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Two billion planets in our galaxy may be suitable for life

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    #62
    Rhys Essien
    Registered Users Posts: 3,029 ✭✭✭Rhys Essien


    Live webcast tonight at 12:30am our time.Its about what Alien life might look like.

    http://www.space.com/24022-alien-life-childrens-book-webcast.html


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    #63
    Capt'n Midnight
    Moderators, Recreation & Hobbies Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Technology & Internet Moderators Posts: 91,807 Mod ✭✭✭✭Capt'n Midnight


    tac foley wrote: »
    Unless we can come up with a method of transporting our physical bodies many times faster than the speed of light, we are totally screwed, and we will never, ever, know.

    More to the point, just think of the expense!

    tac
    Our descendants may know.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_probe - we should be able to get to some candidates in the next few thousand years


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    #64
    maninasia
    Registered Users Posts: 4,620 ✭✭✭maninasia


    Zubeneschamali wrote: »

    This is true, but the energy needed to accelerate any sort of passenger ship up to this near lightspeed would be very large - think "destroy the earth" quantities of energy.

    You can read about relativistic rockets at this link,

    which suggests a 1 way trip in something the size of an Apollo mission at 1g to Alpha Centauri would require 1.7 million kilos of fuel converted to energy. Evey kilo is about 20 megatons, so 1.7 million kilos is about 600,000 times the energy in the biggest H-Bomb ever tested.

    and that's a one way trip. A two way trip would be maybe 25 million giant H-bombs worth.

    That's not a problem for advanced technological civilisations.

    But think about it, will they actually accelerate a massive space ship or just beam the information around instead? Snail mail versus the galactic internet, you know the answer.


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