It’s entirely possible that we will have our necessary second Earth one day. People like Stephen Hawking have argued that we need to start colonizing space within one hundred years to keep the species alive, and people like Elon Musk are actively working toward making it a reality. We may figure out how to launch one hundred thousand people at a time (the alignment of the planets allows for favorable departures only once every two years—according to Musk, the Mars colonial fleet would launch en masse, “kind of like Battlestar Galactica”), devise a way to manufacture rocket fuel on Mars, and solve the problem of building infrastructure necessary to sustain a colony, not to mention make a home in a place with temperatures of minus eighty degrees Fahrenheit (talk about a climate problem) and deadly radiation. If we can’t clean up our water and air, we can always manage on a planet without any…
Jonathan Safran Foer
We are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast
Penguin Books 2019