Sextillion is the word with new star discovery

Sextillion is also the name of a Martian prostitute I once paid for the best night of my life.

Well, yeah. I think humanity's salvation will be the colonization of other planets.

But besides moving quickly we also need the technology to survive in ultra-harsh enviroements, otherwise only earth-like planets will be usefull, and those are one in a gazillion.

Until you learned she'd given you asteroids.

I've been meaning to email them and tell them I counted 100 sextillion more than them. Too late now...oh well...

Any idea how we might do that ?

With this political climate all we have is wishful thinking. Maybe in the next 4 or 5 generations will the powers that be might start thinking about a possible off world great exodus and on that day add a touch of Murphy's Law and that's when an unaccounted for 15 mile long asteroid crash into the Atlantic Ocean near South America leading to the next extinction level event.

It is certainly dangerous to hang around on any planet for too long, but I cant see anyway of travelling to other worlds apart from making our own world and enjoying the journey more than the destination.

I think the answer is on physics... but im no physicist...



I think the r with the arrow on top is a vector and the t is time. Thats about it =)

That's just the Schrödinger equation - it's been around since 1926:

Murphy was an optimist.

Sextillion, denotative of cotillion... a soiree of sexers. I think I'll put this on my next party invitation.

It'll be the splash of the Society Pages.

I've had a real close look at some of the possibilities put forward (I lack the imagination to come up with my own) and none of them are viable.

Worm Holes - these exist in the foam of space time as the smallest bubble possible (note I did not say imaginable because it is far smaller than that). To make one the size of a basketball will take the energy of the sun. How do we enter such a thing and live ? It would be like a black hole. How do we control where it goes ? How do we make it longitudinal instead of spherical ? The basic assumption here is that space is curved and it isnt. It is flatter than flat.

Space Warp - this involves squashing space in front of the ship and spreading it out behind it, so space is covered in a shorter distance. This is reliant on understanding gravity and using it as easily as we now use electro-magnetism. I dont know where to begin to tell you the problems with this.

If all problems are solvable, then we still have time against us. If we can travel huge distances through space we will also be messing with time and this will involve all the paradoxes from Einstein's thought experiments. Time and distance are two ways of measuring the same construct...seperation. Nature wants us to keep our troubled little existance to ourselves.

If we just admitted we are stuck here, we might just take better care of the planet we have. But it will be very difficult to live on in a billion years time, if something doesnt happen before then, and it is mathematically certain we will have at least one major asteroid impact before then. So we should have a long term plan to leave. Just dont imagine we will be going very fast, because we wont be.

I imagine, though, that there are some hidden just beneath our nose, but physics just hasnt gotten there yet. Just like the ancients had no idea eletricity existed and could be used, there might be something incredibly usefull hiding that we are about to discover.

Well, I dont think any world-leaders are taking the possibility of colonizing other planets as a serious solution to the world's problems. Actualy, sadly, our world leaders havent gotten to the point of thinking of humanity as a whole yet, they still think only in their countries.

I really think humanity cant colaborate towards any goal as long as there are a zillion countries involved in a tug-o-war for money and power =)

The only thing that seems to offer hope is gravity and the only reason it does is because we have not pinned it down yet.

I still say if it is made of matter it is meant to stay where it is. Otherwise the universe would be a big lump.

I think that is the key. Give all peoples a state based on language, religion, history etc and then start to join them, working out differences as you go. That is what they tried to do in Eurpoe but they moved too fast with too many nations.

That should work.