Everybody knows space is awesome. That’s why aliens and the sun live there. The one draw back is that space is huge. Annoyingly, impractically huge. The nearest planet is 24 million miles away. It even takes eight minutes to reach the earth from the sun. The sun could have just blown up, and you wouldn’t know it until you’ve finished reading this post and three others. And the rest of space is just… space. It takes a long time to get to the good stuff.
Almost too long.
That’s why NASA (along with the pocket-protector warriors of DARPA) is spending some real time and money designing plans for space colonists to take one-way trip to spread the human species to far-flung space locales. The so-called “Hundred-Year Starship” program is building the foundation for an interplanetary version of the Mayflower. Space colonists would head off into the cosmos, with no real anticipation of returning to the Earth.
The program isn’t some theoretical message board either. NASA is kicking in $100,000 for the project, while DARPA is contributing an additional million. And that’s recession money.
There are no real details of what the project specifically hopes to accomplish. But the fact of the matter is our government is putting some real capital behind the idea of space colonization.
I’m just going to hope they don’t know something that we don’t about the future habitability of this planet.
via PopScience
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