ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY: Post-apocalyptic survival: your guide to clinging to life

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Astrophysicist Dr Eamonn Kerins, from the UK-based Jodrell Bank Centre, University of Manchester, is equally ambitious about space exploration and settlement. Highlighting how researchers have discovered thousands of exoplanetary systems in the last two decades, he points to a new raft of satellites, spacecraft and very large telescopes, that will track down yet more exo-planets.

“Given missions such as Plato and TESS, we’re going to go from knowing about 4,000 planets to up to 40,000 in the next 40 years,” he says. “If we’re thinking about having to leave our planet, then my field can pinpoint planets that are about the right distance from the host [star] and about the right size to give the kind of gravity we are used to.

“We can probe planet atmospheres, and once our instrument sensitivities are up to it we will also be able to say if that planet is a good candidate for Earth 2,” he adds...