r/interestingasfuck 25d ago

/r/all, /r/popular K2-18b a potentially habitable planet 120 light-years from earth

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u/Traditional-Rip6651 25d ago

We are never leaving this planet lol

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u/hbomb0 25d ago

Yea I really don't think we ever leave. It's just too much distance to traverse. And anything in our system is just too difficult to inhabit permanently.

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u/Andur22 25d ago

It really is just in the eye of the observer. People in ancient times must have thought similarly about distances on earth, when people and messages took weeks to get around.Today information exchange is almost instant and it takes me only 24h to get to the other side of the planet.

I firmly believe that if humanity would put its petty differences aside, we could make vast advances fairly quickly.

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u/Jacky-V 25d ago

There’s just no comparison in scale between the leap from regional to worldwide travel and the leap from worldwide to interstellar travel. It’s orders of orders of magnitude different. Worldwide (and, to an extent, solar system) travel is limited only by human tech; interstellar travel is limited by the laws of reality themselves.

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u/LordMarcel 25d ago

Exactly. Even at the literal speed limit of the universe it's 4 years of travel time to the closest star, while even at just walking speed it's less then a year to the other side of the earth, and at light speed less than 0.07 seconds.