No, we'll never migrate off-world
I’m one of those astrophysics buffs. You know the type: Little knowledge, lots of fascination, soaking up Star Trek (TNG, naturally), reading Hawking and his ilk.
Dreaming of life in space.
The more this planet degrades at the rate we are trashing it, the more realistic — or at least potentially necessary — life on another one becomes. Maybe that’s what those less inclined to mitigate the damage are counting on, that we can always colonize someplace else.
Can we? One super-smart Nobel Laureate says no.
That’s according to astrophysicist Michel Mayor, co-recipient (with Didier Queloz) of the 2019 Nobel Prize in physics for discovering the first planet orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system.
“If we are talking about exoplanets, things should be clear: We will not migrate there,” he told Agence France-Presse (AFP) Oct. 9, because he wanted to “kill all the statements that say, ‘OK, we will go to a livable planet if one day life is not possible on Earth.’”
Why can’t we? They’re too far away.
Before we could possibly advance technologically enough to travel with Star Trek-level warp drive, we’ll have long ago extinguished ourselves here, at the rate we’re going, he says.
“Even in the very optimistic case of a livable planet that is not too far, say a few dozen light years, which is not a lot, it’s in the neighbourhood, the time to go there is considerable,” he added.
He’s not the only mega-brain in this field to think so.
University of California astrophysics professor Stephen Kane told Live Science he agrees with Mayor.
“The sad reality is that, at this point in human history, all stars are effectively at a distance of infinity,” Kane told Live Science.
We can’t even reach the planets in our own solar system yet, let alone anything outside it. And we’d have to reach beyond to find a livable planet.
“I would be very surprised if humanity made it to the orbit of Jupiter within the next few centuries,” he told Live Science. The nearest star outside of our solar system is about 70,000 times farther away, so “all stars are effectively out of reach.”
But hey, everything seems impossible until the next big discovery, right? Flying in airplanes and the internet sounded crazy. Yet once they came, both quickly transformed the world.
That’s not a like comparison, apparently. In this case, say Kane and Mayor, the required physics isn’t even on the imaginative plane yet. It would require a fundamental change in our understanding of the relationship between mass, energy and acceleration. In other words, we need centuries of discoveries to get there, not decades.
How disappointing. And motivating.
Next time: The third recipient of this year’s Nobel in physics — James Peebles, and what he can tell us about what we see and touch, and what we can’t — yet.
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Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network who wishes she’d been smart enough to be a cosmologist. Contact her at [email protected].