Okay so the new planets are roughly 39 light years away. How far is this? Well, its basically stating it would take 39 years to reach the planets traveling at the speed of light. That’s 300,000 km per second. I wonder when they would have to start pumping the breaks so they don’t over shoot by a few light years when you’re traveling that fast?

Still a long way away if you think about it. A person would have to travel pretty much their whole life just to enjoy retirement on a new world. Science will need to push forward on the discovery of the warp drive engine. Ever since people have broken the sound barrier they have thought about the possibility of now breaking the speed of light. But as you break the sound barrier there is a sonic boom that could be heard for miles. I wonder if it would be a tremendous flash of light as we see in science fiction shows today? Is it even possible? So many questions.

So we have the ION engine today. What’s that? How fast is it? The ion engine has a small amount of thrust, so it takes a long time to get up to speed. Lets imagine we just launched two lucky kids into space to travel to the new planet(s). When the ion propulsion system begins operation, the spacecraft will be in LEO (low Earth orbit) and moving at a slow stately pace of about 27,354 kph. The ion engine will then take 15 months and increase the speed of the craft by 12,872 kilometers per hour. This will top the spacecraft out at around 40,226 Kilometers per hour. A lot slower than the 300,000 Kilometers per second that we would need to get there in one lifetime.

So if you’re in the future right now, reading this to see what us simpleton humans thought of these new found planets and what needs to be done to get there, make sure you have weapons that work in space and not just a really fast engine. Work on shields, evasive maneuvering and escape plans. And watch out for those off world viruses, who knows what other micro organisms can do to humans.

By The Byte