Three thousand habitable planets in the known universe, and I'm stuck on the only one without a way off. Talk about lousy odds. Two thousand nine hundred ninety nine planets give you the free and clear to mount up and leave whenever you want, and one lone planet locks you in for the duration. And I have to live on that one planet. Lousy, really lousy odds. To be fair, it's not like we're trapped here in lockdown because no one wants us to leave. We just don't have the tech to go anywhere yet. We send people into orbit all the time. But really, how much fun is that? Orbit. Talk about a waste of time and money. Orbiting a planet is like walking around the block, and when was the last time you walked around the block and got excited about it? That's what I'm talking about. If I could just leave this rock, though, that would be something. The sky would be the limit, literally, if I could just leave. As long as I could choose to go anywhere I wanted to go, I'd sign up for a one-way ticket today. I'd be the first, and I'd fly the farthest, and no one would need to know where I was headed until I got there. I might not even know my destination myself until I got to see all my choices. I'd just get the flashy part out of the way first, and worry about the details later. I might want to check out one of the other known planets. Whoever lives there must be pretty impressive if they've already mastered the art of leaving home. And they must be pretty smart for not coming anywhere near this place. We'd wine them and dine them and then we'd roll them, pick their pocket and steal all their secrets of spaceflight. No, they've done themselves a favor by not getting tangled up with us. We'd just drag them all down, like the slow kid in class anchoring the wrong end of the bell curve. Of course, it's possible no one's ever come here because they don't know about us. We try to get the word out, but space is big and cold and quiet and there's no way of really knowing if our message is getting out there until we can go listen to it ourselves. We could be whispering in the backyard while we think we're shouting from the roof. If I left, I could answer that question before I even decided where to go. Because I'd have to consider how welcome I'd be. If the rest of the galaxy-hoppers are out there actively avoiding us, they might not appreciate me showing up unannounced. It's one thing to be a party crasher and another thing entirely to be a planet crasher. We've been waiting for ages for someone to drop in for a visit, but even then I suspect not everyone around here would be happy if one day someone did. Maybe I could bypass completely all of the known worlds. There's bound to be plenty of unknown worlds out there too, and they couldn't all hate us. Some planet somewhere would welcome me like a hero, I know it. Maybe the fact that we only know about three thousand worlds is a sign we're not trying hard enough. Or maybe we've just fallen behind in our cataloging. There could be a pile of studies about dozens of planets just waiting to be entered into the known-planet database. I don't know exactly who monitors these things, but it probably takes a decent amount of work to find, track, confirm and catalog all known habitable planets. If I could leave, maybe I could find a new one all on my own.