Scientists have discovered a "new" planet which they say appears capable of sustaining life.

Could this be the "new earth" so long hoped for?

Time will tell.

Rather than "581c", I fancy the name "Bradbury" for the new planet. What say you?

Let's not get TOO excited. Remember what happened to The Third Expedition? It looked like Earth, sounded like Earth,...

This idea of distances is insane.

Roughly..and I mean just dotting down some figures on the back of a shovel with charcoal...the distance to this planet and time to get there is like this:

Okay, they say it's about 20 light years away.
Let's say the spaceship we have to travel to that planet does about 30,0000 miles an hour, or, approximately 720,000 miles each day.
Light travels at roughly 186,000 miles each second. That means, that every 50 seconds, light travels about as far as our spaceship will travel in 1 year. Now it took about 1 year to travel the distance that light traveled in less than a minute, meaning.... take 20 years and subtract about 50 seconds.... leaving, 19 years and .. 364 days and...well, you get the point!It's just too far. Even a million miles an hour would still have the pilots watching the centuries roll by...
Obviously, we're talking something diffferent than a plane trip to Scranton, Pennsylvania from San Diego.

quote:

Originally posted by philnic:
Let's not get TOO excited. Remember what happened to The Third Expedition? It looked like Earth, sounded like Earth,...

You know what they say: Mars is heaven!

quote:

Originally posted by Nard Kordell:
Let's say the spaceship we have to travel to that planet does about 30,0000 miles an hour, or, approximately 720,000 miles each day.
Light travels at roughly 186,000 miles each second. That means, that every 50 seconds, light travels about as far as our spaceship will travel in 1 year. Now it took about 1 year to travel the distance that light traveled in less than a minute, meaning.... take 20 years and subtract about 50 seconds.... leaving, 19 years and .. 364 days and...well, you get the point!It's just too far.

Wow - good job with that shovel and charcoal.

Clearly we're talking teleportation here - "gas and go" travel is so twentieth century!

Doug Spaulding:
I decided to use something better than charcoal and shovel. I'm trying twig and soft gravel. At least I'll be able to make out what I'm jotting down.

My original figures are way off.

Let's put that light in light of 30 minutes travel, instead of that 50 seconds.
At a lengthy 30 minutes of light travel, we're looking at 334 million miles.
That's only 344,000,000 miles.
Where as the rocket ship traveling at 720,000 miles a day, would take 1 year to go 266 million miles, or about 266,450,000 million miles.
Gee, light isn't that fast as I thought!

More importantly, that includes how many stops for fresh coffee?

Indeed. Also resultant potty breaks!

Exactly! Coffee is a diuretic, you know!