Slashdot Mirror
Hawking Says Humans Must Go Into Space
neutralino writes "The Associated Press reports that astrophysicist Stephen Hawking wants humans to establish colonies in space in order to ensure the survival of the human race. At a news conference in Hong Kong, Hawking said that 'It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species. Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.'"
We'd just start creating things that can wipe out the galaxy.
Why do we have to start with humans in space, isn't it a much better idea to start making colonies with animals?
Those can provide us with a LOT of experience at a lesser risk. If animals die in space (or maybe even bacteria) people will probably make a small fuzz but forget it quickly. If humans die in space it could mean the end of the space project.
Once we establish a solid base, and knowledge about building a new colonie we can send humans...??
My blog: http://www.redcode.nl
Right. So we don't need to backup data, have spare tires, insurance of any kind or disaster recovery plans. Because, after all, those are just measures that ignore the problems.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
You hear that "whooshing" sound? That's the whole idea, going right over your head.
Hawking isn't saying "Earth's toast, let's go screw someplace else up." He is saying that we don't want to put all our eggs in one basket. Let's have a backup Earth somewhere, so that if the huge meteor hits, or global warming drowns us all, or some virus comes along and kills us all, at least some of humanity will survive.
We can try to fix things that we can here on Earth, but we don't control the rest of the solar system, or viruses, or massive volcanoes, or [your favorite disaster here].
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
Previous human migrations were driven by less, ahh, altruistic motivations. Survival, distaste for the status quo, better living, things like that.
And what part of wanting your offspring (or theirs, etc) to actually live and carry on your culture is "altruistic?" For most of us, that's exactly the opposite. It's completely, rationally seflish. We want what we build to last and improve. And you don't build large systems without redundancy, that's all. And the thirst for some adventure and a challenge is hardly "altruism." You want altruism? That would be killing yourself to free up some resources for somebody else so they don't have to work as hard. Except, a fat lot of good that does if a giant meteor smacks into your resources.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
> it's creating a limited backup.
Bollocks. Space offers us an unlimited future. As soon as anyone can exist in space, we have that limited backup (sort of). As soon as we can build, garden, live and breed in space, then we have that unlimited future.
The problems people cite as reasons not to explore have always been with us, read Tacitus, Sun Tzu or the Hammurabi column for proof. The "Fix us first" crowd wants Utopia on Earth. There is no such thing, unless you can stamp out human nature. If their arguments won out, we'd still be clubbing antelope in Africa, "Oh, no, don't walk north, you might stub your toe."
Space is our future. Lead, follow or get out of the way. The meek shall inherit the Earth, the rest of us are going to the stars. Earth is the cradle of civilization, but one cannot live in a cradle forever . Ad Astra, etc, etc.
Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
Season 1, Episode 4: Infection http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/countries/us/guide/0 04.html
Reporter: "After all that you've just gone through, I have to ask you the same question a lot of people back home are asking about space these days. Is it worth it? Should we just pull back, forget the whole thing as a bad idea, and take care of our own problems, at home?"
Sinclair: "No. We have to stay here, and there's a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics - and you'll get ten different answers. But there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on: whether it happens in a hundred years, or a thousand years, or a million years, eventually our sun will grow cold, and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us, it'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-tsu, Einstein, Maruputo, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes - all of this. All of this was for nothing, unless we go to the stars."
People will stay on Earth, and try to fix it's problems, and other people will go to various colonies and start fresh, and perhaps differently there. That way if any one spot gets whacked by a huge rock, or any other disaster you care to think of, not all of us will be killed. There will be some left somewhere to continue the species.
If forums teach us anything, it is that logic and critical thinking should be required courses in the public schools.
But why should an individual care about whether or not the drama of humanity continues? For instance, if we permit let every person who currently lives to live out a natural and good life, and somehow do so without creating any new people, would that be acceptable?
Because a hardwired, nihilistic, self-destructive (self, including species as self) outlook wouldn't have allowed us to get this far, genetically. The very traits that allow us to nurture offspring that take years to develop simply require us to look at the big picture, and to cherish the future. And to make that more workable, we develop cultures that are built around generational continuity and hope. Anything less than that is a sort of cultural insanity and requires a truly loony willing suspension of disbelief (see 70-virgins-if-I-blow-myself-up-in-a-Zbarro, childish "rapture" fantasies, and related examples).
We're generally wired to get a warm and fuzzy feeling from passing along our culture and protecting our little broods. Remove that, and you're not going to have people, as a whole, living out a "good" life.
Reaching out to or making other livable environments (as in, off-world) is just as rational as clearing the bear out of the cave you need to shelter your tribe. Just as rational as using that bear's hide to keep your little naked ape-like offspring warm through the ice age. It's silly to ask if we "deserve" to survive... survival is deserved by rationally taking advantage of the fact that we exist at all. There is no meaning in anything, otherwise. Since we make the meaning in our lives, we decide if we're worth surving or not. The universe doesn't give a crap one way or the other.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
They (westerners) haven't the slightest hint of how to be happy. They're always unsatisfied. They need more and more, and they live for the future.
Good. It's called "drive." It fuels things like space exploration. Unlike our navel-contemplating planet co-squatters in the East, our "God" is outside us, above us, and we're forever (hopefully forever) building towers and spaceships to meet Him. Works for me, just fine.
It's the itchy, unsatisfied sacroliliac of some impotent balding outside-looking 40ish engineer today that will -- again, hopefully -- lead to my daughter finding herself working on Mars thirty years from now.
"Woot!" to Professor Hawking, sez I.
"Woot!" to his nurse, too...
Of course a few hundred years ago, I would have been born, lived and died within a 100 mile radius. Probably not have been able to read or even be exposed to an idea that wasn't promoted by the Church or my Lord. Unless I was lucky enough to get an apprenticeship with a local artisan, I would likely have no other option but to do whatever my father and his father before him did. Subsistance agriculture. I would then marry a woman who also was trapped in the same little bubble as I was and breed up some more workers for the farm.
I'd be too damn busy and tired to notice that I was miserable, or even wonder if there was any other way to be.
I'll take my slot in the rat race, thank-you-very-much.
People keep saying that the human race is fundamentally evil, is doomed to annihilate itself, all those lovely things, and yet the human race has thrived and advanced so far in such a short amount of time (even just one hundred years ago, things like cathode ray tubes, plastics, and any number of modern-day polymers were unthinkable). The very fact that people are aware of the problems we as a species have created means that humanity, at its very core, is not entirely as bad as some of its members make it out to be. It's inevitable, however, that something will happen someday that will threaten the existence of mankind - It happened with the dinosaurs, unless you're one of those people who believe the Earth is 4,000 years old.
Maybe it isn't feasible to go to space now, but if we, as a species, come together to pool our resources to create interstellar travel or indeed any kind of feasible, long-term space flight, we could just pull it off in a few generations. Things like cancer research, AIDS research, and research into creating more efficient and environmentally-friendly ways of life would all continue on while the project is underway; The world wouldn't stand still for a few centuries while such a project is put in motion. In fact, it could be considered as top priority in the research required for such a thing, since in order for a colony to be sustainable, it must have a higher standard of health than we've ever known, and it must be composed almost entirely of renewable resources. It would require a renewable source of food, a renewable power source, renewable water sources, a renewable source of oxygen, a renewable crew (both robotic and human), military/policing forces, skilled workers, a large surplus of parts and materials to fashion new parts, sufficient fuel to reach its projected destination (preferably with excess), medical services, entertainment services, and so on. It would have to be, in and of itself, capable of functioning as a country on Earth might, with the added disadvantage of the inability to perform trade (and so requiring a mass surplus of supplies).
I think Hawking is one of the greatest people of our time, and I also think that he's dead-on about this particular issue. However, I also think that wider-scale marine colonization would probably be a better place to start this venture than the Moon or Mars. If we can successfully live day-to-day life in an underwater environment for extended periods of time, with high degrees of external pressure, then it's entirely possible to live in space, where the opposite is true. The preparations for such space travel are right here on Earth; We just need to use it, and I'm sure the extra habitable space wouldn't go unused.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Yeah... too bad things like "money" and "power" are more important. We can't seem to do anything without money being involved and no one is willing to give up all they have in order to change the way things are done.
Maybe I'm just a Star Trek geek (and if I am, not I'm not a particularly good one... I haven't memorized any episodes or anything like that and it was only yesterday that I got the joke of Data telling Scotty, "...it is... green...") but the idea of a world where things like money are obsolete? A simply amazing thing. There are people like that from time to time such as Nikola Tesla... he wanted to give the world free power, but J.P.Morgan put a stop to that pretty quickly. There's always someone ready to shamelessly stand in the way of mankind to make a buck.
Given that we seem bent on such things as placing the value of a dollar above the hunger of our neighbors, do we really deserve to be able to infest the rest of the universe?
the same factors that lead to it destroying the Earth and/or human life thereon might well lead to the same outcome in our planetary colonies.
yes, but not all at the same time. think of life on a larger scale. instead of there being hundreds of countries, there are hundreds of colonies. some may destroy themselves. some won't. new ones will be founded. no problem.
Great Post.
I'm sick to death of people romanticizing the past. Far from being an idyllic life full of good health and hearty laughs, it was, for the average person, a grim and miserable existence by modern standards. Poor health and toothaches were the norm, mixed with a variety of concerns about how this season's dry weather was going to allow the family to survive the winter.
We have it pretty good. Our concerns and stresses about getting ahead in the rat race are a damned sight more tolerable than last century's stresses about simply staying alive.
...but YANAPTMCI (you are not a physicist, though my cousin is) - he works at Brookhaven, and takes occasional duty on the "big red button", as in, "crap! there's something wrong! push the big red button to shut it down!"
You're afraid of something hundreds of thousands of times less dangerous to your health than a dozen risks you blithely take every day, such as walking down the street, drinking tap water, eating cooked meat, flying on a commercial jet, etc.
Your comment reminded me of my grandmother, who became alarmed when she heard there was an "electron gun" in her television. I mean really, should we listen to you? You can't even spell "dissipate."
I liked your comment but /. is an impossible audience for that kind of thinking. You're mainly talking to American technologists who believe that a techno-fix exists for all problems. They will be the last people in the world to see that this isn't true and will always dump on the messenger for it.
Personally I was brought up on sci-fi stories and used to think that we would colonise the stars someday. I no longer think this is possible. Even a moonbase I regard as highly unlikely and the idea of living on Mars for me belongs to 1950's style sci-fi. To me, sadly, the future of mankind looks more like NOLA post-Katrina than Star Trek. But every culture and civilisation has it's fantasies and dreams and these are ours.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Yes, well, I hope you recognize that for most people on this earth, nothing has changed. Lucky us.
// This is not a sig.
I'd like to hear your explanation of that statement. The Federation is likely a government unlike one we have ever seen before, but is probably closer to a republic democracy than anything else. The president and the council of the federation seem to be elected by some means. Starfleet is the military and scientific branch of the Federation (like rolling the marines and NASA into one branch). Starfleet is definately under the control of the Federation, so much so that Starfleet has even attempted a coup on ocasion (http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/DS9/ episode/68250.html). We've seen federation life through a very limited perspective, through life on Starfleet vessels and stations. Trying to understand the intricacies of federation politics from watching Star Trek episodes would be like an alien trying to understand the US government by watching "JAG".
I've never quite understood the obsession with "continuing" the human race. While I am certainly concerned with the long-term impacts of what humans do,thus a concern for environmental impacts, population control, and the conditions under which my fellow people exist under, I one could care less if humanity survived for a million more years or not. I'm not going to be there, and I have little concern about whether or not our "civilization" still exists. It's this ridiculous sentimental attachment to a non-existant overarching concept, in whatever forms it takes (racial prejudice, nationalism, religious fervor) that leads to the stupid wars and completely preventable human created disasters. As far the ones outside of our control, well, sitting around worrying about a meteorite striking seems like a lot of paranoia.
The problem with all kinds of "berzerker" "grey goo" type stories is that they ignore the thermodynamics of evolution. All over the Earth, right now, as we read slashdot, there are a trillion different forms of "grey goo" trying like hell to take over the earth and eat every last ounce of available energy. They are called plants, animals, fungus and bacteria. All of these things, genetically speaking, would like NOTHING beter than to cover the entire world with copies of itself and devour *everything*.
But, for some reason, that doesn't happen...
Every wondered WHY something was more or less fit than something else? It simply has to do with resource efficiency. You can't just go gung-ho in one single direction, such as non-stop reproduction, and expect to be successful... otherwise there would be organisms NOW that don't stop reproducing to take a breath. If the evolutionary system doedn't spend teh energy to balance the forces, focusing in required measure on health, defense, resource allocation and rationing, it will be quickly over taken by an organism that does.
The grey goo spends all it's time making more grey goo.... thus very little time developing defenses against the things that would love to either make a meal of them (everything is edible to someone, various iron metabolizing microbes are hungrily waiting to meet the micromachines at the bottom of the ocean) or build a house out of it, nor does it spend any time building feedback systems to make sure that it is expanding in a direction that won't leave it stranded in a dead end (like expanding directly down a hole and then unable to expand back out because it's own dead little corpses are blocking the exit), etc.
Grey goo, on Earth today, would quickly discover that attepting to compete with an system with a 4.5 billion history of winnter-take-all-no-holds-barred-free-for-all evolutionary deathmatch is not quite as easy as it may have first thought, and that's before the humans even begin to notice.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Starfleet commanders repeatedly order civilians around
In time of emergency or extenuating circumstances, this can be necessary. In the real world it's illegal to disobey the instructions of a police officer, and I presume the same law applies to obeying military officers too.
The only civilian space transport ever shown is on federation vehicles, at the discretion of the federation. No federation civilian-owned space (or even stratospheric) vehicles are portrayed.
In DS9, Kasidy Yates (Sisko's girlfriend/wife) was a civilian freighter captain who at one point was a convey leison officer between a convoy of civilian freighters and starfleet. In TNG, when Worf's mother brought Alexander to stay with him on the Enterprise, she mentioned how she got on a transport to get there. It is unlikely that the wife of a retired enlisted cheif petty officer would be given privlidges to use starfleet vessels for personal travel across the galaxy, so it was likely a civilian or commercial transport.
No private corporations are ever shown
In the TNG episode "Family", Picard was asked by his friend Louis to leave Starfleet and join a civilian project for terraforming the ocean floor. Picard's family also owns a vinyard. Sisko's father owns a restaurant. Ezri Dax's family owns some kind of mining operation.
Contrary to your assertion, I don't believe any election is ever portrayed.
During the changling crisis on earth, the Federation president wishes he had never entered his name onto the ballot for the office.
No civilian media organizations are ever shown
There were several mentions of a "Federation News Service" during DS9, something I imagine would be analogous to the AP.
No legal civilian energy weapons are ever shown (in fact, civilians appear not even to be allowed to have blades!) - yet starfleet personnel are rarely without a powerful sidearm
Well, first off the Star Trek universe is supposed to be idealic where civilians didn't need to be armed. However, Guinan did own a phaser rifle of some kind. About owning blades, if you're refering to Worf disarming Okana in TNG episode "The Outrageous Okona", it seems a resonable precaution to not allow armed civilians to roam around a starfleet vessel.
There appears to be no such thing as privacy, except for high-ranking Starfleet officers. The federation appears to have massive databases containing all known information on everyone, used liberally by Starfleet.
Starfleet is a branch of the government, so it makes sense that they'd have access to government data banks. If the FBI wanted to to a background check on you, how much information do you think they could dig up in various databases? Hell, how much information do you think you could dig up about a person on the internet?
Actual buying and selling appear to be officially prohibited (Picard didn't even understand the concept of "investment"!), reducing trade to barter and trading bars of latinum on the black market
The economy of the federation is a matter of protracted discussion, but doesn't exclude the possibility of some kind of modified socialism that actually works. Just because we can't think of how it could work, doesn't mean it can't (Kinda like Warp Drive).
In at least one case, a civilian is tried by a court with a Starfleet judge!
You'll need to be more specific of where that happened. However, if a person commited a criminal act against the military or government, I'm sure there's some kind of legal precident where they're tried in a military tribunal as an enemy combatant or something along those lines.
The most prestigious jobs in the federation appear to be starfleet offices Dr. Bashir talked about how he was offered a position in a civilian hospital in Paris by his girlfriend's father.
I can't think of examples right now, but the point is that there is sufficient evidence that the Federation is not a military dictatorship.
...the ransack attack of the human space diaspora fraction gone militaristic, technologically advanced and greedy. At first, I thought: "Well, a virus can traverse to colonies, as people will travel to visit relatives or do business", when it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps it is actually ment to be a "never look back" voyage for space emigrants. Here on Earth, thruout history, the groups of humans, of the same specie, were constantly THE ultimate threat to each other, just because they were separated for a while and hence developed distinct group identities. It IS going to happen on the large scale if we colonize the space across large distances. The space aliens will be us.