Habitable planets (http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/scientists_find_habitable_planet/) are a statistical certainty, however far out of traveling reach. I doubt that this one will change the Zeitgeist. What about when we achieve the capability to seed terraform planets far removed in space-time? Which leaves me wondering if our pioneering genes will be evolved or engineered away centuries before the New Frontier.

Which leaves me feeling so out of place.

Gliese 581 c is five times the mass of Earth, but just might have liquid water; it might even be a water-world.
I've made some images of the planet;
A pic from space;
http://img181.imageshack.us/img181/3752/gliese581jg4.th.jpg (http://img181.imageshack.us/my.php?image=gliese581jg4.jpg)
the clouds are pinkish because the star is a red dwarf, but the star itself doesn't look very red; it is in fact as red as an ordinary incandescent lightbulb.

A view of star-rise as seen from the surface of GL 581 c, and compared it to Sunrise on Earth, using Celestia.
I've assumed several things;

1/ the planet is a waterworld;
2/you can see the star from the surface
3/it is tidally locked (this means the star-rise goes on for ever if you are on the terminator)

http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/9061/gliese581io4.th.jpg (http://img256.imageshack.us/my.php?image=gliese581io4.jpg)

Note how big the star looks compared to the Sun; it is, in fact, quite a bit smaller than our star, but the planet is much closer

I'm ready to book a vacation.

On second thought, no: The trip's bad enough, but the constant 5 gs after arrival would really get tiresome. I guess humanly "habitable" is in the eye of the beholder.

space colonization is not gonna happen overnight. It's gonna take at least another generation to become reality.

The trip's bad enough, but the constant 5 gs after arrival would really get tiresome. Five times the mass is not equivalent to five time the gravitational acceleration at surface.

The unnamed planet Gliese 581c is most proberly the secondairy planet of it's solar system the first one being a neptune sized 16 earth mass planet. that is 5 million km away rouhly 10 times further then the moon is from our planet I wonder if that could give regular eclipses.

anyway under the asumption that the planet is 1.5 times larger then earth (the mass is pretty certain). It would gave a surface gravity of 2.15 g
... according to wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_581_c) I might be wrong abouth the mass but I get 2.2g if it's 2 times the size of earth and 2.9G if it's 1.5 times the size of our earth