The Kepler Telescope has found 3 new stars all of which are in the “habitable
zone”, a sun type star in our Milky Way galaxy. One of these Sun type stars is
Kepler-69. It has a planet orbiting around it about 70% bigger than earth. As
of date astronomers have found 697 of such habitable planets. We know some of this
because of the Kepler mission which launched a spacecraft in 2009 to look for
such planets; they have found about 100; good job. Most of those are just to
big, Jupiter size; so in Goldilocks terms they are not “just right.”
Besides Kepler 69 there is a Kepler-62 that has a couple of planets
nearer our own size even if their star is a bit dimmer.
It is good to know we have some neighbors. At the rate we are
abusing our own planet it might be time to invest in space travel. Given they
are likely to far away from us for us to make it
during our lifetimes. Kepler 60 is 1200 light years away and Kepler 62 is 2000 light years a way. But it might be a better legacy for our future offspring
and the planet we are leaving them. I'll leave it to you to figure out how many generations it would take us to get there.
It's good to keep our options open.
How many generations? Hmm. 1200 light years:
ReplyDeletespeed of light 671,000,000 mph: typical generation 26 years: current Xenon Ion Drive
propulsion capability 200,000 mph...2 pages of calculations with an awful lot of zeros....
164,395 generations! But, if technology improves so that the speed of light can be approached a mere 50 generations or so.
Throw in some Captain Kirk warp drive stuff and
maybe a few days? The planet sounds nice, the
trip...gee, I don't know!