...if its year is only 11.2 earth days long?

SPACE has a good article that includes the answer to your question:

Very cool:

What is more interesting is the history of the planet — whether in the early ages, the young ages, of this planet the star was so active, and the star emitted so much high-energy radiation, that it blew away the atmosphere and may have blown away the water also," he said.

Other aspects of the planet's history also have a bearing on just how wet Proxima b may be. For example, if the alien world formed far from the star but then migrated inward, it is likely water-rich; if it formed near its present position, it likely started out much drier, study team members said. (But even this latter scenario doesn't preclude the existence of large amounts of water on Proxima b, Anglada-Escude stressed; comet and/or asteroid strikes could deliver the substance, as apparently happened here on Earth, he said.)

Tidally locked planets were once regarded as inhospitable to life — baked too hot on the star-facing side, and freezing cold on the dark side. But recent research suggests that such worlds may indeed be habitable; winds in their atmospheres could distribute heat, smoothing out temperature extremes.

And if Proxima b is potentially habitable, life-forms have a long time to gain a foothold there: Red dwarfs keep burning for trillions of years, in contrast to stars like the sun, which die after 10 billion years or so.

"Proxima Centauri will exist for several hundreds or thousands of times longer than the sun," Hatzes wrote in his "News and Views" piece. "Any life on the planet could still be evolving long after our sun has died."

The sun is 4.6 billion years old. Proxima Centauri is thought to be slightly older — perhaps 4.9 billion years or so, study team members said.

Over 3/4 of the stars in the universe are red dwarfs. They are, by far, the longest lived star type. Many will go on slowly burning their hydrogen for up to a trillion years, or more.

Yes, they are dim, but once they get out of their adolescence they are stable.

The habitable zone being so close in is worrying though, because any planet there will very likely be tidally locked to the star, showing only one face to it. Not sure if that is conducive to life.

caused all the water to have evaporated from the light side like what happened to Venus with any remaining water (if it ever had any) frozen on the dark side?

The article indicates that the planet could be in danger from solar flares.

Twenty years? Let's do this.

good news everyone!

humanity's comin your way universe, deal with it!

The stars are very distant. Even the closest ones are about 4.5 light years away. With our current rocket technology, it would take over 100,000 years to get there.

There's hypothetical future technology to cut down that travel time dramatically, but then there's collision risks at high speed. The galaxy is full of gas and dust between the stars, and they can be lethal as a traveler approaches even a fraction of the speed of light. When distant galaxies collide, it's mostly the gas and other particles that strike each other. The stars mostly pass right by each other. When the Andromeda galaxy hits the Milky Way in a few billion years, it's believed that none of the hundreds of billions of stars will collide because they're so sparsely distributed. The gas in between will heat up and glow, however.

Here's a recent article about using laser-powered small sails to fly past the solar system mentioned by the OP and the risk of collisions through the interstellar medium (which doesn't mention the greater risk closer to each solar system): http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/08/could-breakthrough-starshots-ships-survive-the-trip/

By the way, I seriously doubt that warp drives will ever be achieved, at least anything that achieves FTL travel. Why? Inevitable causality paradoxes.

This is the technology being referenced in this thread:

a child reading science fiction than...Cincinnati or Baltimore. Whoops, forgot jump rope, c-i-n-c-i-n-n-a-t-i, cross off Cincinnati.

"Lisa Kaltenegger, a Cornell astronomer: "A planet next door. How much more inspiring can it get?"
Scientists even now think planets in binary star systems (in general) might be habitable, although this one doesn't exactly look like Kansas. What Proxima b might look like:
https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=

Wonder if Jeff Bezos is planning an interstellar space ship already.

to fuck up.

There is only one that we know right now that we are messing up, and that's the one we seem to be stuck on.

Would have been involved LOL

Getting up to 20% of light speed using lasers? Photons are not all that strong an accelerant (little mass) and the light levels would have to be astounding to punch through the atmosphere and provide the thrust.

Electronics can't be too small because they have to be able to send data back. and survive long periods of time in space.

I'll believe it when I see them get a probe up to escape velocity.

But they do carry momentum, albeit not much

(Sorry for being so picky, just wanted to clarify)

And this is about visiting the NEAREST star to us other than our Sun.

If you know where to point it, you can use a laser to measure the distance to the moon by bouncing the beam off one of the mirrors left by the Apollo missions. The thrust produced by the laser would be very low, but a craft could achieve huge speeds by operating the beam continuously. Theoretically, the speed would asymptotically approach the speed of light itself, although it could never quite get there, of course.

The momentum of a photon is h/wavelength, where h is Planck's constant. If you have an ideal mirror, the momentum imparted to the spacecraft by one photon would be double the initial momentum of the photon.

According to my (non-relativistic) estimates, a 10GW red laser at 633nm could accelerate a 1000kg spacecraft so that it reached Proxima Centauri in 34 years. The spacecraft would be travelling at 25% of the speed of light at that point so it would not spend much time in that neighborhood as it would have no way to slow down.

You would not want to get in the way of the laser beam unless you were highly reflective.

What would such a thing look like from the ground? It would probably blind you just from the scatter.

If I assume a 1kg probe then 35 gigawatts of power are needed to accelerate it to 0.2c in 3 days. That's considerably more than the 1.21 gigawatts needed to propel Marty McFly back to the future in a deLorean.

**Whew**

I'm getting dizzy just thinking about it.


Oh, the vertigo.