Humans Won't Migrate To Far Away Planets, Should Protect Earth Instead Says Nobel Prize Winner

Swiss-based astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz just won a Nobel Prize for their work refining the techniques we use to detect exoplanets.

But though he's looking to find them, Mayor insists we as humans need to more closely look at our own world instead.

Michel Mayor - Reuters

Mayor knows that a lot of people think of Earth-like exoplanets as a sort of backup plan, somewhere we can go when everything is screwed up on Earth. But he insists that won't really be the case, and humans might never migrate across interstellar space.

"If we are talking about exoplanets, things should be clear: we will not migrate there," Mayor told AFP, when asked about the possibility of humans moving to other planets. "These planets are much, much too far away. Even in the very optimistic case of a livable planet that is not too far, say a few dozen light years, which is not a lot, it's in the neighbourhood, the time to go there is considerable," he added.

"We are talking about hundreds of millions of days using the means we have available today. We must take care of our planet, it is very beautiful and still absolutely liveable."

Basically, until we come up with a much much faster means of space travel that's also financially efficient, regular people aren't going to be hoping on spaceships to relocate outside our solar system. That's why Mayor says we need to stop talking and thinking about the whole thing as a backup plan. "We need to kill all the statements that say 'OK, we will go to a liveable planet if one day life is not possible on earth'," he said. "It's completely crazy."

NASA

Mayor and Queloz won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the of the first exoplanet in our solar system, back in 1995, using, custom-made instruments at their observatory in southern France. Since then, we've discovered over 4,000 exoplanets in our galaxy, using the technique they pioneered.