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Also honestly I think it's extremely fortunate that we have Proxima Centauri only 4 light years away as our nearest star. It's a red dwarf, and will continue to
by dheera 6y ago
Also honestly I think it's extremely fortunate that we have Proxima Centauri only 4 light years away as our nearest star. It's a red dwarf, and will continue to shine for at least another 4 trillion years, a thousand times longer than the sun will shine. Of course, granted it's habitability zone and other things are different, but that does not preclude us redefining habitability by inventing another life form to be our successor.
Proxima Centauri will outlive the vast majority of stars in the galaxy.
- Robotbeat 6y agoIt’s worth pointing out that an a long time scale of tens to hundreds of thousands (not to mention millions) of years, the stars move around quite a bit. The Alpha Centauri system will be just 3 light years away in 30,000 years. In 1.4 million years, Gliese 710 will pass within 0.2 light years of Earth. That’s close enough to be reached in a human healthspan with some beefed up (but still fairly sane) nuclear-electric propulsion that we could probably start building today if we had a reason to go out to 0.2 light years. But other interstellar propulsion systems with higher performance are feasible, such as pellet stream beamed propulsion combined with a magsail. Really good fusion might work, too. Laser propulsion is feasible especially for probes but isn’t terribly efficient (pellet stream uses like a hundredth the energy for the same payload). Antimatter would be nice, but I’m not convinced feasible storage could be developed to beat the usable energy storage density of fission or fusion... or rather we’re probably much more than 100 years away from sufficiently efficient antimatter storage.