Lot of people, even top scientists, say that once we have made this planet uninhabitable by sheer dint of perseverance we can pack our bags, get into a great big spaceship, go to another planet in a galaxy far, far away and start all over again, making that planet uninhabitable. And so on ad infinitum. But, I may be wrong here, in those other planets wouldn’t there be things that want to serve us for dinner on a platter or kill us for the sheer joy of it or to eat later or put us in cages and study us or wouldn’t there even be microscopic life forms that would infest and kill us in microseconds (I can go on but that would suffice)? With evolution there having taken a different path and all that you know. I can’t see how a few nuclear devices and a few cans of hospital grade antiseptics we might be able to carry would help us in the long run. Cecil (or anybody else), I am having regular nightmares thinking of this. Please help me.
For starters, any civilisation which is able to move en masse to a new planet doesn’t need to, not because of anything we are capable of doing to the Earth. Anything short of the physical destruction of the Earth isn’t going to render it uninhabitable to a civilisation capable of building the sorts of space-borne habitat necessary for the trip.
First, top scientists don’t say that, since even if we get faster than light travel, it would take one hell of a big spaceship to move us. Even the biggest migrations from Europe to the US, like from Ireland, took place over a long time and were hardly total.
In any case, alien life forms, evolving totally separately from us, would hardly find us very appetizing. Given the time spans involved, chance are we could find a planet with a breathable atmosphere but little if any life on land.
But I agree it would be better and cheaper to clean up the earth first.
If we were to find another planet we could colonise that bore life, we’d be well advised to sterilise it before colonisation. Megafauna won’t be the problem; microfauna will - q.v. War of the Worlds.
Ìn any case, there’s no need to be having nightmares about this.
This will not happen in your lifetime.
There’s some huge if’s to overcome first.
First we would need the technology and the organisation to get us to another planet.
Next, Cryo-sleep only exists in movies, so far. It will take decades before it works and also before it is sufficiently tested to be put in use.
Then, even if we do find a planet that could support life, do you have any idea how long it would take to make it habitable?
How long to make a breatheable atmosphere? To spread all the beneficial micro-organisms over the planet, the earthworms, the insects etc,etc.
Alas, my friend, you will be loooong dead before any actual passenger ship with colonists will have left earth for another planet.
So no need to worry about hostile critters on another planet.
Yeah, this is all strictly science fiction, at least at this point; and if you’re really interested in the idea of colonizing other planets, there’s lots of good and bad science fiction out there that deals with all the issues involved. In reality, we’re nowhere near being able to travel, even on a small scale, outside the solar system; it’s an open question whether human-life-supporting planets exist anywhere else in the universe; and, barring some huge catastrophe which I hope will never happen, we’re a long way from making this planet so uninhabitable that moving is a viable option.
From memory Stephen Hawking in a popular TV series on cosmology hints at this. But then my memory might have failed in this instance. - Nihal :dubious:
If a reporter asks a scientist about how we would colonise another Galaxy, the scientist will obligingly answer (it’s good to publicise science, especially theoretical stuff.)
This does not mean anything is going to happen.
As Latro rightly said, there are many obstacles to overcome.
Also you need to know about the incredible distances involved. The Andromeda Galaxy located at a distance of 2 million lightyears away is the nearest major galaxy.
This means it takes light 2 million years to cover the distance.
Light travels through space (mostly vacuum) at over 180,000 miles per second.
Not only is that a vast distance, but scientists don’t believe any spaceship can travel at the speed of light.
So assuming we manage half the speed of light (pretty difficult!), it would take our spaceship 4 million years just to reach Andromeda.
Long, long before we could move to another planet, we’d be able to build space habitats – big deep-space colonies where large numbers of people could live.
Then we could use earth as a garbage dump.
(Are you ready to learn the secret of Tiphares?)
Seriously, before we have the ability to migrate on a global scale, we’ll probably have the ability to fix whatever’s wrong with earth. And maybe to terraform Mars and Venus and some of the Jovian moons.
Look, we have enough planets in our own Solar System. All we need is to tow Mars into Venus’ orbit to warm it up and tow Venus into Mars’ orbit to cool it off – double terraforming! I really cannot see any practical objections to this plan . . .
Do you remember how we accidentally destroyed the Earth and had to move to this planet? And they decided not to tell the stupid people because they thought it might upset them?
Do you know what towing companies charge for overnight storage of whole planets? By the time we figure out what lot they’re hiding it in we’ll be in debt for the next 25,000 years!
Cite? I’m guessing you may have seen an implication that wasn’t originally there..
Hawking is a proponent of spreading humanity across the stars to prevent our eventual extinction.
But as far as I know, he has never suggested that even a sizable fraction of humanity on Earth can be saved, only that we should work to preserve our species. It is true that many (most?) people conflate this with the idea we can preserve most examples of our species as well, but people are kind of dumb like that. I haven’t seen a serious scientist suggest it as a possibility in anything like a reasonable time frame.
I don’t actually think it would be that much of a problem. The nasty bugs are nasty because they have evolved with us to take advantage of our biology. I don’t think alien microfauna would know what to do with us.
