First Habitable Planet Close To Being Confirmed By Scientists

From the Huffington Post:

Gliese 581d, a planet orbiting the red-dwarf star Gliese, may be the first real candidate for human expansion. That is, if it didn't take 3,000 lifetimes to get there, according to Science Daily.

And

From Fast Company:

There are no days on Gliese 581d; one side is perpetually light and one side is perpetually dark. People thought this would mean that the night side would be perpetually frozen. But a new study by the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at the Institute Pierre Simon Laplace found that because of the local star's red light that penetrates deep into the heavy carbon atmosphere, the planet regulates heat quite well. Downside: It will always be a sort of red-hued dusk. And gravity is twice as strong, meaning it won't be too pleasant to walk around. But at least we'll be able to live there. The problem, as with most things in space, is the distance. At 20 light years away, it would take 300,000 years to get there.

More here.

Twenty light years? Pish tosh!

It is indeed impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, but, in theory, we can approach the speed of light, and, needless to say, that's really fucking fast. Seriously. There have been designs for interstellar space ships on the books for decades now. I mean, the devil's in the details, of course, and it would be one of the greatest feats of engineering in human history, but we can do this. Even if we just traveled in old school rockets utilizing constant acceleration, rather than fancy sci-fi hydrogen scoop ramjets or nuclear pulse propulsion engines, we could travel at speeds matching a not insignificant portion of the speed of light. Fuck man, even half the speed of light gets us there in forty years.

What the hell are we sitting around for? Humanity's future awaits. And here we sit gabbing about Arnold Schwarzenegger's love child.

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