From our first steps through the African savannah 2 million years ago, right up until we started to make our way into the stratosphere, we humans never truly envisaged that our destiny could lie elsewhere than on Earth. The idea that we could one day be meant to leave the planet where we were born was just not conceivable by most people in the past. Their imagination was peopled by angels, demons or spirits, not by aliens and space battles. For them, the celestial heavens remained a magnificent backdrop thought up by God or competing divinities, and absolutely nothing in any antique cosmogony suggests that a possible departure from Earth could one day be humanity's greatest adventure. Medieval man would have had a spiritual breakdown if he had been invited to step aboard a spaceship and take a voyage to colonize another star system.

Yet things have changed with space conquest. As we gradually discover the existence of exoplanets suited to our wildest dreams, the possibility of a departure from Earth sounds increasingly familiar and exciting. Indeed, as inaccessible as this may seem, at least for the decades to come, the likelihood of interstellar travel should no longer be viewed, given the amazing technological progress we are witnessing every single day, as an unrealistic dream. After years of relative indifference following the exploits of the Apollo missions, space exploration has obviously caught the public's imagination once again, and we’re shyly beginning to admit that traveling to the most lavish and furthest-flung reaches of the universe could one day come true.

However, this enthusiasm may well hide a disturbing existential question, with potentially dramatic consequences: what if humankind is in fact bored with life on Earth?

If someone had presented me with that question during a conversation, I would have been slightly troubled, but this only on an intellectual level. But if this awareness of a boring world had come to me through the experience of everyday trials and tribulations, then I would have devoted my full attention to it. This, of course, is exactly what happened. A few years ago, I was depressed at work, but I could not distinguish between a simple “bore-out” or disillusionment concerning my professional life, which can affect anyone, and a more tenacious ennui, revealed in a disappointing everyday life but reaching to the very essence of my entire human existence.