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I think by the 22nd or 23rd centuries, when we visit this planet, humans aren't likely to be the only intelligent inhabitants of Earth and the Solar System. We will create another "race" of intelligent artificial life forms, and the will have a lot to do with getting us to Proxima b.

Right now, all they are doing is seeing if it can be used to maintain a satellite's orbit against atmospheric drag in low Earth orbit. the thrust its said to produce is very weak. I think some sleight of hand may be at work here. It might be worth while to send it into space to see if it works, it would be better if they could use it to send something to Mars, rather than just maintain its orbit against atmospheric drag. After all one can always overestimate atmospheric drag and say it works. What we really need to do is to accelerate an object with the em-drive, that would once and for all prove that it works. If a satellite could go into a higher orbit using the Em-drive, that would prove it beyond question!

Well you would need a work force in the trillions at least, that work force would be mostly robots, they would outnumber humans at least 1000 to 1 and they would do our bidding. I am basically thinking of projects for them to do before they get out of our control. Having once space colony circling the sun has advantages over millions of them, for one it can't collide with itself, while many millions of smaller habitats can. This habitat would have 160 times Earth's surface area of living space, one can even live underneath the illumination strips, because unlike the giant windows of O'Neill's standard design, the illumination strips don't have to be part of the hull. One can live under them and they can provide illumination both to the opposing valley and to what's under them, so we really are utilizing all of the cylinder's floor space. Also the rotation diameter is only 20 miles, we know of materials that can handle that stress, the really long part is its length, but that just requires a lot o building. We need von Neumann machines to do this work, once that replicate enough times to bring the work force up to the right number to construct this thing. Once constructed the discard the excess von Neumann machines and leave some behind for routine maintenance and upkeep of the structure and we're all set to inhabit it.

I suspect that the solar wind around Proxima would not be a great area in which a slow down could occur. I think it would be easier to slow down in the broader solar winds of Alpha Centauri A and B. I think if we were in a hurry to build a spaceship, an Orion would be the thing we could build without having to develop too many radical new technologies. Anyway our enemies are not as deterred by nuclear weapons as they once were, how else do you explain the 9/11 attack? Maybe if we were to explode a few nuclear weapons to launch an Orion, that would have a healthy effect on our potential enemies, that they'd better not mess with us. In any case, we could send a bunch of people to Mars with that.

I think the Jupiter system is the best model we have for Proxima Proxima has the mass of 127 Jupiters if I recall correctly, what would be the masses of the Galliean satellites if we increased their masses 127 times?
Satellite Mass 127 times
Io 8.93×10^22 kg --> 1.134*10^25 kg
Europa 4.8×10^22 kg --> 6.096*10^24 kg
Ganymede 1.48×10^23 kg --> 1.88*10^25 kg
Callisto 1.08×10^23 kg --> 1.08*10^23 kg

Earth mass is M⊕ = (5.9722±0.0006)×10^24 kg
I guess Europa would come closest to Earth mass if scaled up to the same proportion as Proxima.

Seems the Galilean satellites are tidally locked, why wouldn't the planets around proxima be?

Distances could be multiplied by 11.269 times to get new orbits of
Io 421,800km -->4,753,264.2 km
Europa 671100km -->7,562,625.9 km
Ganymede 1,070,400km-->12,062,337.6 km
Callisto 1,882,700km-->21,216,146.3 km

Seems like Europa becomes an earthlike planet if you scale up its mass in proportion to Proxima, and you increase its distance by the square root of Proxima's mass in Jupiter masses. So maybe the Proxima system resembles Jupiter's.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galilean_moons

The "egg" in Artificial Intelligence, the "caterpillar" is "nanotechnology," This structure isn't something that would be built by "humans in hard hats," it is something built by machines for humans, the structural materials would come out of the backside of the Moon, the volatiles would come out of the asteroid belt. I pick an orbit between Venus and Earth because that space is mostly empty, has more available solar energy, and there would be a ring of solar collectors on the Sunward side of the cylinder. This solar collector ring beams microwaves to the cylinder, and the efficiency of conversion from light to electricity to microwaves to electricity is not 100%, so having more available solar energy than at Earth is a bonus.

The inward turning cylinder ring around the Sun is in the shadow of the Solar Collector ring, it radiates the waste heat into space from this inefficient conversion process. The electricity it receives from the Solar Collector ring it used to generate artificial sunshine in hologram form from the light strips. The light strips are arranged in the same trilateral pattern on the inside of the cylinder as the window-solars are in the standard O'Neill cylinder design, and since this cylinder doesn't have end caps, mirrors are structurally impossible anyway. The only way to approach this cylinder that's bent into a ring around the Sun, is from the side. This cylinder rotates in and out once every 6 minutes for gravity. If you are close enough to see the cylinder, it appears to be straight, you can't see the curve at all, if you pulled out far enough so you could see the entire ring around the Sun, it would appear so thin as to be invisible, you would need a telescope to see parts of it, but the telescope would prevent you from seeing the whole thing at once.

If you stood inside the cylinder, you would see the landscape curve around you, there would be an illumination strip above you with a holographic image of the Sun providing light. The image of the Sun would over time appear to rise in one direction, starting off very red, and becoming brighter an whiter as it climbed in the sky, then it would set, becoming redder until it fades into darkness providing night. If you look in the direction of the cylinder's length, the cylinder appears as a tunnel that seems to diminish into infinity, no apparent curvature is evident, because even at this closer orbit, this curvature is very slight, and imperceptible before the cylinder diameter seems to diminish to nothing with distance. If you looked up in the sky once more, you would see two strips of land above you, to the right and left of the illumination strip above you, both the illuminator and the land strips would run the entire length of the cylinder, which is to say, like the cylinder itself, they go completely around the Sun. To the right and left of the land strip you would be standing on, are two more illuminator strips, that illuminate the two opposite land strips above you. The distance to the center axis of this cylinder is 10 miles, if you were to ascend to that height, the atmosphere would equivalent to that experienced at the top of Mount Everest, in the "Death Zone" in other words, you could acclimatize yourself to it and breath that air without added oxygen for a time, but not for long. There is no landscape that reaches that high in any case. Some mountains may get as high as 5 miles, you would breath the equivalent of the 2.5 mile altitude on Earth, and you would experience one half gravity at the summit of such a peak. So 10 miles is pretty much as wide as such a cylinder can get while remaining inhabitable throughout. (as inhabitable as the summit of Mount Everest ever gets!)

A double shell might be a good idea, but I still need the radiators to regulate the internal temperature, so it doesn't get too hot inside, and we might also want seasons in certain places. There is a lot of land here, might want some places to be the Arctic and over a distance, transitioning into subarctic, temperate, subtropical, and finally tropical, with different day lengths over a seasonal cycle to match. Not all parts of the cylinder would experience daylight at the same time, I'd say at any given moment equal lengths of the cylinder would experience day and night at he same time. During night in a particular section of this cylinder, the illumination strip would either show the stars, or an image of the moon, which could be at various phases depending on the time of the month. the diurnal cycle would be 24 hours long and vary with the seasons over a 365.24 day year just as on Earth. As for the unpredictability of humans, that is why you have police and jails if they misbehave.

In Stephen Baxter's novel Proxima, he used the terms Substellar point for the point where the Sun is directly over head, and the opposite point was called the Antistellar point, on the dark side of the planet. Would you want to use those terms? Since on Earth the Sun rises in the East, why not call the Substellar point the East Pole, while the Antistellar point would be called the West Pole. When you are facing east, North is to your left, so in this case North if clockwise around the planet and South is counterclockwise. But Baxter used the conventional North, South, East, and West Directions. His planet still had a North Pole, the planet still rotated, it just rotated at the same speed that it orbited the star, but relative to other planets and stars, they still were seen to rise in the East and set in the West. The Proxima b planet will still need communications satellites, there are four possible places where they could be put, the most useful ones would be Proxima b L1 and L2. L3 is on the opposite side of Proxima, L4 is 60 degrees ahead of Proxima b in its orbit and L5 is 60 degrees behind., and they are each about 7,500,000 km away, not terribly useful if you want telephone like communications. Proxima power would be useful, just set up your solar panels on the ground and orient them towards Proxima, no need to tract the star, you could even use Solar concentrators if you like.

Anybody who can travel across the void between the stars is not going to have trouble getting off an Earth sized planet, as we will have to get off an Earth sized planet just to start the journey to the stars in the first place. If your talking about traveling faster than 10% of the speed of light you start getting ridiculous or gigantic ideas, myself included. I have the idea of light years long linear accelerators, and that is one way to accelerate an decelerate at 1-g for the entire journey without using antimatter, There are those giant lasers that are thousands miles wide pushing thin light sails, and there are microwave beams and star wisps, and that pretty much exhausts the realistic possibilities for interstellar travel. if one wishes to use fusion, you have to plan on a trip that will take generations, either a generatin ship, a sleeper ship, or most likely a seeder ship. An AI would have to pilot and crew it. Unfortunately humans don't hatch out of eggs, and need to be raised and educated. Humans are clever and will tend to do things in a generation ship that are no anticipated. I don't feel comfortable with sending a space colony on a one thousand year journey to Alpha Centauri, its hard to predict what humans will do during the 1,000 year transit, and such a starship will be huge, just to suppose a colony of sufficient size. Sleeper ships crewed by AIs are a different story.

Past 20 years the future is simply the future, I won't be part of it most likely, I am nearing 50 now.

I think it was just radio leakage, their signals weren't meant to travel over interstellar distances at all, it is after all, not very practical to send a signal 95 light years and expect an answer. One question is, if we are receiving their radios signals, are they receiving ours? Right now they should be receiving our radio signals from 1921.