Looking for alien Earths? Here they come

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So we have the right stuff, what it takes to leave and never look back. Now all we need is the way.

My best guess is a few thousand years. Since most guesses about tech are wrong, maybe a few hundred.

First step, and slow, is send probes. There is a bit within the five to ten light year range. That is hundreds of years for a close up look.

Even if everything works, it will be hundreds of years in the passage. People are the problem. They don't freeze well, not for restarting them. They can only take limited G force, so it will be a long trip, and new crew will have to be made the old fashioned way.

Coming to a stop at the other end is always a problem, the faster you go, the sooner you have to slow down, so an extra few generations in the passage would be cheaper.

There are some Tin alloys that become powerful magnets when supercooled, so power generation between the stars can be done. The ship will have to be large, produce food, keep generations, and a spinning disk for some sense of down.

It is a test of what we don't know, do us and our food really need gravity? If so, everything dies and goes on out into space. Will the shielding work? Not for anything the size of a baseball moving 40,000 miles a second. A double hull with goop between might work. It will go right through, then it is anything vital hit.

Anything that size must be built in orbit, current rates about $40,000 a pound to get it there.

The best crew would be all female, with a sperm bank. Other services can be supplied by robots that look like Fabio.

There is the questions we never ask, how much are we dependant of the bacteria in our guts? What would happen without constant refreshment? The world would move toward less to produce immune responses.

Anything Earth like is going to be a one way trip to the surface.

Now comes the fun part, we will pick worlds with life. How one adapts to alien biology will be iffy.

Like the New World, the common cold seems to have killed 25,000,000 from Columbus making one landing. Either side could be a plague.

Intelligent life would have a prior claim, and what do we know of intelligence? Our crops could not grow at all, or the whole planet could turn neck deep in Snow Peas. Eating the locals, even well cooked, could cause problems. I am sure life has some common patterns, but we only know one.

Consider that even here there are Gluten and Casine problems, what there?

We are at a point in Biology. We could have not made it when there were Algae and Sponges.

The Jurassic would be fun. Big white meat.

Until very recently, humans were a minor prey species. Any time before our own, a dangerous world, and now and forward, much more dangerous.

The odds of gaining a foot hold on another world are low, and if they did, would they tell us? Just turn off the radio?

Are you kidding? Masses of my paternal cultural group did just that roughly one hundred years ago. They did it as well one hundred years prior to that, likely not for the first time.

And we are hardly unique in that regard.

On my maternal side, moms family left Europe in only 1924, dividing families as well.

I agree that it couldnt have been easy, but its been the norm in human history.

And it wasnt just the euros that did it. Consider the Chinese labourers who came to America to build the rails.

The Volga Germans(twice), potato famine Irish, Ukrainians, Poles, Chinese.. are just a short list of humans that came en-mass. Many, were illiterate and did not hold any expectations of correspondence.

In modern times - ie. some time today - Africans will arrive on our shores knowing that they may never see their families again. Phone calls are right out of the question, and delivery of mail has no assurance. Political strife means that they may never visit home safely.

And lets not forget antiquity, when people lived in small nomadic tribes. Chance meetings with other groups were an opportunity for marriage outside the group. Participants in that had no assurance that they would ever see their families again.

No ruveyn, the fortitude needed to pack up and say good bye forever is deeply engrained in us. Some day we will use it again when we head for the stars.

A Bussard ramjet is probably the best hope for getting to seriously relativistic speeds.

to go fast enough to scoop up enough hydrogen to fuse, would require going at about c/10 which is far beyond our capabilities. Besides which, we have not figured out how to do controlled nuclear fusion. The best we can do is trigger H-bombs with A-bombs.

ruveyn

Controlled fusion we can and do do now, it's "just" a question of increasing the energy efficiency. We're (very; it depends what you count) roughly breaking even at present.

c/10 we could do now using a bomb pusher, but you wouldn't want to be sitting on it. ^^