Puny Hew-mons.

600 light years? That's like next door.
Assuming light takes 600 years to
get to your neighbor's house.

Sweet! NASA has spotted a planet in the 'habitable zone' of another star system! The planet, unimaginatively named Kepler-22b,* orbits a sun-like star, has an average surface temperature of 72 degrees which is like room temperature and is only 600 light years away! If we leave now in a spaceship capable of traveling at the speed of light we should arrive by the year 2611! Awesome, right? No. As a matter of fact it's not awesome. Let me explain.


Look, I am all about getting our mighty Galactic Empire going as soon as possible (dibs on Supreme Ruler), but it's embarrassing that after like 50 years of space travel we're still screwing around with chemical rockers and only live on one planet. The aliens must be laughing their asses off (or whatever the alien equivalent of asses are). So why am I hesitant?

It's ovipositor, they're laughing their ovipositors off.

"What'sa matter wuss, evolve on a
planet with a surface gravity of only 1g?"

It may be temperate and only 600 years away, but it's also two and a half times the the size of Earth. I'm no scyentist, but doesn't that mean that the gravity could be like way higher than ours? Any beings that evolved on such a world would be super-strong compared to the humans we send. Even worse, after 600 years the ones that arrive on Kepler-22b would be the descendants of the original crew and will have lived all their lives in low gravity, subsisting on astronaut ice cream and Tang. They'd be no match for the Keplonians. 

"I'm afraid I don't see your point."

-Amy Sims, 7th level Elven Mage

Even without the muscle atrophy 600 years in space will leave you with, the aliens will probably still be able to kick our asses. On TV, whenever humans encounter aliens, they're always way bigger and stronger than us. Wookies'll tear your arms off if you win at holo-chess, Spock can beat the crap out of Kirk, and I'm not sure what was stopping Alf from snapping Willie Tanner's neck and simply eating the cat because he totally could. It's like the whole galaxy works out all the time and we're just some planet of Dorito-eating, Dungeons and Dragons playing shut-ins. 

So what's to be done? Well, since I'm about solutions, I've prepared a simple guide outlining how we can cope with meeting with our physical superiors. Personally, I'm voting for the Exo-Suits. Nobody's going to mess with you when you're wearing a forklift.

*Seriously? Kepler-22b? It sounds like someone named it after their apartment. Since NASA clearly can not be trusted to name the planets they discover, I'm proposing we call it New Delaware. I don't really care about Delaware, but I feel like it's gotten the shaft over the last 200-odd years. Even the founding fathers knew Delaware was destined for anonymity, that's why they let it join the Union first.

Above: The Constitutional Convention. This was Delaware's equivalent of winning the big game senior year
before getting married and spending the next 60 years working at a carpet store in Milford.