Abandon Earth Or Die, Warns Hawking

siliconbits writes "According to famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, it's time to free ourselves from Mother Earth. 'I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space,' Hawking tells Big Think. 'It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.'"

Comments

Re:Need For Tools

[nomadic]

Yeah, how come it's always the same scientists who have failed in developing technologies that will help us leave, who are telling us to leave?

Re:Meh...

[strack]

what a pile of divine manifest destiny bullshit. we dont 'belong' anywhere, theres no 'reason', beyond the practical, as to why we are stuck here. and dont give me that hippy drum circle 'working out our issues' claptrap. and we are most definitely not thousands of years away from workable space travel. you are guilty of having no ambition, no vision, for human exploration of space. you are, quite boring.

Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop

[Americano]

FACT: the original point I was discussing was that, and I quote, "War is about the only thing we're willing to spend tax money on at all."

My point was that other non-war-related things made up the bulk of our federal spending. In NO reality is it correct to say that "war" is about the only thing we spend our tax money on. That is, and was, the ONLY point I made. So, what can we conclude here:

1) Infrastructure and Social Programs are both *Non-Military* spending;
2) Infrastructure and Social Programs make up "the bulk" of the spending in the budget that is NOT accounted for by the military;
3) Infrastructure and Social Programs (or, "Non-military spending", if you are an anal retentive jackass) are therefore the majority of the federal budget.

This whole point is aimed at the conclusion that "all we spend on is war and the military." This is demonstrably false by comparing what we spend on the military versus what we spend on "everything else". Infrastructure and Social Programs are two broad categories that cover "just about everything else" in the federal budget.

You are arguing against a point I never made, and doing so quite poorly, I might add.

There you go again. VA programs are NOT infrastructure. For some weird reason, you keep trying to slap infrastructure and social programs together, when they're obviously two very different things.

For god's sake, what is wrong with you? In the context of this discussion (military spending vs. other spending), "Infrastructure and Social Programs" are lumped together because they describe the bulk of non-military spending.

Tuition and other VA benefits like that can certainly be well-argued to fall in the category of "non-military" spending, as they have no specific military application, and in fact serve to build an educated workforce - thus falling into the "infrastructure and social program" categories, rather than the "military and war" category.

I truly fail to see how you can be so monumentally dim-witted as to not understand the context of this discussion, yet argue so vehemently for any side of it.