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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.'"
ah, the basic premise behind Agenda 21, mankind as a cancer that must be suppressed into a state that will be sustained by this single planet. This leads to a single world government, mass depopulation (read death camps, look up negative population credits) and people living sustainably but not self-sufficiently.
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.
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.
People don't need planets to live. Or, at least, not to live on. Lagrange points to anchor habitats are a nice touch. Give me low G, controlled weather, and no Mosquitos any day. Get us out of 'natural' ( ignoring the natural/unnatural false dichotomy) environments and in to ones designed by engineers to handle hard human loving.
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..."
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."