remember the end of Starship Troopers?

"it's afraid!" "yay!"

like that.

Don't get the swim trunks out quite yet, Grant. Gliese 581-G may be in the Goldilocks zone so far as temperature & planetary mass is concerned, but it is still to be determined whether it actually harbors any oxygen and water; and I'm not sure we have mass-spectrometers sensitive enough to make that determination from 20 LY away - at least, not yet.

Plus, not exactly sure how that tan is going to work out - Gliese 581 is a red dwarf star, so it's going to be pretty dark on that beach of yours, not to mention the likelihood the planet, which has to orbit very close to its parent star in order to stay in that Goldilocks zone, may very well be in "tidal lock", that is, with one side always facing its sun, while the other perpetually faces away. So, unless you get in early on the land rush, you might find yourself staking a claim on the dark side, where the temps are going to be much, much cooler than on the day side.

My advice would be to pack a parka along with the trunks, just in case...

@2, the planet's mass is only estimated at the low end, the minimum, so it could actually be a lot bigger than they say. On the other hand, it could be a binary world, with a huge moon like Pluto. It's all just educated guessing at this distance.

Venus is in the "Goldilocks zone" in our solar system - it's wrapped in sulfuric acid clouds, a carbon dioxide atmosphere so thick that surface air pressure there is like being a mile under the ocean and it's 900 degrees on the surface of Venus, hot enough to melt lead. Not much swimming going on down there... :(

@ COMTE: I remember hearing, in the wee hours of the morning, when I was only half-awake, that the year there is 37 days (which is in the article but I forgot to include), and that the temperature ranges from something like -6 Celsius to +71 Celsius (if I remember correctly, as it wasn't included in the text article) if that helps at all.

According to Stephen hawking, the fastest man made thing is some satalite (can't remember the name) hurling through space at something like 3500 miles an hour and at that rate it would take us 350,000 years to reach this new planet.

@5: Thanks! I asked that question here.

Can we send Mudede there? Please?

I wonder what their Jesus would do.

@5
We have space vehicles and satellites that go much faster than 3500 mph. Like, at least ten times that speed. Voyager 1 is currently travelling at 39,000mph. You need something close to that speed to reach escape velocity for the sun to begin with.

The Pluto Express will reach Pluto in 2015, only nine years after it launched. Which is about as fast as anything we've ever put in space has gone.

If we wanted to though, we could probably engineer a vehicle that could travel at .1c or .2c, getting to the Gliese system in 100-200 years, plus a data return time of 20 years. This is longer than a human lifespan, but certainly not "impossible" for a future mission of an automated probe.

Consider human spaceflight is already 50 years old, and we still have probes 30 years old delivering data, thinking about a mission 5x longer that that isn't unbearable either.

I think you missed a zero or something there @5. There are vehicles on earth (e.g. advanced fighter jets and the SR-71 Blackhawk) that do more than 3,500 mph; standard orbital velocity is between 17,000 & 18,000 mph, while Apollo spacecraft returning from the moon typically achieved velocities of just under 25,000 mph.

Currently, the fastest-moving man-made object is the Helios II satellite launched in January 1976, which has achieved a recorded velocity of just under 253,000 kph (roughly 157,000 mph), which is about 0.014% the Speed of Light. Gliese 581 is roughly 117 Trillion miles away, so at that speed (if MY zeros are all in place!) it would take about 85,000 years to go from here to there.

Not to say we won't eventually be able to build something that could go considerably faster than that, of course, but regardless, we're definitely not going to be setting our Warp Factor or spinning up our FTL to anywhere close to a velocity that would get us there in a reasonable amount of time (say within a single human life-span) anytime soon.

SR-71 BlackBIRD, duh...

Sorry about that I did miss a zero, thanks.

It is going to be the fulfilment of Revelations Chapters 20,21 & 22 from the Holy Bible.
Praise Lord. Jesus is coming soon and he will take us to the new earth. So, confess, repent, pray and stay away from sins. Let’s meet there.