More Things to Worry About . . . Later

There's a giant cloud of hydrogen gas speeding toward our Galaxy. It will hit in less than 40 million years!

This means you have a little time to start making your gas-cloud-impact plans, but it's never too soon to start.

What's likely to happen when it does arrive? A wave of new star formation -- lots of new, bright, massive stars forming and then blowing themselves to smithereens in supernova explosions only a few million years later. The whole region of the Milky Way Galaxy is likely to become uninhabitable as the supernovae flood it with energetic radiation.

Really, there's nothing to do but move to the other side of the Galaxy and wait for the storm to pass. That may take some time -- the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across, and the central region is probably uninhabitable. The fastest object launched by humans is only going a piddly 20 kilometers per second, or 1/15,000 the speed of light. That means that if we started right now it would take 1,500,000,000 years to reach safety. That's more time than we have. Going at interplanetary speeds we'd still be in the danger zone when the cloud hits.

Time to start working on better rockets.