Somewhere out there in the galaxy is another planet suitable for human habitation. And two sets of scientists are racing to see if that planet might be found in the nearby Alpha Centauri system.
Writing for The Washington Post, reporter Joel Achenbach describes the efforts of the two groups — one American, one European — to be the first to confirm the existence, long suspected, of a planet in that system.
The American team is making 100,000 observations of the Centauri system and analyzing them to try and find a planet. Their European counterparts apparently have more sophisticated equipment, the article states. Both have their electronic eyes focused on our nearest stellar neighbor, a binary star system that is practically next door to our sun.
Of course, astronomically speaking, the distance to something “right next door” is still, well, astronomical. In the case of Alpha Centauri, more than four years of travel at the speed of light, if that ever proves possible. Or, as Achenbach puts it poignantly in his article: “The venerable robotic probe Voyager I, which has traveled farther from Earth than any manmade spacecraft, is racing away at nearly 11 miles per second and has already traveled 10 billion miles. It would need on the order of 80,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri were it traveling in that direction.”
That, naturally, makes any manned mission (much less colonization) little more than water cooler talk for a long while yet. However, the scientific community is looking at new options for exploratory spacecraft. Among those is the idea to go small. As Achenbach relates in his article, the first vessels to cruise the reaches of interstellar space might be less Starship Enterprise than “Cellphone Enterprise: a small, speedy spacecraft, crammed with nanotechnology and capable of beaming snapshots back home.”
And from the Trivial Coincidences Dept., in the mid-1990s science fiction show Babylon 5, when humans took to the stars the first society they encountered was the Centauri Republic. But those folks didn’t live in the Alpha Centauri system, it turns out; the name was just a “translation error,” it seems.