Humans need to figure out space travel, or we could be staring down the barrel of extinction, a theorist has claimed.

Astrophysicist Avi Loeb – the bloke who made his name by ranting about the 3I/ATLAS “space ship” – has claimed our current “single-planet civilisation” is one pandemic away from extinction. So, if a COVID-19-type virus should reemerge, we are done for…

On his blog, Avi wrote: “If humanity gets through the next century without a civilizational catastrophe, we will have the opportunity to become an interstellar species. A single-planet civilization is one pandemic away from extinction. An interstellar civilization is much more difficult to extinguish.

“Venturing to space provides the insurance policy that transforms humanity from a fragile transient into a potentially enduring entity. Settling on a nearby rock, like the Moon or Mars, is not optimal because of the harsh living conditions there. It is much better to construct a kilometer-scale, habitable space platform artificially.”

Avi hashed out a rough plan for how humans can get “interplanetary”, plugging his own projects in the process.

Avi wrote: “I am not naïve enough to imagine a political reality in which the 2.4 trillion dollars allocated each year to military budgets worldwide will be repurposed to space exploration out of an epiphany of our leaders.

“Instead, I am hoping that through my leadership of the Galileo Project or the UAP Science Advisory Council to the U.S. Government, we will discover technological artifacts from interstellar civilizations. Such a finding might change our priority and inspire us to imitate our cosmic neighbors. Witnessing a more accomplished sibling in our family of intelligent civilizations will encourage us to do better.”

Avi then suggested we “hitchhike” objects like 3I/ATLAS “which was moving at 58 kilometers per second — several times faster than our fastest interstellar probes so far.”

He added: “Such an object would bring us to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, in 22,000 years. To cross the Milky Way galaxy will take a billion years. Synthetic biology might allow us to design astronauts that survive long interstellar journeys and adapt to the harsh conditions of space.”

Read More: Humans must become interstellar species as we’re ‘one pandemic away from extinction’