Stephen Hawking Asks The Internet a Question

An anonymous reader writes "Dr. Stephen Hawking received about 15000 answers to a question he posted 2 days ago on Yahoo Answers. His question was 'How can the human race survive the next hundred years?'." I imagine you can do better than 'It Can't.' How would you answer Dr. Hawking's question?

Comments

Re:Your Answer, Stephen

[FireFury03]

allow women (or encourage women) to work.

With unemployment on the rise, is it really a good idea to be encouraging more people to try and get jobs? There aren't enough jobs as it is...

I'm not "anti-women-working", I'm just being practical - having 1 bread-winner per family is better than having some families where both partners work whilest other families have both partners out of work.

The unemployment problem can be reduced by reducing the number of hours each person works and increasing the number of employees, but I imagine that would screw with the economy rather a lot :)

Re:Your Answer, Stephen

[LordoftheLemmings]

The population will never stabilize without help and the best way to stabilize the population is to kill people. World war III would solve a lot of the worlds problems. Think about it, say we kill off 5 billion people leaving only 1 billion. Now people are more spread out, when you rebuild you won't have as much overcrowding. Its a kind of fresh start, where everyone appreciates what they have because they saw how close the came to loseing everything. On the plus side after civilization collapses there will be no health care, allowing people with health problems to die off thus raiseing the health of future generations.

You need a better example

[Loundry]

Consumption for comsumption's sake is demonstrated clearly by people buying bigger and bigger SUVs... A suburban housewife driving a Hummer? Ridiculous...

Ridiculous to you. I can effortlessly imagine that a suburban housewife bought the hummer for the reasons of prestige, safety, enjoyment, and comfort. Are you saying that all of those reasons are completely bogus? That there is no suburban housewife who would drive a Hummer for any of those reasons?

Are you going to argue that a suburban housewife feels A) no additional prestige or negative prestige, B) no additional safety or negative safety, C) no additional enjoyment or negative enjoyment, and D) no additional comfort or negative comfort through the act of buying a Hummer?

Instead of seeing the reasons why one might buy a Hummer, you are blinded by your contempt for those who would do it and concluding that they are merely "consuming for consumption's sake". In other words, they're mindless and evil morons for not seeing the world the way that you do.

If you need a clearer example than that you should take off your $500 sunglasses...

Obviously if I disagree with you, then I must be one of the evil, hated rich. My sunglasses cost $9. Function over form, dipshit.

Regardless, I do need a clearer example. Give me an example of a person buying something solely for the sake of buying it. Make sure that you can prove that there is no reason that they would buy it except for the sole reason of buying it. And try and do a better job of masking your bitter disdain and false feelings of superiority.

Re:You need a better example

[Loundry]

First, the $500 sunglass remark was metaphorical. I wasn't implying that you actually owned $500 sunglasses, really I was implying that the fact that $500 sunglasses exist at all suggests consumption for consumption sake, a second example, if you will...

First, it was not a "metaphor". You were making a snide and dismissive remark toward someone that you hold in contempt because they don't share your views.

Second, "consumption for consumption's sake" is a point in dispute. While you're trying to prove that one, you might also think about tackling "education for education's sake" as well as the notion of an "altruistic action".

Second, I didn't resort to personal attacks because I disagreed with you, but you seemed to feel the need to do it with me.
Why is that?

Making a snide and dismissive remark toward me as an expression of your contempt is, in fact, a personal attack. If you are willing to apologize for that, then I will apologize for the "dipshit" comment and I will be happy to return to a more civil discussion.