well it is OFFICIAL!
there is an earth-like planet in the habitable zone around the nearest star to the star.
this is very exciting news .
and theres a chance life may exist on this planet. even if there isn't life it could be a place to set up and colony for humans in the far future. our descendants will be able to live on proxima centauri B for far longer than our sun will survive.
so I think the logical thing to do is start building a probe to travel there and start doing recon on the system. is the planet habitable? are there other planets in the system? is the planet rich in resources to keep a self sustaining colony there? are their aliens that exist there and are they peaceful or sadistic? will we be able to share technology with them.
I say right now- all the governments of the world should contribute together to build a super probe that can reaching proxima centauri B within 20-30 years. steven hawking seems to think this is possible.
It was possible, until 2015. Sending a probe to B was a potentially good idea, because in 2012, planet finders claimed to had discovered a gas giant planet around B. But the finding was proved to be false and so sending a probe to B would have no benefit, since the star could just be observed with the Hubble Space Telescope. Although a close up view would be spectacular as well as the achievement, there would be no discoveries made by the use of a probe. So it would be a waste of money. By the way, even the fastest way thought of- a probe with a metallic parabolic sail attached to it, which nuclear weapons would be launched at and the blast would propel the sail forward, carrying the probe with it at speeds of tens of millions of miles per hour would still take up to 100 years to reach the star. But with a demo model, instead of a sail, it was a cone shaped demo model of the probe or a spacecraft. And instead of nuclear weapons or nuclear propulsion, laser beams were used to propel the model up in the air. This process is called Laser Propulsion and the demo experiment proved successful. Laser beams can travel at the speed of light. So with a small man made self-contained nuclear reactor as a source of electricity, and with the speed of laser beams, a probe could first be propelled by nuclear propulsion so travel speed begins at if flawless- tens of millions of miles per hour. Then the travel speed could be increased by the use of the Laser Propulsion, since the laser beams would always outpace the probe. The electricity for the laser would come from the source of electricity from the self-contained nuclear reactor. Nuclear reactions are so powerful with such a small amount of matter, the small amount in the nuclear reactor would be enough to last the entire time of the mission, EVEN IF the laser beam were constant, never ending throughout the mission and so the speed could reach more than double than the larger nuclear propulsion alone.
Yeah, you spend a lifetime getting there (when fractions of light-speed are possible) and when you get there u find it is just a barren waste. What do you do then?
And just because it is in the zone does not automatically mean that it has water.. The star is a red dwarf, so the system would have had a completely different creation process to the sun and its planets. Theory has it that our water came from icy comets that impacted Earth in the early days. But the creation of billions of comets, like those existing in the Sun's Oort cloud, may well be a very special feature of stars of a certain size.
There may be so many steps and "angles" involved in the creation of planetary systems, that it is possible we are alone. After all you can arrange the 26 letters of the alphabet in more ways than there are stars in the observable universe.
I personally believe that said planet is 99.9% likely to be Venus-like, rather than Earth-like. And it is probably too close to Proxima to have a moon. But there may be a good chance that there is a Mars-like planet also orbiting Proxima a little farther out that we could colonize.
A starship powered by thermonuclear fusion could probably achieve ~20% light speed, getting us there in ~22years, one way.
On the other hand, why not just go and visit Venus?
Please read the excellent book, "Entering Space", by Dr. Robert Zubrin, PhD, available on amazon and other places.
Possibly. We need more information before we can justify the cost. So a few years of making measurements on the atmosphere would help. Remember that the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft have not cleared the influence of the Sun's gravity yet (after 40 years). We would also need to develop some means of communicating over that distance, and re-awakening the spacecraft after many years of inaction.
it is a guess based off the dimming of the light and the mathematics behind it. we have yet to actually see it. so it is not officially an earth like planet. it is simple only rocky.
there is an earth-like planet in the habitable zone around the nearest star to the star.
this is very exciting news .
and theres a chance life may exist on this planet. even if there isn't life it could be a place to set up and colony for humans in the far future. our descendants will be able to live on proxima centauri B for far longer than our sun will survive.
so I think the logical thing to do is start building a probe to travel there and start doing recon on the system. is the planet habitable? are there other planets in the system? is the planet rich in resources to keep a self sustaining colony there? are their aliens that exist there and are they peaceful or sadistic? will we be able to share technology with them.
I say right now- all the governments of the world should contribute together to build a super probe that can reaching proxima centauri B within 20-30 years. steven hawking seems to think this is possible.
It was possible, until 2015. Sending a probe to B was a potentially good idea, because in 2012, planet finders claimed to had discovered a gas giant planet around B. But the finding was proved to be false and so sending a probe to B would have no benefit, since the star could just be observed with the Hubble Space Telescope. Although a close up view would be spectacular as well as the achievement, there would be no discoveries made by the use of a probe. So it would be a waste of money. By the way, even the fastest way thought of- a probe with a metallic parabolic sail attached to it, which nuclear weapons would be launched at and the blast would propel the sail forward, carrying the probe with it at speeds of tens of millions of miles per hour would still take up to 100 years to reach the star. But with a demo model, instead of a sail, it was a cone shaped demo model of the probe or a spacecraft. And instead of nuclear weapons or nuclear propulsion, laser beams were used to propel the model up in the air. This process is called Laser Propulsion and the demo experiment proved successful. Laser beams can travel at the speed of light. So with a small man made self-contained nuclear reactor as a source of electricity, and with the speed of laser beams, a probe could first be propelled by nuclear propulsion so travel speed begins at if flawless- tens of millions of miles per hour. Then the travel speed could be increased by the use of the Laser Propulsion, since the laser beams would always outpace the probe. The electricity for the laser would come from the source of electricity from the self-contained nuclear reactor. Nuclear reactions are so powerful with such a small amount of matter, the small amount in the nuclear reactor would be enough to last the entire time of the mission, EVEN IF the laser beam were constant, never ending throughout the mission and so the speed could reach more than double than the larger nuclear propulsion alone.
Yeah, you spend a lifetime getting there (when fractions of light-speed are possible) and when you get there u find it is just a barren waste. What do you do then?
And just because it is in the zone does not automatically mean that it has water.. The star is a red dwarf, so the system would have had a completely different creation process to the sun and its planets. Theory has it that our water came from icy comets that impacted Earth in the early days. But the creation of billions of comets, like those existing in the Sun's Oort cloud, may well be a very special feature of stars of a certain size.
There may be so many steps and "angles" involved in the creation of planetary systems, that it is possible we are alone. After all you can arrange the 26 letters of the alphabet in more ways than there are stars in the observable universe.
I personally believe that said planet is 99.9% likely to be Venus-like, rather than Earth-like. And it is probably too close to Proxima to have a moon. But there may be a good chance that there is a Mars-like planet also orbiting Proxima a little farther out that we could colonize.
A starship powered by thermonuclear fusion could probably achieve ~20% light speed, getting us there in ~22years, one way.
On the other hand, why not just go and visit Venus?
Please read the excellent book, "Entering Space", by Dr. Robert Zubrin, PhD, available on amazon and other places.
Possibly. We need more information before we can justify the cost. So a few years of making measurements on the atmosphere would help. Remember that the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft have not cleared the influence of the Sun's gravity yet (after 40 years). We would also need to develop some means of communicating over that distance, and re-awakening the spacecraft after many years of inaction.
it is a guess based off the dimming of the light and the mathematics behind it. we have yet to actually see it. so it is not officially an earth like planet. it is simple only rocky.