Comments on Earth 2

I say we send Bush on a one-way trip to investigate. He can take Cheney with him if need be, and maybe AG Gonzales as well.

Well, except for the fact that the cost of the trip - even one-way - would probably equal what we've spent to-date in Iraq (assuming of course, you actually want them to survive the journey and report back), I'd be in agreement with you.

Although, on the other hand, I doubt we could rely on them giving us anything in the way of accurate, factual reporting on their observations.

Not to mention the fact that we'll all be long-dead before anything they had to say actually got back to us.

They found Krypton, basically.

I'm pretty sure that they would be dead too.

#1 nah leave em here on earth to fight their own Wars and shoot pesky
critters.

Unless there is something like
'The Thing' on that planet all these what I call destructoids can sit their happy asses down and ponder their stupidity and spend there time debating God and war while science and reasonable humans get the honor to go
because they got their act together.

counterpoint to my comment I can see this becoming some space race to see who gets to go when the time comes when our planet is through.
Saddely its a long way off and I bet this world is gonna be so broke to even accomplish the attempt if we keep on 'Spending Money and scientific knowledge on War!' hello planet earth
wake up. What do you want to do now huh World Leaders?

I don't even know why people are talking about going there, did you notice it says more than 20 light years away.

I am curious to know how long it would take to get there. Since we cannot travel at the speed of light, I think it would take hundreds, maybe thousand of years.

It took Voyager 27 Earth yeas to travel 13 light-hours

Gliese 581c is 20.40 light-years away.

Maybe one of you math nerds can tell us how long it would take to get there with present technology.

It would take a long time to get there, 13,476 years. Without some kind of stasis the community that left on the outbound ship would be a very different community by the time they arrived. Also, with that mass, the gravity is strong, so they are all very, very short and incredibly wide "green people"

elswinger, that isn't too much of a math nerd thing. Or I'm a math nerd and don't know it. If distance equals speed times time then 13 light hours = (X)27 earth years. meaning we travel at .48 light yours a year. using the same equation (ok I am a math nerd because I used the word equation on the slog) we travel 178704 light hours from here to there at a rate of .48 light hours a year. We'd be touching down and rolling out space sleeping bags in about 372300 years. This may be wrong, it's been a while since I was in algebra.

Nothing wrong with your math, SFAIKT (not being a math nerd myself), however, we can probably reduce that travel time significantly, say down to the order of a few hundred years (!) using currently available technology such as sustained low-thrust ion propulsion. This however, doesn't take the relativity factor into account, since the passage of time would be different for people on earth than it would for the Bush-Cheney expedition.

Still and all, it ain't gonna be a quick trip by any stretch...

@4 - a risk I would be willing to take.

Maybe the residents of the new planet can send us instructions via radio waves on how to build a machine that humans can use to travel there. We can pick up their signals with our radio telescopes. There's a nice one in Puerto Rico.

Who cares. Honestly. We'll never visit it, its simply too far away. Might as well be made of cat food.

Only incredibly stupid aliens would want us around. Incredibly stupid aliens probably aren't technologically advanced enough to help us out.

The discovery does add weight to the argument we are not alone, and there is other worlds out there. And being that it is inhabitable there must be some odd life there if there is any to survive. Unless that life is more advanced than we are and has something more ancient up their sleeve in terms of mathematics and algebra and human theories.
On the other hand I can see religous nuts and scientoligists going all gaga that this some how validates their claims too. Like maybe that planet is heaven and maybe this Earth is hell. Heres where we are when we are alive and there is where we go when we die.
You know all that metaphysical stuff.
Until Dr. Noah gets there on his space ark and proves otherwise heres to it being that that is where UFOs have been comming from.

And God might resemble an insect.

Carl:

It's my understanding that SETI researchers have given a listen to Gliese 581 a couple of times in the past, and most likely it'll jump back up to the top of the list again with this new discovery.

I wonder if the Dalai Lama can scan Christianity and indicate where the next incarnation of Noah is currently breastfeeding.

I wouldn't mind commanding the trip myself (I'm likely in the running for this voyage somewhere in line between the entire staff of the Hollowed-Out Mountain and the Dafur refugees) if only to experience the post-touch down satisfaction of taking a dump outside and cracking open a bottle of Herradura.

Then taking a thunderstruck look around. Then a noodle-legged sitting down. Then a sucking of the thumb.

@18

I hope they hear "Shit, they found us"

It'll probably be more along the lines of, "Do you MIND? This is a PRIVATE conversation!"

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