I tell you what, pal. If this frustrates you so, and you feel those guys at NASA are just a bunch of incompetent, do nothings -- why not go to school, study Physics/Cosmology/Astrodynamics and work for NASA to change what frustrates you? We might be THAT much closer to not only reaching your goal of increased space travel speed, and advancing our knowledge of space travel (if even minutely).

Or you could remain behind the comfort zone of your computer, free to gripe about NASA and calling them 'dumbasses' without actually doing anything about it, and having none of your problem solved.

Our fossil fuel subsidy will be used to enrich a corrupt minority of society that can only see a few decades into the future and are counting on the rapture, not on some star-trek utopia.


Andrew

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Ethanol is a fabulous solution to our energy dilemma because it will provide more fuel for us to drive around and look for food.

-- Unknown

We simply don't have the advancements due to not enough interest in the field, hence lack of funding on many fronts (not just Democrats). Astronomy and Astrophysics has taken a backseat to money making and get rich plans in society. Discovery is no longer a priority today.

I was going to post this exciting news.

FINALLY. I say, FINALLY: we may see some life out there.

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That is why I've been a advocate to other means.
Nuclear Fusion is the future IMO....We shouldn't be wasting time and money on areas that we know hold no promise or can't deliver what is expected.

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Anyone who thinks freedom comes cheap, please put the blindfold on and stand against the wall.

Many times I believe Americans will have to take back the country and start a new government.

Us finding it.

Consider: If you reduce in scale the sun by one billionth in size.
It would be about 6 ft. in diameter....and the nearest star - about 25,000 miles away..which so happens to be about the circumference of earth at the equator.

So at that scale a spaceship would only be visible in a powerful microscope, moving at a speed barely visible to the eye even under high magnification...to get to the nearest star it would have to circle the globe.

Getting even an unmanned ship to the nearest star moving at fantastic speeds would still take 100,000's of years to get there - which at cosmic scale is about the distance of the keys on your keyboard...space - is huge....life is extremely rare...it is highly improbable - I dare say mathematically impossible that we will find meaningful life in the cosmos.
The only way there is any chance is if the theory that time and distance can be "folded" and fantastic distances can be achieved by figuring out how to travel between the folds...which is not in the physical world as we know it.

I've always found it interesting that people are fixated on determining if a planet can support life, based on life as we know it. Why do we assume that all life forms in the universe must breath oxygen and rely on water for survival? There are other possibilities after all.

Hold your horses, its still just a very BIG maybe so far. We need a lot more information about this planet than what we have, we don't even know what its atmosphere is like. All it really means is that we've found the first possibly habitable planet in history that isn't earth, and thats a very good step. Though I have to admit, these are better odds than we've ever had before.

not entirely true.
Our solar system is made up of the same materials and compounds as found all over the solar system, with the same static setup...we are in fact something that is repeated billions of times - not unique.
Therefore it is logical that the same rules apply there(s) as here.

Question, whats so wrong with earth that you want to get the hell off? O.o Earth is pretty nice, people aren't always the greatest but they aren't always the worst either.

We can trasnport the GOP there and then they can report back to us about the environment to see if we should go.

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Life only becomes meaningful at its extremes

-- S

And Blame George Bush for not advancing medicene on vetoing the stem cell research bill.I wanna be cured of diabetes and i wanna hear again.

I agree that life may be sufficiently rare and the universe so massively huge that the raw chances of us stumbling upon it are very low.

However, I don't understand how you can say for certain that life is rare? It might not be rare. We don't really have a large enough sample in which to judges that conclusively.

Andrew

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Ethanol is a fabulous solution to our energy dilemma because it will provide more fuel for us to drive around and look for food.

-- Unknown

Not until probes reach that planet, and that should take a while, with current technology.

But don't be fooled to think it would take that long..
200 years ago SteamEngine was awesome and terrible engine of machine-power, humans were shooting eachothers with muskets and medicine was somewhat unreliable.
100 years ago technological innovations were just beginning to spark new inventions, humans were shooting eachothers with brand new bolt-action rifles and medicine had found exiting little buggers floating around.
40 years ago space had been reached, computers were past infancy and medicine could operate inside human bodies.

We move at incredible pace. Wonder how long it will take to make better ion engines to have more able explorers.

That is why science is investigating the possibility of hypersleep, where number of people are frozen untill the destination, but again, we need more advanced technology to accomplish that..poor mice.

You must understand that humans could travel that way, living in mobile city until reached wanted destination. Food production and maintenace of large number of humans is possible, but exeptionally costly. And meantality would change over only one generation.
And spaceborn humans would have different speech, and understanding. (cloud, rain, sky, mud, dirt, wild animal, river, ocean... all obsolete words without any meanings to them)

I would like the idea of new colonization, at the very best it would help this planet, as number of humans would reduce. But granted, human nature involved, many things would go wrong.

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En uneksi. I do not dream.

America should send George W. Bush (and Dick Cheney, too) to bring democracy to this new planet.