what does it take to inhabit a planet

Ive been doing a lot of thinking and ive realised the only hope for continued survival of the human race is to spread us out over as big as an area as possible.
Not like hundreds of miles, but millions.
So i want to know excactly what it takes to make a habitable planet.

what i know we need:
oxygen[and so forests]
water[needs to be in place]

but what else.

And why arnt we more foucusedon this as a race

the planet must be in the habitable zone around its star, for one, but we are having a hard time finding alot of these, and when we do, they tend to be gaseous and not terrestrial.

The one flaw with your idea, and it is a good idea, Is that with our current technologies, it would take 9 MONTHS just to get to mars, and it doesnt have the same greenhouse/UV/Magnetosphere which is pretty much required for human anatomy.

Err.....it takes people.

Seriously, what's the point in spreading to other worlds just to do the same again?

I think this way of thinking just proves one thing... The human race is a virus, nothing more.

[edit on 29/4/2009 by nerbot]

Until we become a type 2 civilization, it won't happen, we are currently a type 0 Civilization.

Utilization of new science tools and funding for new science projects have dropped dramatically. If we could start funding projects that advance our technology and could "save the world'', would take us to a type 1 faster, but the minds that control all the money are fixated on wars and primitive times, we won't move forward for quite sometime, assuming that the human race makes it through the next century.

The Powers That Be aren't letting us off this planet. Off planet attempts at control& domination are going to be sooo hard. Much easier to pen us on Earth with all our wonderful police and military forces set in place to quell any insolent civilian attempts at freedom.

There probably aren't any empty habitable planets anywhere near enough, in my opinion. They've all been gobbled up by other races already.

We're FAR too late.

We might be able to colonize other planets in our solar system, but to find vacant, Earthlike planets within a few dozen light years or even an hundred?

Nah, forget it.

Mankind is not the master of his own destiny. Mankind is more like cattle in a pen waiting for the big cattle trucks to come and take them to the slaughter house. Men and women are bred, manipulated, controlled and harvested by a POWER your limited, primitive minds can't even conceptualize.

reply to post by swolleneyeball

Wow, did you get some answers to your question!

Here are a few practical ones.

Apart from being in the habitable zone, rocky, watery and generally earthlike, your habitable planet would need to have a good strong magnetic field like Earth's, to divert nasty high-energy particles from space that would otherwise fry anything living on the planet's surface.

A rotational period of around 24 hours would be nice, though perhaps not essential.

You might, perhaps, be able to terraform an unfriendly atmosphere, doing what plants and blue-green algae do as well as 'cracking' oxides in the crust and releasing the oxygen. I don't see how this could be done significantly faster than nature manages it - but it probably can.

Plenty of nitrogen or another fairly inactive gas in the atmosphere would also be necessary to stop all that oxygen from burning up everything on the planet.

If you're planning to eat the local fauna and flora then you'd be hoping the local life-forms are not only carbon-based but involves left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugers. Chirality

If you're planning to take tomatoes and rice and chicken along, then you'd want soils composed of the correct minerals - no, wait, it's harder than that. You'd need soil, which is a very special substance manufactured by earthworms. Hmm... hydroponics. But you'd still need to find the right minerals available locally.

One could go on and on, really. There's a list of requirements as long as your arm.

I'm sure there are habitable 'new Earths' out there - it's a big universe - but if there are, they've probably already evolved their own intelligent lifeforms, who may object violently if we descend from the heavens and try to take thier planet away from them.

In the end, and probably for the foreseeable future, I reckon this is the only world we've got. I honestly wish I could say different.

I forgot the star. Very important.

Wrong sort of star and the planet won't have the right combination of elements in its crust to support life. So I guess a G-type star of about the same age as the sun, with a moderate and predictable stellar activity cycle and your planet orbiting it inside the Goldilocks Zone. I have a feeling you're going to need the star to be a singleton, not a binary, because a second nearby star could create orbital instabilities that render the planet uninhabitable, or sterilize the planet with high-energy particles if it was really hot and bright. This is a bummer, because most stars are binaries.

Also, the angular velocity with which your planet falls around the star shouldn't be too high, or the circumstellar space too full of debris, or you'll be dealing with dinosaur-killer-style asteroid collisions rather frequently.

Okay, I'll stop now.

Do we really want to spread our diseased and corrupt species elsewhere?

I mean, shouldnt we at least master to work together on one sphere first?

I think first we need to work on making this world better, so we actually 'know' what we are doing when we try to make another sphere a home for our species.

We are destroying this sphere....we dont need to go destroy another one.

Once we can master that nature should always come first, then us second....then mabey we might have a chance to be productive somewhere else...until then, lets keep the other spheres free from our corrupted ways.

Originally posted by Astyanax
Also, the angular velocity with which your planet falls around the star shouldn't be too high, or the circumstellar space too full of debris, or you'll be dealing with dinosaur-killer-style asteroid collisions rather frequently.

Good thoughts, though in this case, a high amount of debris collision might actually be desireable as it would probably prevent any advanced life from being there, assuming such life is common on similar worlds. That would make the planet free for the taking and/or seeding, but you had better have a good, reliable way to detect and divert any possible collisions yourself.

[edit on 30-4-2009 by ngchunter]

Originally posted by Astyanax
I forgot the star. Very important.

Wrong sort of star and the planet won't have the right combination of elements in its crust to support life.

How about a moon too?

If the "ebb & flow" of the oceans and the gravitational "pull" is a key part of our evolution and existance...it may be quite useful to have one around (and around and around...).

Did I say I would stop? Oops.

I went googling to see what I could find on the subject and guess what?

There's an under-construction Wikipedia page full of answers to your question.

Also an article on the search for habitable planets - what they're looking for.

And a New Scientist article telling us that there's nothing very special about the sun in terms of 'fine-tuning for life'. Hope that's true.

Google search for attributes of a habitable planet.

Well hell arnt we a lucky bit of muck people arnt we. we are just in the butter zone for everything arnt we, but i gusse if you werent we would have a singular conciece to precieve that anyhow.

I was really hopeing hollywood had snagged somthing right with just a couple teriformers right out of Alien.

I was hopeing that with a new planet in reach a cultural shift from money to life would happen and in stead of one filthy planet we could have two clean ones .But humans are barbaric by nature so that ones out the airlock.

How would a small electromagnetic generator function in terms of a floating space station big enough for small groups[400-500]
work. Im assuming since we evolved inside an elctromagnetic field a machine one wouldnt do any damage, but would it be strong enough to repel the cosmic radation?

While in its baby stages i dont think we should stop for even a second about working towards a life off our homeworld.