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It's not quite that bad. There are about 100 known stars within 20 light years; with the nearest only about 5 away. https://www.stellarcatalog.com/stars.php?of
by gizmo686 1y ago
It's not quite that bad. There are about 100 known stars within 20 light years; with the nearest only about 5 away.
https://www.stellarcatalog.com/stars.php?offset=100 https://www.stellarcatalog.com/stars.php?offset=100
Actually getting a spacecraft to them in a reasonable amount of time is still well beyond us. But if we could get a probe up to relativistic speads, that would put missions to nearby stars on a similar timescale to existing space missions.
Our ability to actually get
- chickenzzzzu 1y agoI agree and appreciate that, but I would venture a guess that most of the nearest ones to us likely don't have "earth-like" planets, even accounting for the bias in our viewing capabilities you described. The moons, however! Maybe that bumps the chance of having a habitable celestial body to 0.00001% per solar system? That's my current rough guess. It would be remarkable if "actually life is very easy to form in the universe, it turns out Earth was just first".