Paul Little: If we fail here, how will Earth II fare?

Matthew McConaughey looks for a new world.

Interstellar, the sci-fi blockbuster starring Matthew McConaughey as a farmer turned galactic explorer, is one of those movies that has got everyone talking. Often during the movie itself. You may as well because it's just about impossible to hear what's being said for much of the time.

It's an ideas movie, jam-packed with conversation-starters about humanity and its place in the universe.

The film tells of a near future in which mankind has made the planet uninhabitable and is facing extinction. We've just about used up all the resources here and are running out of food.

But a few rock-jawed scientists and an avuncular Michael Caine have devised a way for us to zip through a wormhole, find a new home and move there, possibly in the form of never-really-explained embryos that will be used to repopulate Earth II.

This idea had been floating around for some time now, prompted by the apparent inevitability of our species' demise due to the fact that we've trashed the place. Many scientists believe it's unlikely that, aeons down the track, our survival as a species would require colonising another planet.

As though this would be a good thing.

But if we can't look after the planet we have - a relatively low-maintenance orb for which millions of years of evolution has made us a very good fit - why should we expect to be able to do the same to another one?

How long until we ruin that one as well with our inability to resist tampering with nature because, you know, we're humans, so we can do what we want.

Talk about entitled. If you give your child an expensive plaything and the little monkey breaks it, you don't replace it.

When it comes to our impact on the planet, we haven't exactly added value.

The more the extent of the environmental carnage we have perpetrated on our beautiful home becomes apparent, the more it becomes clear that humans aren't really that terrific after all.

Even when we can see what we're doing, we don't stop. We keep burning the fossil fuels, ignoring the reality of climate change, using up irreplaceable resources and allowing species on whom our survival may depend to become extinct.

There's a poignant section in scientist Riley Elliot's new book, Shark Man, in which he describes the human activities that have put the shark population with its 100 million year history at risk after just 20,000 years of human existence: climate change, overfishing, destruction of habitats, fossil fuel extraction, pollution and plastic gyres (islands of plastic waste formed in the oceans).

It's a catastrophic picture which is one small example of thousands that could be used to demonstrate the poor state of our stewardship of the planet.

"Rage against the dying of the light" intones Interstellar frequently in a banal use of Dylan Thomas' verse to describe the attitude humanity should take to the possibility of its demise. On the contrary. The human race should be allowed to go gently into that good night, drawing a veil over the failed evolutionary experiment called humanity.

Perhaps some other intelligent life form will prosper elsewhere, and do a better job on their home.

He sometimes drinks too much, occasionally decides not to turn up to work for dubious reasons, has relationship ups and downs that affect his performance, has been known to miss planes and likes to play cricket. In other words, Jesse Ryder is just like many other 30-year-old man. So, whatever his work prospects, he is not exceptional and I never ever want to hear about his personal life again.