Out of Pod Experience

For me, this is pretty exciting. But seriously anyon who tries to say there isn't life anywhere else. In this entire universe are stupid!

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/kepler-22b/

Nerf Aliens!

I like your attitude

The human race needs new places to go in order to leave the much more weaker "administrative class" behind and grow.

Which is why aliens would stop us dead.

We will have to end the trend of tyranny, slavery, usury, and the usual trappings of humanity BEFORE we head out to the stars lest we bring it with us.

Because then we will have that new planet, in some years, having to send people here to liberate people from the death camps because everybody got stupid and started supporting dictators.

And then, a few generations later, the people on that planet, thinking "It can't happen here", will have the same thing happen but be even more blind to it than the earthlings they saved, and that new planet becomes the wellspring from which tyranny flows, with bases on over 900 other planets and a reserve currency that wrecks the economy of every other planet.

See a pattern here? It goes back 5000 years - from region to region, then to continent to continent, and now planet to planet?

I don't think any advanced races will put up with that - thankfully.

The other reason why they won't let us colonize beyond our own system is because humans will have sex with just about anything.

I'm more than certain I disagree with him on the specifics, but he's quite right. Human minds obviously do not handle large scale civilization well at all. We need to evolve, biologically or socially, to think along the lines of all being unified as living and sentient beings.

We naturally divide, segregate, and have many mechanisms to narrow the number of people we care about. Social classes, cliques, geographic divides become social ones even with mass communication. Even people working together tend to divide themselves and then cast blame across those divisions when things go wrong, instead of continuing to work together on a problem.

I <3 the Human Race.

I haven't quite got my head around the enormity of the age of the universe relative to immediate human comprehension, but isn't the problem with finding sentient life in the universe less to do with distance and rather more to do with the extremely low probability that any flourishing of life is going to happen in the same time period as any other flourishing of life?

We can only hope that if we find intelligent life we're the ones that find it. When a more advanced society locates a primitive one.... well, look at history. The primitives end up wiped out simply due to being in the presence of awesome

When an object with mass may be faster than a massless object (zero mass at rest, i know).. there might very well be a means to reach this planet in under 600+ years.

Hell.. if even reaching light speed is achieved by humans (I don't need a lecture on the compounding issue of mass coupled with increasing speed).. who ever makes the trip will merely blink and be there. Light speed = time stasis.. if you truly want to live forever, there ya go. So while we might skip about our Sun 600 times.. the astronauts abord that photon rocket won't notice a damn thing, nor will they age, when ship dings 299,792,458 m/s till it begins to lose speed on final approach. They won't even need 600 years worth of food and toilet paper.

Here's a conundrum. How would they do a test flight on a light-speed ship?

When it arrived at it's destination everyone involved in the testing and ye...everyone living on the planet at the time would already be centuries old worm food.