100 people on a planet outside the solar system

Let’s imagine to must leave our planet, let’s imagine to must recruit a minimun crew to transfer our race outside the solar system. Those almost science-fiction scenarios remember us many movies or tv series.

Lost in Space, the American scientific tv series of the years ’60 created and produced by Irwin Allen, is the perfect example of it. This series really looks like a late study of the University of Strasburgo in France.

The series arrived in Netflix the 13th of April of the 2018. The mission in the serie is the one to recruit a family for a five years and a half trip towards a planet in orbit around the closest star, Alpha Centauri, that the spacial probes found out it has the ideal conditions for the human life.

Proxima Centauri B: our future planet

In the August of the 2016 is been discovered the closest planet to the Earth outside the solar system. This planet is Proxima Centauri B, we think it is rocky, with a minimum mass of 1.27 (+ 0.19 / -0.17) terrestrial masses, which makes it our potential future planet. The exoplanet that we are talking about is lightly bigger than the Earth and it rotates for a period of 11,2 days.

Like the Earth, even the planet Proxima Centauri B has a Sun: it orbits stably at low eccentric around a red dwarf of kind M which is called Proxima Centauri. Its star has a lightness of around 0,15% the Sun’s one and it is rich of metals, which usually isn’t in the small mass stars like it.

Both of them, Proxima Centauri and Proxima Centauri B, belong to the star system Alfa Centauri. Proxima Centauri is the smallest and less bright start of Alfa Centauri but even the closest one to our Solar System.

Proxima Centauri B is inside the area where there potentially are the right life conditions and it becomes an interesting target for an exploratory mission. The distance towards Proxima Centauri is estimated at about 4 × 1013 km.

With the maximum speed now achievable, an interstellar trip of this kind will take about 6300 years. The progress in the engineering’s field could reduce the needed time to reach the planet.

Like in a movie

The purpose of the scientists of the University of Strasburgo in France is the one to study and quantify the minimun human crew needed for a spacial trip which has the purpose to reach Proxima Centauri B by human colonists genetically healthy.

The survival of a multi-generation crew is of major importance when we talk about spacial trips not repeatable. Determinate a real and defined quantity of population is a process really complicated.

Scientifically we need to consider many aspects highly casual like the infertility, the probability of sudden deaths, accident rate and casual events. The study consideres all the probable aspects and all of them percentages but with so theoretical and variable values the work wasn’t surely easy.

Many exoplanets have been found and many more will be found, but searching for the closest potential Earth-analogue and suceeding has been the experience of a lifetime for all of us. The search for life one Proxima B comes next.

Guillem Anglada Escudé

100 people are enough to colonize an exoplanet

The researchers of the University of Strasburgo published the matematic process that shows how 98 people are able to colonize an exoplanet. 100 people around so, are needed to guarantee the 100% success for a trip in the space of 6300 years toward the closest exoplanet to the Earth until now known.

The studies say that, if Proxima Centauri B was really habitable and the future spacial vehicles will reach the speed of 0,067% of the light speed, 98 people will be enough to colonize an exoplanet.

This post is also available in: Italiano