Scientists have announced that a new rock floating through space, Gliese 581 c may be a habitable planet. If this is the case, we will need to start thinking about ways to get there. Hell, we’ve been thinking about it as a species for years but we need to put aside social and political differences and really work toward finding a way to migrate to a new habitable planet. We don’t even need to live there really. We just need to be able to grow food on the planet until we find more planets capable of sustaining life.

Once we discover a planet capable of supporting farming, we can send our robo-workers to do do all the heavy lifting and humans will make future livings as Teamsters. Only we’ll all be piloting space ships delivering foodstuffs and repair parts back and forth. Ice Pirates anyone? It may have been an entertaining farce in 1984, but if we as the human race want to go out with a bang, not a whimper, then we really need to start making real progress into deep-space exploration and migration.

We need inter-galactic spaceships capable of traversing millions of miles a la Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek.

Think of it as science fiction if you must…but things change. Sometimes, fantastic stories that were once considered fiction lead to discovery.