If humans can't make the trip, what's the point besides maybe satiating curiosity in a few hundred years from now?

I wouldn't bet on and as I understand theory allows a shorter routes. Major caveat is weve never observed them and their existence doesn't guarantee they're traversible.

What's exciting to me is that the existence of such a planet provides fuel for more research into the field.

Interstellar travel is probably not ever going to happen. Even if we have antimatter propulsion (which is still probably not practical even under ideal circumstances), we’re still talking hundreds of years of travel time to get to somewhere like this star.

This also goes for aliens visiting Earth. Interstellar travel is just so impractical that I don’t think anyone has come on safari to Earth.

The political challenge of funding a laser program just for research for centuries seems just as daunting - lacking the capability for some self repairing, self healing devices, the automated or (lobster-ai) probe going to stars is just as far away as when Charles Stross first wrote about it in Accelerando some twenty years ago. Given the collapse of political norms, looking back, the decades long research projects of the US space program appear to be soon relics of the past.

One of the Voyager probes measured the density of the interstellar vacuum at 80,000 protons (and the same number of electrons) per cubic meter. A proton going through a piece of aluminum foil delivers a roughly constant amount of energy regardless of speed; a relativistic proton will pinch through and carry most of its energy with it.

(No punchline; I just think that's cool. I understand that the real problem is the rare dust grain, not the ubiquitous gas.)

Project Hail Mary :)

Yeah, if your username is any indication of your age, you've possibly taken much the same trajectory of pessimism that I have. As a youth, I assumed we'd be hitting multiple Cs or bending space time when I was an adult; As an adult I thought we might get a percentage of C and conquer the solar system; Now I realise Just How Much Effort it would be to accomplish much of any value on our own Moon, never mind Mars.

I still hold on to the idea that very long term we might make strides in our own solar system, but it is a depressingly-longer timescale than I always used to believe.

Unless we have some magic-level shift in our understanding of physics, we're never getting anything beyond Von Neumann probes to other stars, and even then we're talking thousands of years.

If we had a probe in orbit around this planet, do we have a way to stream data across 48 light years with any kind of reliability?

Honestly a near millennia long expedition would be very cool, and doesn’t seem too long on the scale of space stuff.

We cannot design a probe that travels at the speed of light.

> Can we expect that level of commitments from our governments or corporations?

Clearly, right now we cannot. This is one of the worst obstacles to progress in these areas that I see, and I don't see any obvious way to fix it.

The situation we're currently in would've been utterly unfathomable to me 30 years ago. I have lost a great deal of the hope and optimism I held in the past. Interstellar exploration is but one of many fields where we are suffering due to short term thinking.

Well, some years ago helium was a preferred way for suicide. This reflected very bad on the producers of party balloon helium tanks, so they added an amount of oxygen and it was no longer an effective way.

So the question becomes: How much of that atmosphere is helium?

Note: terrestrial chemistry is no different from chemistry that can occur anywhere, given the right molecules and conditions, and even then it’s a matter of degree.

Nitrogen being replaced by helium would actually be fine but for the niggling issue that we need nitrates. There are no heliates (?) to compensate. The name doesn’t even make sense… helium is the sole gas to have an ium end like metals- chemically it’s that meaningless what you call it as an ion…it shines elsewhere though.

For biology, it’s a necessary condition that the environment react with it and it reacts to the environment. Over time the two become deeply intertwined through the process of evolution.

It’s hard to see how that kind of evolution will occur if a lot of the environment is nonreactive.

Survival may be plausible though. There’s been some research showing some bacteria can survive in high helium environments. That’s a far cry from proving something like a bacterium can evolve in a helium environment that’s non-reactive though.

According to AI, an equivalent would be roughly when Google maps shows you 10mi/20km reference scale.

Turning off the labels, aliens would probably assume that the world is naturally full of green stuff that is dealing with some strange grey infestation.

> if you were floating in a spacesuit at the same spot you'd also see that resolution (likely highly distorted) with the naked eye

…would you? The lensing would occur right at the apparent surface of the sun.

They’re both the same basically now. Different weather, same assholes. Much of the FL natives I know had to flee to cheaper pastures.