Concerns were mixed among 150 Roanoke City elementary school students gathered at the Virginia Tech Roanoke Center as they pondered making a new home 240 trillion miles from Earth.
Some worried about taking up resources needed by other forms of life, others asked about the possibility of hostile neighbors, and some fretted about what the chickens aboard their spaceship would eat.
The third, fourth, and fifth graders were all participating in the Roanoke Center’s ACE: Association for the Colonization of Exoplanets program, which challenges students to plan the settlement of a rocky, Earth-sized planet in another solar system.
“Students receive specialized mission parameters based on the engineering discipline that inspires them: aerospace, agricultural, biomedical, civil, electrical, or mechanical,” said Ashley Sloan, the center’s lead STEM instructor. “They then use real…
