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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.'"
ME. Right now. Why would I want to have my tax dollars on this. I have to pay the mortgage. I have to pay the $320 Comcast bill. Going to Mars isn't going to get me anywhere.
Human mentality...
What are the key technologies needed in order to do that and where do they stand today? How do we afford that while focus is on survival in much of the world - and on greater comfort in the rest of it? From where I stand it seems likely that we will have to wait for something drastic to get motivated.
Lost in space at an early age. Survived the vacuum. Now rebuilding castle in air.
Unfortunately, we really need to get our shit together on this planet before we start thinking about colonizing others.
Sarbonn's blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/blog
I don't want to seem like a total pessimist, but I don't care at all what happens to the human race. If every human dies because of a meteor or something, the universe won't even notice. I think it is a bit premature, since we have never publicly met any others, to believe that our species is worthy of being preserved and expanded beyond earth. Thanks for the books, Hawking, but there has to be higher priority things to do.
Okay, I'm quite happy to go find a new home amongst the stars, but at this point the only way that is going to happen is if the earth explodes and my ashes get distributed through space.
If our future is on worlds beyond earth, then we need to start with a space transportation, of the form of a single stage vehicle that can at least go to the moon and back repeatedly, with a turn around time of less than two days. Additionally the vehicle needs to be able to return from the moon without having to depend on an already established infrastructure.
I am a big fan of travelling to Mars and beyond, but the truth is we should establish a solid space flight foundation first. At the moment the technology we have is expensive and suitable in most cases only for one-way flights and of a crew of no more than seven people. Once we resolve the transportation issue, then we the Moon and Mars suddenly become relatively easy. One way flights are great for automated payloads, but for anything intended to transport humans, then we still have a ways to go.
I really believe that we need an x-prize designed for a single stage reusable space vehicle. The aim: launch into orbit with a single stage, do a full orbit, return to earth and do the same thing a second time within two days. The x-prize would be split into two parts: unmanned for the first offering and manned for the second offering.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I think the point is that since, in addition to all those people, someone like Hawking is saying it as well just adds credence to the idea. No one is claiming that Hawking invented the idea; they're just pointing out that Hawking is one of the many who follow this particular line of thinking.
Living With a Nerd
Even if all of humanity was unified, we'd still die eventually if we stayed here. This planet has an expiration date. It's nice to pretend that if we were all hippies and lived like cavemen, that it'd last forever, but that isn't the case. Sooner or later we're gonna have to get out of here, or go extinct.
Earth's "best if lived on by" date is far enough away that I'm not terribly worried about it, but even aside from that, there are always asteroids out there that could blindside us. And I'm sure that's the sort of thing Hawking is referring to anyways.
Yes, I remember seeing that on Battlestar Galactica just recently. Though the whole ending with Katie Sackhoff being an angel (falling into a sinkhole on an alien world?) and God using MAGIC to create a Viper spacefighter did suck.
From TFA:
"The nearest star [to Earth] is Proxima Centauri which is 4.2 light years away," says University of Michigan astrophysicist Katherine Freese, "That means that, if you were traveling at the speed of light the whole time, it would take 4.2 years to get there."
Wrong. It would take no time at all.
Dr Freese - you have failed your special relativity course.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Just need a way to ascend to a higher plane
II've been telling people for over a decade (for many reasons...mostly having to do with our biological necessities) that we "need to get off of this rock"!
-Oz
Well and good, but where do we get the energy to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable life-supporting ecosystem elsewhere? Hawking is a physicist, so I'm a bit surprised to hear him proposing something like this without explaining where the lift capacity is going to come from. There's a reason why Pan Am never began the orbital shuttle service depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey (aside, of course, from the fact that they went out of business).
It's always been an intriguing thought, but the fact is, the evidence that homo sapiens evolved from native primate species here on Earth is quite clear, and grows clearer with each passing year.
It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million.
Right, because space and non-earthlike planets are so much less prone to disaster.
Like anyone can even know that
The problem with that sentiment is that the wars have actually helped technology evolve. China was advancing faster for a long time, until a large enough piece of land was covered by it that real wars became uncommon. In Europe we continued trying to wipe each other out and it caused a lot of technological improvements. Competing countries and corporations advance technology a lot faster compared to monopolies and true world powers.
The space race was sped up by the arms race between the USA and the USSR. Both just wanted to prove they were better.
War may be a costly way to advance technology and not a nice one, but it is an very effective one.
I would also prefer global peace as I do not think it's worth the suffering, but it would most probably hamper advancement, not speed it up.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
I think we could easily manage to come up with the necessary tools/technologies required for sustained space travel if and only if we stop focusing our time/money/effort on trying to kill each other. Where you were born or what you look like does not make you better than somebody else. Just because somebody disagrees with you does not make them wrong, or worthy of being persecuted and/or killed. Others do not exist to provide you with everything you want. Desire is not an occupation.
Granted, I think that most humans will always have a competitive side. But it's a little ridiculous for the US to spend almost 37 times as much on the military budget [via the DOD] as they do on space exploration/research. And those numbers do not include anything like the FBI, homeland security, veterans affairs, DOE, and interest/fees from previous wars. If you include those numbers, the military spending is more like 60 times as much as the NASA budget. That's pretty ridiculous, in my opinion.
Even after Earth has be engulfed by the sun?
Yeah, he's just totally riding off of the fact he managed to become celebrated as one of the smartest people in the world and helped millions become interested in astro-physics, all whilst dealing with a crippling disability.
He clearly needs to get over himself! You can totally hear the smugness in that voice synthesiser of his!
Unless a event occurs that is so impacting and unprecedented in known human history. Humans will never learn to unite and live in cooperation with each other. Like you said, it's not in our nature.
And with 'impacting and unprecedented' I'm thinking in terms of Divine intervention, alien visits (which might turn out to be the same thing), natural disaster killing 70/80+ percent of the human population, the made up Mayan prophecy turning out to be true after all..
That sort of stuff.
In other words, ain't gonna happen.
If we can hold out long enough hopefully technology will be so advanced and relatively cheap that at least the more fortunate in our society can get a second chance somewhere else.. (where they can start all over again)
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
As humans can't survive anywhere else in the solar system, and as travel outside the solar system is impossible, it's obvious that humans will eventually go extinct. So what? The wish-fulfillment of Trekkies notwithstanding, basic physics and engineering make it a practical impossibility. I find the level of debate on this very frustrating. For instance, I guarantee someone somewhere will post something like "If everyone had your attitude, we'd never have left the trees!" (which of course is a self-evidently vacuous and stupid response to my observation about physics and engineering.)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Got any advanced physics ideas on reducing the cost to orbit? We really sort of need that before any sort of mass migration into space, even just LEO, can occur.
The temperature range, atmospheric pressure, protective magnetic field of earth are far superior to anything anywhere else in the solar system, except for a certain altitude in Venus' atmosphere, but Venus has virtually no hydrogen. Outer space requires too much work to be survivable. There are no fossil fuels in outer space. We can't even live without fossil fuels here on Earth. Space colonization is madness at this point.
The fact that wars have helped technology evolve suggests a defect in resource allocation, rather than a virtue of war.
Quite obviously, during any war worthy of the name, much of the population busies itself with the neccessary-but-useless tasks of filling catridges and emptying them. Substantial amounts of human and physical capital are reduced to rubble. Oil wells get set on fire, roads, rails and bridges get bombed, fields and forests get mined, etc, etc.
Wars represent a vast quantity of resources simply thrown away(in many cases this is the rational act on both parties' part, given the costs of being conquered; but from the overall welfare numbers, war is expensive), compared to peacetime. If, in fact, more R&D gets done during wartime, despite the reduced resources available, this suggests that peacetime could dedicate the same R&D resources, with less sacrifice(because a smaller slice of the bigger pie would be needed) or even more R&D resources for the same level of sacrifice(because getting X% of the larger pie is better than getting X% of the smaller one).
Pretty sure Hawking never said we should ALL live on a spaceship. His point is that we need to begin colonization of space, and give humanity a much higher chance of continued survival.
Stephen Hawking is taking the survival of the species slant to preserve human space exploration. Let's look at it another way. Who gets to go? Only the wealthy? The 'geniuses'? The 'artists'? Random sampling?
Human beings are arrogant enough to think that the universe couldn't go on without them...
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Yeah... except using an incorrect adverb doesn't qualify one as semi-literate. And fact of the matter is, the average individual does NOT have a full and complete understanding even of his or her native tongue. Hell, I'd say that even an individual with a doctorate in linguistics is likely to occasionally misuse words.
As far as "only so many jobs" goes, theres always government...
>>>This planet has an expiration date.
Yeah 5 billion years into the future. During the previous 1 billion we evolved from amino acids to cells to amphibians, lizards, and intelligent mammals. So by the time the earth expires, we'll likely have moved into Q-like beings. Even if we stayed on this planet, its eventual scalding by the nearby star wouldn't affect us.
As for asteroids that caused massive extinctions, the previous one was 70 million years ago. And 250 million years ago. During that timespan we evolved from small rodent-like lizards into modern mammals. Who knows where we'll be in another 70 million years.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
it may be easier to primorial goo with all the building blocks
Easier it sure would be, but the point is about spreading the human race, not just life. And seeding primordial (missed a 'd' there) goo is like giving a dozen kids a random assortment of Lego blocks (plus enough time to forget about the Spongebob episode they just watched) and expecting identical results. Because of how evolution works, there's no guarantee you'd get anything like humans, and it would take far too long to see results.
Yeah, but no one wants to or likes to face reality. This type of delusion, that we *must* get off this planet, is a delusion of the mid 20th century onwards, which I like to call Space Nuttery.
The fact that space is utterly empty, devoid of anything to support life deters Space Nutters not at all. They get their engineering and biology from sci-fi.
As you point out, we do not have the energy for this. We don't have the technology or resources. Period.
The reality is simple. We are born on this planet. We will die here. This wounds Space Nutters for some reason. They're also usually the same people who are against life-extension technology, but think the vastness of space is somehow proportional to our ridiculously short life span.
If the Earth can't support life in the long term, what makes them think the dead hulks like the Moon or Mars, or the metal-melting Venus and Mercury are of any help?????
Anyways, we can't get there. And even if we did, we'd be so utterly and ridiculously dependent on Earth that it in no way answers their argument.
We can't even fix a pump in orbit with all the industrial might of the Earth just a few kilometers away.
Hell, our technology is in decline, besides making faster computers, what has progressed in the last few decades? Nothing fundamental.
It amazes me that people can stand there and that war has some unique property that causes development.
The only reason that 'war' advances development is that we're willing to spend tax money on development during war.
We could get all the effect (In fact, more, as war sucks resources.) and none of the deaths if we'd just spend money on development.
Of course, I live in the US, where we can't even spend tax money on bridges. War is about the only thing we're willing to spend tax money on at all.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Short of a direct hit into the Sun by some other largish body (from our observations - an exceedingly rare event), which would "flame up" the Sun quite a bit and perhaps push it off the main sequence prematurely (most likely not, so it would be at most just atmosphere & part ocean stripping solar flare - which will happen anyway, to much larger degree, in 1 billion years - so would be fine underground, and certainly not much different in other places in the system), what you're saying will happen in 5 BILLION YEARS. Think good about what such timescales mean...
One that hath name thou can not otter
I stand by the statement, your paranoia notwithstanding. I fear my great grandchildren dying not of something falling out of the sky, but by the effects of ecosystems gone bad, the dying ocean then bereft of fish to eat and poisoned by fertilizer and pesticide runoff.
They'll die because some idiot took up the battles of their ancestors, hijacked a nuke, and used it to settle some perceived debt that's hundreds of years old.
The doomsday sayers have been using the excuse to leave, find a new nirvana, only to have the new one turn into dissention, turmoil, and conflict. Outward migration fixes very little. This is a dying planet, but it could be rejuvenated. No one wants to spend the energy to do that, it seems.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
This presents a false dichotomy - there are more than enough resources available to work on both. Achieving extra-Earth travel and "fixing" the problems that plague us here require different solution sets. Neither is completely insolvable.
The only true problem is that humanity as a whole has yet to determine that either is as or more important than their self-centered point of view.
He doesn't talk about "migrating off" so much as "spreading out" we would still need to solve the class of problems you discuss. but it makes sense to get *some* of the population off this rock, and as far away as possible, as soon as possible...
Presumably your enemies.
The migrations to the US are a great case in point. Get those (fill in these blanks) away from here, they're apostates, heretics, and they dress funny and have bad breath.
It gives a whole new meaning to Gleason's "To the moon, Alice!"
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
If Armstrong reported back from Applo 11 he saw precious gems the size of beach balls we'd had bases on The Moon long ago. If Viking 1 and Viking 2 turned on their cameras and saw the ground was litered gold and silver we'd have bases there too. But the truth at the moment turns out they are just barren. On Earth people avoid vast stretches of barren "bad lands" and consider them mostly worthless. Why go out to The Moon and beyond just for really expensive "bad lands"?
It is the global imperative of every single being on this planet, from ants to elephants, with the odd exception of Panda bears, to perpetuate the species.
So?
It's the underlying driving force of evolution. We are born, we grow, we procreate, we die... rinse and repeat.
Sounds like a pretty pointless exercise the way you're describing it.
What Hawking is saying is simply that if we wish to fulfill our evolutionary destiny..
Actually I think he's saying if we want to AVOID fulfilling our evolutionary destiny, which is extinction...
we will need to find another hospitable home to do it since we will eventually outgrow and probably make this one uninhabitable in the process.
As if our planet now isn't big enough. He should just be honest and say "we're fucked here. Woudln't it be cool to hedge our bets and go into outer space?" But I don't see how (a) space would be any less fuck-upabble and (b) why we in the 21st century should be worrying about the problems of the 25th century. I mean jesus, we've got enough actual problems. Let Buck Rogers handle it.
Yeah! Why just fuck up the earth, when we can fuck up the GALAXY!
Change yourself? Too hard! Let's just filthy another nest.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The federal budget would like to disagree with that statement. The majority of our federal budget is tied up in providing social programs and infrastructure, not in "war". Yes, the defense department gets a comparatively large portion of the budget. NO, it does not comprise all or even the bulk, of government spending. This is a facile talking point that is, unfortunately, entirely false as well.
Of course, as all the recent administrations have shown us, not having the tax money to spend doesn't mean you can't rack up a hell of a credit card bill. Why let things like "insufficient tax revenues" ruin the party?
Complaints about spelling or the misuse of a word in an internet argument is simply the mediums way of say "I agree with everything you say, and have nothing more of value to add to the conversation."
Beyond that, it is incredibly stupid to try and use that particular fallacy, since (as you said) EVERYONE eventually makes a spelling or grammar mistake, and thus the complainer ends up showing themselves as a hypocrite.
Wasn't it only like four months ago that Dr. Hawking was direly warning us all to stay as far out of the interstellar limelight as possible? Another flip-flop from the liberal elite intelligentsia!
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
It's simple, then. We'll just have to declare war on Mars.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Exactly. For evolution to work (as fast as it had to get us here) we need natural selection to work as well, i.e. we need only the fittest (to survive) to reproduce. But nowadays almost everyone survives and reproduces. Natural selection forces on humans are lowest of any species on this planet. This means we are evolving very slowly and for all I know we could be degenerating into lower beings.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
>>>As for asteroids that caused massive extinctions, the previous one was 70 million years ago. And 250 million years ago. During that timespan we evolved from small rodent-like lizards into modern mammals. Who knows where we'll be in another 70 million years.
This is the kind of guy that should be looking for building opportunities after a "hundred year flood event". After all, he's got another hundred years without a flood. Right?