Our Desperate Search For a New Home

Imagine life as you know it suddenly halted one day. All life - including humans, animals, plants, and any other microorganisms - will have been extirpated from Earth, leaving not a trace behind. Scientists predict that this day will arrive 1.5 billion years from now. One billion years sounds like an indefinite future but in the grand picture of the cosmic timeline, it is an incredibly small amount of time.

One would think that if a 1.5 billion-year timeline is not enough time to prevent the apocalypse, our global community would be making a collective effort to find a solution. Surprisingly, no single institution or organization, including NASA, known for its leading role in space research has invested appropriate time or effort into trying to find a habitable planet for humanity to settle in permanently.

Many theorize humans will be wiped out much sooner than the day that all life would be destroyed. That said, many argue that it is simply not worth the effort and the money to try to leave the planet. It has been predicted that in 500 million years, the Earth is on trajectory to have many catastrophic events, namely the loss of water and carbon dioxide as a result of increasing temperatures, killing all plants and animals far before the Sun can engulf the planet. Since these natural catastrophes are likely to occur way before the 1.5-billion deadline we are given, finding an alternate planet for humanity no longer becomes feasible. The chance that humanity will wipe ourselves out first before any of this by means of war or global warming has a very high chance of occuring, further convincing people that we will not even make it to a point in time when the sun’s expansion is considered a large threat.

Despite all these valid reasons, why should we still care about the end of the world? How long it will take to find a way or a place to extend the lifespan of humanity is absolutely uncertain; nonetheless, starting research and development now is a safe bet to have all resources and methods prepared by the time 1.5 billion years is up. Our history demonstrates this. Because our society failed to deal with global warming from carbon emissions in a timely manner, polar ice caps are melting, endangering and destroying homes of thousands on small island nations. Failure to raise awareness for health and sanitary needs hundreds of years ahead of time led to the Bubonic plague wiping 65 percent of Europe’s population. To ensure that our future generations survive, we must take action now. The survival of the human race depends on our decisions. The planet we live on does not belong to us - it belongs to our future generations. And it is our responsibility to preserve our Earth for our descendants. The late Stephen Hawking warned us: “We have given our planet the disastrous gift of climate change ... When we have reached similar crises there has usually been somewhere else to colonize ... But there is no new world, no utopia around the corner. We are running out of space, and the only places to go to are other worlds.”