Is it time to move home?

Until today I hadn’t realised that Ken Livingstone was a big fan of space exploration, but an article on the RT website has corrected that misperception. Ken writes enthusiastically about China’s dark side of the Moon landing and posits that “The threat to human life on our planet from climate change and the super volcanoes means that the only way humanity can survive is by spreading out to other worlds.” I don’t know where he gets his super volcanoes stuff from, but it is highly unlikely volcanic eruptions will threaten human life on a global scale. We will see natural occurrences such as volcanoes and earthquakes making significant impacts as time goes by, but they will be localised. Indeed, where there are global impacts they could be benign in the context of climate change, as some of the volcanic gases released into the atmosphere can have a cooling effect. But I’m prepared to accept e.g. that if the Cumbre Vieja volcano in the Canary Islands suffered a ‘theoretically possible’ massive collapse it could send a tsunami racing towards New York. Wall Street wouldn’t like that so naturally, neither would we.

As regards climate change, if the only hope for humanity is for us to spread to other worlds, then this is madness indeed. If we had such technology on any scale we would almost certainly have the technology to address climate change, i.e. the ‘geo-engineering’ option. But neither exist at the moment and we’re already learning how to live with climate change. I suspect that even if global temperatures rose in the next century by five degrees Earth would still have an atmosphere more conducive to human existence then that of Mars. Which is not to say that such a temperature rise here might not obliterate billions of human lives, but with existing technologies adaptation for some would be achievable for far less effort and cost than hopping on board a Virgin Galactic rocket to some unsustainable colony on a very hostile planet. What on earth is Ken thinking?

Should we exist for that long, then in about four billion years’ time it will be absolutely correct to look elsewhere for a new home, as the Sun begins its final trajectory to becoming a Red Dwarf or whatever, which will start with its massive expansion. I imagine by then humans will have been transmuted into strange artificial intelligence beings, possibly not even organic, and able to survive without oxygen. I don’t think we’ll recognise ourselves in a million years’ time, never mind four billion. Homo sapiens from just 250,000 years ago would have some difficulty identifying with us. Which has nothing to do with Brexit. We were connected to the European continental land mass in those days. Just thought I’d mention it.