Nobel Prize for Physics winner who discovered first exoplanet says humans will NEVER migrate to a world outside of our solar system, calling the idea ‘ completely crazy’
- Michael Mayor, along with his colleague, won the Nobel Prize for physics
- Mayor wants to ‘kill’ the idea of migrating to a planet outside of the solar system
- Said it would take humans too long travel to these worlds and is unrealistic
While many scientists search for exoplanets that could be inhabitable, one expert deems the idea ‘completely crazy’.
Swiss Nobel laureate Michael Mayor has said that humans will never migrate to a planet outside of Earth’s solar system because it would take ‘hundreds of millions of days’ to reach these distant worlds.
The Nobel Prize winner has instead suggested that Earth is still livable, as long as humans put forth the effort to take care of it.
Mayor, along with his colleague, was given the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the first exoplanet in 1995.
Scroll down for video
Swiss Nobel laureate Michel Mayor has said that humans will never migrate to a planet outside of Earth’s solar system because it would take ‘hundreds of millions of days’ to reach these distant worlds. An artists’s impression of 51 Pegasi which was discovered by Mayor and Queloz
‘If we are talking about exoplanets, things should be clear: we will not migrate there,’ Mayor told AFP near Madrid on the side-lines of a conference when asked about the possibility of humans moving to other planets.
‘These planets are much, much too far away.
‘Even in the very optimistic case of a livable planet that is not too far, say a few dozen light years, which is not a lot, it’s in the neighborhood, the time to go there is considerable.’
Although he, along with Didier Queloz, discovered the first exoplanet, Mayor believes it is important to ‘kill all the statements that say ‘OK, we will go to a livable planet if one day life is not possible on earth’.
Professor Michel Mayor (left) and Professor Didier Queloz worked together to discover the planet 51 Pegasi b in 1995, the first one to be discovered orbiting a star which isn’t the Milky Way’s sun. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics last week
‘It’s completely crazy,’ he added.
‘We are talking about hundreds of millions of days using the means we have available today. We must take care of our planet, it is very beautiful and still absolutely livable.’
51 Pegasi b is a gaseous ball similar to Jupiter and was discovered by the professors at the Haute-Provence Observatory in southern France in 1995.
‘We are talking about hundreds of millions of days using the means we have available today. We must take care of our planet, it is very beautiful and still absolutely livable,’ Mayor (pictured) explained
‘It was a very old question which was debated by philosophers: are there other worlds in the Universe,’ Mayor said.
‘We look for planets which are the closest (to us), which could resemble Earth. Together with my colleague we started this search for planets, we showed it was possible to study them.’
Mayor said it was up to the ‘next generation’ to answer the question of whether there is life on other planets.
‘We don’t know! The only way to do it is to develop techniques that would allow us to detect life at a distance,’ he said.
Since the discovery, over 4,000 exoplanets have since been found – 1,900 of which have been confirmed.
Professor Queloz and Professor Mayor’s discovery is now regarded as a pivotal moment in astronomy that changed our understanding of our place in the universe. No planet other than those in our own solar system had ever been found before.
