Searching for Planet B

Followed by the rise of mammals, the Chicxulub impact that concluded the dinosaur era with the force of 300 million nuclear explosions, the planet’s temperatures soared in a spooky way that the planet is likely to experience again and very soon. The planet’s prominent thinkers including the late Stephen Hawking, have predicted that Earth will shortly reach a knocking point and humans will need an insurance policy, an escape plan, or to be more precise—Planet B.


Earlier this year, a terrifying analysis was published in the science journal where scientists claimed that the volume of the ocean without oxygen has quadrupled in the past 50 years. However, the oxygen deprived swaths of the open seas have proliferated by the size of the Europe.

A research team led by the German oceanographer Sunke Schmidtko in 2017 calculated for the first time that the humans have drained 2% of the oxygen from the oceans since 1950.

Theatrically declining oxygen in the oceans is an introduction to many of the worst mass extinctions in the history of Earth. The most severe one happened 94 million years ago, known as Oceanic Anoxic Event 2.


Sune Nielsen, a geochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts said, “Basically the entire continental shelf went anoxic. There was no oxygen at the bottom of the shelf anywhere in the world.”

So should we despair and evacuate Earth and go somewhere else? Martin Rees answers this question in his new book, “On the Future” saying that notion is a dangerous delusion.

Rees says, “I know it’s been promoted by Elon Musk and by my late colleague Stephen Hawking, but I think there’s no Planet B. The world’s problems can’t be solved by escaping from the world. They’ve got to be tackled here.”

