Someone show me a way to get out of here...

Stephen Hawking, one of the planet’s smarter hairless apes, has finally confirmed what many of us have long suspected- humanity, at heart, is just a “virus with shoes.”

HONG KONG - The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday.

Basically, we’ve screwed up our own planet so badly, things are only going to get worse. Time to jump ship now, before we melt to death or get wasted by a meteorite (admittedly, not our fault) or blow each other up with those magnificent doomsday machines that nobody ever tells us about, so really, how were we supposed to know going in that blowing up your country would result in the destruction of the species, hmmm? You could’ve text messaged it- “Yr pwned- the Doomsday Device is fully fuctional. No bombs, plz, or we all die. n00bs.” Would that have been so hard?

But hey, moving to outer space? It sounds like a pretty good idea to me. I want more rocket ships in my life, I want colonies on Mars, I want travel to other star systems- I want to meet alien babes and teach them the ways of earth love! I want to foil incredibly complicated A.I. with simple logic paradoxes! I want to find the monolith, ride the wormhole, and become the Star Baby. But what I really want is for romance to return to space exploration. If we never get off this rock, the human race will be nothing more than a footnote in the history of the galaxy, a cautionary tale that Wookies tell their young: “Grr ar wrhal! Ragh mwra, ar.”

One could argue that we’ve made our bed, and should now lay down and die in it like good little boys and girls, but I think that’s short-sighted and, honestly, sorta lazy. Judging something as large and complex as a species with simple moral tenets may work nicely in fiction (after all, we do so love to know we’re special, even if our specialness is nearly always connected to our “ability to destroy ourselves” and our “ability to dream”), but I’d like to think that we can learn from our mistakes. Our track record so far is distinctly virus-esque, but we’re trying to be better. Maybe a change of scenery will make things easier. Or else we’ll just evolve into stronger, more potent killing machines.

Oh, the suspense.