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On July 14th, 2015, the space probe "New Horizons" will reach the dwarf planet Pluto on it's flyby. Your "easiest" way to get to Pluto is thus to do it mentally, and let that probe be your eyes, ears and hands.

That is, after all, the point of those probes. They are like a man on Earth using a telescope to save walking across a field. You've "got to" the other side of the field with a telescope as surely as if you'd walked.

On the other hand, we've rockets in design that might carry us the 55 million kilometers to Mars in a journey of about 30 days. Given that Pluto is 5,913,520,000 kilometers away (on average), we might be able to go there in about 8.83 years.

That would be a major undertaking, and would require the ship to be an enclosed self-sustaining environment. And it would be going to Pluto for no point. There are plenty of resources closer to home - the moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, even the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Frankly, Pluto is not likely to be ever worth the construction of a life ship that after 8 or 9 years would only see what the probes have already seen, and only be able to mine that which we could mine cheaper in the asteroid belt. One may well have to wait for population pressure and strip mining of all nearer planets, before it could be worthwhile. Say in the year 3,500.

Thus, I'm sorry to say, that the "easiest" way I gave at the top, is actually going to be the "only" way for your lifetime, and your grandchildren's lifetime. Barring some staggeringly unforeseen breakthrough in cheap and super fast interplanetary transport.

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15y ago

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