James Webb observation shows TRAPIST 1e could have Earth like Atmosphere

[Ninurta]

Well the place look`s promising , but there is no way to reach it .


Cant they try finding places more near us ?

They are trying, but it's not as easy as it sounds. Other star systems have random tilts with respect to Earth. For example, the Solar system we live in is tilted at 62 degrees from the galactic plane, and rotated away from the galactic center

We could be looking at many closer habitable systems, but given that their orbital planes may not align with our line of sight such that the planets pass in front of the star from our viewpoint, we have no way of determining whether they have an atmosphere at all, much less what it may be composed of if they do.

We could be looking at them from the pole down rather than on edge. In that case, we would detect q wobble in the star, but have no way of knowing what any potential atmospheres are made of. We would know "something" is there, but not what, exactly.

While there are ways to reach such places, those ways are not "fast". We could accelerate to near light speed with current tech, but that carries a huge risk of ramming an interstellar body such as 3i Atlas, or Oumouamoua, or even something larger like a rogue planet, at light speed. If a 60 mile an hour (about 90 KPH) car crash into a wall is likely to kill you, just imagine what a 300,000 kilometer per SECOND ( 1.08 BILLION KPH) crash would do. Even tiny dust specks at such speeds are thoroughly dangerous - and you would be on the body almost as soon as you detected it at light speeds. You'd be "there" long before you had any time to react to it.

So, slower speeds and much higher travel times are the way to go. Something speculated as "generational" star ships would be in order - star ships whose inhabitants would undergo generations, perhaps hundreds of generations, before reaching their destination.

In terms of human life times, 80 generations (2000 years @ about 25 years on average per generation) or so takes us back to roughly the time of Christ. Imagine the changes that would be wrought over 100 or 200 generations aboard a generational star ship. 200 generations would take us back 5000 years, to 3000 BC... before the Age of Gilgamesh (roughly 2750 BC)... back to a time when only small pockets of humanity were just starting to climb out of the Neolithic into the Chalcolitic and small scale farming was starting to take hold in small areas of humanity..

Would the descendants reaching the destination even remotely resemble culturally  their ancestors that initially set out on the journey? They would be as far removed from us as we are from our Bronze Age or even Stone Age ancestors.

Robert A. Heinlein wrote a novel about such a journey. It's called "Orphans of the Sky". Highly recommended reading.

Another link to a different edition of "Orphans of the Sky"


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