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Stephen Hawking Warns Against Confining Ourselves To Earth
alancronin writes with this excerpt from CNet:
"Stephen Hawking, one of the world's greatest physicists and cosmologists, is once again warning his fellow humans that our extinction is on the horizon unless we figure out a way to live in space. Not known for conspiracy theories, Hawking's rationale is that the Earth is far too delicate a planet to continue to withstand the barrage of human battering. 'We must continue to go into space for humanity,' Hawking said today, according to the Los Angeles Times. 'We won't survive another 1,000 years without escaping our fragile planet.'"
Humans are. Earth will continue even in an environment not hospitable to us, and life too will probably go on.
About shitting in your own litterbox.
Isn't Hawking the one who said that if we contact aliens, then they will kill us? Maybe we should just stay on Earth and be very, very quiet (like a dormouse hiding from an owl).
"We won't survive another 1,000 years without escaping our fragile planet."
The sad part is that those who decide where our resources go can't see further than 10 years. (and being optimistic, here)
...then we are basically a cosmic cancer.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.
--Robert A. Heinlein
Earth wasn't "fragile".
We destroyed it with arrogance, lack of priority, lack of understanding, and with the confirming biases of divine providence and eminent domain.
There is plenty of stuff to ruin beyond our planet - we should not go until we've cleaned our room.
'We won't survive another 1,000 years without escaping our fragile planet'. Should read; 'We won't survive another 1,000 years without escaping our fragile planet, at current rates of growth and consumption'. It's extremely small minded/short sighted of the worlds most famous physicist, to assume the current system will keep chugging along, with business as usual, for a THOUSAND more years. He should do a little historical research...
The planet is not fragile.
- The planet is fine - the people are fucked.
What a load of crap, coming from a idol.
Manifest destiny.
So let's just become a horde of locusts jumping from planet to planet consuming their resources and polluting them into lifeless rocks until a coalition of alien species has to band together to eliminate the threat humanity represents to the galaxy.
Or, learn how to survive on this planet before going out and colonizing another one.
And wouldn't the energy, use of resources, and capital that would be necessary to venture into space accelerate the decline of this planet?
Space travel isn't exactly a "green" endeavor.
To look at just the first part of Hawking's syllogism. Yes, it's tempting to extrapolate doom given that the first Industrial Revolution began only 250 years ago. At the start of that, the world was overwhelmingly rural, and society in places like Europe seemed no more "modern" than their counterparts under the Roman Empire 1600 years before. Since then we've had, all the comforts and conveniences of the modern digital age, but also two world wars, nuclear proliferation, chemical and biological weapons, clearcutting of old growth forests, global warming and rising ocean levels threatening billions living on coastal cities, the rise of the Orwellian surveillance society backed by Big Data storage and number crunching.
But to be convincing, Hawking would need to provide sophisticated models of human social behavior and its economic and environmental consequences, and run that model forward. Part of human psychology has probably always had a doom and gloom, bring back the good ol' days component to it.
Extinction is such a pressing danger only for biological entities. If humans transcend biology, then they can take a much greater battering and expansion into space is no longer an inevitable development for the human race. In his novel Marooned in Realtime , which deals with a technological Singularity, Vernor Vinge muses that a civilization might choose to retreat into a virtual reality buried deep below a planet's surface instead of expanding outward. Sure, then one would have to worry about the death of the sun, engulfing the planet in its red giant phase, but that's billions of years from now. And even if a civilzation wants to expand into space, that's much easier done after transcending biology than as a biological race that has to manage fragile ecosystems.
http://what-if.xkcd.com/7/
Basically, this advice either boils down to "get out if/while you can", or else we're going to have to take some amazing steps to even get a small portion of the population out of the gravity well.
Which is actually good advice from one perspective - it's a very good negotiating approach.
We know that all paths we see before us seem to lead to epic population tragedies.
The cost of each of them is almost unlimited, in terms of taking away a meaningful future for humanity.
The private sector very strongly resists any attempt to do basic non-commercial research that can lead to a solution to any of these tragedies (and in fact is at least the indirect cause of many of them).
The reasonable answer, without requesting it, would seem to be an increase in funding by many of the nations of the earth for basic research. An increase in space exploration by China, for instance, would lead to a new space race, meaning more research and education.
More research and education will lead to progress towards solving basic problems, and possible escape from earth.
But for now in the US, conservatives think it will lead to more liberals, so it will be opposed strongly until they fear China enough to allow some progress.
Ryan Fenton
Then it's up to the physicists and mechanical engineers: without some cheap and easy method to LEO, we're not getting off the planet in numbers and equipment sufficient to survive out there. Say, controlled gravity.
Thinking a bit further ahead, we're actually doomed as a species if we can't get out of our own solar system. Getting off our own planet is a decent start, but we're still tied to a very small "island" around the sun, with all the other possible places to live generations away. This means Hawking's words are truer than he knows, we must learn to live in the space between solar systems. But still we must spread out, as some have said like a cancer in the universe, or it will all end here.
Do we dare play for the longest payoff and work for future generations to have the resources and tech they need to spread out, or do we continue to think only of the immediate future? How do we prevent the latter from cannibalizing humanity and resources for their own gain while working on these "blue sky" issues, rely on those few who have "beaten them at their own game" and amassed large fortunes of their own? - HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
I think Hawking was talking about mankind - not the entire planet.
Some of us will have to leave the planet for the human race to survive, is what I believe his point was.
Space elevator. We need it. Now.
The way our society operates, we will never feel the need to invest enough money to set up a self-sustaining off-planet colony for its own sake, because it makes no sense economically. That's just the way we think about this sort of thing, even though it may not be good for us in the long term. Therefore, if we do ever create such a colony, it will be for economic purposes. For example, a commercial mining operation that is considered cheaper to operate precisely because it is self-sustaining.
I am more worried about the survival over the next 50 to 100 years. Our ability to destroy ourselves is coming to a point where we will likely not make it another 100 years and we will take half of all species with us. http://rawcell.com.
Sterilization will work for them too.
Human survival is pretty much meaningless in the general sense, it is only important to us. As I can judge from comments human beings rarely comment here ... However self importance and ignorance make us feel good, that is all. As I live I understand that this world is full of lying and trying to survive or eat your brother monkeys. In other words, a mud and it is not important if you survive or not.
You know what has been shown to reliably reduce population growth? Wealth.
And it has the upside of accomplishing the job without all the nasty social side effects.
A wealthier people is a less crowded people. Now if only we could do something about those maniacs trying to kill us all because they want ALL the money for themselves... I think the guillotine process worked very well last time, even if the effect was only temporary. And this process, too, has the pleasant side effect of curbing the population's growth, though not by as much. Sounds like win-win-win-win-win to me.
...the rest of the universe is dying for us to show up.
Aaaah, all those new cosmic markets of unlimited potential, just sitting there,waiting for our neo-liberalism, our lawyers and our banking system All those rivers to poison, life-forms to exterminate...We'll share with aliens everywhere all the greatest recent accomplishments of human civilization: we'll sell them iPhones, have them have Facebook accounts, invite them on Oprah. And if they happen to have lots of oil...well, even better: we'll pretext the presence of WMDs to invade them and introduce them to democracy..
With all due respect, Mr Hawking, please shut the hell up and let us auto.destroy in this planet. The rest of the universe will do just fine without us.
Seems to think we need to change EVERYTHING but our selves.
"Here, we've been first-rate buggers and pissed all over this trash heap.Let's move n to our next noble and inspiring endeavour - locating the next places where we can foul our own nest."
Why doesn't he get out and run around a little more often? Fresh air and sunshine! It'd clear the cobwebs in that addled brain of his.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Let's also sterilize the people who make idiotic, inhuman proposals on what to do about rising population. When they are gone we can have rational debate.
I recognize elements of string theory in there. Is that the new name for it?
Population.
To continue at the way we intelligent monkeys are going, the 'earth' will soon give up.
Lets take a quick look at how quick this could happen:
In the UK there about 60,000,000 people. Lets suppose only half of that number eat eggs. Lets suppose that only half of that number have an egg (or a product that contains eggs) a day.
That is STILL 15,000,000 eggs a day that need to be produced in the UK alone ~ let alone the rest of the World.
Now consider other things in a similar vain: heat(power/fuel et al), water, rice, wheat, potatoes etc.
It soon gets pretty scary thinking what can happen if/(when) the infrastructure breaks down.
The only way to get on is to EXPAND into other places ~ but there isn't any left here on Earth now.
2010:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/08/09/1327251/abandon-earth-or-die-warns-hawking
2011:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/11/19/2218213/human-survival-depends-on-space-exploration-says-hawking
WTF does he know? Dude can't even get out of his chair.
"It worked in China" based on what measure of success? Research the horrible things that have happened in China *because* of that policy.
>> Stephen Hawking Warns Against Confining Ourselves To Earth
This from a guy who hasn't gotten out of his chair in forty years.
Mr. Hawking went on a date:
It was his first one in over ten years. When he came back, his glasses were smashed, his wrists broken. He had twisted his ankle and grazed his knees.
Apparently she stood him up.
"God probably has life forms on every planet and star. Earth he has given to the sons of men. He wants us to stay here and don't space travel. We are to live on a perfected earth as perfect humans..God's plan for earth from the beginning..it will be done."
Since some people die before having children, or simply decide not to, 2 children per family would quickly lead to the extinction of our race.
It sounds like quite a number of the people answering are quite happy to see those they like go extinct in order to revel in the anticipation of the extinction of those they don't like.
*shrug* To steal the title of Dan Ariely's book: Predictably Irrational.
It's a perverse modification of the judgement of Solomon with the mother saying "That's fine, as long as I can be sure her half of the child is truly dead."
But there is nowhere else in the entire universe that's anywhere near as friendly to humans as Earth.
We don't know one way or another, but if you're talking about the entire universe, there are billions of stars in just this galaxy alone. Mars was once wet and warm enough for humans to live comfortably on. It's highly unlikely that there are no other habitable planets anywhere. There probably are in our own galaxy.
Free Martian Whores!
Hawking is a cool dude, he has a wheelchair that communicates for him.
Other then that, I don't listen to him, he's a bit unbalanced mentally, IMO.
Dude is smart, had a brilliant mind. Now though? I think he's feeling old and frail and his fear of death shows in his statements.
Be seeing you...
While I admire Hawking using his celebrity to promote a noble cause, his thought process doesn't quite point to "genius" on this one right now.
None of the other planets in human-survivable range (without anything from Area 51) have breathable atmosphere, so we'd have to build closed systems to sustain us on other planetary bodies.
So, why not just build an underground Arcology right here on Earth instead and save the travel time ? Unless the Earth actually explodes, it should be able to sustain a community just as well as any on another planet... as long as it has strong doors and locks.
Regards, Lex
One thousand years? Seriously? If we think that the planet we currently inhabit is going to become more hostile for human habitation than any other place in the solar system in the next thousand years, what sorts of scenarios are we talking about? Even if we got hit by another major comet, this planet ould STILL be tremendously more habitable for humans than anywhere else. What sort of extraterrestrial habitation do we envision that wouldn't be orders of magnitude less expensive without leaving the gravity well?
By far, the greatest threats to humanity are certain non-malevolent activities of other humans. Might some extraterrestrial science help in solving some of the problems created by these activities? Sure. However, we need to keep in mind that sending some 'seed' of humanity to space isn't going to improve the lives of other humans here on Earth. Thinking that everyone is better off because of the 'success' of a few is the very sort of thinking which makes it more difficult to solve the social problems which are causing us to think this way to begin with. So, as much as I respect cosmologists and other space scientists, they need to set their egos aside before making policy recommendations to improve the lot of humanity.
.. Maybe, there is the chance that we shall just devolve to a monastic, barracks-like existence, first.
Living in space does NOT equal living in the basement, O'Neill cylinder would be like a park, while a Dyson sphere would make planets like basements.
Wow, the pervasive misanthropic comments are remarkable. Why do you all hate humans so much? We are a virus? By that definition, what living thing isn't? All life expands to the limits of the environment to support, we just happen to be very good and modifying our environment.
I'm a species-ist. I value humans more than other species...because I am one. Is that wrong? What rational logic is there for any other way of thinking?
Hawking's comment was a single line in the interview, and regardless of your political tilt, it is fundamentally true. The only thing you can reasonably argue about is the specific time frame. The earth will become uninhabitable. It might be in 50 years when hit by a asteroid, or in a couple billion years when the sun expands, but it is inevitable. Ultimately to beat extinction we need to leave the planet and eventually the solar system.
So do we wait until extinction is imminent? Do we wait to solve every problem here on earth before we start (as if that will ever happen)?
Or do we start now, with the understanding that it will take hundreds of years to accomplish? I vote start now.
I think we have to set our goals to something like The Venus Project first and start fixing the shits we did on our planet before going to others.
When he refers to the planet as fragile, he isn't referring to what we do to it. Think about the meteorite that blew up over Russia, which fortunately was considered small. Think about Yellowstone finally blowing its lid. Think about another awesome methane burp gurgling up out of the ocean--changing the climate and chemistry of the air world wide in a very short amount of time. Not only is there the man-made things to worry about, but there are a number of natural things that can and will happen in 10 years, 1000 years, or 10,000 years or more.
There are planets that are more geologically stable out there with less foreign objects floating around them. We need to find those planets.
As a big community of technological people, most of you should be the most aware of how critical it is to have backups.
We should try to get up to 100% utilization of this planet as fast as we can, because we're not going anywhere until we do.
The problem is, we can't change because all we care about is money.
Can't agree with you there. People don't give a shit about money. You can't eat it, you don't build your house out of it, and you can't fuck it either. What people care about is what money can get you: Resources. ...and that gets back to your original point. We all want resources, and short term ones at that. It's pretty hard to care about the long-term since we don't really live all that long anyway.
So you can say it's human nature, and that we're basically like a virus, or just that it's a problem of incentive. Either way, most people find it hard to care about what happens after they're dead until they're relatively close to dying, by which point they're off to a very late start for making change.
It follows that there's 2 semi-steady states for humanity. A: Where we exist in an environment where we don't consume all the resources, in which case we compete & grow. B: Where we are limited by the resources in our environment, in which case we suffer and try very hard to get back to state A.
Alternate ideas are unlikely to be stable. For example, "The hippie state of humanity" where we all suddenly stop caring about resources would probably mean humanity's stagnation, as we would sit around smoking dope until we run out. Another good one is "Slashdot Utopia" where scarcity ends, and again we stagnate, gorging ourselves off the products of our 3D chocolate printers and devolving into an "Idiocracy" like society. Eventually we pass through 'B' back to state 'A'.
Never be ashamed of who you are.
-Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg
Even if there's a literal Heavenly Paradise a mere 1000 light years away, that's as unfriendly to humans as the surface of Venus.
How, pray tell, is one supposed to make the six quadrillion mile journey to get there?
With the amount of energy you'd need to send just a single schoolbus-sized Space Shuttle that distance fast enough that the astronauts wouldn't be collecting Social Security several hundred millennia before they got there (which actually is physically possible thanks to relativistic time dilation), you could power the most ludicrous imaginable planet-wide environmental cleanup program here on Earth. Hell, with that much energy, you could probably terraform Mars as a side job, turn it into a luscious garden. And that's just a single ship....
Suggesting we colonize the Solar System to protect the species, as Professor Hawking has done, is simply idiotic. But the stars? They're beyond idiocy.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Learn to survive on lifeless rocks.
There are far more lifeless rocks in the universe than there are planets with the precise balance necessary to sustain human life right out in the open. These lifeless rocks are full of mineral resources, of course. With the right technologies, we can use those minerals to build bio-domes on the rocks, and live in them.
And even ignoring that fact.....
We have no idea when an extinction-level event might next occur, and as such we can't afford to drag our feet on developing the technologies that will enable us to escape. While there are benefits to fastidious environmentalism, figuring out how to make that part of human nature is not as pressing a need as figuring out how to get to other environments that are worth preserving.
Lastly, there is no evidence that:
1) there are any intelligent alien species anywhere.
2) that they have a coalition.
3) that this coalition would feel threatened by our claiming of planets they have yet to claim
4) that this coalition would go to war over environmental preservationist ideologies.
That threat is entirely imagined. The threat of an extinction-level event caused by no fault of humanity is a historical fact and a concrete reality (we just can't put a timeline on it). This must take priority over your science fiction.
I don't care to hear from a chair-bound, brilliant scientist telling me what to do. Chances are, his views of "what is right for the planet" are just as kooky as any other environmentalist.
one of the world's greatest physicists and cosmologists. He's not even in the top 10. I doubt anyone outside the industry could name 10 physicists anyway.
However, he has conditioned the public to accept his stupid statements, like 'We won't survive another 1,000 years without escaping our fragile planet.' only to retract them later to equal fanfare.
~that humankind is worth saving at the rate we are plunging along without being able to control the idiots that seem to be more than delighted to make the majority of people feel this miserable. The majority of people on this planet do not know why the most seemingly sensible people who might be in a position to help starvation, energy, peaceful cohabitation instead of warring against one another on such a large scale are constantly spinning their wheels, getting nowhere. The greatest minds on this planet have already been bought and sold. The greatest plans of mice and men.. elementary101 in futility. There are such devious plans in the works right now it will make your blood curdle.
You're completely ignoring colony ships, which are still the preferred method of transportation. Far easier to hollow a few asteroids out, strap engines on the side, and tell your passengers that The World Is Hollow and they are not allowed to Touch The Sky.
Humans are far too delicate in space environments to continue to withstand the barrage of stellar battering by constant particles and radiation and the lack of gravity, where no objective evidence shows we can reproduce & expand a population in an extra-terristrial environment.
That is the question. Why?
Hawking is a proponent that everything that we know about the universe happened on its own, there is no higher power, no purpose, none of that. The fact that we are here discussing all of this is just because of randomness. As such, what difference does it make if the human race goes on or not? What are we preserving for future generations or even the rest of the universe? Our (the human race) contributions to the universe are no more important than that of an ameoba. We are here because of pure chance and whether we are here a 1000 years from now or not doesn't change anything. It is only our own eqotism that would lead to the conclusion that we must leave the planet because eventually we will become extinct here. Everyone reading this will eventually die, too. That is how the universe works.
Let's also sterilize the people who make idiotic, inhuman proposals on what to do about rising population. When they are gone we can have rational debate.
There is no need to do that. The average world population birth rate has fallen below 2.11. In the West, it is by choice, in the third world, it is by disease and starvation. Regardless, below 2.11, the rate is not high enough to sustain our civilization, whether on this planet or not. So, in a way, Hawking is right, just not for the reason he gives.
Reminds me of this quote from The Matrix:
Agent Smith complains to Morpheus that the Matrix and its inhabitants smell disgusting, "if there is such a thing [as smell]". Smith has an open hatred of humans and their weakness of the flesh. He compares humanity to a virus, a disease organism that would replicate uncontrollably and eventually destroy their environment were it not for the machine intelligences keeping them in check. Ironically, Smith eventually becomes a computer virus, multiplying until he has overrun the entire Matrix.
Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Smith#Personality, Paragraph 3
Trixinet
To get out to space we first need to improve our human culture!
With our actual population rate, in 1000 years we would have exhausted the feeding resources of all our reachable universe...
Rwe obliged 2 save our future by choosing:O3 hole-greenhouse effect instead of accepting everydays gossip-nonsense chat?
We need to bring all the diversity of animals and plants we rely upon for food and resources.
Good luck with that.
If we cannot survive on the planet that nurtured us for millions of years, we might be doomed to destroy the habitability of every planet we touch, assuming we find a habitable planet, and export enough genetic diversity, and plants and animals to survive as a species.
Put some bacteria in a Petri capsule with nutrients. The growth is automatically started, consuming all the nutrients, expelling waste. No planification. The capsule has a finite amount of food. Is a closed system, no replenishment method. All the food consumed, the bacteria die drowned in their own shit. Literally.
Human race is following this same path. Steady.
If 1,000 years from now, we aren't all brains in vats living in literally fantastic virtual worlds, then we've failed somewhere along the line.
Also, Mr. Hawking, L2Economic Avancement. Yes, some economists actually make predictions, counter-intuitive ones, that come true again and again and again.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I think he's wrong. While escaping our planet is a great way of increasing our chances of survival as a species in the extremely long run, even if we completely destroy the ecosystem that keeps us alive, planet earth is still a vastly less hostile environment than just about the entire known universe.
Leaving Earth really won't help us at all. Only finding an exact copy Earth will help us. And chances of doing so are pretty much zero. We might find something that provides us with energy, resources and a magnetic field, though, but finding a place were we'd be able to breathe outside, even after terraforming the hell out of it, is an unrealistic goal. And even then, I'd rather be locked up in a biosphere on a dead planet earth than on some foreign world.
And even that would be pretty damn hard; possibly the biggest hurdle to take would be to create a proper artificial self-sustaining isolated ecosystem to keep us alive. I don't think we've managed to do that yet, though ESA, amongst others, is working on that.
0x or or snor perron?!
Did he tell you that in person?
As long as the earth crust stays more or less intact and earth keeps most of its elements earth will still be the most hospitable planet in the solar system:
- it has 1g
- a lot of hydrogen and oxygen
- stable orbit
- stable rotation, not gravitanonal locked
- a magnetic field
Look, nothing we humans can do to earth will make it less hospitable then the second best planet in the solar system: mars.
As tribal family groups we're capable of living in a tremendous range of environments, even when riddled by disease and beset by violence. All that's required is for people to live a few years past the start of their ability to breed. Before industry, technology, and development are able to ruin every ecosystem for human habitation, industry, technology, and development themselves will collapse. People from near the north pole to the south seas will then carry on as hunter/gatherers and simple agriculturalists, just as they did for hundreds of thousands of years before civilization. And, of course, living in social isolation, the groups will evolve their own languages and beliefs, and therefor tend toward war when they interact.
"If you're not passionate about your operating system, you're married to the wrong one."
Some organism anchor in one place, and hunker down, relying on the external forces to spread their offspring. This has worked for plants for a long time. We have the ability to sense dangers that no other animal can, to plan an escape from a multitude of catastrophes. We don't wait around for misfortune to find us when we know it's coming. We don't stand in the middle of the street just because we will eventually die.
It isn't egotism to give the people a better chance at survival. We take the steps today so that there is a chance that we won't screw it up when it matters. Today we are the beneficiaries of the work done by the people of the last hundred years. It seems a waste to sit down on the railroad tracks and wait for the train to hit us. Doing this as a species is immoral cowardice.
Storm
Stephen Hawking is probably a good deal smarter than most of us. How quickly most folks here discount that and assume that he hasn't considered some basic and obvious fact or evaluated some assumption. 1000 years is a heck of a long time for a civilization. If this guy thinks on that scale, he's obviously not considering the constraints that are true for us today.
Look at this in another way.
IF the more libertarian leaning of the human species does NOT leave the planet and then the solar system, they WILL be eradicated by the kings, popes, and other power mongers who can NOT allow 'their kind' to agitate and actually implement their own 'free will'.
That is MY take of what the Frontier Thesis by Turner was partly about.
HMMMMM, wonder how this concept was dealt with by Asimov in Foundation? Need to find my first edition left to me by my father and do some re-reading. Just my way of saying this might not be a 'new thing', just a different variation on the same sociological condition.
This is ancient news. If anybody else said it, it would get no publicity.
We should form a makeshift fleet of humans for a desperate search for a planet similar to earth. Oh wait - someone already did that.
I don't think you're quite correct in the belief that Hawking thinks the human race has no purpose. If that were true, why would he have ever cared to become a scientist in the first place? I mean, why bother learning how things work if there's ultimately no advantage in knowing anyway?
We may indeed be here because of pure chance (as opposed to some concept of a supreme being which created all of us according to a plan). But that doesn't negate the fact that we're capable of rational thought, as well as having certain preservation instincts and a desire to learn.
It appears to me, at least, that in a largely randomly created universe, we're the one thing in it with the ability to create order out of the chaos.
When you state that "our contributions to the universe are no more important than that of an amoeba", I counter that such a view is irrelevant to the point. Yes, if you look at the entire universe and the effects the human race has had on the formation of new stars or the alignment of the planets -- then forces of nature like gravity are apparently FAR more significant contributors than we humans are. But why would we feel a need to contribute to the universe in the first place? (We're not even sure any other intelligent species exists which could research and comprehend what our race did after we were gone.)
I think we're driven to create, explore, research and document, and even care for other animals we find on Earth because it pleases us to do so. We have the ability to procreate, and therefore a measure of vested interest in trying to improve things for the next generation. We also have a desire to interact with other humans in mutually beneficial ways -- a desire which tends to amplify all of these individual wants or desires. (It pleases us to share a thing of beauty with other humans who express an appreciation for it, hence art and music.)
Ultimately, any of us could just commit suicide tomorrow, deciding "there's really no point in going on and using more of the planet's resources up" -- and some do. But it's a very small percentage of the overall human race, and we certainly create new babies at a rate greater than that of those who decide to "check out".
So IMO, Hawking is simply fulfilling his needs as almost all of us are trying to do. He publishes books to fulfill his need to share his knowledge and maybe even for the sake of gaining notoriety/fame. Why? Just as easy to ask "Why not?"
I've been saying it since 1956 at least. Because we have approached the carrying capacity of our planet, both in terms of our ability to annihilate ourselves and in terms of resources, we had better be prepared to move out there. I don't claim to be in Hawking's league, but I really doubt one has to be a genius to see that this needs to be done.
Colony ships need at least as much energy, if not more. You've got an entire postmodern industrial complex to keep running, after all -- plus, you've also got the added energy overhead from recycling literally everything.
And sleeper ships are a no-go. At those timescales, any and all gasses will leak out of any container, no matter how thick and sturdy, as surely as it does from a rubber balloon...plus all your plastics and rubber will turn brittle, your silicon chips will be completely fried from cosmic radiation, and on and on and on. You'll need a continuous maintenance operation, which turns it back into a colony ship.
And, besides. If you're happy living between the stars for several times longer than recorded human history, why should you care at all about any particular star except as a place to recharge the batteries? A planet would be useless to you -- especially one with an entirely alien biosphere, where everything will either try to eat you or trigger allergic reactions.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Dont Worry.. We have Elon Musk now!
Evolution selects for people that don't get hung up on "why".
Just an observation.
I know it doesn't answer your question.
Philosophers have been working on it for some time,
maybe they'll figure it out some day.
(My personal answer to "why" is that life is fun and interesting; isn't that enough?)
Lightbulbs? Impossible. Humans can't fly. Impossible. Etc. You're closed-minded.
I'm not saying it is possible, but that you can't exactly say it isn't. If someone finds a way, it will obviously be a way no one ever imagined before, so saying it's impossible is simply closed-minded.
Travelling interstellar distances requires cheap energy like fusion. If we canmaster fusion energy we may as well remain on earth because we will not need fossil fuels, convert sea water into fresh water and grow food with controlable costs. The key word of human survival is cheap and abudant energy
Stephen Hawking isn't even that great a physicist, it's just that people like the story of a paralyzed physicist who 'explorers the universe from his mind'! By the time it would take for the technology to exist to do anything even approaching what Hawking suggests, that same technology would probably already have been used to clean the Earth up thousands of times over.
I think the only point when humans should seriously start colonising space is when humans are capable of properly taking care of one planet first. There's no point messing up so bad the planet takes a beating and then cavorting around on other worlds instead to dilute the problem temporarily. If the fundamentals are shaky it'll only scale up the problems over time. Then it'd be if the galaxy is messed up let's go invent psychohistory and use robots and telepaths to stop the dark age. I love space technology and the possibilities it offers, but would not entrust our solar system (and the galaxy for that matter) to humanity in its current state. Having a major proponent for space colonisation like Dr Hawking could definitely help develop the required science and tech though.
Earth as a venue for humankind will still be more compelling than any other likely galactic oasis we may find, even as it might be in 1000 years time. No where else has so much in its favor. The fact that we need to shift our focus towards diversifying our food sources on earth and being more responsible guardians of the earth is but a challenge. These challenges will pale in comparison to those challenges that we might face if we were to colonize some other galactic outpost.
Those determined to set out for points afar seem to overlook that their travels would need to be fueled by pillaging the limited resources we have here on earth. There is a distinct possibility that the resources required to explore the jump to another planet would come at the cost of the very planet we have a chance now to conserve.
Surely the focus needs to shift towards ensuring that we grow within the limits of the planets capacity to sustain us.
We just don't want to admit it.
Humanity is already on he downhill slide. He's proven in the few thousand years of recorded
history that he cannot and will not grow into a more intelligent, worthwhile being, but is mired
in petty battles of ego, lust and greed, condemning countless millions to death.
He has abused his stewardship of the creatures of this world, sending untold number to extinction.
He has allowed his sewage and waste products and chemical creations to devastate the planet,
threatening all species with horrible disease and premature death. He kills his own kind for little
or no reason. He consumes far too much for little or no return, or simply because he can.
Mankind is in fact a plague upon this world and the sooner he is gone, the better for it.
Re:Paradox, your context remains anthropogenic, though in your case it's on the absence not presence side.
You wrote:
"The Universe managed quite well for aeons before we dropped in and it'll continue to do so long after we're extinct. We're not the raison d'etre (despite many of us being convinced we are)."
Wiktionary defines "anthropogenic" as the influence of humans on nature.
Your implicit encouragement of not caring about the human impact on the universe does indeed impact nature and the universe.
Implicit avowal of non-action is indeed still an action.
And I argue here an entirely negative action.
To explain:
First let's take a more universal context: here we see that one of the ubiquitous characteristics of this universe is the trend from simplicity to complexity, from simplicity to ever greater elegance, from simplicity to increasing beauty.
The beauty of some humans within this context at this time is that they represent the shift to conscious life aware of this evolutionary process for the first time.
Previous ontological discontinuities (how often do you get to throw out such a phrase?) are before Big Bang, Big Bang, shift from energy to matter, appearance of life, appearance of conscious life, and currently the appearance of conscious life conscious of this 13.8 billion year process.
Oh, and so far as we know this final state-shift only began in the last 500 years ie relatively speaking in the last couple of minutes.
And we haven't yet found anywhere else in the observable universe where this has occurred.
We appear to be it.
Certainly the universe will continue to exist if we go extinct, but it will be a setback for this universe's developmental trend.
Does that make us as humans important?
Absolutely, but not for us humans, but for the universe.
Our choices as post-modern readers of Slashdot to get on the evolutionary train, or to go down to the pub once again, will determine the speed or the continuation of this universal developmental trend from simplicity to complexity.
So this is the time to renounce any posture of not caring, get with the program, and take massive action to evolve in every way possible.
(Slashdot calls me "anonymous coward" simply because I don't have time to log in.)
After fifty years of manned space exploration, we've only visited the Moon a handful of time, and most of our experiences of putting humans in space have been temporary visits into Earth orbit. We can't even figure out a practical method of sending people to Mars. What makes you think we'll ever find a way to permanently send people to other planets? We evolved to live on Earth. I say that with a certain amount of angst since I'm old enough to have grown up with the NASA manned space program and it was always my dream as a child and young adult that human beings would personally explore and colonize the galaxy. However, reality had other plans.
Heh.
Did you ever read "Galápagos" by Kurt Vonnegut?
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?