• Question: Do you rekon that human beings(homo sapiens) will be able to fly a rocket to a distant planet and make living there. I would really like to know this.

    Asked by submarine3 to Emma, Jen, Joseph, Michael, Mona on 20 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Jen Gupta

      Jen Gupta answered on 16 Jun 2011:

      It depends what you mean by distant. I think that at some point humans will go to Mars and it’s possible that we could set up a base there. The closest that Mars can be to Earth is about 55 million kilometres which sounds pretty distant but in astronomy terms is really really close. The further away planets like Jupiter and Saturn are made of gas so we couldn’t really go there but we could go to one of their moons such as Titan which is one of Saturn’s moons.

      The closest star to us (apart from the Sun) is over 4 lightyears away but it would probably take us so long to get there (see this article http://www.universetoday.com/15403/how-long-would-it-take-to-travel-to-the-nearest-star/) that we would die before we got there. And we don’t even know if there are planets going around that star!

    • Photo: Emma Bennett

      Emma Bennett answered on 20 Jun 2011:

      Maybe, but like Jen says everything is so far away that space travel in a rocket would be quite difficult – what would you do for years and years on a rocket?

      Interestingly NASA were doing some work to try and grow seeds in space so they could feed people on long expeditions to mars and beyond, so you never know space tourism might be closer than we think.

Comments