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Comment by exratione | Hacker News Reader

Seems unlikely to be the first choice of destination on that basis. By the time the technology exists to reliably transport people (or equivalent amounts of mass) to other planetary systems in a usefully short amount of time, then the technology will also exist to cost-effectively (a) make everything habitable for baseline humans via habitats and other forms of engineering, and (b) engineer sentient entities that can live comfortably in native conditions near anywhere in a star system.

So whether or not the system has habitable zone planets will be irrelevant. Our descendants will go to the closest one first.

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Could still be useful in case anything ever happens to our solar system.

But 22 lightyears means it's still going to be one-way trip, even with matter/anti-matter engines. Unless we develop immortality by then of course...

Or procreating on the space ship.

How is that not a one way trip?

Staying on Earth is also a one way trip then.

I think the point was more about a one-way trip for a single person.

I'd agree that it's not a one-way trip for humanity, though. Once some of us get there (e.g., progeny of the original crew), eventually some of us could get back to Earth too (at some later date). Assuming Earth isn't destroyed by that point...

Probably by the time the progeny get back to Earth the current species will have self-annihilated and the earth would have returned to a more peaceful place, the atmosphere recovered, the vegetation replacing the asphalt and the oceans clean and pure. A few thousands years peace is exactly what the Earth needs.

Without the "trip" part.

It's not even a one-way trip unless you count procreation. It's likely a part-of-the-way-then-die trip.

Presumably any initial ventures that far afield would have a fairly small and very select set of passengers. People who are particularly intelligent or otherwise gifted. Or, indeed, multi-talented.

What if there offspring just aren't that bright? How can you ensure the mission succeeds over the course of several(/many?) generations?

Religion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_the_Sky

We still don't know if we have to travel 22 light years to reach a point 22 light years from here.

Predicting what is impossible based on existing knowledge hasn't worked too well in the past.

Very roughly, if you had a ship capable of accelerating at 1 g (I know of no way to do this), you'd experience a decade of ship time to cross that distance.

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/O/one-g_spacecraft... has other examples. They are round-trip, not one way, hence my describing my math as very rough.

Somewhat related; if you accelerate at a constant 9G it would take around 3 months to reach the speed of light.

That would be a pretty miserable 3 months. Can humans stay conscious for long at 9G?

Top Gun pilots can withstand 9G for quite a few seconds without a G-suit IIRC from documentaries on the topic.

I think you're underestimating the importance of not living in bubbles for a) and opening a can of worms by assuming b).

and what would that can of worms be? :) ...really, if there is a "can of worms" to open here, we'll open it quite soon, well before any such voyage, by starting to do cosmetic-human-genetic-engineering, economic-oriented-human-genetic-engineering and warfare-oriented-human-genetic-engineering, and I'm pessimistic enough to bet on the third one as the first to crop up (nothing better than: "supper smart military engineers", "super smart, fit, sociopathic and fanatic - ie. unbreakable - spies" or any other such combos that I'm sure make up some twisted folks' wet dreams...).

Same goes why goto the moon when we are not colonizing the sea. We will go there simply to proof our technology advancement.

Habitable zone planets are interesting primarily because there might be alien life on them, and only secondarily because we might want to colonize them. Our descendants will probably not allocate billions of dollars on a mission to a ball of dry rock when the alternative is a planet with a potential for life.

>Our descendants will probably not allocate billions of dollars on a mission to a ball of dry rock

if our descendants will still be thinking in billions of dollars ...

But it depends what is cheaper...

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