Imagine, if you would, a potential future for humanity… Imagine massive space-elevators lifting groups of men, women, and children skyward off Earth’s surface. These passengers are then loaded onto shuttles and ferried to the Moon where interstellar starships are docked, waiting to rocket to the stars. These humans are about to begin the greatest journey humanity has ever embarked upon, as they will be the first interstellar colonists to leave our home Solar System in order to begin populating other worlds around alien stars.
There are many things we must tackle first before we can make this type of science-fiction scene a reality. Obviously much faster methods of travel are needed, as well as some sort of incredible material that can serve to anchor the aforementioned space elevators. These are all scientific and engineering questions that humanity will need to overcome in the face of such a journey into the cosmos.
But there is one particular important feature that we can begin to tackle today: where do we point these starships? Towards which system of exoplanets are we to send our brave colonists?
Of all of the amazing things we need to discover or invent to make this scene a reality, discovering which worlds to aim our ships at is something that is actually being worked on today.
It’s an exciting era in astronomy, as astronomers are currently discovering that many of the stars that we view in the night sky have their own planets in orbit around them. Many of them are massive worlds, all orbiting at varying distances from their parent star. It is no surprise that we are discovering a vast majority of these Jupiter-sized worlds first; larger worlds are much easier to detect than the smaller worlds would be. Imagine a bright spotlight pointing at you some 500 yards away (5 football fields). Your job is to detect something the size of a period on this page that is orbiting around it that emits no light of its own. As you can see, the task would be daunting. But nevertheless, our planet hunters have been utilizing methods that enable us to accurately find these tiny specks of gas and rock despite their rather large and luminous companion suns.
However, it is not the method of finding these planets that this article is about; but rather what we do to figure out which of these worlds are worthy of our limited resources and attention. We very well cannot point those starships in random directions and just hope that they happen across an earth-sized planet that has a nitrogen-oxygen rich atmosphere with drinkable water. We need to identify which planets appear to have these mentioned characteristics before we go launching ourselves into the vast universe.
More here.
More here.
