This is why we can't have nice things...

Ok everybody, the clock is ticking. According to the world's smartest human and noted alien invasion fear monger, Steven Hawking, we've got just six hundred more years to figure out a way off this planet or we're doomed. Doomed!

"My God that's...wait, did you say six hundred years? Yeah, sure 
we'll get right on that. After we cure cancer, come up with cold fusion 
and invent time travel. Pfft...you know, we're not your monkeys."  

-Scientists

Miami is already seeing serious flooding
and it's only a matter of time before cities
 we actually care about suffer similar fates.

What specific threat will doom us? Well, despite Hawking's previous warnings about alerting hostile aliens to our presence with inane SETI transmissions, the actual architects of our doom will be, unsurprisingly, us. Hawking says climate change resulting from the last two and a half centuries of industrialization combined with a rapidly increasing population will make the Earth uninhabitable sometime in the 27th century. Rising sea levels alone are expected to have catastrophic consequences for coastal cities in fewer than 100 years.

He's made predictions like this before, giving us timeframes anywhere between a hundred years and a thousand years, which... kind of makes me wonder why he's not working on inventing a warp drive instead of sitting around calculating our destruction, but hey, he's the once in a generation super genius I guess...

"Duh, because it's like, way easier."

-Dr. Steven Hawking

Old people: "dicking over succeeding
generations since the dawn of time."

The bright side to all of this-which is simultaneously the root of the problem-is that be it a thousand years or in a hundred years, chances are that if you're reading this you're probably not going to be alive to see the worst consequences of climate change. Kids on the other hand are kind of screwed. I'm not saying that laying blame on any one particular group is getting us anywhere, but if I were to lay some blame, I'd lay it at the feet of old people. Not all old people of course, just the ones who vote for politicians who are openly hostile towards environmental issues knowing full well they'll never see the consequences.

If we can double deck a taco, surely
we can slip some surly bonds.

So what do we do? Steven Hawking says we should get packing. Sure, the galaxy is an endless, radiation-soaked void that wants to kill us, but he feels it may well be preferable to Earth someday. It's not going to be easy, I mean, unless the government has a secret Stargate program or something, colonizing other planets is going to take some doing. And that's cool, I mean, I'm all for pouring the collective creative energies of the human race into something that isn't a new iPhone app or a taco within a taco.

But isn't there is something, I don't know, a little defeatist about this whole thing? Are we really talking about abandoning the Earth rather than switching to solar power and riding bikes? Probably. We are, after all, sort of a path of least resistance species, which is kind of what got us into this mess in the first place.

Besides, can you imagine an entire planet full of people
being insufferable about how they bike to work?