acceleration technology isn't accelerating that quickly.

Yep - anything less than a solar system scale event will just force us off planet ala the first 3/4 of Seveneves. If we are going to leave the system in the next couple of hundred years it'll be generation ships getting up to maybe 1%c.

Yeah, but we're experiencing a massive acceleration in science and technology.

Consider this question for Fyneman and his response in a lecture in Auckland in 1979 (part 2 of the video pkp|ex linked), and then the question that follows.

Didn't Stephen Hawkins say that if we didn't find the ability to get off the planet in the next 100 years we'd be fucked?

This was a few years ago I believe...

Like that moment you realise you've already failed unrecoverably in Civ

Ok, fair enough, I should have kept it at 4.25 years, so it wasn't breaking the speed of light. (but I do believe there will be other ways to get places without breaking the speed of light)

But as LS said, things will advance quicker and quicker.

You all know the story of computers and their advancement.
And their advancement will speed up the advancement of science.

Imagine what we knew about space in 1976, and what we know now.

Seems to me that Elon Musk is working as hard as he can on that problem.

Elon Musk is just trying to go home to his people.

Some more info on the Proxima Centauri b exoplanet:
http://www.ice.cat/personal/iribas/Proxima_b/

fuck yeah science

Science: Turning one greenhouse gas into a stronger greenhouse gas since ages!

But real - that's pretty sweet.

Looks like it's been a successful year:
Germany’s Wendelstein 7-X ‘Stellarator’ Is Operating As Expected

saw that earlier and I've been "not getting excited not getting excited" all day 🤘🏼