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Human Survival Depends On Space Exploration, Says Hawking
thomst writes "The Winnipeg Free Press posts a story by Cassandra Szklarski of the Canadian Press about an email interview with Stephen Hawking in which the astrophysicist and geek hero opines, 'Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.' The story also covers the upcoming Canadian debut of Hawking's new TV series 'Brave New World With Stephen Hawking,' and his excitement about ongoing work at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ont. investigating quantum theory and gravity."
So he wants us to explore space, but not talk to aliens.
Looks like he dyed his hair.
We're all going to become happy fluffy hippies and live a sustainable lifestyle in little teepees where we'll end all conflict by singing happy songs and shit.
Germs cause disease. I thought that the idea that our future was in space exploration was pretty common by now, and that politicians were the ones in the way.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Really pretty simple. Kill all the idiots driving SUVs and who have houses over 1200 sq ft.
Suddenly energy use per capita plummets by over an order of magnitude, and the earth and humanity lives on.
Seriously, what we need is a good predator that preys upon the fat and stupid.
Colonizing space is a nice idea, it has been my dream since I was five. However, I have another suggestion that could also work.
Okay, but what's so great about long term human survival? Bearing in mind that long term here means way beyond the point that all of us and our children and great great grand children are dead. Humanity isn't going to survive forever whatever happens so why should we care if it survives a bit longer than planet earth?
"Mr. President, I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy at the bottom of some of our deeper mine shafts . . . Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. But ah with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years."
"Doctor, you mentioned the ration of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?"
"Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
People are always inventing religions. Most die, but the new (in the span of history) cults Scientology and Mormonism seem to be doing a good business, in the USA at least, other religions elsewhere. Since all religion does is answer the unanswerable questions of life, such as the purpose of it, just found a new religion where the answer to the meaning of life is to get the fuck off this planet. Maybe not using those exact words, I'm sure some more mystic and transcendental and pompous word choices can be arranged.
What motivated people is not cold rational analysis. Motivation is emotional. So just translate the valid motivation into the wacky language of religion.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
that man is genetically predisposed to be selfish and callous with regard to his environment, and will probably destroy earth's habitation within a few hundred years - is as interesting as his conclusion, that we need to use space travel as a way out.
I realize that Hawking is far from the first to articulate that POV, but maybe with someone of his (scientific) stature, people might take it more seriously as a springboard for investigation and discussion outside of the science fiction-reading community.
Just sayin'
If Earth is the Garden of Eden and we're forced to abandon it due to poor stewardship, would that make the book of Genesis prophetic?
Is it just the transmission of DNA?
Then if it is, then transmitting our DNA via high powered radio telescopes would be far cheaper than a space program. Next would be including DNA samples on anything leaving the solar system (pioneer, voyager, new horizon).
If it's our cultural heritage, we've been beaming a (lopsided) collection out into space for the last 100 years. We've even sent some physical artifacts.
If it's the survival of our MINDS that we're concerned with, well rather than build space ships capable of crossing the interstellar void (which'll likely take centuries) maybe it would be faster to figure out how to convert them into code and beam THAT.
Of course this assumes that there is someone out there on the receiving end. I don't think that's too unlikely a hypothesis but reasonable people might disagree. So let's get listening! (And maybe we'll figure out the answer to the Fermi Paradox).
(By the way, I'm all for a VERY aggressive space program, it's just that maybe we shouldn't think survival is the best reason for it!)
There is no future for mankind in space. As a matter of fact, just as there were no humans a long time ago, there will be no humans a long time from now. Evolution is still happening now, you know. And no, space is not the future. It's empty, hostile, vast, barren and desolate. It's a radiation-blasted vacuum with a few lifeless rocks strewn about. The ridiculous over-optimism and total ignorance of the Nutter crowd (you know the type, calling this planet a "rock", as if the other planets are any different, hell, the other planets aren't even rocks) is hilarious to watch, scary to realize that they're serious.
Tell me Dr Hawking, what do you plan to do about the fact that people, the fittest specimens of humanity mind you, fall apart in space? How does putting a few test pilots in low Earth orbit change a single thing for the 7 billion people we have here?
Get over it, the Space Age is dead. As a matter of fact, Dr Hawking, in the Space Age you'd be dead. You're in the Information Age now and thanks to computers you can still communicate. Think we'd send paraplegics in space?
Just because he's smart in one, tiny narrow hyper-specialized brnach of mathematics, doesn't make his view points on sci-fi delusions valid, or even important. He's not even wrong.
So he wants us to explore space, but not talk to aliens
Getting the human race into space does not necessarily mean zipping around from one solar system to another like in Star Trek. Getting the human race to colonize our solar system would be quite sufficient and quite plausible given our understanding of science and technology. We are not likely to run into aliens elsewhere in our solar system so there is no real inconsistency. :-)
The existence of our species is extremely vulnerable if limited to Earth. It's not about nuclear war or resource depletion. It's about an asteroid or comet, a gamma ray burst or God only knows. If life ended on Earth tomorrow, save for a few old spacecraft, it would be as if humanity never existed. At least if we spread out to Mars, those humans on Mars would remember those lost on Earth. If we spread beyond the solar system and something happened to both Earth and Mars, at least humanity would continue!
It's about our first duty, the continuation of our species.
We're all going to become happy fluffy hippies and live a sustainable lifestyle in little teepees where we'll end all conflict by singing happy songs and shit.
I'm glad you said that. When I sing happy songs, I shit too. I glad I'm not alone!
After describing my issue with my doctor, he said, "You know, this is the first case of singing causing IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome) I have ever heard! I'll have to write a paper and publish this in the NJM - you're going to make me famous!"
"Yes, but it only happens with happy songs."
I'm now experimenting with Irish folk tunes (all that dieing at sea, lover leaving and other tragedies) to see if it makes me constipated. I'll post later about that.
so we just need to find places to go and then with the stargate we can move to them real fast.
Fact of the matter is that humankind has not put much effort into developing food crops optimized for outer space. Genetic engineering can make growing food much easier in outer space, and survival of humans as well. It is all about sticking humans up in big rockets. Kay Bailey, and many pork coveting Texas House members want their big rocket pork, science be damned. What would Burt Rutan, or John Carmack think of this.
I really do think it's better if scum like us stays in our own solar system. Perhaps when we've become fully civilized They'll let us come out and play.
No, no. According to Hollywood and big media, the future of humanity depends upon how much of a twit one is (as in twitters) And upon how much PR coverage one can get. You know, the pop-tarts of society: Tarts who are an "important" part of pop culture. Britney Spears, the Kardashian bimbos, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, all "Boy Bands" etc. The more vacuous the more important they are. After all, Farmville is much more important than ensuring the long-term survival of the species, right?
[For the clueless, that was sarcasm.]
While I find the whole "let's escape our problems on Earth by migrating to space" fantasy interesting, I think it's worth remembering that, at our present rate of consumption, we will exhaust our planet's resources long before we're actually able to permanently survive somewhere else. For details, I'd suggest reading this excellent post from physicist Tom Murphy's "Do the Math" blog. It was featured on Slashdot a while back.
The basic point is that, given our current situation, proposing a future in space is essentially a distraction that ignores the problems we will absolutely have to solve here on Earth. Hawking is probably right in that, if we manage to survive long enough, we will eventually establish colonies on other worlds. But if we can't focus on immediate challenges here, we'll never get there.
Apparently Hawking is worried of our resources running out, but mining other celesatial bodies can be done without colonizing them. And even if we did colonize them, exponential growth would not be feasible indefinitely. I believe it's much easier to change our ways than to colonize space.
No "long-term survival / Hawking" jokes yet?
'When the Going gets Weird, the Weird turn Pro.' - Hunter S. Thompson
I think getting rid of as much of our flesh as possible is the key to survival. A more adaptable species is going to be easier to do than hunting through billions of planets to find one that fits our fragile bodies.
The "threats" to humanity are pretty easy to enumerate, because we know them from the geological record: glaciation, global warming, pandemics, meteorites, and volcanoes. All of these have extinguished many species in the past, but humans are adaptable enough to survive any of them. Even if they happened, earth would still be a more hospitable place than any planet we are likely to be able to travel to, or any space habitat we can build in the foreseeable future.
If the long term survival of our civilization is a concern, what we should focus on is creating time capsules that will help humanity to rebuilt more quickly after the inevitable collapse of our current civilization. We know that works because it has worked before. The technology is simple, reliable, and predictable. Such time capsules should include things like writings, seeds, tools, and recordings.
Manned space travel, on the other hand, will just happen by itself, or it won't, depending on whether it makes physical and economic sense. It is not a rational thing to bet on or worry about.
"Go west" doesn't work anymore. You can't just rest all your hopes on being able to continue life on another planet. It's a romantic idea, but actually doing so would require efforts that are by far much larger than ending world poverty or convincing people to care about the environment. A manned mission to mars would cost $40-$80 billion. Here are some problems, each enough to explain why we won't be anything near this in the next 50 years (just some examples, I'm sure there are more):
Space expenses don't scale well. While development costs do scale, things like transport, fuel, assembly of rockets, etc. does not scale very well.
Full Autonomy is extremely hard. If earth goes down the toilet, you can't rely on yearly shipments of equipment and technology. You'd have to build *everything* in your colony, which would require a huge colony indeed (so that you have a factory that makes the robots that manufacturers your mp3 players and *everything else you rely on nowadays*) and thus an even greater effort.
Humans just love earth. Even mild changes to our environment can have extreme consequences on our health. Thinking about going to Europa, that trendy Jupiter moon? Well, it only has 0.134 g, so you need to put *everything* in giant centrifuges. And that's just one factor. Building a huge shell that keeps the pressure of 1 bar earth atmosphere and 10^-12 bar Europa atmosphere separate is another one...
the distances are just WAY TOO VAST
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
if the human race can not make life great on this planet then living in space where being even more efficient and much more benevolent is required to survive will never succeed.
humans are just inherently too stupid and greedy to survive for generations in some space ship or artificial planetoid type thing considering the track record we've made here on earth.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Our bodies are not adapted, evolved, or designed for space.
We are vastly better off concentrating resources into robotics, AI, and technologies that will allow for the imaging and transfer of brain state. Those next creations - or evolution of intelligence - will be free to explore the universe.
Alternatively, mastering genetic engineering may allow us to create organic lifeforms that ARE adapted to those environments, and have or exceed our own intelligence. That is also possible within a short timeframe.
As the Dr. already indicated, it's not likely we are going to make it the next few hundred years as-is. That'll be ok, we'll all be at the feet of (insert deity here) in eternal paradise, right? *laughs*
..don't panic
... or ALS is starting to get the best of his brain. Sorry, but in my opinion, he's full of crap in many ways. Everything from man-made global warming to depleting all our resources within 100 years to colonizing other planets. All nonsense.
Any here more interested in Dr. Hawking's thoughts on the possibility that neutrinos are faster than light ? Seems a bit more timely concern, though I do see his point about human survival.
Interestingly, did the ambition of a robust space dream for the US die when the US had no real competition from the Russians or anyone else in the world? It looks like the US accumulated all the technical know-how (probably in some super secret programs) while never really unleashing its full potential. What a shame. Obviously, it's not clear if even with all the technical knowledge, how viable colonizing other terrains is. But having all that technical knowledge gives humans an edge without doubt. And to make a U-turn in my comment, it all goes back to basic human distrust. If the countries could actually agree and work on this together, there would be proliferation of knowledge and a better chance at space colonization. That's not happening any time soon. Space colonization is an issue that probably cannot happen with some basic human unity and cooperation between the countries.
Imagine the technology that would be needed to build a self-sufficient lunar colony. You would need to be carbon-neutral, recycle all your water, and pollution would generally be out of the question. Any dangerous byproducts created by the colony would have to be dealt with on-site.
Sounds like technologies that would be important here on Earth also, and setting up a lunar base would create a need for such technology. The moon also has the advantage of allowing an emergency return to Earth, which makes it a good first step for living in space.
Of course, the expenses are pretty high, and the technologies that would be developed would not be useful on Earth for a long time after the initial investment. Without any real profitable reason to live on the moon, it would be hard to justify spending that much money. Now, if we discovered some useful resource that could be profitably mined, that would be another story.
Palm trees and 8
Why Mars? There is a nice big rock orbiting the Earth that we could establish a base on, and it would be much cheaper to get to it. Granted, there is not a lot there, but so what? There is not a lot on Mars either, and any technology we used to establish a lunar base would be equally applicable to the establishment of a Martian base.
Palm trees and 8
If you had, you'd know they could not possibly live in outer space.
This has been showing on Channel 4 in the UK for a while now, I really recommend giving it a watch. Some pretty good episodes of Hawking's tv show, with lots of scientists hosting various sections.
Human survival depends on birth control.
A pessimistic interview given by someone named "Cassandra". How nice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra
All this talk about Space Exploration is great, and I agree that in the future, we will one day have to colonize space.
But what about right now?
Space Colonization is simply not practical today and may not be for another century or longer. So why not look the other way? What about Oceanic Colonization? No exotic technology like carbon nanotube space tethers are required, no worries about intersteller radiation, bone mineral depletion, obtaining drinking water, fuel or breathable air. We have all the technology to build floating and underwater structures, we know who to make artificial island communities (look at Dubai)
All this is right here, right now. Why don't we stop focusing so hard on the long shots and start looking at what we can start doing today to alleviate the population crises and making better use of our existing resources? It seems our astrophysics community really has a hard-on for space exploration while Oceanic dwellings are merely the pipe-dream of young architects as part of design competitions, but is mainly regarded as a novelty and not really taken all that seriously.
70% of the earth is covered in water, scientists predict this will increase within the century.
Does it not make sense to start adapting and learning to exist on the largest resource available on the Earth?
The Matrix Trilogy had an excellent line, that really isn't played up enough.
> There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept.
This implies the machines were ready to separate (some programs) into compartmentalized versions to ensure survival and to start over, as in the beginning of their ascension to dominate the earth's surface. This strategy seems particularly applicable to deep space exploration as it speaks to practicality and the machine equivalent of transhumanism.
A form of space ark is currently, our best bet. Haul organic material (maybe just DNA) or a machine capable of synthesizing appropriate material from raw materials and send it off, piloted by an advanced AI and + digital copies of human minds. Based on our current understanding of physics, people born in the solar system will never get out of the solar system. The idea of self-contained craft that "lug around" energy is really silly and prone to failure. It's incredibly risky and there's no good model for how to do it. When you take the idea of minimizing organic maintenance and we already assume we're willing to invest a relatively large amount of inorganic components, we have a couple near-practical solutions. After we arrive at a habitable planet, we have a new set of problems. Say there's (likely) a ubiquitous pathogen that our human bodies can't defend against in the planet's environment, we better have the technology to adapt our bodies. There's not as many hurdles to cover as one would think, they are just different hurdles than most people think about and it's within reach.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Entropy.
Now that it's clear that the "goal" is impossible from a Naturalism perspective, I suggest widening the scope of possibilities for consideration.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
he's done.
I've been saying the same thing for decades (as have others), but why would anyone heed the words of someone who's neither a celebrity nor a published expert? I could live with being ignored if the message finally got heard because of Hawking... but I doubt it will. Most humans plan no further than satiating their stomachs and gonads. Space exploration doesn't improve the majority's prospects for either, so....
stephen
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The most important technology you need for any serious space colonization is the ability to manage a closed ecosystem with no internal inputs except energy. If you can't do that, you might still be able to get to Mars using less complete recycling, and you can park in Earth orbit with occasional resupply, but you can't do anything significant out in asteroid belts and you certainly can't run a generation ship out to other star systems. Even Mars colonies are pretty sketchy - you've got spare CO2, sand, iron, and maybe water, but those are just the crude raw materials, not the fancy stuff like dirt or vitamins, and the Moon's got even less.
Running a terrarium like Biosphere 2 is something we don't know how to do without cheating yet. Terraforming a whole planet is much harder - we've done some experiments on one of our nearby planets which haven't been successful - we don't even know where the thermostat is yet, though we seem to keep turning up the heat, killing off the local vegetation, and making holes in the ozone and leaving big patches of desert where there used to be vegetation and planting monocultures in place of jungles and prairies. A spaceship's ecology is somewhere in between - simpler than a planet, so maybe we don't actually have to have figured out how to fix Earth before we build one, but out in the asteroid belt you can't mine for dirt - you have to know how to make your own.
The other way to colonize space is to radically simplify the ecosystem's requirements by sending robots instead of canned apes. That's useful for data collection and mining, but unless The Great Nanotech Singularity In The Future!! lets us all upload onto better hardware, that's not going to let humanity migrate off the planet in case of a dinosaur-killer asteroid or a nuclear winter. So we're going to need to do some serious work on this ecology stuff first.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
We started a project with a planet that was mostly habitable, found ways to make it habitable for far more humans, but did immense amounts of damage in the process, and it may not be able to support that many in the future. There are projects going on to adjust the atmosphere a bit, reducing the quantities of several simple gasses that we've been adding, and not only do lots of people think that doing so will be too expensive, some of the companies that have been providing the raw materials think it's worth convincing half the population that science is evil because letting other people mess with the thermostat may interfere with their business.
Basically, until terraforming Earth is profitable, it's not going to get done.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I think before you start talking the talk, you better start walking the walk.
Humans have been pretty disastrous to this planet so far - do we really want to inflict that upon more planets.
I totally agree with the idea that we need to head into space for the human race to survive long term - but until we can figure out how to be a less selfish species, I'm not sure us spreading and surviving is in the best interest of the universe
Once, I would have written it off to deja vu and went on with my life. But the same article, 3 times? I might be human, but my memory is not that terrible, Slashdot!
Yes, we need to get off the planet and out of the solar system before the Sun blows up 4 billion years from now. We've got time. We also need to get off the planet before the next dinosaur-killer asteroid hits, probably somewhere between 0-100 million years from now. We've got time for that too. Meanwhile, our first step needs to be Not Being Dead, which means we not only have to find ways to not have a major nuclear war or an interesting biological war, and our next step needs to be to avoid rendering Earth uninhabitable before then. Working on both at once is just fine.
Space technology is useful for building measurement systems to understand what's going on here on Earth. It's also useful for understanding what's going on in the rest of the solar system, so we can identify any dino-killer asteroids pointed at us and deflect them or blow them up, though even Tunguska-sized events are pretty rare - it'll be a much easier project if we let Moore's Law crank our electronics development for a couple of decades so we'll have much better and lighter-weight equipment. But to do anything serious out in space, or to terraform Mars into an emergency backup planet, we need to develop serious understanding of ecosystems, because we need to bring ecosystems anywhere we're going to bring humans. (You also need them even for robots, but they can use much simpler ecosystems.) All of that biology's a lot more difficult work than merely getting rockets that can go halfway across the solar system.
Meanwhile, getting to the Moon was a fun way to demonstrate our military-industrial complex's skills that are layered on top of the heavy industry business. But right now we have to figure out how to get the heavy industry folks to stop cranking up the planet's thermostat, get the military-industrial complex to stop drumming up new business for themselves, and get a bunch of farmers to have better technology than slash-and-burn agriculture or petro-business-based fertilizers, and it wouldn't hurt if we can find something productive for the 50% of humanity that are no longer farmers to do.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Learning how to live underwater would teach us how to live in space, and will get us used to living underwater on planets/moon such as Europa. Since 3/4 of the planet is covered in water, maybe we can spread "West" into the ocean? It's prettier down there anyway and chicks dig dolphins. Running out of air down there would be less consequential than in a vacuum. Most likely we will be shooting for a planet outside our solar system only if it has water. High radiation levels etc would be easier to avoid underwater, and I think it would take a long time for oceans to evaporate should global warming become global boiling.
Namaste
But it's tricky. Worth the investment though.
This is being reported as if it is news. It’s not; this is an obvious consequence of Earth not being able to survive after our sun goes supernova. Hawking isn’t referring to fifty or a hundred or a thousand years from now. This doesn’t take someone with Hawking’s mind to point out. Honestly, people
Everyone talks about building a ship and doing this or that on that part of the galaxy over there and yada-yada. But, why not look at it in the right perspective: we just need to control where our planet moves to. We need to take this planet with us, because we need it that much more. We don't need the religion of trans-humanism to rebore our souls into a cerebral vat that links our neural kinetic links to synthetic appendages. We need to EMBRACE and EXTEND this verry planet and just create the control mechanisms to obsolete Atlas from holding us in the sky and this become our craft to travel throughout the galaxy.
Only problem is there appears to be the orbit of Earth is around the Solar sun, and we need either a Greenhouse effect to keep us warm while travelling away from our Solar sun or we need to look at the core issue: we need to steer the sun in the direction we want to travel so it takes Planet Earth with it. According to this Youtube video, I am accurate that the Sun is indeed doing what I have already concluded: the Sun is the Head of our space-craft.
skip to 1:20 mark for animated illustration.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex283trHBgE
As humans, we often think we know all the benefits (and costs) of doing something before we do it. In our daily lives this is very useful because things ARE predictable. This isn't the case with space exploration. You can debate till you are red in the face about the costs/benefits of space exploration, but you will never actually know it until you do it, so get off your lazy asses and do it already.
We'll never make it.......oh! we made it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWf3iJjqYCM&list=FL7kKrE4eTs17mQl7eyvJIOg
This requires money, long term thinking and wide consensus. These are things our politicians are not capable of even dreaming about. This is not even taking into account all the fiddly vested interests.
Lets not forget that deciding what to do with this worlds changing climate has stalled for the good part of 30 years.
Unless our governments are transformed to autocratic beurocracies we're simply doomed.
There's a reason why autocrats can build beautiful cities while democracies can't put forward the planning for a new building without decades worth of argy-bargy.
The launch was a rush. That railgun they drilled through the planetoid accelerated me at 50G, or 490m/s/s. With only 487km of railgun it was over in just a few seconds and I was off to the stars. It's cold out here and dark, with not much to do as I sleep almost all of the time. They keep pushing. The high-energy lasers in orbit around Venus still fluff my solar sail and deliver power so I don't have to activate my nuclear engine. I'm supposed to be seeing some time dilation at this point, but really, not so much that it can't be accounted for.
I understand launching so much mass shifted the orbit of the planetoid significantly, but was timed to do so in a way that moved it into a more convenient orbit around the sun. Not that they fill me in on the details.
They laid my way with resupply years before of course. I'll be docking with one of those probes soon to boost my xenon and hydrogen - that's why I'm awake to make this log. I've five of these resupplies to do, and this next one is the fourth. I'm halfway to my destination, and still have all of this resupply inventory. It's for deceleration, and I may not need any of it if the L2 solar sails work to spec. I'm glad for the backup plan because we all know how low bidder contracts kill.
It's been 40 years, and it feels like a week.
There's not much to do out here except wonder if tech innovations will have people stopping by to pick me up on their way to the stars with new drive tech. It's nice that my mental donor wasn't too introspective - some replayed vids and a little virtual dolphin flogging and we're ready for sleep again. That will be handy when we get to Tau Ceti if we've got to do some terraforming before it's fit for men. That could take a few million years even with my well-designed spore toolkit. Sleep will be a blessing.
Twenty years and it seems like a week. Frankly I'm glad they vary my clock at need. I wonder what meat people would feel like by turnaround. Perhaps it's best not to go there. It's not like they could survive the launch acceleration anyway.
They said this personality is rated for 18 months of subjective time before it's overcome by a psychotic desire to kill the manipulative bitch that made me volunteer for this program. That may have been optimistic.
End log.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There always was religion, and always will be. It's a psychosocial phenomenon that is never going away. So you can sit in your Ivory Tower and cast scorn on it, or USE it to actually promote the future of mankind in outer space.
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.”
-Seneca
Stop warring with what you cannot change, accept it, and use it for something positive. And yes, it is useful, as there is a lot of grunt work needed to get us into space, and not all the grunts are Einstein. They need religion to guide them. So do you want to guide them or feed your ego by pissing on them? Seneca's quote is correct, although I really wouldn't call people wise who can't see what is part of life, and prioritize a sense of smug superiority over what it takes to make something work.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
i'm w/ the good doctor,
but also my thinking is that we should raise our heads out of our shapely buttocks for a moment
and think about spreading life of any form, not only human, to the rest of the galaxy.
i'm a good science boy and have no doubt that there is life out there,
but so far there's no signs of anyone except us.
we're on the cusp of wiping ourselves out in one way or another,
and when we do it's by no means certain that this planet will ever again attain space-faring capability
before it gets eaten by the sun. given this, i think we have a huge moral imperative to send out
large numbers of cheap life-bearing probes into the galaxy. little infectious bombs.
primary producers wired to chill out until there's a reliable energy source, and then mutate like crazy.
He's right in one sense: the first thing a motile organism achieves is the ability to swim in the direction away from its waste stream.
Keep in mind that All newborns have NO religion. We're born atheists (scientists/explorers).
We already know this, The purpose of life is,
Evolution of biology.
And evolution of passed-on information.
(at times, they even blend a bit)
After getting an electrical shock while repairing your bedside lamp all of you
are able to calculate how much electrons go through your ass. But the stupid
lamp stay out of order.
Having all the conditions to leave wonderfully in Earth, humans have still not
learnt how to do it in a sustainable way. And you spend your time
musing on how to do in another planet.
My wish is that human race get his end here. Luckily before this planet get
totally destroyed by his idiocy.
And the sun will rise in the east, fire is hot, ice is cold, and water is wet. Got any other obviousness to impart to us Dr Hawking?
Seriously, it's pretty widely known that the only way to survive a variety of extinction level events is to get off this rock in a manner such that off-rock locations are completely self sufficient and independent of the rock. But doing so is a century or more off at best.
In there beginning there was nothing
not even time--
no planets, no stars, no hip-hop, no rhyme.
But then there was a bang like the sound of my gat:
the universe began and the shit was phat
The universe began as a singularity.
Nobody knows what went on then, G.
For ten million trillion trillion trillionths of a second,
the state of the universe cannot be reckoned.
The fundamental forces were unified--
we've no theory to describe that,
though I've tried. Then the forces
split and the universe was born--
it was hotter then a priest watching
kiddie porn.
Protons, neutrons, and electrons came to pass
as photons collided, changing energy to mass.
Three minutes go by, temps to cool one billion
down from one hundred million trillion trillion.
This reduced heat allowed a new event:
the formation of heavier elements,
still it was millions of years 'fore the first star glowed.
IF YOUR DOWN WITH THE BANG SING ALONG HERE WE GO!
It was the big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
the big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
Hold on now, what about inflation?
That's a little tricky and could use some explanation.
Inflation, one could barely state,
was the time when the universe expanded at a rate
that was faster then the speed of light, but that over-simplifies and it ain't quite right. Still the for purposes here, it will have to do, 'cuz I ain't got the time to explain it to you
ROCK
DAMN
It was the big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
the big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
The beginning of time, and the birth of all matter
Say it took seven days, you're as mad as a hatter.
It was millions of years 'fore the first star glowed, if your down with the bang sing along, here we go
It was the big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
The big pow piz-ow bang a dang diggy diggy boom diggy boom pow boom the Big BIZANG.
the big bizang...
The big bizang...
BOOOOOM....
the big bizang.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
That is exactly why my favorite Science Fiction title is AquaNox. Post-apocalyptic / cyberpunk atmosphere aside, the story is so well thought-out as to be downright scary, in exactly the same sense as 1984 is scary.
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS
So, it takes a Hawking to tell the world about this? I mean, how many common sense people have already known this since ecology, history, and sociology classes in high school? I hate the word spread (waxing 'The Matrix' where Hue compares humans to virII). How bout a shift to 'develop'? This is as bad as a couple years ago when Madonna 'discovered' starving children in Africa and made it her point to publicize it. I think its about time we started asking ourselves who our leaders really are, and who started calling them leaders. I mean, haven't you noticed with all the funding and money being spent on advanced physics, that it really doesn't end up in the end user's hands? We are paying these people to think they are great thinkers. Yes, lets colonize space. Duh....
... or does Stephen Hawkings look like Bill Gates in a wheelchair?
If you're a glass-half-empty type, does Bill Gates look like a walking & talking Stephen Hawkings?
I only posit this thought because it has tremendous possibilities of Bill Gates' Impersonators to double (ehr, quadruple) their income. Anyone think of doing a Science Channel series by Stephen Hawkings and narrated by an impersonator/actor?
Rockets don't burn cash $$$ to reach trajectory. You don't stuff life support systems with pennies (well... unless you're using them as a reactant in the production of vital gases, but you know what I mean.) Pressurized domes aren't constructed out of stock values. Etc.
There are a lot of great arguments here about how expensive it is just to lift weight into orbit, or do a manned flyby of a gas giant (why the hell would we do that, I don't know).
But, realistically, by the time these efforts are undertaken, money will have little to do with it. You can quote the cost of taking a five-hundred year trip to another sustainable planet on a vessel capable of sustaining ten generations of the inhabitants.
Or, my preferred plan: you invent artificial wombs and just send them with some robotic nanny/professors and a sperm and egg library to whichever planet or itinerary of planets. You could get there and discover it's not as habitable as the astrophysics wizards predicted it should be. Maybe there are bad animals or some kind of noxious gas or germ.
So, maybe you should be prepared for multiple centuries-long journeys before hitting 'jackpot'. Or, maybe you should bring along extinction-event weapons to "cleanse" the planet, and accompany the human-genetic library with an Earth life-form library, but the logistics behind robotically replacing the generational training most animals undergo in order to survive in the wilderness is mind-boggling.
And life would be crappy without animals. But you can't do a selective extinction event, not without a robotic laser-sniper sitting in orbit for a long time selectively studying and then shooting dead just certain animals.
And you don't want to risk your valuable cargo's life by plopping them down in a germ soup their evolution hasn't prepared them for, so you'd have to bring all of the Earth germs along with you somehow. So, another genetic library enters the mix, and there's no sure gaurantee the germs will thrive on the new planet. They're pretty unique to Earth.
But, you *need* the germs, so... you almost may as well have sustained the human occupants the entire time. Even if it was just an "Adam and Eve" model system, reproducing from the sperm bank instead of with each other. Of course, such a low number doesn't bode well for the survival of the species. If Eve cuts her hand changing an air supply fan, and the fan turns out to be coated with the sort of strange-ass organic gunk that grows on space vehicles occupied by humans, and she gets seriously fucked up and died, you're fucked. You'd hope you brought your artificial womb for backup....
My apologies, I digress.
Any way you look at it, it's so "expensive" that you won't find the needed assets in the hand of any one person.
So, the only way you'll ever get out to populate space is if you dedicate the entire population to the effort, and you'd have to have a population that finds itself conducive to a single, unified effort, and also conducive to taking a gigantic hit to the entire concept of private property. You'd need to resurrect Adam Weishaupt. You'd have to lead the world with a resurrected Illuminati zombie. I mean, since we're being imaginative, and all.
You'll have to dedicate all of these mineral resources, engineering and labor resources, time and energy to the effort of producing the mechanisms, launching them, all of it. And there's not going to be any way to afford it unless you either pay just for the human effort or pay just for the mineral rights.
People are going to argue for the former, and so you're going to have to secure the mineral rights through governance. But that ultimately means all the private enterprises, hopes and dreams of individuals that those minerals represent is all going to be squashed. People are going to go without those minerals, so the money you're paying them is going to mean less than it would have before the project started.
So, in real terms it's not going to be about dollars, it's going to be about number
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
nsfw-language http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6648229/siri-argument
If he really wanted to light a fire under our ass he could claim he screwed up his equations on Hawking radiation and claim that the earth will be swallowed by a black hole in 20 years.
You figure they're going to get on a camel, tie the nuke between the humps, and ride it over here? Seriously, even if they do develop nukes, the only reason they could possibly be a threat to us is if we let them be by not maintaining radiological monitoring at/near our borders. And we're not going to do that, because this threat is not new (at least, if you don't limit the field to the middle east.)
Face it... they are going to get nukes. And when they do, they will use them. On Israel. Probably immediately. While shrieking "Allah Akbar!" And Israel will respond in kind. And we'll finally have to seriously pay attention to developing non-petroleum energy here in the USA. (but the good news, such as it is, is that we can channel the money that used to go to middle east foreign and military aid into non-petroleum energy development.)
The thing about nukes is delivery isn't a matter of calling UPS or Fedex. ICBMs are a technical challenge of a higher order than nukes (the "difficulty" of fission weapons is mainly about refining materials to a particular degree of purity... the rest can be done by any competent machine shop by any decent physics nerd... fusion weapons -- crowd pleasers -- are something else entirely), likewise, radiologically shielded aircraft that are capable of intercontinental travel while carrying these very heavy objects... very tough, technologically speaking. And while they may hate us, they hate Israel more. A lot more. That's where the nukes are going to go. You watch.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
We really can't do that to the moon. That said, I don't see any reason why we couldn't do both.
That's what makes it "impossible". Not any technical hurtle. People like you are the problem. Thinking like yours would have delayed both Columbus and the moon landing. Besides, you're too focused on now. I was obviously speaking of the future. (Although not as distant as you'd likely think.)
and what, precisely, has the universe done to deserve a scourge such as us unleashed on it?
This is not news. He has been saying the same thing for years. Trashdot manages to print yesterday's news today yet again.
Read Plagues and Peoples by William H. MacNeill and then tell me if you think going off planet to some place humans can actually live for a short time is anything but insanity. Leaving the planet is scifi nonsense and I'm sick of hearing it from scientists who should know better. Jules Verne was correct in "War of the Worlds." Microparasites (bacteria and viruses) would kill an alien species. And the ones found in amenable environments off planet would kill us too. And wipe out the Earth population of humans when brought back. Hawkins is either naive, or wilfull.
E Proelio Veritas.
did we really need a scientist to tell us this? I think this point has been obvious to every 10 year old since we knew we could into space.
Not to get overly political... But this is one of my personal problems with the dissolution/re-positioning of NASA. IMO, NO for-profit organization will ever spend the money to figure all of the things out that would need to be figured out for this to happen. They *will* figure out how to (cheaply) put satellites into orbit, mine asteroids and potentially inhabit the moon. But anything beyond that would require technologies that they themselves wont have desire/need to research. Thus we will have to depend on college professors working on donation/funding - severely limiting the rate at which such discoveries will be made.
You totally missed GPs point. GP was suggesting that colonizing the moon has benefits on earth. Not only, do we learn how to get people living off the earth, but we glean knowledge which can be used back here to make our planet better.
As a lifelong SF reader (and not that swishy sword and sorcery stuff either) who will die bitterly disappointed that he never got the chance to visit the moon as he always assumed he would; maybe even Mars, I've come to the conclusion that the effort to colonize space is probably enough to guarantee the extinction of, if not the species, at least technological civilization. On the other hand, if we were to ever get to the place where we could feasibly colonize space (as distinct from just tossing the occasional visitor up there), then probably we'd have control over enough resources, both physical and psychological, that we would no longer be in any danger from extinction events.
For simplicity's sake, let's say that the current lack of will to explore space among the general public is gone, and we are going to take Hawking's words seriously. Even then we're a few generations away from being able to cut loose from Earth, going by the current state of the space programme.
There was a story here about a company planning to set up a fueling depot on the Moon by 2020. Whether they may succeed is one thing, but they're thinking in the right direction. We cannot obviously send another Apollo style one-shot mission, the costs are too high. And ultimately it has to be a commercial venture. My idea is to make lunar travel commercially viable first, both for practice in space travel/setting up a base (yeah I know that Moon and Mars are totally different environments, but it will still provide considerable experience in running a space base).
Here's one path I can think of, over perhaps the next 70 years (partly inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy):
- Set up the fuel depot on the moon - mining ice at the poles and converting to hydrogen/oxygen. Use robots if need be, at first. Build an underground lunar base, and let it be manned the way Antarctic research stations currently are. Over time, Earth-Moon trips should drop in price. Perhaps lunar tourism can also take off.
- In parallel, develop another Earth-Moon capable ship that can possibly do the trip faster than Apollo's 3 days. By now, the tourism should hopefully raise more money for other things, (He-3 mining, or mineral prospecting for one).
- Start building a spaceship in orbit, using discarded rocket boosters or similar. Let this ship fly to the moon and stock up on fuel.
- Send an advance mission to Mars comprising a prefabricated base, some sort of nuclear reactor, and robots to assemble everything. This will be used by the humans when they subsequently go there.
- Finally, send the spaceship along. This would have to be a pretty advanced ship that has spinning sections for artificial gravity, and perhaps hydroponic gardens for growing plants during the long trip, not to mention heavy duty radiation protection for its living cargo.
The last step above can easily take half a century from now. The mistake being made is the assumption that we have to get to that stage immediately, which we obviously cannot.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
we're talking about memetics: the ideas that evolve and grow in the realm of language and society, and we are just their vessels
memetics has superseded genetics in terms of "where it is at" in terms of evolution and transmission of information on planet earth
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Steven Hawkin is of his rocker. With a lack of further theorizing about black holes because lack of proof, now fantasy has its turn in this persons mind. Our saviour!
Well Steve take half of the population and we would be glad to be rid of you and your followers. Good riddens i would say. To be able to evacuate the nuts who believe this must plunder our motherplanet to the bone to be able to have the energy resources. Although the whole idea is never going to be put in practice, the danger is that those who share this foolish dream with him have an excuse to abuse the planet that hosts them and infecting the even dumber with their lies. Like they are doing now with their greed and power hungry raping of nature. And after all that the endless count of problems and difficulties to have such an undertaking will show it to be a tower of babilon. Fallicy, of a fool, and sad but true, of many other so called positivists that did not get past star track. Easter island is a example of a place where such fools used to live..