Moontanman

I think it helps quite a bit, a robotic craft doesn't have to have life support running for thousands of years, all it needs is the ability to find resources in another planetary system and use them to build... it could be quite small compared to a traveling colony of living humans, a self replicating Von Neumann type probe. I think a lot of this depends on exactly what we are talking about. Are we talking about sending a live human to another star system with that person's lifetime? A slow colony ship to another star? An unmanned probe? I think the most obvious way would be a slow colonization of a stellar system via artificial habitats and then venturing outward as the technology matures maybe snagging interstellar comets as they pass the solar system then possibly onto other objects in interstellar space hopping off when they pass other star systems. Once humans get used to inhabiting habitats in space and improve the technology whether or not a star has an habitable planet becomes meaningless, debris becomes the goal not planets.

We have the occasional thread on alleged aliens but nobody ever seems willing to tackle the physics and engineering discussion of how they got here Interstellar travel would indeed be a challenge but I see no reason to assume it's not possible. From robotic craft carrying data that could be used to reconstruct living beings upon arrival to long term space habitat travel I would hesitate to claim it can't be done. I would think a slow colonization of places like Keiper belts and oort clouds being used as a source of raw materials to build artificial habitats capable of slowly traveling from one star to another to using space objects similar to kuiper belt objects which are thought to occur in interstellar space but if not you could take a chunk of a kuiper belt object along with you to use as a store of raw materials for the trip. If small comet like objects exist in interstellar space they could be used as spepping stones from one star to another. I would think that slowly spreading across space using these methods would be preferable to only looking for habitable planets and trying to travel directly to them from one star system to another. I would expect searching for habitable planets and then taking off to colonise them would be very difficult but slowly spreading from one star system to another using small bodies as resources makes much more sense. In fact I have doubts that planets would be desirable at all, deep gravity wells, possible disease from alien microbes and native life forms would make the controlled conditions of a space habitats more desirable and would also make nearly every star colonisable whether it has planets or not. Why are you assuming chemical rockets? What about other more efficient means of propulsion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_propulsion Propulsion technologySpacecraft propulsion technology can be of several types, such as chemical, electric or nuclear. They are distinguished based on the physics of the propulsion system and how thrust is generated. Other experimental and more theoretical types are also included, depending on their technical maturity. Additionally, there may be credible meritorious in-space propulsion concepts not foreseen or reviewed at the time of publication, and which may be shown to be beneficial to future mission applications.[37] Almost all types are reaction engines, which produce thrust by expelling reaction mass, in accordance with Newton's third law of motion.[38][39][40] Examples include jet engines, rocket engines, pump-jet, and more uncommon variations such as Hall–effect thrusters, ion drives, mass drivers, and nuclear pulse propulsion.[41] Recently I've seen a fusion engine that (supposedly) can be strapped to another space craft and reused (I'm not really sure how serious this one is) https://pulsarfusion.com/sunbird-fusion-propulsion/ The fact remains that technology is advancing and I doubt that chemical rockets will be the limiting factor. One more https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/nasa-tests-record-power-lithium-plasma-engine-for-mars-travel/gm-GMA58E3587

Yeah, maybe Trump will release the bigfoot files soon, or the Fae Plan... 🤩

Finally!

Industrial disease was one of my favs as well, I always liked to play it on the way to work at midnight!

I found little info on the specifics of UV light and the needs of birds only that they do need it and can see at least some of he UV. Lots of ads promoting various light sources for birds containing UV are available. The following article may have some relevance. I know that good quality foods and calcium carbonate sources can allow turtles to grow correctly with little direct UV but I'm not sure if that applies to birds. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168159113001512

I'm not so sure about this, unless Americans are crazier than Russians! Here in the US we seem to be ok with the dear leader doing whatever he wants. Once the nukes start flying push back by the population seems a bit of a day late and a dollar short scenario. Support of the crazy states would be immaterial at that juncture.

How long would nuking a target deny use of that land? Neil deGrasse Tyson asserted recently that modern nukes release significantly less radioactive fallout than the original (1940s) style nukes and we can see that the only two cities ever nuked were not abandoned but were inhabited continuously to this day. I admit to less than perfect knowledge on this so I could be far off the mark.

Couldn't panspermia from another planet in the solar system skew the data if we find life anywhere else in the solar system? Unless said life is significantly different from the life we have on Earth how would we show any life detected on Mars didn't come from Earth? Or even show life on Earth couldn't have come from Mars? I'm not sure that finding life elsewhere in the solar system is a good way to plot data points.