STOP PRESS: No life on other planets!

To be more specific, I mean 'no human life on other planets', but I wanted to get your attention. Given the stats, I'm sure there is something somewhere, in a galaxy far far away, tapping away at their version of a keyboard.

But I'm equally sure that we're never going to be able to get in touch, talk to each other or exchange views about the films of Ingmar Bergman. So we're not talking about other types of life on other planets - we're asking whether we humans can ever live our lives on other planets.

This question rattles around like a guest who won’t leave. Not a week goes by but some scientist comes up with a press release about how finding a few kilos of water in moon dust makes life off Earth possible. Are they joking?

Well, as their careers usually seem to revolve around the issue presumably not, but one wonders how they manage to tie their shoes and remember to put their trousers on before they leave the house, so stupid is this contention. We will never be able to live anywhere else but Earth – end of story.

Maybe a few intrepid travellers will set foot on another planet apart from the Moon some day in the future. Maybe a few more will go to the Moon and maybe even live there. But not people in any number, and not people who want to live like we do here on this wonderful blue globe.

It’s just not possible.

Think about it – where are we all? Look at a representation of the world at night, and it’s all lights around the fringes of the continents, with a few bits filled in. Most of it is singularly free of Us. We cling to a tiny portion of the planet, the only bit we can thrive in.

And that’s between sea level – wherever that is at the moment – and a few thousand metres in height, and between about 50 N, 50 S in latitude. We can’t live on the sea. We can’t live in the desert in any number. Most of us have to avoid living on the land where we grow food, to leave room for the food.

If the Earth was a plot of land that we owned, you’d find us all in just one little corner, unable to stray beyond the bit that suits us.

So we haven’t even adapted to living on most of the only planet that we live on. And yet some deluded souls merrily talk about extra-terrestrial life as though it were only a year or two away, once a few technical issues have been sorted out.

Now, academics devoid of a grain of practical sense are not news, neither are press releases designed to get column inches. But the conclusion is rather important – the conclusion being that Plan B for Outer Space doesn’t exist. We have to make Plan A work or we won’t be around.

The debate about global warming and climate change – is it happening? whose fault is it? what should we do about it? – has swung markedly of late. The so-called ‘deniers’ – who I prefer to call ‘ignorers’, as (a) it’s more accurate and (b) it stops me getting excited about stockings – have become more vocal and are recruiting popular opinion to their camp.

To declare my position, I’m sure that the climate is changing and that human activity is causing it. I also think there’s nothing we can do to stop this interaction – partly because we’ve been playing around with carbon for too long, and partly because we enjoy it too much to stop.

So I have tried to concentrate on accepting the worst. To be able to do this, I have to remember that my species contains a high proportion of idiots. This isn’t too difficult, as the evidence is not hard to find, and I’m a sucker for the rational approach. But it does make you wonder what the hell goes through their minds…

So my conclusion is that Plan A is sunk (as indeed thousands of homes will be, once the ice starts melting). This means that I also have to spend time thinking about what I’ll do when it all goes horribly wrong. My response so far has been to develop Plan C, which largely revolves around a tent, a hill, a crate of whisky and a rude woman. Not too sophisticated, but it uses only proven technology and it sounds a lot of fun.

Recruiting now.