Say you were Captain of the starship USS Enterprise on a five year mission of exploration, and on the average you flew around Warp 6 or 392 times the speed of light – about a light year per day. In our neck of the woods stars average about 5 light years apart, so on the average, you could visit a star a week – five days travel time, two days there – or around 250 stars total during your expedition. Quite a career in either a television series or Starfleet – but hardly the merest scratch in exploring the Milky Way Galaxy, which is a disk 100,000 light years in diameter and 1,000 light years thick containing 200,000,000,000+ stars. Even the bubble of space around our Sun is loaded with stars. As cataloged by the real-life 1990s Hipparcos mission, there are over 120,000 within 450 light years of Earth – within a year or so of crusing distance for a 24th Century Star Trek Federation vessel. Of those, 17,129 may have habitable “M-Class” planets. That precise number is what astronomers Jill Tarter and Margaret Turnbull came up with in the preparation of their newly-released HabCat, or Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems. (The rest of the stars probably have planets too, of which we’ve already discovered over a hundred – but not habitable ones). For now, we’ll use Tarter and Turnbull’s list to guide future searches for alien radio signals. Maybe someday, their work will be a list of ports of call for a starship – or a fleet of them.
3 thoughts on “Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems Lists SETI Ports Of Call”
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“In our neck of the woods stars average about 5 light years apart, so on the average, you could visit a star a week – five days travel time, two days there – or around 250 stars total during your expedition.” This pace would of course only be possible if, once you got there, the planet(s) you were inspecting were obviously incapable of supporting Earth-life. Otherwise you would have to conduct an exhaustive battery of tests to determine just how viable the planet would be as a future home for humanity. Although, if we develop the technology to speed around space in this way, we may have developed better instruments to scan with.
The 2 days is just to drop off a small science staff on each planet. The star ship then departs for the next port of call. Another star ship comes by a year or so later to pick up the science staff if the research is complete, or to re-supply them if not. I seem to recall one time the USS Enterprise re-stocked a two-member field staff … they were quite low on salt.
that the preliminary scanning would be done by Voyager’s great-grandchildren. If we ever do develop a drive that makes faster-than-light travel possible it is likely that it will be some time before it is considered safe for human use. Much as we do now, we may send electronic scouts ahead of us. There would be advantages to this: an unmanned probe would be able to more economically hang around performing relatively simple analytical tasks and then transmit the results back to Earth; it could also explore a great many star systems in its useful lifetime. However – fans of Larry Niven may remember his ‘known space’ stories, which suggested some drawbacks to this approach. Simple-minded probes were [in these stories] sent out with instructions to find a habitable planet and landed during the only time of the year when the wind was less than two-hundred mph, or else landed on escarpments occupying the only breathable band of a planet’s atmosphere. There is also the matter of the other objective: to find extra-terrestrial life. Would it be better all-round if E.T.’s were first encountered by people or machines?