What do we do after a second Earth is discovered?

Thursday, June 26, 2008

Image:Comparison TOS original remastered.jpg
After the article yesterday about the search for a second Earth getting tantalizingly close to fruition there was a new thread on the forums at space.com. It's already over three pages and if you like forum threads (because be warned that in parts it's rather silly) it's worth a read. There's actually not much in terms of information, but it's interesting to finally see the debate open up on exactly how we should approach a planet of this type once it's discovered, and if there's already some sort of life there should we still colonize it? Here are some interesting quotes from some of the users on the thread:

Hicup:

What then? Say we find a planet, and confirm that it is almost exactly like ours. What would the world's nations need to do? Is it even possible to go it alone, or only those with the will? What about all of our differences? Does this all need to come to fruition before we can even think about branching out?

Keep in mind for discussion purposes that, it would be confirmed that we found another Earth like planet. The distance is imaterial at this point, but for the sake of argument, lets say it was within 100 light years..

qso1:
The point being that its gonna take something like this to "As Obama would probably put it" Inspire people about human spaceflight again. Human spaceflight desperately needs something humanity can relate to or it will eventually come to an end.

An earthly twin would provide that inspiration and human spaceflights (HSF) continuation IMO.

Of course, it wont be easy and for HSF, it likely will have to be international for the foreseeable future. I personally think we could go it alone if need be. But this is something that much of the world will want to be in on. I don't see that we would have to put aside our differences. We should but thats not human nature.

derekmcd:

Another thing that I find a bit amusing, should we find a habitable earth twin... If we decide to send out a generation ship to make the journey, they probably won't be the first to reach Earth 2. Their journey will probably take so long that technological advances here on Earth will allow for a bigger, faster, better ship that will pass them up.


1 comments:

Anonymous said...

What will do? Go fuck it up as immediately as possible, of course.

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