Inventing A More Interesting World

THE MOST RECENT hit science fiction movie, "Interstellar", posits a dying earth, and a grand plan to travel across the galaxy through wormholes to other planets, and to terraform them in order to construct a new earth, replacing the old one. Exciting stuff, requiring only that a little common sense be ignored. Wormholes are temporary, they come and go capriciously, according to theory, and, according to theory, traveling through one and across vast distances of space causes the hole to collapse en route. But aside from that, the question arises: assuming that humanity has the ability to travel across the galaxy and restructure planets to make them humanly habitable, wouldn't it be easier to merely reconstruct the earth we already have, or to travel a mere fifty million miles, and terraform Mars? Never let common sense get in the way of a good flick. After all, we live in a culture largely devoid of simple, common sense, popular science. Even as we speak, thousands of planets are being discovered orbiting other stars, a small car is roving around the surface of Mars giving us vast amounts of data and starkly beautiful photos, and we think we finally have the answer to the question of whether the universe is a one time event, or a recycling one. It would seem to be the former. None of this is ever widely discussed among the science laity. A large number of us are much more interested in UFO abduction, beings from Andromeda, and messages channeled from somebody near the star Sirius. It seems that no matter how interesting the real world is, we are not content with it, and are eternally impelled to invent a more interesting one.