© Karl Tate / Life's Little Mysteries
Doomsday escape scenario.
Doomsday escape scenario.
Although "doomsday" is quite unlikely from one day to the next, a humanity-exterminating event could strike at any moment. It could happen suddenly in the form of a giant, non-catalogued asteroid, or more slowly through the spread of a mutated or never-before-encountered monster virus.
Rest assured, however, that doomsday will not be a foretold supernatural event falling on a pre-selected, arbitrary date, such as tomorrow, May 21, 2011, despite the claims of a fringe Christian broadcaster in California. (Ditto for the 2012 Mayan calendar hoopla.)
But should doomsday come, and the planet were to become uninhabitable, what might humanity do to survive?
In the short term, with the end of days nigh, the outlook is bleak. Although the concept of a last-resort, fleeing-for-the-stars planetary evacuation has been given thought, it has not received any dedicated action.
Gaining knowledge of how to preserve our civilization down the eons has been a lesser-cited rationale for further advancing human spaceflight abilities. As theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking put it to Big Think last year, "our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space."
