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With the recent news about an earthlike planet orbiting one of the stars in the Centuri system, it got be thinking..............
I know its practically impossible to accurately answer, but when do you guess the first humans will visit a planet outside of our solar system?
I am going to guess this will first happen 1,000 years from now. I hope in 3016 that someone reads this and either laughs at me, or give me a shout-out to wherever my final resting place will be by then!
I think with the speedy technology advancement, I would guess it is in the next 100 years
I doubt it. In 1970, projections of what life would be like in the year 2010, had us all thin, bald, wearing skin-tight body suits, riding around in levitating cars, and waiting for a shuttle to visit an orbiting observatory. We're pretty-much still wearing jeans, driving the same old cars, and stuck on terra-firma. Humanity is resistant to change.
Right now, there are engines under design to reach fractional light speed, so I'd estimate an attempted exploratory probe mission in a 25 to 50 year time frame. Still, even to our nearest neighboring star system is probably going to be more than a ten year transit and then another 4 to 5 years to begin receiving data. The most likely scenario within our lifetimes will be improved observations from orbital telescopes. In the meantime, there's plenty to do to develop our interplanetary capability and we may well see a manned Mars mission in the next 25 years. I'm 64, I might very well live to see it.
If we are able to go at the speed of light, 3.0 x 10^8, then this would only take us 4.42 years to get there. However, the current technology is only able to go 20,000 miles per hour, so it would take 142,000 years to reach the nearest exoplanet to Earth.
If we are able to go at the speed of light, 3.0 x 10^8, then this would only take us 4.42 years to get there. However, the current technology is only able to go 20,000 miles per hour, so it would take 142,000 years to reach the nearest exoplanet to Earth.
Yeah, speeds are totally impractical right now, for example:
Voyager 1 launched in 1977= 39 years ago
speed= 38,000 mph
distance= ~12 billion miles away (just leaving planetary sphere of our solar system)
distance to Alpha Centauri= ~26 trillion miles
So it's less than 1/1,000 of the way there in almost 40 years
I think for humans to visit the nearest exoplanet one would have to take what in essence would be a colony ship in order for the trip to be anything but suicide.
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