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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...
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...
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
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.
Does anyone else read the part in quotes in a synthesizer voice?
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.
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.
Back in 2006: Hawking Says Humans Must Go Into Space
And again in 2000: Hawking on Earth's Lifespan
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
No, he doesn't. He said that exact quote two years ago, to CNN. Of course, it may not necessarily be plagiarism, because he's been saying this for years, and it isn't like he types off the cuff.
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 won't take too much technology to reproduce Hawking's voice saying "I told you so"
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.
Well, it depends on what frame of reference you're measuring from.
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?
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!
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
You are missing the point entirely. It isn't for us to up and leave earth all together, it's to continue to inhabit earth while also colonizing other places.
If we live on multiple planets/moons/space stations, then any one disaster would have to be truly fantastic in scope (enormous gamma ray burst large enough to wipe out a large area of space) to take out all of us at the same time.
>>>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
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).
That's bullshit. Did the numerous people that died in WWII really make it any quicker? What it did do was provide some stimulus to the efforts, but it also wiped out a lot of people who could've been the one to figure out fusion by now or any number of unimagined future technologies. Not to mention that entire countries are destroyed and the labs, factories and libraries which they contained gone up in smoke.
War is one impetus to evolve technology, but it's hardly the only one. Pure curiosity is one that would as well, just not when people are behaving in such a belligerent, greedy fashion as they do currently.
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
The problem is that one of the problems is this
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."
>>>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
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.
"The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever."
- Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935)
Most of those rules were invented AFTER the language was invented, by people with anal tendencies. Such as outlawing the double negative. Prior to ~1700 the double negative was not only an accepted part of language, but often ran into triple or quadruple negatives. The purpose was to add additional emphasis.
The blue book claim "Who refers to people. That and which refer to groups or things," sounds like an invented rule, not a reflection of the actual speakers of the language. i.e Prescriptive rather than descriptive. Real wordsmiths like ee cummins, Shakespeare, and Chaucer didn't give a fuck about rules. They wrote whatever they felt like writing.
- "Ther nas no man no wher so vertuous" (i.e., "There was not no man nowhere so virtuous")
- "He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde / In all his lyf unto no maner wight." (i.e., "He never yet no vileness not said / In all his life to no sort of man.")
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
Much better to spend the money on fixing the problems here (but that might cost corporations profits so not likely to happen).
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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?
Use electricity to create liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. No, really, it's just that simple.
Well, now you're moving the goalposts - first you ask about energy and then you blame it on lift capacity, which isn't the same thing at all. But the answer is equally simple - if we need that much lift capacity, we simply build that much lift capacity. As with energy, it's just an engineering problem.
The real problem has nothing to do with engineering, or cash, as many posters like to think. (Mostly because it lets them get their Twenty Minutes Hate in, using the current or past Administrations as the topic.) It's that there isn't anywhere to go in space. It's all about economics. Transport grows and prospers because it fills a need in moving people and goods from point A to point B, and in space there is no point B. (This is why the 'colonization of North America' and 'subsidize rockets like the government did railroads and airmail' models so beloved of space enthusiasts won't work.)
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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"?
Nowhere in that statement does she say it is. There's a second quote further on which could be taken together with this to imply, kinda, that she was making the statement from the traveler's perspective, but it's far from clear, and, I also think, "Which is more likely, the physicist doesn't know basic relativity or the reporter botched it and gave quotes out of context?" The question pretty much answers itself.
In fairness, quite a bit has expanded in our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of life. DNA was first described in 1953... 57 years later, we are mapping genomes (with some organisms fully mapped), manipulating, replacing and removing genes, and discovering the genetic basis for numerous diseases and other traits at an ever-increasing pace.
Just because it ain't silicon & metal doesn't mean it ain't technology.
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!
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?
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).
The most important reason why nothing like the Space Clipper was ever built is not due to the launch energy required. It is the cost of building and maintaining an incredibly complex vehicle. Even if the energy used to launch the Space Shuttle were free its launch cost would be virtually unchanged. It costs NASA 450 million dollars per launch, the cost of actual LH2/O2 fuel (not just energy) is on the order of 40 cents per kilogram (for example) so the total fuel cost is on the order of one million dollars (!).
The ticket price for the 30 passengers of the Space Clipper would be $30,000 or so if energy was the only cost, still quite steep compared to air travel, but nothing like the $15 million of the Space Shuttle launch bill.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
There is a good argument that humans are done evolving. To evolve, the strong survive and the weak die out. That is no longer occuring with humans, so it's unlikely we'll move onwards to Q-like beings without a catastrophic event or two.
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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.