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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.'"
We either leave this planet together, or we die on it divided. I think the greed inherent in human nature will prevent us from ever getting organized enough to leave this planet for another.
This actually kinda reminds me of a conversation we had last night....we watched the original V miniseries, and were talking about how stupid it was that they allowed the aliens into factories around the world simultaneously instead of just a factory or two at a time...but then, if they did that, countries would argue over who got to host them first. ::shakes head:: stupid human beings...
Living With a Nerd
What if Earth isn't the first human colony, and these disasters have merely wiped out the evidence of our migration...
What's wrong with dying? We all do it sooner or later as individuals. Why should the race last forever?
Nothing short of a earth destroying asteroid/comet hit would render this planet less inhabitable than even the most hospitable other planetary bodies within our reach. Even a Yucatan-sized hit would still leave the earth much more survivable than anywhere else. It would be WAY more practical to design underground bunkers and habitats here on earth than to try to move colonies to the moon or Mars. And nothing short of a hit that tears the planet into pieces is going to make earth less appealing than Mars or the moon.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The space race was sped up by the arms race between the USA and the USSR. Both just wanted to prove they were better.
But this isn't really "war" in the conventional sense is it? And it was the period during which the fastest and most impressive aerospace advances came. So it would seem that a good dickwaving competition is at least as good as an actual war.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
>>>I think the greed inherent in human nature will prevent us from ever getting organized enough to leave this planet for another.
In Robert's Heinlein's "Man Who Sold the Moon" it was greed that propelled humans to the Moon and Mars and outer planets. In fact that's pretty much true in every science fiction universe, even the utopian Star Trek. People don't do things for rational reasons like "we might go extinct" - they do them for personal gain, or a desire for a better life than the crappy one they have now.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Seems like we could incrementally approach this goal by doing less-expensive, lower-risk things first, like colonizing harsh terrestrial environments (Ocean bottoms, antarctica, salt flats, sterile deserts, etc.).
If we can make a self-contained, self-sustaining colony on the earth, then our species is more robust (we can survive the loss of all the plants, for instance, or if we've colonized the ocean floor, we can survive when supervillains ignite the atmosphere), and we get some experience learning the ins and outs of closed ecosystems.
Once they work reliably, then we can add "in space" to the project description, with all the additional cost and complexity that implies.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Some people, however, are likely to misunderstand your post because, quite simply, they don't even begin to appreciate how much energy it would require to colonise another planet, or how likely we would be to exterminate ourselves by destroying our atmosphere if we even diverted significant resources to putting lots of stuff outside it. Basically, between "let's get off Earth" and "oh look, space colony", they engage in lots of vague handwaving about nonexistent technologies, nonexistent methods of energy generation, and nonexistent materials, the ability to create any of which in great enough quantities would imply a civilisation that really wouldn't need to waste them on a colonial experiment.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
What's wrong with dying? We all do it sooner or later as individuals. Why should the race last forever?
Because we may be the only chance for life on earth to spread to other planets, ... ever.
If we botch it this time, life may not have enough time to evolve another space faring civilisation. Think about it. Though doing nothing we may seal the fate for all of life.
We are part of a much larger ecosystem, without which we cannot survive. If we travel to the stars, so does life - which will continue to evolve.
If there is some great project humanity should try to tackle, it would be this.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
We don't need to boost ourselves. We need to figure out the earliest life forms that we evolved from, and then blast great numbers, but small lightweight quantities, of that stuff towards any apparently habitable planets. If it takes a few billions years, so what. By spreading the human-precursor lifeforms we can colonize a larger number of planets and take advantage of evolution to ensure that the resulting lifeforms are suited to each venue.
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.
Unfortunately, everything you say is also true of the Universe as a whole. Eventually, heat death will mean that thought itself will become physically impossible. Is it possible to escape into other universes? Maybe. Does that mean we should forget about space travel and put all our efforts into figuring that out?
But wait a minute. Supposing we had descendants traveling around space a billion years from now. It is far from certain they would be recognizably human. They might not even be mammals.
So should we give up on the future?
I think the notion that we should explore space in preparation for abandoning the Earth is misguided. I have no doubt that people sincerely believe this, and I even recognize that interesting philosophical arguments can be made for it. For example, the idea we might have to move off the Earth prematurely because we'd fouled our own nest raises the question why we might survive in hostile space when we could not survive on the benign Earth. The answer might be that humans are not very good at dealing rationally with plenty, but we have our minds wonderfully concentrated by imminent death.
Even so, I think that it is somewhat unnatural to be all that concerned with the fate of the human race in the distant future. How many of us let our day to day actions be guided by a concern for humanity ten generations in the future, much less ten thousand?
The real reason to explore space is not for the extension of the human species' longevity, but for the maximization of human experience. Imagine human experience as a rectangle which sits on a two dimension axis. The X-axis is time, and the "escape Earth" position seeks to maximize the area of the rectangle by stretching it as wide as possible. I have no fundamental objection to this, but it should not be undertaken at the expense of the Y axis, which is the personal growth of individuals in any single generation. At some point humanity will be facing the end of its term and can rationally seek the extension of the species' lifespan, but that is not anytime soon. When that point comes, we will be best served by developing a culture which is creative, informed, and adventurous.
That's the real reason we want to explore space. Space exploration is an adventure both metaphorically and manifestly so. That it is a multi-generational adventure only makes it better. When we have lost the zest for exploration, we have lost the capacity to grow, and are running on the momentum of prior generations.
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I think human longevity advances are the only way to "cure" this. Make it so that human lifetimes can span more than a few decades, and people will suddenly be *way* more interested in not pissing in our own nest. Even if only the very rich can afford it, they're the ones with all the power, so it would still help.
Well, there's the ethical question then of whether or not this is justified when there could be other forms of life already there on the planets we've targeted with our life-form "bombs".
And besides, wouldn't you feel foolish if all we did was manage to evolve cockroaches and influenza everywhere? They suck enough here on Earth, let's not help them colonize other planets!