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Comment by tejaswiy | Hacker News Reader

I actually find it very scary that the nearest planet not in the solar system is 4.3 Light years away!

If FTL / Close to light speeds are impossible in this universe, we're just left with generation ships [1]. It seems that there is a very good chance that we'd be stuck on this rock called the earth forever. Really need to take better care of it.

[1] and generation ships are highly impractical (see http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/designin... )

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Do we need a planet at all? Seems like an easier option for being non-Earth dependant would be to develop vessels that are self sustaining and which perhaps mine asteroids and gas clouds to get what they need. The whole getting onto and off a planet just adds more complications than its worth.

Forever is a long time.

Alpha Centauri feels far away because our lifetimes are so ridiculously short, and we're so unfathomably economically poor, compared to the age of and resources available in the universe. These limitations don't have to apply to whatever our descendants will be a few centuries or millenia from now.

To them, a trip to Alpha Centauri might be a weekend lark.

Sorry. Irrespective of your lifetime or economic resources, a weekend lark would violate the laws of physics.

It's metaphor. If your life span is indefinite, a journey lasting a few hundred years is nothing.

The nearest planet "that we can detect".. What says that planets can only form around stars? Yes, its most likely since those are some of the biggest gravity sources, but if you have a failed star system, or accumulation of mater out in deep space, no reason it can't aggregate and form its own starless planet

Too cold to be habitable, though, surely? So it doesn't affect the OP's point.

I find it scary it's only 4.3 light years away. If they can manage 1/10 the speed of of light, they can reach us in just 43 years.

1/10 of the speed of light is still pretty fast. Helios[1], the probe that holds the speed record from all our spacecrafts travaled at 252 792km/h. That's still less than one 1/400 of the 1/10 of the speed of light.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_probes

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