I had a dream that earth was sending a craft to Gliese 163C, a planet recently found that is believed to be within the “habitable zone” for life– at least life as we know it. The planet is about seven times the mass of Earth and orbits a red dwarf, a small, relatively cool star, but because of the close distance between Gliese and its star it has a surface temperature of about 60C or 140F. That’s pretty hot.

The nice thing about an uninhabited planet being to too hot is that cooling it down is pretty easy. You can do things to the atmosphere to block a percentage of passable heat radiation and cool the entire thing.

Though one thing they can’t tell about the planet right now is what the poles are like. If the average temperature is 140 across the surface, there’s a chance the poles are very much cooler, like our own, which means there could be zones of human-sustaining weather.

Gliese 163C is 49 light years away. For me, that means one thing:  it’s definitely reachable. We’re definitely headed for other stars. If it turned out that the only earth-like planets were thousands of light years away, we probably wouldn’t ever reach them. Not without a Star Trek-like discovery in warp travel.

How fast can we go right now? Is 49 light years really feasible?

No problem. With low-to-zero friction of open space, even with our current technology we can get a space craft going really fast– mostly by using the gravity of our own sun. For instance, the Helios 2 probe, launched in the 1970s, reached a top speed of 157,000MPH. As you might know, the speed of light, which is the physical speed limit of all matter, energy and information in the universe, is 180,000MPH. So, we’ve been able to move our own objects at 87% of the maximum speed of all things.

So if we tried getting to Gliese 163C with our current technology, it’d take approximately 55-60 years.

If we can’t solve the problem of warp travel to make the galaxy smaller for us, we have another possibility: extend our lifespan significantly. Were we to live for 300 years each, then the journey to Gliese 163C would take about the same amount of relative time (relative to total lifespan I mean) as sailing to China used to take.

Based on how things are going right now, I think increasing the human lifespan is more likely than discovering how to “warp”.

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Tonight is Phantom of the Opera, I’m not sure where my expectations about it are.

Would sort of rather be taking off for Gliese 163C.

Have a great weekend.