Fund the Manned Mission to Alpha Centauri. It's Our Destiny.

It's our Destiny... To Colonize Space. We could afford Epic Voyages to the Stars if we simply stopped funding stupid stuff... We ought to be colonizing space, contacting ET and become part of the galaxy wide community... Instead we spend our money arresting people for marijuana... a totally worthless expanse. We fund wars over oil... and who's "invisible friend" is better... Absurd. 

Support the Manned Mission to Alpha Centauri

Like a Noah's Ark for Colonizing Space.

It should have the ability to grow its own food and take many seeds to plant at the colony we build for permanent settlement.

Remember to take:
Humans (Women, Men and Children)
Animals... Elephants, Giraffes, Cats and Dogs... Everything except Rats,  Mosquitos and Cockroaches... include Spiders and Ants... could be useful...
Plants... Corn, Trees, Wheat and Marijuana. Bring enough so that the trees can produce oxygen for breathing.
Fish... There be Whales, Captain... Dolphins, Tuna, Trout...
and those brightly colored Tropical Fish... I just like them.
Birds... after all, where would we get bird poop if we forgot to bring birds?

Spare Parts and the ability to build spare parts we forgot to bring...
Satellite Dish communication to the Internet.

The spaceship we build to colonize the stars has to be complete. If we forget to bring coffee plants or pizza... sorry... no delivery service available.

Hospital facilities. Especially important to hire pediatricians to deliver children and help them survive.

Other essential plants. Opium Poppies for chronic pain. Magic Mushrooms for mental health...

The design of the spaceship should include artificial gravity.  Easy to implement as the ship will be accelerating for half the voyage and decelerating for the other half. Assuming that it may take a very long time to get to Alpha Centauri, it would be very healthful for the astronauts to be able to visit a planet if one is found and not have their bones destroyed by lack of gravity. This is especially important for people born in space.

There ought to be research laboratories for creating new life forms. DNA. Genetic Engineering. What if, when we get there a new type of life form is needed to survive the bizarre climate of the new world? Something that breathes methane for example...  Well, unless we are able to change the climate of the new world...
It would be handy to change the lifeforms we bring to be compatible with what we find there. This would be a fine place to experiment with designing better humans... The basic flaw with Genetically Modified Humans is... What if they don't like us? A trend of life is to reproduce your own DNA without concern for all other DNA... What if they decided that there were too many old style humans and reduced the population from 7 billion to 100,000 people. That would help with problems caused by pollution and consumption. If we did our GM far away from here, there would be less opportunity for trouble.

and bring many single celled organisms... if all else fails, life can evolve from that.

Since the journey to Alpha Centauri will take a very long time, keeping the voyagers busy and sane is essential. They could do astronomy as the visibility far away from the sun would be better due to a dark sky. They could also actively try to contact aliens. If there was a ring of bright LED lights all around the spaceship, they could blink on and off in non-random patterns... For Example: a Fibonacci sequence or simply counting up... Any alien that observed such lights might conclude that they were odd and go investigate. The LEDs could broadcast in Visible light, infra-red and ultra-violet so they would be more visible to aliens that have eyes different than ours.

Also: astronauts could be kept busy writing songs, art and books and then beaming the results back to Earth. This will become more difficult as time goes on. The Star Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away... That's a slow internet connection...

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What if we visit Kepler-186f, the newly discovered earth-like planet?
Too far away for easy access. 490 light years...
Should we contact any life forms that already live there before bringing in our own DNA? Certainly we don't want to kill them all off by introducing a human style disease... We made that mistake when Europeans colonized America.

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Comments? email me at gregvan[at]yahoo[dot]com
or just comment on this blog post...
We Have the Technology...
We Just Need the Funding...