In A Search Of A New World
Hello, everyone! This is my first post on Medium. But I am not necessarily new to writing. I am quite active on Quora and casually write on my personal blog as well.
Back in 2016 when I first started blogging, I wrote a couple of fictional stories about life on Mars [3],[4] following Elon Musk and his SpaceX’s plan to colonize Mars.
Fast forward to 2020, with a global pandemic like COVID-19 and weird apocalyptic weather patterns like the recent orange sky on the west coast, we must say, we should think about expediting the process of colonizing other planets sooner than later.
Yes, we have a higher chance of dying trying to be the first generation settlers on Mars. But we have a pretty decent chance of dying because of germs, viruses, or natural disasters on earth as well. A while ago I predicted that due to the rapid climate change, the earth might become mostly uninhabitable within the next 200–500 years. Another global war can reduce that life-span within only 200 years.
Elon Musk, a while ago, also talked about some weird “law of physics” defying Mars terraforming ideas too [5]!
In any case, my guess is that it would take a couple of hundred years to actually establish a decent Mars and moon settlement if we rapid up the process of multi-planetary colonization starting in recent years. And terraforming or changing the climate on the Moon or Mars cannot happen any time soon, even if they are possible.
But why there is a need to terraform or inhibit an uninhabitable nearby planet when there are perhaps earth-like planets all around the universe?
The main problem is reaching that level of distance with our current fuel-based technologies.
The nearest exoplanet Proxima Centauri b is perhaps 4.2 light-years away which might have an atmosphere close to earth [1].
What if we could actually move to an Earth-like planet where we can do a fresh start without the need to change the atmosphere?
But it could take us 6300 years to reach Proxima Centauri b with our current technologies [2]. Many generations, even hypothetically with ample fuel, food, and other supplies will die on that journey. And if some of us do reach there after 6300 years, we might discover that the Proxima Centauri b is an uninhabitable planet by now. And I am not even talking about the problem of time relativity which is a separate complex topic (I can discuss at a later time).
So we must build new types of space vehicles that can reach a great deal of distance defying the problem of time and space relativity, which can allow us to conquer the next Earth-like planet within our lifetime.
This is perhaps a quest, we should collectively start on working as human civilization, while we are at colonizing Moon and Mars.
…………………………………………………………..
Reference [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6] respectively: