The Discovery Enterprise: Evacuate Earth

On 2/12/13 9:56 PM, Alex Michael Bonnici wrote:

> Today on Discovery Enterprise we examine a nightmarish scenario namely the
> imminent countdown to the destruction of our home planet and our immediate
> necessity to evacuate the Earth. In Evacuate Earth, we envision a scenario
> in which a neutron star - tiny and incredibly dense- is flying straight
> toward our solar system. When it arrives in 75 years, it will pull our
> planets out of their orbits and shred the planet we live on.

OK, I was with them up to this point.

> Our only choice
> is band together, create a vast ship and a new drive to power it, and find a
> new planet in the closest possible solar system to escape to.

...And here it got silly. We don't need a planet to live on, and if we
did...

> After a journey of almost a century, the ship will deliver mankind's remnants to our
> new home, and the human story will begin again.

...we'd be screwed, because we can't (in the near future) build even a
small ship that could reach an extrasolar planet in under a century, let
alone take a significant fraction of humanity there.

Imminent destruction of our planet would be an impetus to give up
planetary chauvinism, not to find some other planet to cling to around
some other star.

(Alex, I'm not picking on you -- I know you didn't write this. And I
appreciate the pointer, despite the writers' lack of imagination.)