Why is NASA seeking another habitable planet?

NASA is absolutely one of the least likely public institutions ever to undertake an effort to deceive or hide facts from the public.

Plus, nerds the world over could easily keep them honest. They have to cooperate with other space agencies and any number of private contractors and individuals to do what all they do.

 

It's the old "space colony" thing,you know?
The first hurdle is Oxygen.
The 2nd one is water.
The 3rd is food.
ain't no rabbits on Mars I bet.

 

Knowledge.

There's nothing we can do with it now, but a long time from now, with future scientific advances, we may be able to colonize other worlds which would be advantageous to the survival of our species. That way if something happens to Earth, the species still has a chance to carry on.

On top of that we may see some scientific breakthroughs result due to the engineering of a space vehicle to carry people there.

 

Well...that would suck. Wouldn't it be easier to live underground?

 

Forget about NASA...there are roughly a billion stars in our galaxy and billions of galaxies just in one tiny patch of black space that we can peer into.....do the math...if this type of travel was possible someone elese would have figured it out by now and already be here. For us this rock we are sitting on is it. All these other planets are or ever will be to humans is interesting. We just made it to pluto..unmanned...how long did that take? Distance to pluto doesnt even show up on the scale when we are talking about the distances involved even to the nearest sun to ours.

 

Humanity has always wondered what's over the next hill. We spread over the world and now we might develop the ability to travel to the stars. It is our curiosity, our sense of wonder that drives us. I would not want to be a member of a race that doesn't have that. The choice is, go forward or back to the caves. The Koch brothers are trying to drive us back to the caves.

 

(*)(*)(*)(*) that, at least in space you get some nice views. Remember the Matrix's underground Earth? I think I'd rather die.

 

Which is why our lawful and peaceful revolution is the only answer. So get in there and make the first needed agreement forming unity, NOW!

WE can control ourselves if we know enough about what WE are capable of, and WE do not know that because IF WE DID, we would have not been covertly enslaved in a cycle of destructive consumerism and war to begin with.

 

What if NASA would ask you why are you so interested in this?

Do you know something NASA doesn't?

 

NASA needs something to get people excited about space again for them to have funding and jobs.

Maybe not right away. Even if fast speeds aren't possible/economical enough, if we could create a true mini-biosphere we could go almost anywhere (at least within our galaxy) within some number of generations. There's hurdles, and it may even require desperation (e.g. threat of extinction) for us to even want to do it, but it's possible.

But yes, as far as science goes, it would represent a huge leap forward with philosophical implications. Having only planet Earth as habitable and with life seems inconsistent with how things should be, and is a little n=1 when it comes to understanding life and the universe.

It all depends on how much warning we get, and when we get that warning. If we had 10 years warning, and mankind pooled its resources in research, manpower, and materials, we could probably send a ship somewhere.

If somebody figured it out, why wouldn't they also be smart enough to avoid being seen by the crazies who live here? Maybe somebody in our galaxy has figured it out and has either avoided us or not discovered us yet, maybe somebody in another galaxy figured it out. Maybe life doesn't usually get as far as it has on Earth for a species like ours to dominate because of disasters. You say space is big, and yet you assume we would have been discovered if anybody had figured it out? That seems self-contradictory, particularly since mankind has barely had radio technology long enough for signals to reach a fraction of a percent of the galaxy. Besides, even if it takes 1000 years to reach a place, and ignoring all of the space-time stuff, all that means is that somebody born on Earth is unlikely to set foot on another solar system (unless suspended animation is possible). That doesn't mean colonies couldn't reach it.

 

Are you some sort of religious nut? I've no idea what you're talking about or what it has to do with extra solar planets.

 

There's this new fangled stuff that involves folding of space and time, and someone somewhere has supposedly been making computers that can use it. There are people working on this stuff. Oh yea. It's called quantum mechanics.
Let's just imagine. What if a company like Space-X were to announce that they have an experimental rig that has a 60% chance of moving a limited number of people from here to the new planet in an instant. What they need is for a voluntary crew to man their craft. There's a 40% chance that you would end up floating around in a kind of purgatory that doesn't belong to any time or place.
The volunteer craft is loaded with seeds, farming implements, blueprints for basic stuff, and supplies to last for the first month or so. I don't think they'd have any problem finding the people to man that thing.

 

We can certainly find people to go, similar to those who willingly crossed the oceans on old sailing ships. curiosity or running from the law, all good reasons. We need to pay our taxes so NASA and similar agencies can make the neccessary discoveries. We go forward or go back to the caves. Why not go forward? It's raining soup out there, all we have to do is build a big enough bowl to collect it

 

Because the search for 'life as we know it' necessarily begins with finding similar habitats to ours?

 

So they spend billions just out of curiosity? I think it's cute how many of you are so trusting of the government.

 

Curiosity. None of your choices are anywhere close to being accurate.

 

Billions on finding planets? No. Let me educate you. First of all, Nasa only has a budget of around $17 million or 0.5% or the Federal Budget, hardly billions. Also, most of the planets being found are not being found by NASA but rather by astronomers from universities and colleges. There are even amateurs finding planets.

Of course the real reason your argument doesn't make sense, is that there is no need for NASA to find new planets, the Greys gave a starmap of all the inhabitable planets in the galaxy to U.S. government in the 70's in exchange for Elvis.

 

Okay, time to let you in on a little secret. Those episodes of Star Trek are actually fiction, not a historical document and Star Wars is just a movie, not reality.

Oh and by the way, there is no Santa Claus either...

 

If I have to take seriously the question, the answer is mundane. As someone else has underlined, we research "new earths" simply because we are curious.

We are not looking for oil in the universe, simply because when our star ships will travel to stars we will use oil no more ...

But, where will early interstellar explorer go? The real hope is to find a planet similar to our beloved Earth within a range of some light years [up to 20 - 30 light years]. This would make it possible to imagine to send a probe [with nuclear propulsion] which could reach that solar system in some centuries and send back information.

Unfortunately the probabilities that such a planet exists in our local region are low [not too low, anyway low].

So, we look more deep in the space, just to feed that hope ...

Humans are explorers, we have inhabited this planet and we've got the instinct of the "New Horizons" [just to mention the probe which has just reached Pluto].

 

Because the elites want THIS planet for themselves and they want to get rid of the rest of us.

 

I believe the opposite. They want to send all the wealthy elites there when they know Earth is about to be devastated.

 

I'm not too confident about that, at least as far as how successful such a venture would end up. We might get something built and launched in that time, but would it have any hope of reaching another solar system with its living cargo intact? It's been discussed before on this forum - in this subforum, in fact. One bit of space debris at too high a velocity and you're gone, because the impact energy would be too great for the hull to withstand.

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I for one am glad for every FRN spent on space exploration. It does go beyond mere curiosity, though, since learning about the universe is a way to learn about ourselves and potential ETs as well.

 

I think it's cute how ignorant you are about NASA.

 

Oh, I didn't know there were NASA insiders here.