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.'"
Do we have to go into space right now? Do I have time to go home and change?
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
We'd just start creating things that can wipe out the galaxy.
...otherwise, space exploration is a boondoggle.
We're running out of it here.
Although seriously, everyone still living on earth makes for a giant single point of failure. But my ping time is going to suck if I start gaming from the moon.
Talk about avoiding the problem.
Instead of fixing our problems and looking for solutions, lets go into space to get away from it all.
some how this seems like a bad idea, or atleast a bad reason. Why not go into space for some positive reason? like to learn or solve a problem like over population...
Mod others as you would have them mod you.
He later elaborated on the specific humans who should go into space, including several people he went to school with, that one snooty teller at his bank, his obnoxious neighbors with their noisy children, and that little bastard who egged his house last Halloween.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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
I'm not anti-human or anything (in fact, I'm good friends with a number of them!). 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?
Sounds like his solution isn't necessarily based on developing habitats in the solar system (though he did say moon and Mars were the first steps). This seems like an ultra-long term scenario for which the technology doesn't even exist yet. It's almost like he's saying the Earth is screwed, so let's get off this hunk of rock. I think, considering we could be here for a very very long time, the better solution is to develop technology or philosophies dedicated to helping us live where we are. Can't just give up on Earth...we have no other options no matter how many sci-fi shows we watch.
How are we going to take cows into space? We need cows for steaks and dairy (milk, cheese and ice cream).
They have spacesuits for man. Could they make a spacesuit for a cow? A cowsuit?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
What about that hot nurse of his? Is she coming too?
geek n performer who performs morbid or disgusting acts, as biting off the head of a live chicken
Would colonizing space really solve the basic problems that could cause mankind to die out on Earth? The disasters listed above seem to originate with man, and most of these because of man's relentless pursuit for power or profit. If our lives are so fragile now, on the planet we are ideally suited to live on, how much more fragile will the human race be on an inhospitable planet somewhere else in the solar system, not to mention the universe. There is a great gulf to cross through space and it seems that we should solve the root causes of our problems at home before we bring them with us to a more delicate and dangerous place.
www.mikesmind.com - www.daddyworkathome.com - www.freetofarm.org - www.tenfoottable.com
humanity has a dark self-destructive side
and as weapons become more and more powerful, it will take smaller and smaller groups of people to do more and more damage
until the truly scary it is achieved: it is not inconceivable that at some future date, just one committed nihilistic person could unleash something which could wipe out most of humanity, and at the very least destroy civilization
this could be via genetics or nanotechnology or something weirder and not yet discovered
so indeed, the best way to safeguard from such people is to live in far flung locations, such that a disaster, manmade or not, in one location can lead to recolonization by the other location
hawking is 100% right, it really is in mankind's best interest to take out a survival insurance policy and get our asses into space in a self-sustainable manner
i would give us a century or two to achieve this goal, and with serendity and luck, we will get into space before the statistical inevitability of that one demonic person appearing making their vile mark on the world by killing most of us
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
TFA: "Hawking said that 'It is important for the human race to spread out into space....'"
mmm, I'll bet that long after Steven Hawking is gone, his chair will be still be giving lectures, advice, and making scientific discoveries...
I think it would be better to remain on the Earth to let the Universe survive!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
...just as we need to accept personal death.
The Noah's Ark story has great appeal, but events capable of destroying the Earth might well destroy nearby colonies in the solar system.
Or perhaps I should say, if we hypothesize that humankind does not have the wisdom to maintain a stable existence on Earth, 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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I know we all like to sit around and pretend that there's a solution for everything out there, somewhere, waiting to be found, but humanity is a seriously broken creature. We could have infinite food, power and resources, but people would still kill, rape, maim and hurt one another endlessly.
Well we'd best get crackin' then!
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Dr. Hawking further elaborated on his suggestion that the space colonies include 10 women for every man:
"Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature."
It is true that actually destroying the galaxy is orders of magnitude harder than actually destroying the Earth.
But there are ways we could end up sterilizing the galaxy, by creating Berserkers; self-replicating machines that either deliberately or accidentally sterilize all life. Odds are that if any such machines are actually created, unlike the stories that the term comes from, they'll actually win, and once established they can't be displaced.
Berserkers are one of the interesting aspects of the Fermi Paradox; is the solution to the Paradox that some dumb-asses actually did create Berserkers that come and wipe out all civilizations as soon as they attract attention? Is our high-tech doombot even now winging its way here at nearly the speed of light?
In more recent fiction, the Replicators of Stargate SG-1 are updated versions of the Saberhagen berserkers, designed with a better understanding of computers and more magical technology, but otherwise almost indistinguishable from the Saberhagen variety. (Saberhagen even had some berserkers that masqueraded as humans at some points, and used time travel, which Stargate hasn't gotten around to, mercifully, though I couldn't tell you why.)
In other words, while on Earth the "Gray Goo" scenario is implausible due to energy requirements and simple thermodynamics, the Galactic "Grey Goo" scenario has no such restrictions.
There are good reasons, other than colonisation, for expansion into space: some of them potentially helping with the survival of earth. If we can move dirty manuafacturing, mining activities and some food production into space, the pressure on our own ecology will become much less severe.
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.
There's is little point in escapint to space. After all space and time will collapse within 3,000 Zillion years(aprox.) anyway. You're just delaying innevitability. What we really need to plan is an escape from this doomed dimention!
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."
By (repeatedly) suppressing humans' ability to travel in space for the past ~20 years, this has promoted a deep desire to disperse into the cosmos, thus guaranteeing the survival of the race. It was all part of the Golden Path, and now we will enter the Scattering.
Hello nurse! I have a feeling that the "spongebath" button on his synthesizer is very well-worn...
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
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.
Yes.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The problem with sending animals is that you have to send a functioning biosphere along with whatever creature you send into space. That's a big technical challenge, and for people it's a tradeoff between discomfort and the smartness of the machines against the smartness of the people. For animals, assume that they can't really contribute anything to the (meta) running of the biosphere. If you give them grass they can crap on it and all, but they won't be picking up a wrench to fix a broken water recycling plant or irrigation system. Also, for any significant duration your're talking about an environment where the significant input is energy. No "food enough for three days" but a system that'll continue to provide as long as it receives energy.
I'm guessing that it's more complex to set up an animal-supporting artificial biosphere in space than one to support humans.
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.
He and his daugther are writing a children's book.
The real choice is liberty versus control. -- Bruce Schneier
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!
I don't suppose anyone has read this book?
It's fairly hefty on the physics details, but it does go into some interesting details about not only how humans, or at least sentient spacecraft capable of reproducing themselves need to be sent out by the human race pronto, if we want to have any chance of becomming immortal. I haven't read the book in a long time now, so I'm a little light on details but I can see how Hawking could be on the same wavelength (branching out to preserve the human race)
Will program for karma.
Stereotyping is so much easier than thinking, isn't it?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Fly over urban metropolises and you'll see pus and grime coming out of them, a haze of brown tinges their atmosphere.
But from my SUV the sun is dimmed to a pleasant orange color.
People shuttle to and fro in their daily lives, consuming as much as their salaries will allow. They justify this as acceptable in the "spirit of capitalism". It's "acceptable" to spend all that money on crap you don't need, because everybody else has it, or "it's cool".
But aren't you free to reject these ideas. People would gravitate to better alternatives. It is hard to beat Nascar on my plasma HD and a six pack of beer
Then most of these blobs will be told they need to hurry up there too, so that they can meet that quota, and then by the time you're 40, bald, and more or less impotent, you say: "My God! I've arrived!" And you look around and realize that not much changed, and you feel a big let down, you feel deceived, as if there was some hoax played on you.
This is a victim's thinking. Are you having a midlife crisis? Try buying a red sports car.
If you're interested about what I said here, please know that it was basically all taken from the words of Alan Watts [wikipedia.org], the 20th century's best and little known-about philosopher and interpreter of Eastern religions.
Sounds kinda creepy to me, like Heaven's Gate. If you haven't noticed a lot of people from the far east are highly motivated by US style consumerism. You can only meditate so much I guess.
an ill wind that blows no good
Both humans and animals are completely too specialized for life on earth. Because of that, it's highly unlikely we'll ever see our universe populated by humans. Our short life spans makes any trip outside the solar system completely unlikely. Even if we do make it to another solar system after a 500 year trip, we require a very specific environment to truely thrive. We need an earth-like environment. We need a good variety of both plants and animals. We need a good variety of bacteria. Hell, to successfully move, we need a noah's ark to take us there.
If we really want to see human progeny or intelligent life expand out into the universe, then we need to get AI working, stuff that into self-sufficient, self-replicating robots, and throw them out into the universe. They will be able to easily travel between stars by simply shutting down for a limited time. Robots can survive in almost every place in the universe that humans cannot, so they're almost guaranteed to thrive regardless of whether their destination has an earth-like planet or not.
Buddhism and Zen came from the east, yes... But so did Shinto and gunpowder.
Life in ancient China was pretty shitty for everybody who wasn't the Emperor, and Buddha himself had a pretty fucking miserable life, which drove and informed most of his teachings about humility and acceptance.
I, on the other hand, am very happy and content, living in my suburban house on a French land-lot style yard in a straight row with many other houses. My air and water are clean, my food is delicious, my TV set is huge, and life is wonderful.
Sometimes you gotta stop re-watching "Koyaanisoatsi" and just go outside and fire up the BBQ grill, especially on a nice day like today. Happiness has nothing to do with culture, and everything to do with your state of mind.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Actually might not be as bizarre as you think. If a large asteroid split up into several smaller lumps, the lumps would orbit around the center of gravity/mass of the original rock, and thus would seem like a flock of smaller asteroids, all following each other. Eventually they'd probably be drawn off in different directions by the influences of other bodies, but if one split up on its way into the solar system, it might still be a big ball of fragments by the time it passed by Earth.
It's certainly not totally implausible.
Also, I suppose a really big asteroid might have enough of a gravitational field to attract other objects, or maybe you could even have some semi-stable situation where two asteroids of relatively equal mass orbited around each other, and then their center of mass collectively orbited the Sun (like a binary star system). Again I don't think it would be stable for very long because of all the interfering forces, but it could probably exist for a short while.
Going off on a tangent here for a second: I think the odds of us recognizing the thing that's going to kill us all before it happens is pretty slim. It's not exactly a short list: anything from climate change to asteroids to a virus to some sort of germline genetic engineering gone awry could wipe us out -- and that's only the things we know about or have the capacity to conceive of. There are probably lots of threats out there that we're as ill-equipped to think about as the dinosaurs were of wondering about an asteroid from space. Even if you could put up some type of asteroid shield and control climate change and elimiate industrial pollution and reduce the risk of genetic manipulation, that doesn't mean that we're not living, as a species, in an incredibly precarious situation, all packed together on one planet.
So regardless of what you do to "improve" things here on Earth, Hawking's (and many other people's) point still stands: spreading us out some is an inherent Good Thing from a long-term survival perspective.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Did you ever think that the human race is the berserker? We seek out life, and destroy it. We destroy each other, we destroy the earth. If another species comes to earth, i have no doubt that we will destroy it also.... we are the berserker...
The universe isn't out to get us, but did you read the summary?
We are out to get ourselves. The chance of all those things are growing. In fact, global warming may be well beyond stopping.
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.
Priests and ministers and born-agains often rush in to give God the credit, but really feats of engineering and procreation occur because the process of creation is *fun*, not out of a specific desire to Glorify Him, Praise Him, Meet Him, or Otherwise Interact with God in Ways that Demand Use of Capitialization.
I know exactly what you're talking about. The yellow robots are easy because they don't shoot back. The red robots are a little harder as they DO shoot back but their energy weapon moves so slowly that it's not hard to move out of the way. If the heat gets too intense you can always leave the room anyway.
But....
Should the bouncy smiley face appear...well my friend, the smart money's on the bouncy smiley face.
The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
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.
Let's get this straight. You may not agree with something Stephen Hawking says, but applying a 'Stupid' tag to the article is pointless and, well, poorly informed.
For some time now, I've been watching the evolution of the Stupid tag itself. Why do people use it? Apparently, it's always one of a few reasons: because they disagree with the article, they think the contents of the article describe something stupid, or they're confusing it with 'evil', 'wft', or any number of more expressive, less inflamatory terms.
While I can agree with tagging an article 'stupid' if it expresses a patently absurd notion, none of the other excuses qualify as anything other than flamebait.
Knock it off, whoever you are - you're making yourself look really ... well, stupid.
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
Step 1: Identify habitable planets
If any exist, we should start finding them in the next 10-20 years.
Step 2: Build interstellar craft
This is the tough part. Whether FTL remains a pipe dream or new physics turn out to allow it, we'll either need space elevators or a massive new source of energy (cheap fusion, maybe) to get the huge amounts of mass into orbit. (Fusion power would be used to create the massive amounts of fuel, not power craft directly).
Step 3: Seed planet with bioengineered life
We would probably send a very smart AI probe to do this, armed with bioengineered terraforming microbes. The trip would be very very long, but I think it could conceivably leave by 2056.
Step 4: Move in!
Hopefully the AI will also build us some nice beachfront condos to enjoy the purple sunsets and double moons. Either the colonists would be frozen for the trip, or spend the duration awake and wandering around the ship, fornicating and filling themselves with flavored fizzy fermented fruit juices. Arrival would be timed for opening of beachfront condos.
...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."
...if we're talking about just the mere survival of mankind, a tiny fraction to keep our race in existance, I'll take my chances on a deep subterranean nuke-proof bunker with lots of decontamination chambers, perhaps even a self-sustained eco-system.
Space travel as we know it today is incredibly fragile, and is completely dependent on high-tech from earth. Any disaster of cosmic enough proportions (sorry, mankind would survive global warming, nuclear holocaust and geneticly engineered viruses, if not much of it) like our sun going beserk is quite likely to wipe out any space colony or planetary base. If not, the 250,000 parts of the space shuttle will break down and replacements run out.
The only thing I can concievably think of that would wipe out earth, yet not qipe out any space base (unless we can go interstellar which takes 73000 years with our fastest spacecraft), would be a massive asteriod hitting earth and cracking it like a giant walnut. However, hundreds of millions of years of evidence say that's incredibly unlikely. It killed the dinosaurs, but us mammals survived. So would mankind today.
Not you and me, mind you. "Important" people that would be evacuated to said bunkers. But then again, you and me should worry more about being hit by a car...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Did you ever think that the human race is the berserker? We seek out life, and destroy it. We destroy each other, we destroy the earth. If another species comes to earth, i have no doubt that we will destroy it also.... we are the berserker...
Oh yes. The sterile wastes of the Universe had better watch out, baby, because Humanity the Great Destroyer of.... uh.... err..... whatever-it-is-out-there is on its way!
To make it.... err.... yet more sterile or something. And more desolate.
Except it's pretty much as desolate as it can be. And if not actually sterile, than to all indications, nearly so.
You know, I sort of understand "The Great Nobility Of Mother Nature", although I don't agree with it to speak of in the sense you are advocating. But you have thought this out and realize you are advocating "The Great Nobility Of Utter, Complete Desolate Lifelessness", right?
What possible thing can humanity do to the universe at large to make it worse than the state it is already in ?
Practicing to be goodlife, are we?
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"
He also began beating the crap out of his right arm which refused to cooperate in general and had a propensity to give the hitler salute at the worst possible moments.
Look, the Federation may have been a military dicatorship, but it worked for some people...
All I'm saying is that if humans need to spread out into the galaxy to ensure the survival of the species, Will Shatner and I are ready to go out and sleep with all the alien babes it'll take to make that happen. We'll take one for the team - that's just the sort of guys we are.
"Adventure? Excitement? A Jedi craves not these things."
The Sun will not go nova. It does not have enough mass to create the gravitional force required for carbon fusion. Though, it will become a red giant with a radius of about 1 AU in about 5 billion years. It will then shed its outer layers and become a white dwarf. A supernova requires a star of about 8 times the mass of our Sun. After the supernova explosion (fusion of elements heavier than iron), if the core is still about 3 or more times the mass of out Sun, it will become a black hole, otherwise a neutron star.
"I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside." - Calvin
Yes, well, I hope you recognize that for most people on this earth, nothing has changed. Lucky us.
// This is not a sig.
"very strong backing in Quantum Physics"
Why do I suspect that this boils down to "mystical things are mysterious and so is Quantum physics, therefore the two are related"?
Q physics gets related to everything that people don't understand. It's often a substitute for the unknowable divine for people who find the concepts of God and the supernatural distasteful but yet want to believe in something beyond the ordinary.
Are you sure that isn't the case for you?
There are degrees of self-awareness. We have alot, monkeys have some, ants have none. If I started picking your brain apart one neuron at a time, you wouldn't ever notice a specific point at which self-awareness ceased, you would gradually get less and less aware until you were just a brainstem controlling your heart, lungs and digestive system.
:)
The "secret" of consciousness is that there is no secret. Just because people are fascinated by a problem doesn't make it profound. I myself enjoy picking my nose too, and likely will for the remainder of my days, but that doesn't mean my nose is deeply mysterious.
I suggest you begin with the assumption that the world is a mundane and boring place, rather than that there are deep mysteries that need solving. It's not as depressing as it sounds
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.
Something can be a complex problem worth studying without being a deep and mysterious secret. You know what the difference is, stop playing semantics.
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!"
No, it isn't. The Federation is run by the Vulcan shadow government.
Think about the situation at the time the Vulcans first contacted Earth. They've had their schism with the Romulans and have fought wars with them, and had the worse of it; and now there are Klingons prowling the dark places of the galaxy. Now the Vulcans contact a planet that's just developed warp technology. A planet full of creatures with a horrific record of murder and mayhem, who are capable of justifying the same to themselves in terms of 'pro patria mori' and similar bullshit, who could easily be a terror on the galaxy to make even the Klingons fear... but who are at a very impressionable stage...
Bingo! The Vulcans, in a paternal, imperialist sort of way, take Earth under their wing. They help humans build better starships, they advise and guide. In time, they join with Earth to form the United Federation of Planets. Coincidentally, the enemies of the Earth are the same as the enemies of the Vulcans... How did something like that happen?
So now the Romulans and the Klingons are kept off the Vulcans' backs by Starfleet. By the mighty space navy of the United Federation of Planets. A fleet of ships built at Mars, crewed almost entirely by humans from Earth, now guards a planet of decadent philosophers who are free to pursue their ideals of pure logic and reason. Humans fight and die in huge numbers for the protection of Vulcan. And every Starfleet ship we've ever seen has a single Vulcan, as a highly-ranked officer but not as captain... remember how Soviet ships used to have a 'political officer' to make sure the captain didn't do anything ideologically unsound? Yeah.
And whenever we see Starfleet command, the concentration of pointy ears is so much higher, don't you notice? Oh yes. It's all humans on the front line, but back at base it's all green-blooded bastards.
The entire Federation is a sham, concocted and perpetuated by the Vulcans for their own cowardly ends. Deal with it.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
The very plain fact is that far more Iraqis have died in this *year to date* in sectarian and insurgent violence than died in the September 11th attacks. That sectarian and insurgent violence was *directly* unleashed by the U.S. invasion that was completely based on the decisions of the Bush administration.
Just because the U.S. didn't benefit doesn't mean it was some kind of admirably selfless act. Actually, it was a giant fuck-up that could have easily been forseen and avoided. That is a BAD THING, get it?
I don't believe the Bush administration deliberately did this to get access to Iraqi oil; I can actually believe GWB justified it to himself by thinking of all the nasty things Saddam Hussein did, although such justification is amazingly selective and based on a complete misunderstanding of Iraq. (E.g. "But he used chemical weapons against his own people!"...no, he gassed Kurds. Saddam Hussein is not a Kurd.) Whatever the justification, the invasion has become an absolute disaster from the point of view of the average Iraqi.
No matter how BAD the earth gets. Even with run away globl warmming and unbreathable air it will still be easier and cheaper to build an enclosed living space on Earth then to build it on, say, the moon. Even if all the air on earth were is disapear and the Earth were to be in hard vacuum it would still be cheaper to live inside a presure tank here then inside a presure tank on the moon because. Even if you share the gaol of moving people off the Earth, now may not be the right time. If you start today it might take 150 years to build a sutainable industry in space, one that can operate without support from Earth. But if we start in 50 years it might take only 110 years to do the same thing. To be free of Earth you need things like a stell and aluminum industral and plants that make basic metals and machine tools. How long until there is a factory of the moon that makes digial camera and childred's toys. Not this century.
Oh, dear God, I'd forgotten about "TEH TERRORUSTS".
Listen up, and by: "Listen up", I only peripherally mean YOU. I really direct this to the people who use "TEH TERRORUST!" as a way of trying to make it sound like we have some major concern here in our tough, tough, post-9/11 world.
Let me direct you to a simpler time of life, a time when Reagan's and Kennedy's walked the earth.
A simpler time when people lived with the idea the upwards of 50% of the USA, USSR, and chunks of Europe's populations could be dead in under an hour's time. Yeah, right. Ooooh, scary terrorists.
Hell, I'll take terrorists any day of the week over continuing to live with that. Hell, I'll take terrorists over living with the fear that my village was going to be raided and a member of my family killed. I think my odds are STILL better with the terrorists.*
*Note: Offer not valid in Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan, Most of the Middle East, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Indonesia, Iraq, Chechnya, Sudan, Iraq, and Tennessee.
Closed biosystems to sustain human life have not succeeded so far. Biosphere 2 began to run low on oxygen and so wasn't really self-sustaining.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
The cost of putting something like that on the moon would be extraordinary. How much weight, how many journeys? How would it be assembled - there's manyears of work there? It would have too be fairly big to produce a sustainable crop of food or produce oxygen. There's a long list of things like radiation, low gravity, temp extremes that make small things very difficult and expensive to solve. And it's going to have to be paid for by taxation. Politically near enough impossible I would think. The He3 story could make it a commercial venture but I'm not sure a large firm would spend billions to get small risky energy returns. The first steps would be seen as commercial suicide due to the expense.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Neither Alan Watts, nor the Dali Lama, nor myself, would disagree with you when you say "stick to science". Never have I said you should not, in fact I'm a great proponent of it. As I have shown, it is the other way around, "western" scientists are the ones who do not stick to science. They scoff at their own results, and say things like "God does not play dice".
It's a fool's errand but I guess I can't resist replying to this and your whole shtick.No one who matters in this context cares what Alan Watts or the Dali Lama has to say on the subject. Despite the disengenuous claims to the contrary quantum mechanics was developed entirely in places like Copenhagen, Berlin, Cambridge and other locations noted for their scarcity of ashrams. It was conceived and developed by people with extensive training in and knowledge of advanced classical mechanics (Lagrangian, Hamiltonian mechanics and so forth, not the high school level stuff that is often bandied about). If we were waiting for Buddhists to reach a useful level of creativity to discover QM we would still be waiting (probably forever). In fact the subject in question has not been a static edifice. It continues to be developed and improved, QM -> QED -> QCD -> quantum gravity (that last arrow is a direction, not a completed step). Notably absent from this progress is a useful contributions from any temples or ashrams.
I know a statement like that comes off as insulting toward those institutions which I really don't intend except in regard to bullshit claims made on their behalf and possibly without their agreement with the claims. I had the opportunity to attend some of the lecures of Feynamn and I was even a classmate of Polchinski. These are people who were responsible for improving our understanding of QM and I didn't detect even a hint of oriental philosphy informing either one of them and yet they have done OK. I imagine Joseph might bring matters to higher levels yet.
My point is that QM is a Western game. There have been plenty of contributers from most areas of the world including, for instance, Tomonaga who contributed to the formulation of QED. My point is that his contribution was in no way Eastern except as an incidental geographical matter. I'm only aware of popularizers like Fritjof Capra who make claims such as yours. Not actual working physicists who have made contributions to the advancement of QM. I'm sure there have been many, because of their voracious intellectual interests, who have been curious about Eastern philosophies as well as being actual contributors. Oppenheimer is an example who studied Sanskrit in order to read the Bhagavad Gits. But I don't think anyone claims this was part of the intellectual framework that informed his research thinking. Gelman's Eight-Fold Way illustrated his familiarity with Buddhist philosophy but it has immeasurably more to do with the group SU(3) than any discourse delivered by the Buddha.
Why, that would require an army of super-virile men scoring around the clock. Kif, clear my schedule.
because it is possible.
people think our space shuttles are synthetic creations and therefore unnatural but I think the act of humans flying into outerspace is perfectly natural. and infact inevitable. if you look at the earth from a distance. ships continually try to make it out of orbit some succeed and some fail. but one will make it all the way in this way the act is quite similar to the insemenation of a human child. However once the one makes it through many more will follow. The only way to do this is to MAKE It happen, plan on it happening, continuiing missions and creating settlements in places out in space where we are not dependant on Earth. I agree with Hawking 100%.
We need to do this for our species. We need to think of the herd. The fact is that we aren't simply looking out for HUMAN life, but EARTH life and LIFE in general considering we have found no evidence of life elsewhere.
Support space travel and space colonies.
...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.
'...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'.
This is a sound argument, and one that certainly needs to be made (and attended to). There is, however, a slight flaw in it. If you believe in evolution (broadly speaking), you concede that organisms evolve stepwise. They cannot take huge leaps, but have to progress through a series of intermediate states all of which are evolutionarily successful. That is one reason why no living things have wheels, laser death-rays, or (AFAIK) radio communication.
Introduce a human designer into the loop, and the picture changes drastically. As gnovos reminds us, we are neck-deep in millions of species of fungi and bacteria (and viruses and protozoa...) Very few of them, however, are fatal to humans; and hardly any are fatal wholesale, in the sense that they wipe out whole populations. Why? If a microorganism wipes out its host, it disappears too - or, at the very least, suffers a serious check. But a human scientist can analyze the human body's defence mechanisms, and tailor an existing bacterium or virus to sidestep them. If a microorganism appears that kills whole populations, it will almost certainly be an artificial one.
The same applies to grey goo.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.