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Humans Will Never Migrate To Exoplanets, Says Nobel Prize Winner Michel Mayor


"If we are talking about exoplanets, things should be clear: We will not migrate there.” That statement was made by Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist who was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics this year for discovering the first planet orbiting a sun-like star outside of our solar system. The laureate further adds as Live Science quotes, “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.”

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Mayor shared half of the Nobel Prize this year along with Didier Queloz for discovering the first exoplanet in October 1995. The duo detected a gas-giant similar to Jupiter which they named Pegasi b at the Haute-Provence Observatory in southern France. Since then, over 4,000 other exoplanets have been discovered in the Milky Way.

You might be wondering why would someone who pioneered the finding of the first-exoplanet not believe in colonizing an exoplanet one day. On the contrary, Mayor says he felt the need to kill all the statements that say, "OK, we will go to a livable planet if one day life is not possible on Earth."

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Here’s the reality: We’re messing up Earth and any far-out ideas of settling on another orb fascinates us. However, all of the known exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system are too far away to feasibly travel to with current technology. “We are talking about hundreds of millions of days using the means we have available today. Its completely crazy,” the 71-year-old astrophysicist 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.” 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.

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Cover Credit: Dhawal Bhanushali/ Mashable India