Which is funny because that would have been even more inaccurate. "Millions of light years" is off by a factor of 15,000 or more. "Millions of miles" is off by a factor of 400,000,000 or more (2 million miles is 0.00000034 light years).
I don’t get it. We found lots of planets, including super earths in goldilock zone. What makes this planet unique to deserve a separate article? The article does not explain that.
Why? Give them a new planet so can live peacefully while everybody else has to deal with what they did to this planet? Nah bro send them to Mercury and enjoy the burning entry.
Ugh so fucking long unfortunately. I kind of doubt squishy biological humans will ever make it to another star system, we are so much closer to immortal machine minds that can make the trip much more conveniently than we are to interstellar travel.
I'm in the middle of reading A City of Mars, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, who goes over their take on the feasibility of long term habitation off world. Short answer is, it's going to be a long time. There are a lot of questions, physically, biologically, legally, logistically, unanswered. At best, it's going to be like building a cathedral. It's a project for multiple generations.
I also like watching Issac Arthur's videos on YT, and fantasize about the future. He gives a more positive spin on stuff like that.
Yeah thinking about the giant challenges of building a settlement on Mars really puts in perspective the much much much harder problem of sending people to another star system.
I managed to grab a TESS poster at the last Goddard Space Flight Center open house. It's hanging on the wall behind me, and it's awesome to read some news about it because I got to meet some of the folks on the team.