What type of planets are the ships travelling to? Size, rings, satellites, gravity, atmosphere, hydrosphere, radiation, continents?

• What worries me is that the time involved is hundreds to thousands of years. If the premise is that the ships are used to guide evolution toward being able to adapt on a given planet, you need to know the conditions. Being able to spot an earthlike wolrd from lightyears away and map it isn't the same as knowing what conditions there are. We might be able to do spectral analasys of the atmosphere, and make guesses about temperature given the world's proximity to its sun, but thta's not the same as knowing what the dirt feels like, what the plants do, what's rain like, et. To change a species biology to suit a world you need some very detailed info. Since FTL is out, sending probes to do flybys will take an amazingly long time. If say we find a suitable wolrd around say Deneb, deneb is like 2000 light years away. at the speeds we can muster now any probe would take millenia to get there, teh to transmit the information gatrhered back would take another two thousand years! -- EmptyKube - 19 Jun 2004

• Say we find a suitable world around proxima centuri. A probe from here could take several hundred years to geth there. The signal would only take anothe 4 years back, but who would still care after a few centuries of waiting? To me, if evolving toward a specific world is the goal, the you need detailed info on the world, or we modify the missions as merely experiments in evolution only. -- EmptyKube - 19 Jun 2004

• Logically, they can't ever know the destination conditions unless you change the over all time frame. Its imposible because no one has seen the destination yet. Unless you send out probes first which find a planet, record its environs and send the data back to Earth, you can't possibly know what to expect. Doing that however will add huge chunks of time onto the concept because you have to allow travel time for the probes, return time for the data, time to process, digest, undersatnd and then plan the mission. So on and so forth. My opinion, if you want to start this with current technology you will have to add an element of "fantastic." Some way for the mission planners to know information and locations of planets hundreds of lightyears away. -- EmptyKube - 19 Jun 2004

• (I disagree with the above paragraph. I believe that elements have been detected in extra solar planets. In a hundred years we should be able to analyse extra solar planets quite well.) -DaveK

• As I've said elsewhere, knowing elements and spectral analysis isn't the same as knowing the conditions on the planet. There are too many variables involved to know what the actual fuana and conditions are like. And any images from the planets are subject to time delay. -- EmptyKube - 19 Jun 2004

• I am not so worried by this. For the most part, evolution for both flora and fauna are SLOW. (That's part of the premise of this idea). The life inhabiting Earth today is nearly similar to the life of a million years ago (with notable exceptions--us, and these exceptions suggest a story or two). Evolution, extinction, clmimate change, plate tectonics, all take hundreds of millions of years to go anywhere significant. If we use the idea of constant probes from the beginning, always sending back info, them the ship's crew will know what overarching conditions to expect. They'll know if the planet is like Earth and straddles the water freezing point in the northern hemisphere (ice ages for example). Even using Ice Ages as an example, it only affects a small band of the planet. Sure, the planet life of the Cretacious(120-65 million years ago MYA) is different then today, but it's taken 60 million years to change. A million year flight is still nothing in the grand scheme of planetary and biological change so I don't see time delayed info as a problem. We Human's are just so stuck in our NOW NOW NOW timeframe (new weather forecasts every five minutes, 24 hour news networks, cell phones, T-1 connections, etc. These things make thinking geologically difficult. -- CmAmidon - 24 Jun 2004

• Certainly not Earthlike, if evolution is required. Or, it could be close, but not exact. We need to pick a destination and go from there. I offered a candidate star a while ago. 70 Virginis, which is a G type star with gas giants in close around the star. Perhaps one of the gas giants has a moon which could hold life? I'm thinking Titan or Europa but much more appealing. Not exactly grass and trees, but something that makes people interested. -- EmptyKube - 31 Jul 2004 15:43:26

• We don't know what is around 70 Virginis so we can make it whatever we want. What is the gravity, atmosphere, temperature, and radiation? Is there indiginous life? That one can wait until they get there. I can't imagine any undirected evolution being able to start with a human and arrive at a being that can live on a 3G, cyanide atmosphere, -50C, with a UV index of 1000. We need to make something up. -- DaveK - 01 Aug 2004 03:43:09

• If our intrepid colonists believe they can terraform (in time) anything to their needs, then directed genetic engineering might not be necessary. Of course, as long-term terraforming occurs, some human evolution should probably occur at the same time. -- AnnelieseFox - 01 Aug 2004 18:12:56