Humanity has long dreamed about sending humans to other planets, even before crewed spaceflight became a reality. And with the discovery of thousands of exoplanets in recent decades, particularly those that orbit within neighboring star systems (like Proxima b), that dream seems closer than ever to becoming a reality. But of course, a lot of technical challenges need to be overcome before we can hope to mount such a mission.
In addition, a lot of questions need to be answered. For example, what kind of ship should we send to Proxima b or other nearby exoplanets? And how many people would we need to place aboard that ship? The latter question was the subject of a recent paper written by a team of French researchers who calculated the minimal number of people that would be needed in order to ensure that a healthy multi-generational crew could make the journey to Proxima b.
The study, titled “Computing the minimal crew for a multi-generational space travel towards Proxima Centauri b“, recently appeared online and will soon be published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. It was conducted by Dr. Frederic Marin, an astrophysicist from the Astronomical Observatory of Strasbourg, and Dr. Camille Beluffi, a particle physicist working with the scientific start-up Casc4de.