How to leave planet Earth

As Donald Trump becomes Leader of the Free World, here are your best bets when it comes to escaping it.

A nighttime view of the Earth shared by the ESA's Tim Peake on 25 January, 2016

Tomorrow, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States of America, so how best to leave the planet and start civilisation anew?

Commercial space flight isn’t exactly widespread yet, but it’s never too soon to start making plans and assessing the options (hey, if Lance Bass can come close...), especially now the nuclear launch codes are in the hands of a man who can’t resist lashing out at a Saturday night variety show on Twitter in the middle of the night.

First up: you may already signed up for Amazon and Amazon Prime, but the company’s founder is eyeing a considerably more ambitious service for 2017 which is essentially Amazon Space.

Last year he announced plans for space travel that span hundreds of years, envisioning millions of humans living and working in space, with the Earth (or whatever’s left of it) being reserved only for “residential and light industrial” use.

“We may put humans in this vehicle in 2017,” Bezos told reporters at his Blue Origin rocket factory, though these would initially be test pilots, with paying customers not expected to start boarding for suborbital flight until 2018.

But what if that’s not far enough away from the Trump administration? Living on the Moon could be another option fairly soon.

NASA scientists said back in March that we could colonise the Moon by 2022 for just $10 billion, an incredibly small budget when it comes to the space-flight industry.

The US space agency might not be pressing ahead with this idea, but the European one is, with the ESA envisioning a “moon village” that would serve as a base for science, business, mining and even tourism and me open to people from various countries around the world.

"I think we should go first to the moon and then further on," Johann-Dietrich Wörner, director general of the ESA, said recently.

"A village is something where different people are gathering with different capabilities, different opportunities, and then they build a community.”

What does he mean by further on? That would be Mars, plans for which are a little further down the road still but very much underway.

Space X founder Elon Musk said in September that he hopes to get humans on Mars in six years, declaring that his sole purpose is to “make life interplanetary”. He’s not alone, with the Mars One project insistent on soon establishing a permanent human settlement on the planet. “We’re going to Mars. Come along!” it declares defiantly on its website.

Living off or at least spending some time off-Earth may be possible within most of our lifetimes then, though these projects will, of course, be susceptible to becoming plagued with the same toxic political systems we’ve established on Earth.