60 billion planets in Milky Way could hold life
- Thread starter bigarrow
- Start date
It might also have something to do with time. Because nothing is faster than light, even if you developed a ship that travels 100 light years in 10 minutes from your perspective, 100 years still passed on your home planet. Everyone you know and love is dead when you get back, plus society, technology and everything else would have changed. As a space traveler, you are literally giving up everything you know, to visit another world that will also likely change so much when you visit a 2nd or 3rd time that it will keep becoming more and more unrecognizable. How would anyone want that kind of life? I mean,yeah, it might be exciting the first few times your civilization travels to other worlds, but after a few years, it will be about as exciting as us going to the moon again. Been there, done that, who cares about other alien races now that we know they are there?
the thought of one day finding life on another planet but more importantly, being able to sustain human life on it would be incredible. however, it probable won't happen in my life time i'm sorry to say. as someone has already pointed out, even if we did find a planet like earth, we would have to find a way to break the speed of light cause getting to another planet that's 100 light years away is....(cough!), just a tad far to travel - even in warp speed.
Assuming the human race survives various extinction events over the next billion years, the final extinction event would be the Sun becoming a Red Giant that engulfs the Earth in flames billions of years from now.
Humans will have no choice but to send ships into outer space in search of a livable planet. By that time we will have achieved great strides in technology that would allow the survival of thousands of generations of mankind in outer space while searching for a livable planet, though being able to survive light years of travel that would take incalculable years would probably stretch human ingenuity with the result that the last human being may not be able to reach that livable planet, but we would have to settle for a robot carrying the human DNA to reach such destination to hopefully re-establish our species.
Conversely, Earth has little to worry about an extinction event from an alien species attacking due to the virtual impossibility of traveling through light years of distance.
Unless other civilizations know how to go at the fictional warp speed, then there is very little way they could contact us or we could contact them. I think we might just have to face that fact that for all intents and purposes weâre alone in this universe.