“Catastrophic climate change forces humanity to send astronauts through a wormhole to find new, unfucked agricultural resources for Earthlings.” That’s the premise for Christopher Nolan’s (Memento, Batman Begins) 2014 film Interstellar. It’s exciting to imagine movie audiences seriously starting to think about the potential for exploring cosmic opportunities outside of Earth.

Only problem is…we ain’t found no wormhole yet. And space is big. So big that just getting to our Sun’s nearest star, as fast as humans can make spacecraft go, would take 50,000 years. As Neil deGrasse Tyson so elegantly put it, “The distances of space are incommensurate with the longevity of our biological form.” This probably means we’ll need an interim strategy before colonizing a brand new star system.

Wormhole or no, it’d be nice to start working on an exit strategy before we’re staring extinction directly in the face.

“Interstellar” premieres in November.