The 100 year countdown

"Sorry Dr. Hawking. I will only speak for myself on this one. I will take my chances on Terra Firma." 

Listen up Earthlings! I bring you news of great importance. And it comes from the smartest man on the planet. Our clock is ticking. Mother Earth is about to have something very nasty happen to her which would imperil all of us mouth breathers who happen to live here. Yes, the famed Steven Hawking has given us 100 years to vacate the premises - or else!

Dr. Hawking made that proclamation just like it was as easy to move from Minneapolis to St. Cloud. And we need to pull it off within the next 100 years. If we don't, bad things are in the offing. Asteroid hit, pollution, over crowding - the usual suspects. Similar to many years ago when Robert Malthus told us that population would outstrip our food supply. We were all going to die of starvation. That date came and went, and most of us still have Wheaties for breakfast.

Okay. Let's just for a second say we are going to take Hawking seriously. Where would we go? Well we did find a potential candidate last year. An "Earth like" planet. And it is right in our celestial "neighborhood". It is a planet which might be in the "habitable zone" and it circles Proxima Centauri - a scant 4 light years away. I am game - lets go!

A couple of very minor problems however. If we dug our space shuttles out of mothballs, each one could take maybe a dozen of us on this move. Plus (and this is the kicker), it would take about 150,000 years to get to Proxima Centauri. I am assuming that Dr. Hawking has taken all of this into his calculus. I guess we have some hard core inventing to do in the next century to figure out how to move over 7 billion people faster than the speed of light somewhere else in the galaxy.

One more thing about Dr. Hawking. I have read he is not in the faith. Like many scientists, his profession is his faith. People of God however, believe this planet, our planet, was created for us to dwell on. Not saying when the time is right in our future we can't explore the heavens - but this is where we live.

I read an article a few years ago talking about how our planet is one in a million. There are so many things which are "right" about Earth, perfect for us to thrive here. The tilt, the distance from the sun, the distance from the Moon, the speed at which our core rotates. The article went on and on. It was almost as if this planet was made for us. Funny how that works out.

Sorry Dr. Hawking. I will only speak for myself on this one. I will take my chances on Terra Firma. When I got up this morning and went out to retrieve the paper, the sun was coming up, the birds were singing, and the grass was greening. So why sir, would we ever want to leave this place? This big blue marble is just fine for me, thank you.