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
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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