Nobel Prize for Physics winner says humans will never migrate to another planet
While many scientists search for exoplanets that could be inhabitable, one expert deems the idea ' completely crazy.'
Swiss Nobel laure ate Michel Mayor has said that humans will never migrate to a planet outside of Earth's solar system because it would take ' hundreds of millions of days' to reach these distant worlds.
The Nobel Prize winner has instead suggested that Earth is still livable, as long as humans put forth the effort to take care of it.
Mayor, along with his colleague, was given the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the first exoplanet in 1995.
"If we are talking about exoplanets, things should be clear: we will not migrate there," Mayor told AFP near Madrid on the side- lines of a conference 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."
Although he, along with Didier Queloz, discovered the first e xoplanet, Mayor believes it is important to 'kill all the statements that say ' OK, we will go to a livable planet if one day life is not possible on earth'.
"It's completely crazy," 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 livable."
51 Pegasi b is a gaseous ball similar to Jupiter and was discovered by the professors at the Haute-Provence Observatory in southern France in 1995.
"It was a very old question which was debated by philosophers: are there other worlds in the Universe," Mayor said.
"We look for planets which are the closest ( to us), which could resemble Ear t h . Together with my colleague we started this search for planets, we showed it was possible to study them."
Mayor said it was up to the 'next generation' to answer the question of whether there is life on other planets.
"We don't know! The only way to do it is to develop techniques that would allow us to detect life at a distance," he said.