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Stephen Hawking Warns Against Confining Ourselves To Earth

Posted by Soulskill on from the universe-won't-mourn-a-mote-of-dust dept.

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.'"

3 of 414 comments (clear)

  1. Paradox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  2. Short-sighted thinking by CRCulver · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. A common human viewpoint: by Hartree · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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."