When the late engineer and designer Buckminster Fuller described us as being on spaceship Earth, he may have had a fundamental insight about our future. Earth is our only viable biosphere at the present time. And if we accept the premise that we are on spaceship Earth, we must acknowledge that we have hardly left the launch pad in terms of exploring what surrounds our spacecraft.
The universe, by contemporary measurements, extends 156 billion light years. The nearest galaxy is 2 million light years away while more distant galaxies are 10 billion or 12 billion light years away, too far for any known propulsion system. And communication, as we know it, would be prohibitively lengthy — not days, months, or years, but decades, centuries, and even longer between a sender of a message and its recipient. After all, it takes more than seven months for a rocket to reach Mars.
We have heard for years that to sustain life in space, we would require water. We assume that to manufacture in space, we would also require water. Well, space is full of surprises: It is snowing on Mars, according to NASA. Where there is snow, we can assume there is water.
Are there inhabitable planets beyond our solar system? A few years back, we figured ours alone had a sun (a star) around which planets orbited. Now we have identified hundreds of stars with orbiting planets. Astronomers think there may be millions or billions of stars with planets.