Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Earth 2.0 – to visit is a pipedream; at least for now!


Rocky exoplanet, temperatures not too hot-not too cold, thick atmosphere, enough light from its star to support crop life and house plants, oh and to support us. OH, and a year is 385 days – pretty close!

 

They are calling it Earth 2.0 and they are busy looking into what else it has to offer. So we can start off loading Earth 1.0 and head for this new Earth, right? Well, not likely, ever.

 

The technical name is Kepler-452b but you can call it heaven. Actually a trip to Heaven is a tad more likely. At 1400 light years, if we were to look at the conventional methods of travel today in the present – not a chance. Using the fast traveling (by todays methods) New Horizons spacecraft which flies at a cool 59,000 km/h it would take more than your lifetime, 26 million years more than your lifetime. But say we were to push the envelope, basically think ahead 5-10, maybe 25 years, and consider the FTL Drive being worked on (and with some success) how about then, faster right?

 

Actually that’s a tad more doable. If we were to travel at Warp 8, the trip now becomes approximately a year and a half. While that’s certainly worth it, it could be sometime before we could handle that and even longer before it would make the list of places to go. Why? That far out means whoever goes also needs the shielding so we’ll have to finish designing that as well! Also the amount of anti-matter necessary would suggest that we were really good at making that or had a decent stockpile.

 

Oh, and two details; 1) the gravity would be a bit stronger. Granted it’s a rough estimate, but its mass is probably 5 times that of Earth which means the gravity is about twice what we are used to. And 2) if one were to travel 99.999 % the speed of light, besides taking a mere 1,400 and some odd years, one would barely have aged a month.

 

So, it’s probably going to be a while before we head there; we’ll surely make a trip to Gliese 667A before Earth 2.0, but really, if it were easy, the traffic would be intense!

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