Humanity's New Home?

source: Wired.com

“I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet.” -Stephen Hawking

Wired Science published a story profiling possible planets that would be humanity’s new home. A team of scientists from a Geneva, Switzerland observatory found 45 exoplanets and among them, three “super Earths” orbiting a sun not so unlike our own:

There may be many other planets that current instruments cannot yet detect since they orbit too far from their stars. The current batch of planets just discovered all orbit their star sin less than 50 days. As instruments improve, we will be able to resolve Earth-sized planets that orbit as far from their stars as Earth does, so that same sample of 100 stars might yield even more Earth-sized planets orbiting at greater distances then we can currently detect.

All this paves the way for the discovery of abundant Earth sized planets, orbiting in the habitable zone and ultimately of life in the universe. With all these planets around all these stars in all these galaxies, there has got to be some life somewhere… or so the theory goes.

Isn’t that cool? When can I fill out my mail-forwarding card? But I have to wonder if humanity’s social problems would increase or decrease as we begin our first trek across space. Who would be left behind and why? What will we encounter out there and can we properly defend ourselves? Important as these questions are, we cannot allow them to impede any progress for humanity to venture into the stars. We are intrepid explorers at heart and there’s nothing our species loves more than a challenge.