Question: When will we be able to leave earth?Could we adapt to another enviroment?

Georgia Campbell answered on 10 Jun 2011:

I’m not sure when people will be able to leave Earth, though space research seems to progress very quickly,so maybe it will technically be possible in the near future!

I think that for people to live somewhere that wasn’t Earth would be even trickier than getting there though. We would have to find a planet with a very similar atmosphere to our own so we could breathe properly. The soil would have to be a lot like ours too, so we could grow food – for crops us to eat, and for food for animals. Maybe we could create an artificial environment to live in on another planet?

To adapt to somewhere new, we’d have to be there a very long time – thousands of years even! Adaptation happens by the process of evolution, where tiny changes occur (and are passed on) with each generation of a family. This only happens with ‘selective pressure’ though – a change has to make it more likely for the being to survive, and pass on the DNA that codes for the adaptation that gave them that advantage. It takes a very long time for these changes to spread through a population.

Even if this happens, that adaptations we would make would be very small at first – we would have to move to an environment that was similar to ours to survive in thefirst place, so we wouldn’t have to adapt very much in order to make the most of the new environment.

Hope that answers your question – that was a hard one!