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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.
"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.
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
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...
You're right. Given the historical precedent, I'd say mankind will probably find faster, more efficient ways to deplete the planet of its resources in well under a thousand years.
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.
The Earth is one collision or one solar event away from complete sterilization. When you start considering the scales involved in spreading life over our cold, (At least mostly) lifeless, unforgiving galaxy, the chances of the rare balance currently existing here begin to diminish even without anthropocentric global warming and the like. Maybe ecosystems like earth are abundant in our reachabable speck in the universe, but I doubt it. Humans spreading across the stars is our only know chance of intelligent life sustaining an existence. What's the point of the universe if there is nothing to appreciate it?
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.
The Earth is one collision or one solar event away from complete sterilization.
Agreed.
... even without anthropocentric global warming and the like.
ITYM "anthropogenic."
Humans spreading across the stars is our only know chance of intelligent life sustaining an existence.
Once done (my opinion's mostly based on SF reading I've done), what's the point? All those far-flung human colonies are going to immediately differentiate from each other, leading to "us vs. them" on a galactic scale, so what really is the point of this exercise? Preservation of homo sapiens' DNA regardless? What for?
What's the point of the universe if there is nothing to appreciate it?
Now, that's anthropocentric. 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).
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
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.
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?!
Our population grows at an exponential rate. Strictly speaking, we're not overpopulated now, but in a few generations we will be. We probably won't run out of room before food production can no longer keep up. We may find a more efficient way to produce food that can keep up, but the fact is that this will only slow down the problem. When we do run out of room (or approach that point, anyway), illness will spread quite readily, the end result being plagues, regardless of our collective hygiene. We could solve this by having regularly scheduled mass death events every few hundred years, such as nuclear wars, or maybe we can get playful with it and do some kind of gladiatorial games. Perhaps better yet, is to just get a large portion of our population to colonize new worlds. That's perhaps the only practical solution that doesn't directly involve people dieing.
This solution doesn't address the environment. This is not meant to be a solution for the environment. This is a solution for human kind. There's no reason why we can't continue to develop environmentally friendly technologies while working toward colonizing other worlds. In fact, I'd say the goals are quite compatible, as technologies which require fewer resources will contribute nicely to founding new civilizations.
Learning about brewing beer, by brewing beer.
And yet, that is true of most men. Hell, that is true of a number of women as well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.