It's Nobel Prize time, and we were left off the list again. But there were other smart folks who were recognized for some pretty incredible stuff. One of the awardees, an astrophysicist, said the science fiction movies about humans living on other planets are balder and dash. We're staying put.
With all the talk of climate change, storms growing stronger, wildfires raging longer, and droughts increasing everywhere, there seems to be a select group of earthlings who would rather say adios! to Big Blue and head for Coruscant to make a new home.
But Michel Mayor, who was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics this year (for discovering the first planet orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system), said, "Not so fast."
The astrophysicist--say that three times fast--has concluded humans will never live in another solar system, according to Fox News. "If we are talking about exoplanets, things should be clear: We will not migrate there," he said.
The reason? We're too dang far away. Mr. Mayor pointed out that Man the Voyager struggles enough just getting to the moon. Mars travel might come along in 50 years, but Jupiter in the next few centuries? That's a reach.
And the distance to get to the nearest star outside our solar system is 70,000 times the distance from the Earth to Jupiter, according to Stephen Kane, a professor of planetary astrophysics at the University of California in Riverside.
So unless we develop warp speed or the ability to travel through wormholes, it seems this Earth is what we have. It's our home. And perhaps we should get a little more serious about taking care of it. Let's ditch plastics as soon as we can. There's a patch of garbage in the Pacific Ocean twice the size of Texas.
We only have one Earth, and it's probably past time for us to do a better job at taking care of it. Because the Nobel Prize folks say we only have the one shot. And they should know.
Editorial on 10/21/2019