Wonderful Planet

At the start of the 22nd century, humanity left Earth for the stars.

The enormous ecological and climatic devastation that had characterised the last 100 years had led to a world barren
and inhospitable; we had used up Earth entirely.

Rapid melting of ice caused the seas to rise, swallowing cities whole.

Deforestation ravaged forests around the globe, causing widespread destruction and loss of life.

All the while, we continued to burn the fossil fuels we knew to be poisoning us, and thus created a world no longer fit for our survival.

And so we set our sights beyond Earth’s horizons to a new world, a place to begin again on a planet as yet untouched.

But where are we going?

What are our chances of finding the elusive planet B, an Earth-like world ready and waiting to welcome
and shelter humanity from the chaos we created on the planet that brought us into being?

We built powerful astronomical telescopes to search the skies for planets resembling our own,
and very quickly found hundreds of Earth twins orbiting distant stars.

Our home was not so unique after all. The universe is full of Earths!

This futuristic dream-like scenario is being sold to us as a real scientific possibility,
with billionaires planning to move humanity to Mars in the near future.

For decades, children have grown up with the daring movie adventures of intergalactic explorers
and the untold habitable worlds they find.

Many of the highest-grossing films are set on fictional planets, with paid advisors keeping the science ‘realistic’.

At the same time, narratives of humans trying to survive on a post-apocalyptic Earth have also become mainstream.

Source: AEON