Popular journalistic coverage of the recently trendy branch of astronomy – finding planets outside our solar system (exoplanets, as they are known) is fraught with high drama and false expectations. The reviewers often guide the reader towards the imminency of discovering extraterrestrial intelligent life – which, of course, is nonsense. Even the theoretical possibility of such a result – ever! – is a matter of substantial debate among scientists, notwithstanding my emotional sympathy to humanity’s feeling of universal loneliness.
This does not mean, however, that exoplanet science is useless and should not be pursued. Much is to be gained in our understanding of our own star system by observing the others. Considering the ferocious speed with which exoplanet discovery is taking place, the attached paper that I wrote over a year ago might sound a little dated. Nevertheless, it provides a useful expository essay on the topic.
The most likely contact from another intelligent life form or our own contact initiated by us would seem to me to be either a “probe” or “android”. I cannot conceive of how it is possible to send humans/extra-terrestrials into deep space and maintain the biological requirements to sustain life. I also don’t think it possible to travel at speeds approaching anything remotely close to 186,000 miles per second for sustained periods of time. I think the fastest man has ever been able to travel through space is less than 25,000 miles per hour. At that speed it would take 400 years just to reach our nearest neighboring star “proximus centari” which doesn’t appear to have any habitable exoplanets. Therefore the only possible ways that mankind will ever be able to reach exoplanets can only be achieved in three ways: 1) Unlocking the biological DNA code to allow humans to be able to live for thousands of years. 2) Creating extremely sophisticated probes/androids capable of surviving the various extremes of both space and time. 3) Creating some way to put humans in some form of stasis that allows the person to reanimate at the final destination of the journey.
These are serious problems that do not have solutions at any point within the spans of our lifetimes or our great great great great grand children’s lifetime.
It seems that the most we can do from our position here is to do our best to “move the ball forward”. Humankind is painfully impatient and unfortunately the process is painfully slow. I think we must concentrate our efforts on advancing our science while maintaining the viability of our planet to sustain us, if we are ever to reach the stars and have anything like a serious discussion interstellar travel.
My time is short and this article is about a year old, however I was drawn to this piece. I understand that as a collective humans must find a way to sustain our world, however exploration of the stars has to be one of our priorities to continuing as a race. Your third point stating that humans need to develop some form of stasis in order to transport ourselves to worlds that can sustain or help terraform an environment is your future!