[coldtea]

>You do realise there are probably more habitable planets than there are human beings right now?

Which is neither here, nor there. Speed of light, and around thousands of required technologies missing, many of those huge leaps over what's available today, make their existance (assuming we even knew where they are) moot.

And even if they were known what? You'll carry 8-10 billion people there for trips taking 10s or 100s of years with light speed? Or we're talking about some "generation ship" with some handful of humanity selected for it?

And how would that help the rest?

We haven't send a man out of LEO for 50 years, might as well forget those "habitable planets".