We're Going To Need A Really Big Camper And A Lot Of Gas

Courtesy of our beloved InstaPundit, we have this interesting speculation about the possibility of lots of life-sustaining worlds:

About 40 percent of red dwarf stars may have Earth-sized planets orbiting them that have the right conditions for life.

Red dwarfs – which are smaller and cooler than our sun – are extremely common, making up 80 percent of stars in the galaxy. Their ubiquity suggests that there are tens of billions of possible places to look for life beyond Earth, with at least 100 such planets located nearby.

The new estimate comes from a team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s HARPS planet-hunting telescope to look at a sample of 102 nearby red dwarfs over a six-year period. The telescope checked for a characteristic wobble from the star, indicating that at least one planet was tugging on it while orbiting around.

The search found nine planets with between one and 10 Earth masses, including two in the habitable zone, possibly giving them the right temperature to have liquid water. Because red dwarfs don’t produce as much heat as our sun, their habitable zones occur much closer to the star.

...to which Professor Reynolds replies:

We need interstellar travel. Faster, please!

We do? Well, let's agree at the least that it would provide us with some options. But until a superluminal reactionless drive should make its appearance, I'm afraid it's not in the cards.

Two arguments for interstellar travel are more common than all the others: adventure and racial survival. Let's leave our taste for adventure off the table for the moment. The usual "survival" argument is to secure the future of Mankind against the possibility of a world-ending calamity here on Earth. The establishment of a human presence on a world in some other solar system would seem to improve the odds that Man will continue regardless of any "local" events. At any rate, it's more difficult to wipe out a species distributed over several solar systems than one that's concentrated on one world.

But sublight vehicles bound by Newton's Third Law can't garner the interest, or fire the enthusiasm, of people who have lives they'd have to live out in transit between the stars. Try to imagine how you'd go about recruiting enough volunteers to man such a mission -- to say nothing of the difficulties of financing it. Which is why, when I imagined the Hegira of the Spooner Federation, I based it on a no-alternatives scenario: flee the Solar System or die at once!

What's that you say? What about "suspended animation?" Well, you bring me a man whose "animation" has been "suspended" for a good long while -- say seventy years or so -- and has been successfully "reanimated," and then we'll talk.