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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.'"
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.
Why would I want to have my tax dollars on this.
Better spending tax dollars on saving the human race than blowing it up in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Free Martian Whores!
That's a mentality that will lead to problems. Issues, particularly issues that cannot be solved (like the whole of mankind's problems here on Earth) cannot be worked on in a serial fashion. You wind up deadlocked if you need to solve one problem before working on the next. It's like thinking that I need $300 per month to spend on food, so I better save up enough money for 75 years worth of food before I even think about paying any rent. Short-signtedness taken to it's extreme.
The reality is we need to be researching this stuff now. When we can colonize another rock in space, we need to do so. Waiting for all of our problems to be solved before going into space will ensure that either some natural disaster or one of those many problems you're hoping to solve will wipe us out rather soon.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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).
Your mortgage and Comcast bill are not connected to how the taxes you pay are spent. If you feel you are spending too much money, turn off your cable and maybe sell or refinance your house.
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?
The meaning of life is to plant trees that we will not live to sit in the shade of.
Thousands of generations of people who are no longer living gave you everything you have now. Will you give something to the future, or will you just be another leech?