Astrophysicist Michel Mayor, who recently won a Nobel Prize for his work related to detecting exoplanets, has crushed the dream of anyone expecting that someday humans will be able to colonize these planets.
According to the astrophysicist, humans will never be able to migrate to a planet outside of Earth's solar system and the reason is that it would be too long to get there. "If we are talking about exoplanets, things should be clear: we will not migrate there," " Mayor told Agence France-Presse.
He added: "Even in the very optimistic case of a livable planet that is not too far, say a few dozen light-years... the time to go there is considerable. 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 liveable."
He shared this statement because he said that he felt that he needs to "kill all the statements that say 'OK, we will go to a liveable planet if one day life is not possible on earth'." Not only that he discards the whole idea of it and calls it "completely crazy." According to Mayor, we should instead "take care of our planet" and mentioned that It is very beautiful and still liveable.
In October 1995, Mayor and Didier Queloz used custom-made instruments at their observatory and discovered a planet outside the Earth's solar system. At that time, Mayor was a professor at the Geneva University, whereas Queloz was his doctorate student.
Their discovery started a revolution in astronomy and since that time over 4,000 exoplanets have been found in our home galaxy."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 Earth. Together with my colleague we started this search for planets, we showed it was possible to study them."
