Star-gazing continues....

This is interesting, and it's keeping the Astronomers out of the unemployment office, but in depressingly practical terms, it's of little use to the vast majority of us Earthlings, who will live and die right here on Earth, and never, ever set foot on any other planet - and certainly not one that is 500 light-years distant.

It's inspiring to dream of contacting intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but the sad fact is that because of prohibitive distances and costs and technological requirements it is extremely unlikely that any of us would ever live long enough to send and receive messages to and from planets orbiting distant star systems. Space is called 'space' because that's mostly what it is - vast spaces between relatively small objects of solid or semi-solid bodies and clouds of gases. Most of the stuff we see out there is so far away that it would take many, many lifetimes to reach even the moderately-distant ones, and there will likely never ever be a time when mankind will whiz around in space like Captain Janeway and her intrepid crew of Star Trekkers, because, as mentioned, those distances are too great, and the technology required would very likely exceed available resources and budgets.

There's talk lately of putting a few people on Mars. We already know that it costs about a million dollars a pound to move something from here to there, so it's highly unlikely that there will ever be practical commerce between here and there. And we already know from our robotic rovers there that the place is essentially a vast wasteland without breathable atmosphere or other obvious essentials for life support. It will never be practical to try to colonize the place, and it certainly could never adequately substitute for Earth as a place to live. It's too near the outer boundary of the habitable zone around our sun. In fact, it is on the bitter edges of that, and wishing will not make it otherwise. The only planet most of us will ever be able to explore is the one we're standing on right now.