Habitable planet found? And question about suspended animation

[Diceroller]

http://www.guardian.c...ke-planet-gliese-581g

Very interesting I'm sure but this got me thinking. Just what would we do if we found a habitable planet even one that had alien lifeforms on it? Even if they were humanlike and had sent radiowaves confirming their existance all we'd be able to do is communicate every few years right? We'd be here and they'd be there. That's that. So it's occured to me that as we can't build ships to travel the speed of light maybe suspended animation is the answer, but how feasable is suspended animation? Maybe as illusive as traveling at light speeds or will this be a reality one day? Personally I can't see it though genetic scientists may not agree with me as the way I see it suspended animation in a way is the holy grail as this would mean stopping ageing or to be more precise to freeze ageing. Are we attempting to make suspended animation a reality? What exactly are our plans if we finally get in contact with alien lifeforms and we or they can't travel?

[R1Geezer]

communication will always be impractical even at star trek warp 10, it would take 7 months to say hi to someone and them say hi back even at the closest star. I'm afraid the universe is teaming with life that we simply cannot communicate with it and almost certainly never will be able to. Even if we could build ships that go 10 times c they are too slow to get anywhere in our blink of an eye existances.

[Diceroller]

Okay thanks. What are your thoughts on suspended animation? A pipe dream or a reality one day?

[R1Geezer]

suspended animation, or "stasis"as it is known as and used to good effect in sci fi, Red dwarf etc, would provide a means of supressing the passing of time but hard to see how that could work, currently I don't know of any related experiments in physics even taking place. Even if it where possible the sorts of expanses of time that would need to be covered would be evolutionary. It would be like a dinosaur putting itself in stasis for 5 million years and then trying to communicate with humans for example and in Universal time expanse even that is a blink of an eye.

I think we have to accept that nearly all space and time is inaccesssible to us.

[Diceroller]

I believe that similar was once said about flight as men gazed into the sky and saw flying creatures r1geezer.

[R1Geezer]

yes but I'm not talking about the speed of light as a limit but 10 times it and it's still too slow. Any radio beam at maximum power using our most powerful radio beam has 1 photon per cubic light year at the closest star. It's all Sci fi I'm afraid mate. The universe is inconveivably huge. At keat with flight there was always the example.

[Old_Geezer]

True and it may be a similar situation now; but one tends to think the more we seem to understand the ground rules, the less likely we are to find a way around them. Revolutions in science being less common than evolution.

Still, here's the the tame wormhole eh ? Cheers.

[Diceroller]

Thank you R1geezer Oldgeezer and everyone that has contributed to any of my threads. Your insight views and knowledge are very much appreciated.