Quote:
Originally Posted by speede5
Does it really matter though? Even if we found a planet out there like Earth, what is the point? The human race probably won't survive long enough to have the technology to travel to it, communicate with it, or even get a close look at it. Given the rate we are filling the earth with people, our consuption of natural resources, we are headed for extinction pretty quickly, in the grand scheme of things. Unless by some miracle we figure out how to warp travel in the next hundred years or so, we're going to die staring at the sky. Heck I'd be surprized if we even see the day man lands on Mars, much less a planet in another solar system. Maybe I'm just missing the point.
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I'm not so pessimistic. We can build materially closed-systems that just recycle matter and only need an energy source to sustain themselves perpertually. If we can power it with light from stars, then we don't need the sun. Once we can build space stations that don't need Earth or the sun, then we have all the time in the universe to get to our destination. We don't even need a destination.