this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Futurology
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Tbh, for our generation i don’t think it even matters, since we ain’t getting there anyway. These exoplanets are 10’s if not 100’s of lightyears away and theres no guarantee that any of them are even habitable.
Even for getting to proxima centuari, 4.2 lightyears away and the nearest star to earth, the most optimistic thing I've heard is “we could maybe get the travel time down to 80 years if (and big if) we travel at 10% lightspeed”.
Now imagine how we’re going to get to an exoplanet even 30 lightyears away.
The reality is our generation was simply born too early for many of the things talked about in futurist circles.
To me, its not so much about getting there now. Its that JWST (and the space telescopes soon to follow) should be able to analyze their atmosphere's for life. If we can survey 1,000's of exoplanets, we should finally know how common simple single cell life is in the universe.