Kepler telescope glimpses population of free-floating planets
The prospect and opportunity of rogue planets is fascinating to me.<p>So I'm firmly in the camp that the speed of light is a hard limit in the Universe. Any talk of wormholes, FTL and space folding just seems like wishful thinking and the product of not understanding the domain of functions (eg putting negative values into mass or energy).<p>Additionally there's macro evidence to this speed limit because if it wasn't a limit it would make the likelihood of encountering spacefaring civilizations that much more likely.<p>So given this, it seems like traveling to other stars requires some form of generational ship. And that seems like a problem because the energy required is massive and that's even before you get into issues of having reaction mass. There are workarounds for this (eg space laser propulsion) but the problems seem... significant.<p>So, rogue planets. I wonder if the first vessel for interstellar travel will in fact be some largish rogue body that visits the Solar System. Even something 100km wide will contain a wealth of raw materials that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to accelerate to interstellar speeds.<p>And sure it might take 10,000 years or more for such a body to travel to a nearby star but there's really not a lot of difference between several centuries and 10,000 years.<p>What's more, such travelers could likely seed other rogue bodies they encounter along the way.<p>Could this be the initial vector of interstellar colonization?<p>As an aside, George RR Martin 40+ years ago wrote a book called Dying of the Light. I really enjoyed it just for the concept. In this book there are so-called Festival worlds. These are worlds that wander between systems. When they approach stars they get sufficiently warm and thaw out and may have oceans and atmospheres in that time. People would build cities in that time knowing it was all temporary.