Okay let's say they discover a Super Earth Planet.

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Humans are not good at getting into space. Few have spent a half year there. There were problems. We fall apart.

Humans are also not good at building things that can run for hundreds of years.

It takes a long time to get to Mars, because going faster takes more energy, then even more to stop.

Soon the mass increases much faster than the increase in speed can.

We will stay here, now pick up your litter.

By the time we have the technology to do anything about it, we'll lose all our satellites from collisions with space debris, and no ship will be able to launch safely for the same reason. Yet they keep sending stuff up there. Time to launch some drones to clean it all up.

Here's an image of current low orbit debris (courtesy of Nasa )

It will be very, very challenging. They need to work on materials first. Stuff that will last forever. The Starship Enterprise is just a model made out of cheap plastic and they act like it goes far but how can it really?

We have the technology to rebuild this man. Steve Austin, where are you?


Planned Obsolescence is the culprit. We're too used to building in failure.


There is the slingshot method, and a similar method for slowing down, though I forget what it's called.

But imagine colliding with a micro-meteor at 0.9 light speed (or something bigger).

good lord..it's like Wall E. is it just me or is there a higher concentration near the poles? i wonder why that is?

hopefully the cleanup drones, if they ever come into fruition, will manage to destroy space junk as completely as possible, instead of just fragmenting it into large chunks, that whiz around infinitely and may create an even bigger danger.

I raised this same issue in another thread on WP, and expressed worry that space travel of the human race was going to grind to a halt.

But someone pointed out that there is such a thing as "oribital decay". Low orbit debris eventually falls out of orbit and onto the earth ( most actually burns up in the atmosphere before hitting the ground). So all of that cosmic dandruff around the earth will clear itsself up on its own.

But even then I would think that we would still have to go in cycles: decades of abstaining from launches to let near space clean itsself up, alternating with years with forging ahead with launching again.

Years, decades to a century or more.
Link

By the time we can use that engine life expectancy should be 120+ years

Ideas. Startrek had the ipad twenty years before it was invented. They also had local gravity, skipped inertia, and had replicators. A deflector dish would be needed to travel warp nine point five. A grain of sand would make a mess.

Carbon-Carbon does work, lasts, is low mass, but does not shield. Nasty stuff out there.

Tin Berillium alloy becomes a super magnet when supercooled, which space in the shade has an endless supply. The electro shielding can work. Local gravity, not being slammed against the wall when starting, turning, stopping, needs work.

A Russian woman is currently checking out sex in space. As no one has been born there, we have no idea if they can, or if they might just be different. Guild Navigator different. Twenty-seven generations space born, is not going to walk on the surface of a new planet.They might slither.

Mission control will be sending commands, with a six hundred year lag time.

Unlike Startrek where everyone had a life before the Acadamy, and some hot times during training, shore leave, the second generation will have been given life in a box, no out, times 27.

There might be some resentment. Measure your mutation and report it back to mission control.

It will take a high level of science and technology to maintain life. As no one can be fired, sent back to Earth, maintaining a multi doctorate level of function will not happen.

Even if computers run the place, the livestock is going to mutate, and the social sexual norms change in unexpected ways. One homosexual would feel unloved, but roll the dice often enough, and an all homosexual crew would be the last.

By size, a small crew could become male or female. With equality of life support, marriage would not happen. Even fifty of the opposite or desired sex would not seem a lot to get through.

As more males are born, perhaps they should be aborted, making a two to one female ratio.

Hairless ground apes turn criminal or insane, or both. There needs to be a way of removing them, and their genitics from the mix. Mutations developed after launch will have to be local problems.

Lock a hundred people in a grain silo in Ohio for two hundred years. Give them, food, water, and isolation. From that result chose your crew.

Under the two crew system, Eloi are kept by Morlocks, bred as healthy livestock, who vanish at twenty-eight. Stocking the new planet will take a breeding program to replace them as fast as they die. It does not take a lot of education to test new food supplies, be exposed to new germs, and it may take a hundred years till some develop resistance.

While it may seem to lack ethics, ethics will have to be discarded to launch people into a one way trip that lasts for generations, then colonize a new world.

The message, "We have arrived," will take six hundred years to reach earth, and their reply, "Good," another six hundred years.

Just to survive, will take exposing babies to being covered in the local mud to find some that survive.

This foundation stock must be bred to produce a herd, as Eloi, until there are enough to be worth educating.

They will need food, water, perhaps shelter, maybe clothes, and if there are predators, some means of defense. Perhaps a Morlock electric fence, to keep them in and the raptors out.

It was not that long ago when we had 50% childhood mortality here. An alien planet, 90% would be good. Enough would survive to build a resistant herd.

The same goes for the seeds we send with them. Few will thrive.

It could be done, it is not a problem for moral and ethical people.

That planet better hope we don't find a way to access it.If we do it's goosed.
IMO,unless we mature,I hope we die off here.

Simple solution? Imitate the moon. It seems to experience prolonged orbital success.

Actually that kind of thinking is outmoded in space. Once we do become advanced enough to really make a dent in space time, I hope we have perfected means to harvest various minerals because there is no way any species can deplete space of all the minerals and resources. By this time we should have long grown out of fossil fuels and perfected something purer. Ideally, we make this leap before we get too into space. These advances would keep us from harming other planets like earth. Heck, we can even find water from just about any place in space, even if it is frozen, it can be thawed. So you see, resources are a plenty out there. We just have to get to them. And, they exist in such forms we can harvest them without disturbing anyone's evolutionary journey, I hope.

Why go to a planet 600ly away, even if it's the closest habitable one? If you have the capability for fast, long interstellar travel, then you have the capability to terraform planets. Sure, it might take a millenium to finish terraforming (though it becomes easy to colonise much sooner, once it's proteroformed with a thick, warm, non-toxic atmosphere and liquid water on the surface - the rest is just oxygenating it), but it would take you that long to get to the 600ly planet...

Don't bother with generation ships. Agree on a common protocol for trade and communication, and spread from star to star, terraforming as we go. Perhaps in 2, 3, 4 millenia we'll reach a life bearing world, 400ly from Terra. Maybe an expedition sponsored by a system 20ly from it. Beam the data home, scans of fossils, genomes etc. It will take 400 years to get there, but they should be able to reconstruct what you found. Another 400 years, and the first authentic fossils will get there, traded from system to system.

I suspect colonisation will occur in waves, wwith the first wave taking humanity 50-100ly out. Plenty of systems in that volume. Another few centuries, and the next wave moves out.

I don't think humans will live short lives, like we do now. 3-400 years seems like a conservative estimate, but I don't see any reason millenia-long lifespans shouldn't be possible.

What are you talking about?

The subject is low orbit man made artifacts (like 100, or 500 miles up). The Moon is in high orbit ( a quarter of a million miles up). The Moon's orbit is also decaying, though extremely slowly (like a trillion years from now it fall to earth and get pulverized into gravel by tidal forces from the earth's gravity into a ring like around Saturn-but we have a trillion years before we have to worry about it).So for practical purposes you are right - the moon has "oribital success"- it stays where we all expect it to be in space- in the same orbit month after month.

But in the case of space debris we WANT orbital decay. Thats the point.We want the junk to clear out so we can go back to using near space for new space traffic.

The stuff we have up there is a mix of active satellites, inactive satellites, lost gloves of astronauts, and pieces of vehicles smashed in collisions,and pieces of pieces of pieces of stuff from collison. Imagine a tiny flying screw hitting your car on the highway. Wouldnt do much damage. But image if it hit your car at 17000 miles an hour (orbital spead). It would be like a hand grenade going off on your windshield. We're in danger of walling ourselves off from space with this debris because it seems to be reaching the saturation point. So thats why we need orbital decay to clean up near space.

Lol, then we'd find out what a planet might look like (providing we find the means of gathering usable data regarding its surface) on what happens on a planet that would be just like ours if the gravity wasn't high enough to kill us within hours or minutes.

That's why it's so wasteful. Aim for a trillion year orbital decay instead of a ten year one.