Space Travel is Boring

As global warming, nuclear warfare, and MySpace all threaten to extinguish the majority of life on Earth, the search for a planet similar to our own somewhere else in the universe is desperately being carried out-because let's face it, between those three forces, our planet doesn't stand a chance. For the most part, the planets we find are either too hot, too cold, too atmosphereless, or too Zerg-infested to even consider living on, so when we find one that doesn't suffer from any of those problems, it's a big deal.

Which brings us to Gliese 581 c. Discovered recently on April 24, this planet is already drawing comparisons to our own, and scientists are looking into it further to see if it's a valid candidate as the next planet for us to ruin. The amazing thing is how similar it really is to Earth. It's year is 13 days long, one side of the planet is in eternal daylight while the other is in eternal night, and it may or may not have water at all. Sounds a lot like home-especially with a name like Gliese 581 c.

Mechanical name aside, it's nice to see that astronomers have moved away from plagiarizing Roman gods. Well, really, those were plagiarized from Greek gods anyway-I wonder if with modern copyright laws Greece could sue Italy for copyright infringement?-but still, it's not like anyone worships Jupiter anymore anyway, so why dwell on him? Personally, I've been waiting for them to name a planet just plain "God," but the closest they've come to that was naming a potential dwarf planet in our solar system "Easterbunny." Not that anyone cares about dwarf planets...But I digress.

The best thing about Gliese 581 c is that it's only 120 trillion miles away; about a 180,000,000,000,000 minute drive, depending on traffic, of course. So when do we leave? If we left tomorrow our great great great great grandchildren...would not make it at all, because it would take more than 342 million years to get there. Basically, we're never going there anyway, so what difference does it make if it's habitable?

So we're stuck here for now, battling nuclear MySpace warming on our own, but in the meantime, the search for a new home will continue. Scientists predict that we should have people living on Mars by 2030, and another exciting prediction says that we will have several colonies on the moon by the year 2000. And in 1984 our society will be doubleplusungood.

Maybe we should just stick to fortune cookies...our predictions tend to overestimate our own abilities. Considering we have no idea what the limits of the universe are, we don't have any one agreed-upon reason to populate the rest of the universe, and we haven't even found the meaning of life yet, it seems like little more than wishful thinking to say we'll be anywhere by any time. When it comes to space travel, we're basically where fifteenth century explorers were before reaching the realization that the Earth was round-they could randomly cross oceans and find land, but they had no clue what they were actually doing. Still, it seems like aside from blowing each other up, we don't have much better to do than find our way around the universe in search of life and resources that we can take advantage of. Space travel may be boring once you actually get in the ship and have to wait for years and years to get where you're going, but as long as you bring Starcraft, it shouldn't be so bad. Besides, between realizing and denying the mistakes we've made on this planet, finding a new one and starting over might be a good idea, and as far as we can tell, there isn't much else for our race to accomplish at the moment, anyway...except maybe invent a cell phone camera that doesn't suck.