If we ever found another planet that we could live on.. what would the process look like for starting a new world?
In: Planetary Science
1. Get there
2. Build a habitable environment
Unfortunately Step 1 is impossible at the moment, and will *probably* always be impossible.
Well the first step would be to get there
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
Even if we found a planet in our nearest star, on our current technology it would take us 50,000+ years to get to, give or take, so what’s an extra 10 or 20 thousand years at that point.
So that’s a problem. How do we get us, or anything we build that far and that long away?
Nothing. This is still in the realm of science fiction. We do not have the technology or sufficient understanding to send human beings to another planet indefinitely. Sure, we can whip up a 10,000 foot view outline of what that might look like which is basically what others have said: get there and establish a long-term presence. But beyond that is currently science fiction and speculation, which is not what this sub is for.
The short answer is “we don’t know”.
Put it this way, we haven’t sent a human to Mars nor have we set up a colony on the Moon. Even though neither have atmospheres, they are ridiculously close to Earth relative to any other planet around any other star.
Distances in space are huge and human biology is really not designed to operate well outside the earth. Moving anything beyond a few kilograms from here to the nearest star either takes thousands of years or requires so much energy that we don’t even have the technology that could manage it.
Any possible vessel with a sufficiently high enough thrust to carry more than a few people would pretty much exhaust our resources. It would need to be huge (to carry or grow enough food, water etc) heavily shielded (because we don’t handle radiation), must be capable of self repair (meaning lots of raw materials and spare parts) and carry the fuel needed to bring it up to speed and then back down to speed. We don’t have proven solutions for any of these.
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