Right now there’s bushfire smoke choking Sydney, A volcano eruption in New Zealand, and Lebanon is basically underwater. Earth is cooked, and our politicians really don’t seem to want to do anything about it. So what solutions do we have? Well, we could un-f*ck the planet, or we could all head to space for 1000 years.
Yep, we’ve gotten to the point where we’re considering going full WALL-E and boarding a ship out of here. The first choice according to the movies would be to go to Mars, but the atmosphere there means it would be a pretty miserable life. It’s cold, it’s dry, and we’d all have to live in airtight suits. It would be better than dying a fiery climate change related death, but only just.
Scientists reckon they’ve decided on a much better choice: Proxima Centauri b.
Sure it’s a bit of a mouthful, but we could probably just name it Earth 2.0, or That Planet We Haven’t Killed Yet, or Susan or something once we get there. It orbits around a star called Proxima Centauri, is 1.3 times bigger than Earth, and it the right temperature for liquid water to exist on the surface. There’s really only one problem.
It’s 4.24 light years away.
Some people much better at maths than I am worked out that it will, at best, take centuries to travel in a spaceship for 1 lightyear. So to get all the way to Proxima Centauri b, you’re looking at a bare minimum of 1000 years, and probably way more.
It would mean that the people who took off from Earth would never see the new planet, and heaps of generations would have to live and die on the ship. For the people who eventually got there though, they would have a brand new planet to live on.
Maybe we should just un-f*ck this planet. It sounds easier.