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Stephen Hawking Receives Copley Medal
smooth wombat writes "Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, has been awarded the Royal Society's 275th Copley medal for his contribution to cosmology and theoretical physics. Other notables to receive the award, established by Stephen Gray in 1731 'For his new Electrical Experiments', include Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur and Albert Einstein. In his remarks, Professor Hawking reiterated his previous comments that man must colonize other planets. The medal presented to Professor Hawking was sent into space onboard Space Shuttle Discovery and spent some time on the International Space Station in July of this year. Hawking has expressed an interest in going into space and commented, 'My next goal is to go into space, maybe Richard Branson will help me.'"
I know that Stephen Hawking is a remarkable scientist and fellow human, but does this medal reflect any recent breakthrough of his or is this merely a lifetime achievement award?
I think we should be focusing on colonising the *space* between the planets, using the asteroid belts as a source of raw materials. But, yes, he's dead right.
You can spend trillions of dollars giving water to people in Africa and they will still need water. If you spend that Trillion dollars on sending people to Mars you will then be able to give each village in Africa a free hydrogen fuel cell that will produce water and electricity.
I think his comment goes a bit further then his one sentence reiteration, I believe one of his main points is that he thinks that mankind should not all be on the same planet to ensure propagation.
Let's say we clean this planet to the standards you refer to, then everyone is happy until a large meteor hits the planet and either wipes out mankind or our civilization (along with its technical ability to go into space).
He is thinking much deeper then a knee jerk liberal reaction to global warming and polution.
DK
Honestly, people already spend billions on developing countries. The problem with developing countries and poverty isn't an issue of money or even time. Its a matter of getting people to work together.
Fact is, food is cheap, but getting it to the parts of Africa that need it isn't. Why? The transport system sucks. Why does the transport system suck? Because the African governments are corrupt or the area is filled with warlords who *want* people to starve in genocidal proportions.
You can throw money all day long at a place like Africa today, and all you will end up with is people like Idi Amin or Mobutu Sese Seko, who get just incredibly rich off of aid money and bribes that should be used to develop infrastructure. The people will continue to starve or die of AIDS. Looking at Uganda under Yoweri Museveni (who is now looking a little of the dictator himself), you saw a very real campaign against AIDS that *worked* not because we dumped a billion dollars on Uganda, but because the government and people worked on the problem.
Space, while not perhaps as pressing a goal, is still somewhere we really do need to go, and it is a place where there is a lot of room to throw money around and you will still get a result. What Africa needs is a new mindset, and peace, and simply pushing money at it doesn't help peace. Not with the corruption that thrives off of it.
I think you are kinda missing the point of what he is saying. At our growth rate, it will become essential for us to go either into space to new worlds. According to http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/world.html It took us roughly forty years to double from 3 billion to 6 billion. Assume we create more medicines, etc over time. Assume also that birth control is used by more people and the overal growth rate for the world say drops to..... I don't know... a doubling time of 50 years. Slightly slower.
Now say the Earth is at half maximum capacity in the future. If those people have children the way their parents did, then in fifty years the population will double and the Earth will be full. In another fifty years, they will need a second Earth to house all the people. In another fifty years, four Earths. I think that's what he is really trying to get across.
That is to say eventually we will either face famine, war, etc as the Earth simply becomes too populated and is drained of its resources, or we must escape to the cosmos. And honestly, this is probably the most far out reason of why we should go to other planets. There are a lot cooler reasons like simple exploration and things like that.
Would you rather spend the money increasing the number of mission critical servers in your data center, or creating a hot site so you can survive a catastrophic accident at the main site?
It's all about offsite backups, man.
-- Dave
Making fun of dumb people since 2009
The species is more important than the planet. It's more important than all planets. Continued existence is the primary goal of all life. Some would argue there *is* no other goal. I have no responsibilty to any planet except as it pertains to keeping me and my species alive and thriving. That is the way of life. Parasites who destroy their hosts are inefficient parasites. They will either adapt and evolve into a less destructive parasite, or they will die out. What they will not do is simply stop doing what they do, stop trying to further their species.
Making fun of dumb people since 2009
Well, then I hope we invent teleportation, too. Even with multiple space elevators and an unlimited space ship carrying capacity you'd be hard-pressed to move a substantial portion of the current population of the planet off of it.
I think what he's saying is more that if we colonize other planets, it's harder for our race to disappear. Just colonizing other planets in the solar system means that an extinction level event is no longer just one rock.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And that is why Hawkings is who he is, and why you are who you are. He is trying to look ahead to the time when the earth, or even just the major life forms (human being one of the prominents) WILL be wiped out. While you, OTH, want what is and will always be unobtainable.
Many years ago (~35), I thought that communism was an interesting form of gov. Problem was, that there never has been a communist gov. There were attempts to set them up, but power mongers come along and take hold. Hitler "created" an enemy in the jews and later in other nations. Along the way, he built up the military, ran up a HUGE deficit, and slowly started taking away rights from the citizens. Of course, it turned out that most likely, Hitler arranged a serious of incidents that encouraged the citizens to turn away from liberties and worry about their security. The same thing happened in USSR with Stalin, and in China with Mao. In fact, this approach can and will happen in any country where they allow their leaders to do things quietly or allow them to get by with illegal actions. The problem is that no matter the intention, some new leader will come along and invent new enemies and even engineer things to go their way, such as say, trading hostages for weapons prior to being the head leader or invading a country on false pretext of nuclear weapons( It is for these reason I became a libertarian).
Hawkings has it right. We should be concerned about the long term survivability of mankind rather than the short term survival of a man.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
When it comes to that, you sfall back to your most basic survival instincts. As a species, we should do what we need to survive. There's no "right" or "wrong" in it. If survival means terraforming and "polluting" a planet, so what? Even if that planet has life that will have to die to make way for us, then so be it.