• Question: At our global populations current growing rate and Earths natural resources are rapidly becoming depleted, poisoning our world as we know it, do you think we will have to leave Earth to survive, or do you believe that there could be another solution to our problems?

    Asked by rhooper821 to Ben, Dave, Ed, Sam, Susana on 19 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Susana Teixeira

      Susana Teixeira answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      Fantastic question, thanks 🙂
      I do not believe it is presently possible for us to leave Earth and live elsewhere for any reasonable amount of time. The good news is that the population growth for any species tends to be self-regulated. The bad news is what decreases our population are diseases, natural catastrophes, wars, or simply lack of food for everyone.
      It is not hopeless though. We can work on a solution, and the obvious one is to learn to use our resources much much better. This is in practice not as horribly difficult as we are often made to believe! It does however require a change in our ways of thinking (not just our politicians but everyone), and our habits, and that does take effort.

    • Photo: David Briggs

      David Briggs answered on 19 Jun 2013:

      Great question.

      You are right – if humans continue to reproduce and consume at the rate we are going, we are going to run out of food and other resources alarmingly soon.

      Leaving earth is one solution – but where (and how) would we go?

      Easier fixes include:

      • using the food we currently produce more wisely – current millions of people are starving, but in the rich countries we throw away an outrageous amount of food.

      • give people in developing countries access to proper birth control – so that their populations are better controlled and the governments can provide better education and healthcare for the children that they do have.

      I saw a talk by a scientist (and Nobel Prize winner) called John Sulston – he was asked to look at the problem you describe – you can see what he discovered and what he thought about this problem here

      http://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/people-planet/

      It’s a really interesting report, and has some great ideas about how we (humans) should proceed.

    • Photo: Sam Horrell

      Sam Horrell answered on 21 Jun 2013:

      I think eventually we will have to leave Earth eventually. For one thing, the sun will eventually explode. Not for a very long time though. But yes , we are doing a very good job of messing up our environment and we need to take more steps to correct that before just running off. Currently we don’t have the technology to even consider leaving Earth on any sort of permanent bases. A lot of this comes down to our space travel abilites. The nearest habbitable planet to Earth is a planet called Gliese 581 c and it is 20.3 light years away. Thats 119 trillion miles (190,000,000,000,000). We have no way of reaching that distance with our current technology. Maybe one day we will head out into the stars.

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