Possible habitable planet - right next door

[HopAlongBunny]

Only 40 trillion km's away, make a planet orbiting Proxima Centaurti your next vacation destination!:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37167390

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...rth-next-door/

[Gregoshi]

Pretty awesome discovery. Now we have a good "close" target to start building and testing some of the proposed interstellar propulsion methods.

[Ibrahim]

That assumes the planet is even habitable.

There's every chance it's more like Venus than Earth.

[wooly_mammoth]

Pretty awesome discovery. Now we have a good "close" target to start building and testing some of the proposed interstellar propulsion methods.

Such things are just fairy tales for now. It's still a hardcore challenge to get to a much closer and proven to be decent planet: Mars. And even if we get there, we still don't really have a clue what to do with it, at least if you leave the fairy tales aside. As vital as space travel and expansion is for the survival of our species, to be honest I don't think we'll make it in time. We're still at the level of dreaming about mining nearby asteroids and processing the raw ore in orbit, mostly with robots. Transporting human beings in safe conditions over such distances, with the equipment needed to survive the journey and establish a home elsewhere, that's just blue sky dreaming.

[Fragony]

Journy of a lifetime. A few hundreds. But eventually it will be possible some people are rediculously intelligent.

[GeneralHankerchief]

I call dibs.

[Gregoshi]

Such things are just fairy tales for now. It's still a hardcore challenge to get to a much closer and proven to be decent planet: Mars. And even if we get there, we still don't really have a clue what to do with it, at least if you leave the fairy tales aside. As vital as space travel and expansion is for the survival of our species, to be honest I don't think we'll make it in time. We're still at the level of dreaming about mining nearby asteroids and processing the raw ore in orbit, mostly with robots. Transporting human beings in safe conditions over such distances, with the equipment needed to survive the journey and establish a home elsewhere, that's just blue sky dreaming.

I was thinking of just a Voyager-like probe to 1) test the feasibility and potential unknown issues with interstellar flight, and 2) should it get there, to get a closer look at the planet. Transporting people comes after we know more about how to get to another star. Proxima b is just the first reasonable target for such an effort. And dreams are the seeds of future reality.

[wooly_mammoth]

Well, I agree that it's nice to dream, but between ourselves and these dreams there's the real world with very real and difficult problems. High energy cosmic radiation is one of them. One trip to Mars alone would expose you to a dose of radiation comparable to what some astronauts take in their whole career.

This is one of the many reasons why I can't be that overly excited about the discovery of a seemingly nice planet several light years away. There's a decent one right next door that is yet way out of reach.

[Gregoshi]

Very true wooly, but unfortunately, Mars hasn't ignited our imagination (or doesn't anymore). However, perhaps Proxima b might just do that - and Mars is a good first step towards b with regards to humans getting out of the Earth-Moon system.