Proxima Centauri landing not likely (Jan. 25)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
If you, as I, are a regular reader of National Geographic, you will notice in the latest issue beautiful photos taken from the Hubble Telescope’s new camera. The images are stunning, showing objects hundreds, thousands and even millions of light years away from our valley.
Astronomers are still trying to find the Holy Grail of their scientific discipline: A planet like ours, which could play host to people like we are. They have not found one yet. And if they did, one wonders what good it would do, except to drive the astronomers wild with joy and curiosity.
But that joy would be short-lived, and the curiosity unable to be satisfied. Here are some of the distances that work against their discovery of another planet like earth. Proxima Centauri, the star (besides our own sun) closest to us, is 4.22 light years away. No planets have been discovered orbiting that star.
If there were, however, reaching them would be daunting. If you could get your space ship to roar along at 100,000 miles an hour, it would take you 247.5 million hours, or 8,760 years to reach Proxima Centauri’s neighborhood. The fastest spaceship on record, so far, reached about 40,000 miles an hour once it broke free of the gravitational pull of our solar system. Plodding along like that, it would take some 18,000 years to reach Proxima.
Let’s say we found a planet around Proxima Centauri, thought it might be earth-like, and launched a ship toward it. Even if it were going 1 million miles an hour, in the 876 years it would take the ship to reach the planet, it would be an out-of-date piece of junk.
All of this is to say that even though the photos of space are breathtaking, you won’t be buying real estate there any time soon.
