Scientists are exploiting one of Einstein's predictions to find Earth-like planets around other stars–planets that might even support Earth-like life. Let the evacuation plans begin!

Are you willing to live in a tiny cubby without access to the great outdoors, the local Barnes & Noble, or ESPN?

Take a scenic flight over the summit of Mount Vesuvius in Italy, and the view below is chilling. A dense patchwork of urban sprawl from the nearby city of Naples laps at the flanks of one of the most violent volcanoes on Earth. Since A.D. 79, when Vesuvius exploded with little warning and entombed Pompeii and its 3,000 townsfolk under 15 feet of scalding ash, the volcano has erupted at least 30 times.

Humans are fleeting visitors on this roiling rock in the universe. On December 26, 2004, at 58 minutes and 49 seconds past midnight GMT, Mother Earth reacquainted us with this immutable fact. For millions of years, a creeping slab of Earth’s crust—the India Plate—had been grinding headlong into a similarly stubborn chunk of rock called the Burma Plate. Like a clash of Brobdingnagian armies, millennia of pent-up kinetic energy suddenly exploded from the seabed, a scant 100 miles from Sumatra, Indonesia.