According to Swiss Nobel laureate Michel Mayor, humans will never relocate
to a planet outside of our solar system because it would take too long to
get there.
Mayor and his colleague Didier Queloz received the Nobel Prize in Physics
on Tuesday for their work on improving methods for locating so-called
exoplanets.
When questioned about the potential of people migrating to other planets,
Mayor told AFP in Madrid on the sidelines of a conference, "If we are
talking about exoplanets, things should be clear: we will not migrate
there."
These worlds are way, way out in space. The time to get there is
significant, even in the extremely optimistic assumption of a living planet
that is nearby—say, a few dozen light years away, which is not far at
all.
"With the tools we have at our disposal now, we're talking about hundreds
of millions of days. Our planet has to be protected since it is lovely and
yet completely habitable.
According to the 77-year-old, he felt the urge to "kill all the statements
that say 'OK, we will go to a liveable planet if one day life is not
possible on earth'."
It's really ridiculous, he continued.
The discovery of a planet outside of our solar system by Mayor and Queloz
in October 1995 was made possible by the use of specialized equipment at
their observatory in southern France.
When they discovered the discovery that sparked an astronomical revolution,
Mayor was a professor at Geneva University and Queloz was his doctoral
student. Since then, our own galaxy has seen the discovery of nearly 4,000
exoplanets.
Are there other worlds in the universe? is a very old issue that
philosophers have argued about, according to Mayor.
We search for planets that are the nearest to us and could resemble Earth.
My colleague and I initiated the hunt for planets and demonstrated that it
was feasible to examine them.
The "next generation" must decide whether or not there is life on other
planets, according to Mayor.
"We have no idea! The only way to achieve it, he argued, is to create
methods that would enable us to find life at a distance.
