It's up there, visible to us only as a bright, distant speck of light.
We spend billions of dollars (well, not we, per se, but multinationals and other people who generally have a lot of money) to launch satellites into space so we Incredibly Busy and Important People can be assured we will definitely be able to watch that stupid cat video on the bus to work without getting that annoying little spinning dial thingy that teases us ("Instead of loading the page I'm gonna stop spinning ANY GODDAMN SECOND you rube, just you wait...you know what that means, don't you? It means I have given up trying to load that video because it's a video of a dumb cat getting spooked by a vacuum cleaner. I'll have you turning that damn cell phone off and back on again in disgust if it's the last thing I do"), or so some guy can watch baseball and football via split screen while only paying seventy bucks a month and with the assurance he will never miss an episode of the Big Bang Theory.
We don't spend these billions exploring space, reaching brave new heights of exploration like 21st Century Magellans and Captain Cooks. No. We most certainly do not.
Okay, granted it's hard to do ANYTHING while in space. Just brushing your teeth requires careful planning. But we seem to have given up on the ideas presented to us in 60's sci fi. And when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon I doubt he pictured the world quite the way it is now, in 2016, which according to Robert Zemeckis should see us in flying cars and hovering about on skateboards.
I think it'll be robots who take over the Earth and ramp up space exploration. Face it, even if we did find another planet capable of supporting life, we'd never be able to colonise it. Light speed, warp drives, and cryogenic containment pods that can keep us alive and not ageing a day are elements of science fiction that will probably never be able to drop the word 'fiction' from their description. So even if we were to find that fabled land across the galaxies, by the time we got there we'd be very, very old or very, very dead. Forget it, folks.
So once robots take over (I'm picturing Terminator, but with less violence and way less Christian Bale), time will become irrelevant. They'll arrive on Earth 2.0 looking, acting, feeling and even smelling exactly the way they did when they left Earth.
We already have phones that are smarter than most of us. Mark my words, it's just a matter of time.
