The winner of the Nobel Prize in Astrophysics believes that humanity should focus on solving problems on planet Earth, rather than searching for life on another planet.
Michel Mayor and his colleague, at the same time the recipient of this prestigious award, Didier Queloz, discovered in 1995 the first exoplanet that has a similar potential for the development of life on Earth.
They calculated that it had its star at the same distance as Earth, and that it most likely had water, reports KosovaPress.
Since then, our knowledge of exoplanets has grown dramatically. Instruments such as NASA's TESS satellite have helped confirm more than 4,000 known exoplanets.
But Mayor says pinning our hopes on a world beyond our solar system is a "stupid idea" as we have to solve the problems on Earth first.
"If we are talking about exoplanets, things should be clear: we are not going to migrate there. These planets are very far away," he told AFP.
He also says that even in a very optimistic case, a planet that is not too far away, say a few tens of light years away, is also not a possibility.
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The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded to Peebles, Mayor and Queloz for cosmological radiation
"We're talking about hundreds of millions of days using the resources we have today," he said, adding that people need to take care of our planet.
Climate change is accelerating, with carbon dioxide levels rising, sea levels rising and glaciers melting faster than ever, experts warn. This opinion comes from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that participated in the UN Summit on Climate Change.
The organization has released a report showing climate change and its impacts over the past five years (2015 to 2019). The world has warmed by 1.1 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times and by 0.2 degrees Celsius since the previous period, that is, from the five-year measurement from 2011 to 2015.
