Issue 83, 9th May 2007

Science: Why New Planet Gleise
Might Not Save Us
By Alan Lord

Scientists were swooning with excitement this week, over the discovery of a new, Earth-like planet - Gleise 581c - which is "only" 20.5 light years away.

“This Earth is gonna be done, soon,” CNN's Tapola Ravira enthused. “And new planets like Gleise might just be our only option for survival.”

BIGfib thought we would do some maths and see how soon we can get to it:

First, light travels at 186,000 miles per second, or 300,000 kilometers per second.

This is 66,960,000 miles per hour, or 1,080,000,000 km/h (one billion kilometers per hour)
With 31,557,600 seconds in a year, light travels 9,467,280,000,000 kilometers (9.5 trillion) in a year.
Gleise 581c is 20.5 light years, or 194,079,240,000,000 kilometers (194 trillion km) from Earth.

In a car going at 100 mph (160 km/h) it would take 1,212,995,250,000 (1.2 trillion) years to get there - that's about 75 times longer than the present age of the universe (16 billion years).

At the fastest speed recorded by an Apollo spacecraft - 25,000 mph - it would take 5 billion years to get there - that's the present age of our solar system.

With the fastest man-made spacecraft ever - Voyager 1 - going at 63,000 km/h - it would still take 1.3 billion years to get there.

Finally, with the Daedalus - a spacecraft that can theoretically be built with present technology - a fusion-powered spacecraft unsing lasers fired at rare Helium 3 atoms (which you'd have to scoop from Jupiter's atmosphere on the way), creating a fusion explosion 250 times per second, that would get us up to 12% of light speed (2 billion mph) - it would take us 164 years to get there.
Problem: you'd have to look at Gleise 581c real fucking fast on the flyby, because you can't stop - the weight of fuel needed to brake would be too prohibitive.

So?

Sorry, the answer is: FUGGEDDABOUDDIT

What do you think?? Tell us your views here!

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