SP’s: Earth is pushing its limits to sustain humans. The uncertainty factor regarding our planet’s future plays a major role as well. So, are we ready to become a multi-planet species?
If humanity ever comes up against an enemy that is too difficult for the entire species to ward off, then what would we do? Do we have a plan for that? Well, as ill-equipped as we are, the best human race could do is to move to other earth-like planets, maybe in some other solar systems or just make the planet in ours habitable by nuking it.
Now, if you ask of the dangers that earth could face, there would be quite a few of those. Let’s see, from the top of my head, mass extinction (man-made and spearheaded by climate change), then comes the possibilities of war (within humanity or with aliens!!), and one of the most dreaded asteroid collision that annihilated the last predominant species- the dinos.
Elon Musk, the technology pioneer of the century is specifically apprehensive of Earth’s future and has advised humans to become multi-planet species as soon as possible. And, you know why he is in such a hurry?
Blogger Tim Urban has explained the current scenario very beautifully in this analogy. He says, Imagine Earth as a hard drive which has already crashed five times (you do remember the five mass extinctions right!) and losing out most of its data each time (species).
Now listen to this fact: If the universe is time-scaled into one year, then humans would come into existence on 31st December, 23:58 hours!!
So, drawing from above, we would probably be witnessing another hard-drive crash that could happen any second now. Therefore we must have a backup planet, after all there should always be a Plan B. How about our Red neighbour then? We have also found water there and life supporting Nitrogen too had been detected!
So, how well are we prepared? NASA is the preparing to send manned mission to Mars on its Orion Capsule. Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX wants to take humans to Mars and not just a few colonizing humans but over a million to speed up the infrastructure over there.
Well, if everything goes as per the plan humans would on the red planet by the next decade. And, thus be a dawn of the era of the multi-planetary human species.
For more visualization on the subject, watch Interstellar. ?