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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?
'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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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*
My work here is dung.
We have to stop being a desposable consumerist society. I.e. we have to live more simply. Now I'm not saying that we all need to be organic gardeners who tailor their own clothes and live directly off the land. I'm very much a metropolitan technologist, but I think that consumption purely for the sake of consumption is our biggest problem. The real question is if the market can correct this or if the market will dig such a deep hole that it doesn't react until the shit hits the fan.
next hundred years?
By installing Linux of course!
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".
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Whether intentional or not, a huge reduction in population
would do the trick.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
good ol' pandemic. A real nasty beast of a bug.
Kill off a couple billion, and we'll be good to go for a while.
What?
The answer is spirituality, establishment of a world where materialism will be subdued by the spiritual matters. The establishment of the society where consumerism will be frowned at. The answer is walk, not race, think more than act.
Once the world government becomes reality it will immediately transform the economic system from highly internationally competitive firmly capitalistic to more reasonable more socially oriented system.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
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.
The only solution I can think of involves legalizing, rather, mandating drugs and banning clothes...
My name is Wootzor von Leetenhaxor
Humans are like cockroaches. We've infected every corner of the globe, and we're not going away. However, if we are to survive and prosper for the next century and hopefully longer, there's going to be some big changes. My boyfriend and I were talking, and following the depletion of oil resources (and not before), we'll see a massive centralization of cities, mostly on coasts, and a move towards renewable energy sources. Cars will never go away; they have too much momentum (no pun intended). But when this happens, we'll see much more of a community feel, as everyone will be in much closer quarters. The massive towers in Dubai and Kuala Lampur (sp?) are good examples of this, and will propogate into the next century as we won't have the finances to get around. Cities like Los Angeles will become a thing of the past, as it will no longer be feasible to have your suburban house with a white picket fence. With this, we'll see a lot of changes. Society will be permanently altered. But as Gloria Gaynor said, "we will survive". If we want to extend ourselves to Mars and the moons of the gas giants, we'll need to perfect the biodome, to be able to live independently. Interstellar travel is out of the question, and always will be. We should give up on it and focus on going to Mars, Europa, and some of the other moons. -sigh-
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.
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Humans have survived through ice ages and famine. People often underestimate our ability to adapt and survive. We will survive because we don't want to die
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
The best way to survive the next 100 years is to stop running from the imaginary boogeymen of the LAST 100 years. We have this suicidal fascination with birth control and population reduction. In reality, birth rates are plumetting all over the world. An if it wasn't for immigration, the population of most propserous nations would be in rapid decline. In the U.S. the average couple has only 1.4 children. Without immigration from third world countries, the U.S. would be depopulating at a rate of 30% every 25 years.
Exacerbating this is the profile of who is reproducing. In our welfare state, we pay the least functional and arguably least intelligent segments of our population (this is not racist - 75% of welfare recipients are not african americans) to sit around and breed. The only part of the population demographic that is growing is the poor and dependent.
The crisis of the next 100 years will not be global warming or toxic waste or nuclear fallout. It will be vast armies of stupid belligerent parasites with their hands out demanding to be fed and clothed by a shrinking pool of intelligent functional human beings.
The next world crisis is the crisis of de-evolution!
To survive, we must institute emergency programs of tax relief and education to encourage intelligent people to BREED, for the sake of humanity.
"Sic Semper Path of Least Resistance"
>> I imagine you can do better than 'It Can't.'
Sometimes the correct answer is really boring.
From Yahoo answers, my personal answer:
Humanity has shown itself capable of adapting to an incredible variety of situations, conditions, and hardships. One way or another, I am quite confident that humanity will endure through the next one hundred years.
That being said, the circumstances of this continued survival may be quite different or unpleasant compared to what many people experience today. I believe that humanity needs to come together in a constructive manner and really address some of the many problems we as a species face, from global climate change to the vast poverty, hunger, and disease suffered by much of the world. Until a truly unified approach is taken by all the world's nations, any progress will be piecemeal and incremental.
Alternatively, as you yourself suggested, human colonization of extra-terrestrial worlds by a subset of humanity is an option, however under today's socio-political climate, such an endeavor would likely be limited to a few of the world's more wealthy nations.
I know there's more than enough cynicism to go around, but Dr. Hawking's question was only asking how the human race can survive the next 100 years. Not 1000 or 10,000.
Does anyone really think that there is even the slightest chance of the human race becoming extinct in the next 100 years? (Excepting act of God events like a large asteroid strike or supervolcano) Even the most dire global warming alarmists don't predict the extinction of mankind in the next century.
I expect that in 100 years civilization will look a lot like it does today. India and China will be richer, the US and Europe will be a little poorer and the geeks of the future will have some toys that would make us green with envy.
The real question is, how can any of us reading this survive another 100 years?
Never ever say "That's something we don't want/need to know." Investigate and study everything.
I think in the coming century, we'll continue to see the world's population increase. It will come in a different kind of environmental revolution; we won't just be changing the environment around us anymore, we'll start changing the environment in us. We'll become more resilient, self-relient, and broaden the conditions in which we can exist in an enviroment and when that happens, we'll be able to inhabit new places on the globe and start to move beyond.
Demented But Determined.
with a STFU n00b! Like OMGWTFBBQ!
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.
would have been to answer him as soon as possible with "First post!"
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.
The question is not "survive?" Humans as a species are pretty bombproof and there will almost certainly be humans around several hundred years from now regardless of where our madness takes us, even if they're starveling primitives.
The question is: How do we survive over the long term (100Myears+) WITH TECHNOLOGY AND KNOWLEDGE INTACT?
The number one problem we have today that gets in the way of world peace is religion. The number one problem we have that gets in the way of sustaining our existence is consumerism. Beyond curbing these two major problems we will only make existence miserable for the next 100 years. And we will survive for at least the next 100 years, but who knows how long it will take for the earth to come back to balance... /gam/
"In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not."
The planet is viable now. To say it isn't is to ignore the highest lifespan average of humanity, EVER. Right now humans are living longer better lives than ever in the history of history.
More humans mean greater distribution of labor. More distribution means more specialization which leads to greater technical achievements which lead to things like, but not limited to, 100% of the population living off of food farmed by 2% of the population.
How is the planet exactly not viable?
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
and you'll find a huge disparity between the 5-10% or so at the top of the comfort scale, and the rest. Right now the Western world (most of the US + Canada, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea and the Commonwealth) comprises that 5-10%. Guess what? It won't stay that way for too long, it never does. The best you can hope for is a good five hundred to thousand year run, and I think Western civilization might be nearing the end of its spectacular five-century sprint.
Pick any period in human history, and you'll also find a large number of people actively working to cause the end of their particular civilization.
Why is Iraq's fabled "land between the two rivers" a dry dusty desert?
Why is North Africa, the ancient Mediterranean's breadbasket and father of great cities, hardly able to grow enough food to feed its own populations?
Why did the Chacoans up and suddenly disappear after claiming so much of the harsh American Southwest for their cities and farms?
Why did the ancient Mayans leave their cities that required so much labor to construct in the middle of a jungle?
Humans can have an amazing impact on their environment, but it's easy to forget that while we appear to be the masters of Nature. But the two work on completely different timescales.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
Obviously. So that excludes many /. readers.
Oh my god talk about hyperbole and idiotic moderators. The human race isn't going to die out. I mean come on. There may well be a few billion deaths, but there are billions more humans on the planet so lets face it, we're not facing a global extinction event...
The question you should be asking is how do I make sure that my family are the survivors in the coming tough times... Make sure the genes continue.
Deleted
The human race has evolved in such a way that now we are capable of really fucking up the planet and eventually extinguishing all life on it. But let's see what mechanisms we have for that.
On one hand, we have nuclear weapons of gargantuan power. If we start a nuclear war, we can easily kill half of the population and make life incredibly miserable for those who survive... but wait, that implies that billions of people will actually survive, so the race isn't really eliminated.
We have also produced technology that is capable of affecting the planet in a serious, perhaps irreversible way. The effect that mostly concerns us now is global warming. Because of our actions the weather may go really wacky, potentially causing the death of millions. The ice caps may melt, slowly sinking a very significant portion of the land, precisely where most of the population lives. But that process will take many, many decades, and even though millions may die, most people will have time to move away. This will cause the overpopulation of the current high lands, with enormously devastating effects. Furthermore, eventually the climate changes may make the planet completely inhabitable (at least by humans), but that will take several centuries to take place. Meanwhile, the human race will survive.
We can go on and on, analysing the different ways that we may fuck up. But we will always find the same answer: in order to actually eliminate the human race we have to make all our habitats inhabitable, and we still can't do that within 100 years from now. We need something like a giant meteor striking the planet or the sun exploding, or some other phenomena out of our control.
My point is: Stephen Hawking is a very smart guy, but this time he managed to make a question that is wrongly formulated:
Duh, how can the human race not survive the next hundred years?
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.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Depending on where and how you drop the aluminum, nickle, iron and silicon from the asteroid, you can get rid of all of the warlords at the same time.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Why is he suddenly getting so philosophical? Has he just gotten too old to make any advances in physics and decided to move on to metaphysics? First his urgent call for space colonies, now this. It reminds me of actors who give political speeches. It's not their field of expertise, but people listen to them anyway. It also reminds me of the late career wanderings of other greats like Linus Pauling or Cary Mullis or Issac Newton. idk, I guess he's entitled to muse about whatever he wants, but it's weird to hear him waxing about humanity like a college girl.
How do you promote this kind of compassion? Can you teach it in a school? We need to care about our communities but instead we have become more and more isolated.
You mean like the deforestation of the British Isles? Wiped pretty much every tree off of them, and they used to be covered with them! Why, Scotland only has about 1% of it's original forests remaining -- truly a tragedy of the modern world. Wait... that happened a thousand years ago.
Okay, well my country, Canada, is a major world exporter of wood and wood products. Forestry is an incredibly important industry. We must be deforesting our country at an unbelievable rate! Let's see... save the rainforests web site, Canada, rate of deforestation -- 0% for the last twenty years.
Most of those aren't uniquely modern problems and some of them actually have solutions now that we didn't have before. We have to get better at APPLYing those solutions in some places and we'll probably need to develop some new techniques, but the world probably isn't ending.
As for nukes, people a few thousand years ago used to destroy cities by killing everyone in them up close and personal, then salting the earth to make sure nobody could use it again. Killing cities isn't a modern invention either. Yes, we have better tools to do it now, but we're also MUCH better at not using them.
the answer is 42, of course
SOYLENT!
Enjoy Soylent Physicist, now with anti-oxidants!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
I am amazed at the amount of self guilt and pessimism expressed in response to his question. I propose that the question was asked from the _false_ pretense that we are at risk of not surviving. The question is even asked using a (stated) false pretense as a setup: "In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally". How's this for an alternative view:
We will survive the next 100 years even if we tried our hardest to destroy ourselfs. Every biological and mental mechanism we have programmed into us is designed to continue our race. Take away our desire to reproduce? Take away our pride, greed or desire to exceed? The human race stands no chance of being destroyed.
Steven Hawkings may be one of the smartest men who has lived, but perhaps he hasn't studied history? Or perhaps he is trolling. Our world is in chaos politically socially and environmentally? Compared to when exactly? Oh my god, it's because BUSH is president isn't it. Yep, all Bushes fault. Seriously people, take the liberalism, go cut and blog about it on your livejournal. I can't believe a smart man such as Steven Hawkings would live in a state of emo self defeatism by telling himself the world is going to hell, so I can only assume that it was a brilliant troll.
and to put it bluntly:
YHBT YHL HAND
As long as it really IS cheaper to be wasteful, then that's exactly what people will continue to do! And that also illustrates the fact that things aren't nearly as "dire" as some of the environmentalists and promoters of "less technology/simpler lifestyle" want you to believe.
... yet. When the landfills realy DO get filled up enough though, you'll see this change itself without any legislation or govt. incentives necessary.
At some point, our tendencies to embrace the disposable, short lifespan consomer goods will lead us to a situation where they're no longer the cheaper option and *that* is when you'll see change come about.
It's fine to preach about how much stuff we're tossing into landfills and trying to guilt people into changing, but all that does is push back the timeline a little bit on when it won't make economic sense anymore. A real *solution* can only come about when the best choice really becomes conservation.
Let's take, for example, recycling of glass bottles. Right now, it uses *more* total energy/resources to recycle them than it's worth. There are places that accept glass containers for recycling (though you won't get paid anything for dropping off the glass), but they're typically profitable only because of government tax breaks and subsidies. Glass is largely made up of sand, and we've got no shortage of sand. Meanwhile, think of all the diesel fuel or gasoline used to transport the waste glass around, etc.
As another example, cellphones. Currently, there's just no compelling reason for most people not to toss out an old one and get a new one (often free with a phone contract!) every 2 or 3 years. Totally wasteful and pointless, really -- except for the fact that you pay so much for the usage of the device, it makes little sense to put all of that towards some beat-up, feature-lacking phone that's starting to fall apart on you. The whole business model encourages the disposability of the hardware. It would change if consumers started getting rewarded for turning in their old phones for credit. The question is, are old cellphones really worth enough to make this a profitable option for cell companies to offer it? Apparently not
If the first fifty posts here constitutes our "best and brightest" the human race is doomed for certain. Majority of the posts mention "population". Haven't our attitudes toward population created the majority of our present mess in the first place? And what lever do we have to influence population (and global distribution of wealth), over such a short time window (four generations), that doesn't light more fires than it puts out? Certainly population must be *understood* to formulate any useful ideas, but that's about as far as wisdom dictates.
What I believe must happen is that we come up with many thousands of small ideas that do more to put out fires than start them. Even if you chase a non-convergent series across the x-axis, it isn't going to stay put long enough to matter.
The real thinking involves determining which kinds of interventions are convergent (on average, to a best guess, or with good prospects surrounding constuctive failure--the mine fields of good intentions abound) and which interventions are not (and not necessarily through any fault of their own, but with full acceptance of how "each of us is smarter than all of us" and all that poster-slogan implies).
If I were to reason by analogy to the manifest failures of the human condition that lead us to this point in time, I would guess that the easy redemption slips through our fingers as it always does. We'll end up in the situation where the solution or its mechanisms are fully understood, but the news of the solution is perpetually one step behind the shock front it could have mitigated.
I see this shaping up as a foot race between human resourcefulness and ingenuity and the resonating stress fronts: resources, politics, environment.
My view is that we should be focussing our attention on running the best foot race we can possibly run when it comes to crunch time. What are the mechanisms that aid or impinge on this vital capacity?
I'm still contemplating this problem. I have one certain item on my list thus far: the patent system. As the patent system stands, we have routed one of our most potent weapons--our technical ingenuity--across the Manitoba marsh lands (read about the Great Canadian Railway). All the smart people will have constructive ideas, and all of the constructive ideas will be hung up in the patent system, which is bad enough, and the truly reprehensible litigation environment that surrounds it. Did anyone see that remark yesterday that certain personal awards were upheld in the tabacco verdict, while one was overturned because the statute of limitations had expired as the legal system spun its wheels with great precedent and determination into the soft wet sand?
The usual human response is to fix an institution such as our patent and legal system only *after* its liabilities have culminated in catastrophe. The problem is that we can already the future setting up such that the prime catastrophe is the world around us, and the bloody-mindedness of our legal system is just the *secondary* catastrophe that we will soon have the pleasure of addressing after the berms are breached.
That's the kind of circumstance that stretches human resourcefulness to the breaking point at the exact moment in time the human race can least afford it.
In my view, it's a clear failure of the American constitution that the American legal system was not constitutionally mandated to achieve *proactive* self-reform.
And worst of all, the American legal system is being globalized following exactly the same model as the American power grid. Only Quebec had the good sense to DC couple their grid to that horrible mass of wires and dominoes (and do not fail to observe the contributions of the regulatory and legal environment in shaping the engineering decisions and sand-sucking ostrich behaviours).
Presently, through the global treaty process, American legal process is being aggressively exported using the club of economic integration with the world's most consumeristic popu
How to solve the population problem:
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
Dear Mr Hawking,
I cannot understand why war, overpopulation, global warming and other doomsday theories dominate your views on social science. The fact is that intelligence does not make you an authority on anything requiring knowledge outside your sphere.
War
War is, to me, the only thing likely to be the end of civilization besides an extinction level planetary impact, as over time, advances in science increasingly enable us to affect our environment and control energy using the levers of natural law, but whether this can be universalized over time to the extent that a country like North Korea could destroy the usefulness of the entire world to humans and counter attempts by all the others wanting to detect and thwart those efforts is yet to be seen. Getting back to reality, each country has a somewhat static threshold for war which is governed by a combination of roughly three things from the top of my head:
-The resources at hand to fight the war
-The collective will of the populace, as expressed by the sum of all its knowledge, ignorance, logic and insanity
-The will of the leadership, as expressed by the knowledge, ignorance, logic and insanity of the leadership
Sooner or later, however you see it, enough of all of those things erode to the point of being unwilling to continue with war, someone surrenders or is obliterated, and then the population continues to survive despite whatever costs are incurred.
The fact is that civilizations will continue to decide that someone else shouldn't have the freedoms they have, shouldn't exist, or should exist under their rule, and those who would be subject to those whims SHOULD fight! Anyone who says that there should never be war either thinks that fascist countries should always get their way, or thinks that there obviously are no countries that would destroy or take over a peaceful nation. That's just utopian bullshit.
Overpopulation
It is a fact that as a civilization becomes more advanced and established that the birthrate shrinks. We in the united states require immigration even to keep our population growth even with our death rate. How does a 1.5 children per two adults equal population growth? China and Japan are heading towards massive population shrinkage, even to the point of crisis.
Global Warming
I guess I'd rather not go into global warming, but there is debate as to man's level of involvement on that front. Further, the effect is along the lines of lots of death in third world countries, massive shifts in land values leading to lots of bankruptcy in more developed countries, and possibly other natural disasters. There are some theories about how the flora and fauna would be affected, but the earth's mammalian population seems well suited to survive ice ages and climate shift as evidenced by the past.
Fabric of the universe? Sure, go for it. Cause-headed ignorance and feel-good statements only good for warm fuzzies? Leave it to the idiots with the super-short memories.
Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, how I love it. - Gen. George Patton
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?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Excellent post.
One problem with your post-scarcity theory: it won't last. The world population is expected to double over the next 100 years. I'm not sure technology will be able to deal with the scarcity issues that quickly. Especially for things like clean water, oil, and land. I expect there to at least be some serious wars as these resources become more scarce.
I'd also like to mention humanity's penchant for powerful people to create scarcity in order to increase their power. While technology has helped us counteract that nicely over the past 50 years, I'm not confident that it will continue to do so long term.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
I don't think survival is the important part of the question, especially for such a short time (well, 100 years is only one generation), and we are good survivors. The important part is the "how", i.e. what circumstances, life quality, political and economical climate, human rights, energy situation will our grandchildren have. And honestly, I'm not optimistic. All I can think of, is really not good. Still, hundred years can be a relatively long time, just think back what was here a hundred years ago, and we just might not be able to even concieve the level of changes these hundred years could bring us. I just hope we (well, not we as persons but we as a population) will live to see it without many epidemics, religious or political wars, energy crises and Earth turning into a semi-Arrakis (i.e. desert planet without spice). Then we'll do fine.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I know!! I know!!
Man who prays and asks the LORD for help can righteously overcome ANY obstacle. (famine, disease, pollution, exctinction, overcrowding, crime, you name it)
Ask and ye shall receive.
Knock and it will be opened to you.
Faith can move mountains.
With God all things are possible.
Combine those things with OPTIMISM, and remember that Jesus Christ said ALWAYS forgive, NEVER retaliate; BLESS and PRAY for your enemy. LOVE your neighbor as yourself, LOVE your enemy, LOVE the LORD.
When you forgive, it results in YOUR being forgiven. When YOU give, YOU receive. WHEN YOU BLESS YOUR ENEMY, YOU YOURSELF ARE ALSO BLESSED!
And remember that Christ said that the love of money is the root of all evil. That means be wary of valuing money more than the welfare of your fellow man, or the planet that he lives on. Be prepared and willing to sacrifice of your own time, money and resources in order to make the world a better place.
Jesus also said keep the 10 Commandments. If we all kept the 10 Commandments we'd be in good shape, (but that's not enough.) Don't worship false gods, don't commit idolatry, work 6 days and keep the sabbath day holy (7th day = _saturday!_ Look, JESUS WAS A JEW. Jews keep the saturday sabbath! No excuses.), don't take the LORD's name in vain, don't kill or steal or commit adultery, don't bear false witniss, don't covet your neighbor's wife or possessions or servants, honor your parents.
AND don't have sex outside of marriage. That would keep std's in check and reduce the expansion of things like hiv.
Don't use witchcraft or sorcery, don't use omens or divination.
Learn to recognize when you're being tempted to sin, and pray for the strength to resist!
The most important virtue is love.
I've seen a heavenly sign. I saw a double rainbow, 360 degrees, 2 concentric rainbows ALL THE WAY AROUND THE SUN in San Francisco at high noon when there wasn't a cloud in the sky. Others witnissed the very same event. That was around 2001.
You want man to survive? Seek and ye shall find. Seek the LORD. Have FAITH!!!
God Bless You, Stephen Hawking!
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
I think the first step is to not give religious organizations preferential tax treatment. The rest should write itself.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I've been reading for 10 minutes, in the answers in yahoo and then here on slashdot, and not a single (modded) answer "Of course it will survive!". You sir are _very_ right. Right now we are at the best of our history with resources unimaginable until 200 years ago. If, and a say _if_, somehow, we'll hit a real crisis (and I really don't think we will) a reduction of 80% in our production capabilities would mean... tadam... no games consoles, no new blockbuster movies, no new cars etc. The basic things necesary for our survival are so cheap it's almost imposible to run out of them, globally. A meal at McDonalds may cost 10$, but the ingridients, bulk, cost about a buck. And the cheapest caloric equivalent would probably be a penny or less. With 100$ one could buy food for a couple of years. So people are trying to tell me there is a chance we won't SURVIVE?!
I'm not going to list every imaginable end-of-the-world scenario and debunk it, but instead i will note that all the answers i've seen so far imply a serious lack of imagination. People are really incapable of picturing the world spinning 100 years from now... after they're dead and buried. Well it will spin and it'll be a whole lot better then now. After all, that's what we are all working for right? At least most of us here in slashdot.
And as a conclusion, when I think about 100 years in the future the image that pops into my head is Kusanagi Motoko. True, it's a personal image, but I'm glad I can picture a future that is at the same time strange and beautiful.
Only by asking ourselves (the masses) that very question. He didn't just post it to his closest or wisest peers. Maybe this was the answer Dr. Hawking already had.
The question is too broad and essentially meaningless. It is, at best, an unanswerable rhetorical question.
That said, the question is still important. Not because there is an answer (there are, in fact, several correct answers), but because by asking it, Dr Hawking is using his stature to attempt to raise social consciousness just a tiny bit. This is a case where the act of asking the question is more important that obtaining an answer. It's like asking, "What is the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything?" Yeah, yeah... the answer is 42. A non-sensical answer to a non-sensical question. But by asking the question, movement is created. Some paths lead towards suicide (or, if you're pessimistic, all paths lead towards suicide) but asking the question causes people to move about, discover things, and make changes.
So how will the human race survive the next 100 years? I don't know. I do not even know that we will. But by asking the question, a certain amount of energy is introducd to the system that could very well create a path for the survival of our species. ...for just a bit longer.
Female literacy is one of the key factors in determining birth rates.
Increased female literacy allows women greater access to information on birth control and also higher statuts in society leading to greater control over reproductive decisions. To reduce population growth teach girls to read. This is an abstract of a study discussing factors impacting birth rates such as female literacy. Here is a little bit more info.
I won't argue that religion has been used to justify awful behaviour, but "the largest source"? I think you may be overlooking nationalism. For examples of fevent nationalism run amok, see WW1 and WW2. Talk about your blood baths. In WW1 it wasn't uncommon for countries like England to lose tens of thousands of men a day. With that comparison, Al-Queda seems to pose a threat closer to that of your average serial killer than to a war.
If the human race is to survive: social, financial, and physical elements must be equalized.
Why?
Ever notice how quickly poor and undernourished people reproduce? As an instinct for survival of their genes.
By equalizing Social Elements, racism and separation of social elements will dwindle, thus providing people with a positive existence, and resulting in more commonalities such as knowledge sharing, and working toward common goals.
By equalizing Financial Elements, the human existence will focus heavier upon the right to live, the right to exist, and will therefore work toward a common goal.
By equalizing physical elements such as starvation and poor water supplies (resulting from the above) -- people will survive, and will reproduce less.
Humanity will work towards common goals, and will lessen outright demented war efforts and we will find ways to solve our common problems such as the environment, and our reaching out into space.
It's pretty obvious Dr Hawking isn't interested in the answer, or at least not the answers bandied about by people on the forums.
First off, it's a loaded question. It implies that something needs to be done for us to survive the next 100 years. In answering the question we are buying into his assumption. Now, I don't know whether it is a valid assumption, but I think we should be conscious of what we buy into in answering the question.
Secondly, he already has an answer in mind - he thinks that for the human race to survive we need to colonise the solar system. So in essence, this isn't an attempt to generate meaningful answers, it's a way for him to persuade us there is a problem that needs addressing.
I just wanted to put my two cents in and say, that we need to kill all the Sales and Marketing people on the planet in order to survive.
Human lifespan just isn't the only metric of a planet's viability. Long-term survivability demands that resources consumed be renewable. It also means that we need to pay attention to the biosphere, because our monocultures of lawn grass and crops and animals simply don't have the viability in the long term. We only get by with it right now because we're burning through millions year of surplus solar energy in the form of petroleum right now. You have to be on your toes not to be feeding, indirectly, on oil through the products of industrialized agriculture.
The worst destruction is definitely in the third world, where cash crops that the industrial world demands and the chemicals used to grow them destroy the soil, and people move on to destroy more land. We haven't solved the problem. We've just swept it under the rug for a while.
In the meantime, scientists are saying that the rate of extinction of species on this planet is catastrophic and fits the parameters of a mass extinction. Loss of biodiversity means loss of evolutionary potential, and hence survivability.
We can do a lot to fix it, but until serious ecological responsibility becomes ingrained in our society, I don't see how we'll prevent a disaster that might even reach into air-conditioned Western suburban homes.
I was a born-again Christian for over 20 years and thought the same way as the above poster. I left religion / christianity about 6 years ago and I have to say I have never been happier! I realize now how very much I was missing the point (much like above poster)! Atheists aren't violent criminals doing thing for selfish needs, that does not make sense... but that is what the religious mindset teaches you to believe. You believe this to the point where you can only see "good" as coming from following the Bible, which is utterly ridiculous. Many so-called Christians go the opposite way and become evil for the very reason that they can no longer tell that true morals are not based on some set of rules from a God on high. Morals come from living and learning... education. You do good, people do good to you. There is nothing to gain if everyone is out for themselves! This is why I see Christianity as so hyprocritcal these days... they are exactly what they think the secular world is... evil! And they can't see past that.
Meh.