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

Your Answer, Stephen

[ackthpt]

'How can the human race survive the next hundred years?'

Birthcontrol, ween of dependence on high energy consumption and colonise the solar system, because we sure aren't going to get along forever on this rock alone.

Re:Your Answer, Stephen

[jaydonnell]

I don't thin there is any way we will be living in space in the next 100 years. Also, I don't think moving is the solution to our problems. It's like the drug addict who thinks that moving away from the city will solve their drug addiction. The problems we have aren't a result of where we live, but how we live.

Re:Your Answer, Stephen

[CRCulver]

As for birthcontrol - why (unless the couple is not ready for children yet..)?? Space is just that - space, lots of it. With asteroid belt having an entire planet disassembled into small nice pieces with huge surface area.

People who feel that the Earth is becoming overpopulated don't see colonization as a real cure. Even if you avoided the problem of cost-to-orbit with rockets by constructing space elevators, at this rate you would never be able to move more people off the planet than are being born on it. (This unpleasant fact is a big plot element of Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars ). Therefore, many see birth control as the only way to minimize what they feel is an undesirably large terrestrial population.

Although the only way to make it really work would be to have forced abortions a la the Chinese authoritarian state. I've seen this advocated before among Slashdot comments. It's ironic that the same community which often tends toward a libertarian view of restricting government power has those who want the government to get into the business of abortion.

Re:Your Answer, Stephen

[IAmTheDave]

stabilize in 50 or so years with something like 10-14 billion people

Brutal honesty in my opinions here, but one can only assume that of that 10-14b, anywhere from 5-7b will be Muslim, 8-9b will live in countries currently engaged in either international or civil war, hundreds of millions will die each year of famine or genocide, global consumption of natural resources will more than double the levels they are now, wars will be fought over clean water (on top of other natural resources) and the distribution of wealth will be equally unevenly distributed as it is now - if not more.

To boot, major population areas will sustain the majority of growth, leaving sparsley populated areas still sparsely populated. Realization of the down-side of peak oil will have long hit, we will have seen poverty strike hard due to a crash in the international economy, etc., etc.

It's a grim outlook for sure. Certain populations aren't sustaining because quality of life is increasing, and people are not doing their part having their 2.5 children to sustain growth. Poverty usually sees upticks in populations (as do post-war times).

But with an acknowledgement of global warming but no plan to combat it, no centralized focus on greener technologies including renewable energy, increasing poverty, stupidly fast industrialization of nations that sustain world-majority populations, and wars still being fought based on religion - where can anyone expect to be in 50 years?

I certainly hope for a better future than this. But I live in the wealthy, greedy, oil-hungry 300m-person United States. My country accounts for shitloads of wealth with less than 1/12 of the population of the earth. I'm sure I'll be better off than anyone living in the middle east, China, India, etc.

On top of that, the following things will come to pass: realization and fighting over natural resources as we can only sustain growth in China and India for so long; a conflict and resolution concerning North Korea, and so on.

Oh, and the US may lose it's position as the world market leader... but that seems inevitable at this point in time too.

Re:Your Answer, Stephen

[BewireNomali]

huge numbers is relative. there are six billion people on the planet. an argument can be made tha organized religion has been inordinately successful. Too successful.

I think your point is valid to some degree but I think its because another inexorable drive has reached critical mass. Technology. Information is available to all and is free. We've developed sophisticated ways of waging war. What once required the might of a country now requires nothing more than some cash and enough dedicated people to fill your average classroom. The BARRIERS TO ENTRY are too low. It makes EVERYONE a threat.

A theory floats around about why we've never heard from another species. It proposes that they all reach a point at which they use their own technology to destroy themselves. In other words, no civilization can survive its own technological advancement past a critical juncture.

We've been on the brink of it since the dawn of the atomic age.

So, in hindsight, the post I originally responded to wasn't too far off. At some point, organized religions are going to have to concede to something else... some other unifying force. However, I don't think banning religion or making it a forceful change is going to work. People have to evolve.

My mom always said not to argue with fools. I never understood what she meant as a child. She explained it to me further - that when you discuss something with someone, you're at the mercy of the person in the group with the least ability to comprehend. The group can only move forward with consensus when that person does so. So in a group, you're not at the mercy of the top of curve so much as at the mercy of those at the bottom. Here in the US, Bush's appeal is somewhat an indication of this.

Not to label religious zealots as fools, but we can't move to another place until the zealots decide, one way or another, to not be zealots anymore.

Re:Your Answer, Stephen

[IdahoEv]

I am not worried about the human race *surviving*.

Wars today are no more frequent than they have been at any point in history, and I expect them to decrease (among developed nations only, because of economic interdependency). Even the worst environmental crisis wouldn't kill *everybody*.

In the worst-case scenarios I see, a pair of world wars* kill millions and melting ice caps displace 1.5 billion living on the worlds seacoasts as we move towards the end of the 21st century. I don't think both are necessarily going to happen, but even if they did that's a far cry from wiping out the species.

Even in the case of a full-on nuclear exchange, places like New Zealand and Madagascar are both low population and not particularly strategically located. Both could become reasonably self sufficient and survive with a fairly large population.

* Two world wars: US-Taiwan-India vs. China and Western Christian nations + Israel vs. Islam. They could happen simultaneously if the India/Pakistan conflict pushes the islamic world into an alliance with China.

A far more relevant question is how can the human race prosper and continue to grow? The fact is, I think it will.

Yes, we are running out of oil. But as the price goes up (and it will), other technologies will become competitive. Coal Gasification is frankly not that far away in economic competitiveness, and it can produce enough petrolem for a couple hundred years. We'll switch to it around the time US gas prices hit $6 or $7 per gallon. That will give us plenty of time for fusion and orbital solar power to become developed. We won't run out of energy.

Global warming will probably screw the 25% of humanity living near the seacoasts. Developed nations will build garganutan coastal dikes, and a billion southeast asians will have to move late in the 21st century. That will suck, but it won't significantly affect the global population.

I frankly doubt major world wars between developed nations. The world economy is far more interdependent than it was in 1936. China and the US can't afford to war with each other because both economies would collapse.

The USA will become the 3rd-largest economy, falling behind China and India both in productivity and in science. Much depends on whether or not America can accept this new position without deciding it needs to kill people over it.

Malthusian disaster scenarios are *always* counterbalanced by market forces. When a resource runs scarce its' price goes up, making alternatives viable and spurring research into alternatives. This will be true of everything from energy to food. The poor will get stuck with the short end of the stick, but that's not exactly new or news.

I think there will probably be some nasty terrorist incidents as nuclear and biological technology becomes cheaper and more widespread. Those will be bad, but they won't threaten the existence of the species as a whole.

People have chanted "doom" for centuries. Instead, life has always been nasty, messy, and full of tragedy, but goes on nonetheless. The 21st century will be no different on average, the nastiness will just manifest itself in different ways. But it won't wipe out the species.

The ONLY threat I see truly wiping out all of humanity is an asteroid impact. And that's no more likely in the 21st than at any other point in history. Maybe less, because now we are reaching the point where we could contemplate doing something about it.

Re:Your Answer, Stephen

[CliffEmAll]

I never stop being amazed by the arrogance and closed-mindedness of atheists who accuse theists of those same characteristics. (Theists with the same types of attitudes are just as annoying, but there are already 1000 /. posters here to condemn them.)

It is a simple and obvious fact that neither the existence nor the non-existence of a deity can be proven based on evidence gathered from a human perspective. So some people look at the evidence available to them and conclude that God probably exists, while others such as yourself conclude that He probably does not exist. Until either side can prove their conclusion, which is impossible, it is all just speculation. Given that different people have different evidence before them (transcendent experiences or whatnot) it seems quite logical that they might come to different conclusions. To imply that people who disagree with you have failed to use their intelligence or, as you do later when responding to alucinor, to assert that their experiences can only be symptoms of mental illness is both arrogant and offensive.

As for your question regarding the things religion is needed for, I fail to see how that is a useful question. Can you name anything for which atheism is needed? For what are automobiles needed? For what is /. needed? Something may be of value or desired whether or not it is needed.

Re:Your Answer, Stephen

[macaddict]

On the contrary, in a situation where oil is extremely expensive, who's better off:

The city with the population of 100,000 who can have tons upon tons of food delivered to them on a single train

OR

The 1,000 texas ranchers, each of which have no neighbors within a mile of their homes?

Where do you think the 'tons of food' comes from? It doesn't just magically appear in a grocery store or a warehouse. It comes from those ranchers and farmers with no neighbors within a mile of their home. If you are out in a rural area, food is not as much as an issue as a city. You can grow your own grains, veggies and fruit; you can eat the tasty cows running around your ranch; or you can hunt wild animals. You can burn wood, straw or even cow dung to heat your house. You can go barter a bag of corn for one of your neighbor's pigs. And what about clean water? A rancher will have a well out in the middle of nowhere. Many rural people have access to relatively clean rivers and lakes. The cityfolk can only hope the water and sewer department can afford to keep running their plants. If oil is extremely expensive, that will translate to higher costs for clean water, heat and electricity. Even if the electric plant burns coal, it still has to get the coal on trains that uses expensive oil products. And If farmers can't afford to put fuel in their trucks and tractors to continue large-scale farming (the food has to reach those food-filled trains somehow), do you really think they are going to send what little they can harvest off to the 'big city' and let their own families and neighbors starve first?

In a crisis situation, a city is the last place I'd want to be.

Re:Your Answer, Stephen

[devnull17]

First up atheism takes as much faith as religion. So I applaude that you have a faith based system integrated into your life.

I just believe in the empirical. If God comes down from Heaven and starts talking to me tomorrow, I'll believe in God. I just like having proof of something before I let it shape my worldview. I'm silly like that.

so do saturated fats, should we hold McDonalds (religion) accountable for all the fat, unhealthy people (zealots) in the world? Or instead should we say that how people interact with McDonalds is the real problem? A burger a month... no problem... three a day every day... big problem. Like wise faith and religion implemented as caring and sharing, or implemented as a holy war against everyone.

The difference is that if you eat McDonald's every day, it will probably kill you, but it won't have any direct effect on me. However, if some nut with a suitcase bomb steps onto my subway train with a plan to get his 72 virgins, that is very much everyone else's problem. If you want something a little more close to home, look at the control that Christians are intent on exercising on other peoples' decisions about gay marriage, drugs and abortion. Or the insistence that everyone else's children be taught fairy tales in biology class. Or the fact that the Christian voting bloc was the swing vote that put that monkey idiot president of ours in power. If you're more "spiritual" than "religious," more power to ya. But I've found that the vast majority of religious people out there are little more than sheep.

the world is a brilliant magnificent place, screwed up by people, just like everything else.

I agree that the world is magnificent, and that people haven't been taking very good care of it. But that's neither here nor there. Painting things with such broad strokes (world good, man evil) doesn't seem very helpful to me.

"Religion has had a role in almost every war in human history" WTF? Mongols? Roman? Spanish? Cold war? Way go to with the generalisations.

Christianity was, in fact, a cause of serious turmoil in Rome. The Spanish are infamous for their particularly cruel brand of Catholicism, and there have been dozens of feuds in Western Europe caused by some petty disagreement between Christian sects. And the Cold War wasn't a war, but many viewed it as a conflict between God's America and the godless, cold communist state.

"A higher evolutionary state than theism" so its more evolved? More evolved would indicate some kind of advantage over lesser evolved entities, so why aren't the 'evolved' running and governing the world in a athiest way? Aparently you guys are 'the elite' yet your not at the top (most western politicals leaders are affiliated with some religion as are a large number of business people)... go figure?

Would you disagree with any of the following?

1. There is a strong correlation between countries becoming more secular or progressive, and the development of technology.
2. More secular states tend to be more prosperous and technologically advanced than theocracies.
3. Religion has traditionally been an impediment to the development of science.

I'm not talking about individuals; I'm talking about sociological trends.

" Its main use was (and continues to be) as a device allowing a select, manipulative few to gain control over and wealth from the gullible masses" oh you mean like politics? So we should ditch that was well and all revert to anarchy? Because thats more eveolved right?

Huh? They're not at all alike. Politics is a necessary evil that comes with a government run by a hierarchy of people. But it's better than anarchy. There have been times throughout history when church and state were one, but law and order come from the "state" part, and secular governments function jus

Educate the World

[eldavojohn]

In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?

I'd like to think that education would cure all three of those issues. But it's a rather naïve view. Either way, I'll have my official answer be better education throughout the entire world about everything. That's our best strategy for making it through the next 100 years. Bank on the children. If you raise a child, it's your duty to make sure that they become far smarter than you are. I think it was around high school when I became much more intelligent than my father but I don't fault him for it. I only thank him for ensuring that his son and daughters were well educated even though he wasn't.

Given those three issues, it seems probable that we may not make it another hundred years without severe loss of life. I don't think the loss of life will be complete with the death of all humans but I think there is a high probability for a large loss of our populations in one country or another. I don't mean thousands like natural disasters but I mean a hundred million or more.

We'll survive, just not at a luxury like we've known. Honestly, if a lot of major religions and their leaders could start coming to terms with each other. You know, make it so that it's not like a death sentence when you don't believe in God or Allah? You could also reveal to everyone that our leaders should be more like Gandhi and less like Hitler. That would probably help with those first two problems. In every country, to be a successful politician you need a lot of financial support. Unfortunately, the ideal people leading us are those with no interest in padding their own pockets.

As for the third problem you listed, we're screwed. We're screwed because our numbers are reaching epic proportions that the earth cannot sustain and there's really no way around it aside from birth control. I don't support enforced birth control as far as the Chinese have taken it but you have to admit it certainly curbed their population growth rate. If nature fails us or vice versa, things will be pretty bad though I doubt we would become extinct entirely.

Of course, there are an infinite number of universes and I'm sure there exists one which doesn't have any of those three problems ....

*loads a bullet into the chamber of his handgun*

...which is why I suggest you get to work on the machine that allows yourself, ten beautiful women and I a way to cross over to that parallel universe, Mr. Hawking.

Re:Educate the World

[GoatMonkey2112]

Having more education than someone does not necessarily make you more intelligent.

Simple

[toupsie]

Keep on doing what we have been doing for the last 100,000 or so years. Eating, pooping, fornicating, killing each other and creating stuff. Stick to the basics and we will do just fine. Don't believe the doomsday predictions Stevie, there is always going to be a guy with a sign that says, "The end of the world is nigh".

One Day at a Time

[PackMan97]

As silly as it sounds...we will survive just like we always have. One day at a time.

There have been plenty of forecasters of doom saying that the earth would run out of space, food, energy and whatnot and the population continues to expand.

We'll muddle our way through the next 100 years just like we have the few thousand prior to this one.

Small Scale

[zabbey]

Any one trying to answer this question seriously is breaking out the 50 cent words. Did he say 100 years? In the past 100 years there's been two world wars, super bombs have been invented, a cold war, etc. Real question should be: "How did we survive the last 100 Years?" If we survived through all that we'll survive the next 100 years just fine.

Talk about a vague question

[AKAImBatman]

Answer: By shear force of will

If he wants a more detailed answer than that, he should ask a more detailed question. As any historian can tell you, the "social, political, and environmental chaos" he refers to is absolutely nothing new. The only difference between then and now is that our toys are bigger and shinier.

Pick any period in human history, and I think you'll find that it's easy to define "social, political, and environmental chaos" that worked against the residents of the period. In fact, the conditions that humans have found acceptable in past periods of history are regularly referred to as "squalor" in this day and age. Yet there are precious few examples of civilizations that were wiped out by such conditions.

Yes, the human race makes a lot of messes. Sometimes we stumble across messes that aren't our own doing. Any way you cut it, though, humans will always react to a problem before it reaches the level of self-destruction. Our instict for survival is too strong to do otherwise.

It can't.

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> I imagine you can do better than 'It Can't.'

Sometimes the correct answer is really boring.

Re:simplicity

[Reality Master 101]

but I think that consumption purely for the sake of consumption is our biggest problem.

I vehemently disagree. Messes are a problem, not consumption. Why do we have this new puritanism taking over in certain places? I don't want conservation. I want to live in a Utopia of plentiful abundance, and there is no intrinsic reason why we can't have it.

The solution to all our problems is more technology, not less. You claim to be a "metropolitan technologist", but you appear to be a "guilty metropolitan technologist". Well, I say we shed the guilt and embrace civilization. We just need to make being less messy a higher priority.

Humans need a crisis to change

[spiffery]

I think the pattern is that humans follow a path of least resistance until a need arises. It is understandable to look at humankind and say that we are headed for a crisis, and there will most likely be one. But what happens at that crisis period is a matter of debate. When global warming becomes an obvious crisis to nearly every human on the planet there will be change. Once the need for unification becomes apparent, it will happen. Whether circumstances will allow reversal is a question beyond my ken, but my feeling is that humans will continue doing what we're doing until we hit a critical point. Then people will change, as needed, until the next crisis. Populations will grow, people will die, and problems will be dealt with locally until it is necessary for things to change. And I don't have any particular faith in humanity, except that we do what is necessary when problems arise.

Re:Simple (Not Quite)

[damacus]

100,000 years ago up until the 1930s, there were no nuclear bombs. We only had technology to inflict localized damage on our fellow man and planet. Now there are enough nukes to wreck the planet, advancement in biology such that we now have the capability to create biological weapons on a wide scale. Also, in the last 200 and 300 years, industrial society has exploded and we've seen rapid deforestation and ecological carelessness on a massively wide scale.

The situation is vastly different, and failing to acknowledge that is naive.

Re:simplicity

[tkrabec]

The problem is not having everything, the problem is it is cheaper ( and culturally acceptable ) to just throw something out rather than get it fixed. My wife works with children, and one day she asked one of them where his new bike was, he said it was broken, after several minutes of explainiation my wife determened that the tire went flat and would no longer hold air. The child thought the bike was trash.

I feel we need to raise the price of items to make it more economical to fix it than to trash it, or simply tax the item to make it cheaper to fix then to trash.

-- tim

Re:simplicity

[hackstraw]

I want to live in a Utopia of plentiful abundance

What is that?

Plentiful food, a place to stay, and little to no threat of death?

Take a look around. Plenty of housed, fat, old people, and getting fatter and older!

Re:simplicity

[porcupine8]

You can wash and reuse Swiffer cloths, actually, if you want to. But, of course, they don't advertise this. You can also wash and reuse things like Ziplock bags and lots of other disposable items. So why don't more people do these things? Probably because the time it takes is more valuable to them than the few cents for a new one.

Re:Simple (Not Quite)

[MrNougat]

Indeed, the human race will survive the next 100 years no matter what happens, and probably the next thousand or zillion after that. But plain survival doesn't necessarily have to be comfortable. A species can survive for a long time in really adverse and sucky conditions.

Seems that many people interpreted the question (as may have been intended) to be: "How can the human race survive the next 100 years and come out the other end comfortable and thriving?"

Well, let's think about that. Pick any 100 year span in history. I would bet that, at the end of any 100 year span, most of humanity is merely surviving in really adverse and sucky conditions. A small fraction of the whole of humanity actually thrives. That is as true today as ever.

Maybe the question should rightly be interpreted as "How can the small fraction of humanity which is today thriving continue to thrive through the next 100 years and never mind the people who are already scrabbling for survival today." Because that's really the only question anyone has ever truly asked.

Mu

[sootman]

This question makes it sound like it's a foregone conclusion that we *won't* survive the next hundred years, and what can we do to change that.

What will we do to survive the next hundred years? My answer: we'll keep doing what we've been doing: make new stuff, cure some diseases, find new ways and reasons to kill each other, and overall, everything will more or less balance out, and we'll survive the next 100 years without trying, in any particular way, to survive. I mean, as long as people keep eating and fucking, we'll probably be around.

My personal plan is to keep eating fast food, use the bathroom as needed, enjoy the benefits of modern medicine, and live another ~40 years. I imagine my descendants will do the same, and after a couple rounds of that, we'll be at the 100 year mark, safe and sound.

At a micro level, all humans, individually, will eat food, drink lots of fluids when we get sick, treat injuries, etc.--in other words, do all that human-nature stuff which, almost by definition, living beings do on an individual basis to survive. On a macro level... I don't know, maybe I'll raise my kids and pay some taxes.

As for the question "What can I, J. Random Slashdot User, do to prevent Bush from nuking the world and ending human existence," the answer is "absofuckinglutely nothing." So what's the point of this question again?