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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)
Exactly! What can he know? He's just an armchair scientist! (I'll go to hell for this...)
Ezekiel 23:20
...then we are basically a cosmic cancer.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
'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...
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.
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
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
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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.
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..."
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now though? I think he's feeling old and frail and his fear of death shows in his statements.
Maybe he's regretting trying to disprove the existing of God and is concerned that if he was wrong on that account, it may not bode well. Lucky for him, he was born into a european culture that had it's pinnings on a judea-christian belief that you care for the sick and the weak instead of only the fittest survive. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been here to do all of the work he has done.
Of course, the strength of that culture is much less today than it was when Hawking was born and with the push in modern genetics to not even bring to term a fetus with a genetic abnormality like Hawking suffers from, if he were born a generation or two from now, the world would probably never have benefited from his intellect.
For the record, I am not making a statement as to the existence of a deity or not, nor religion, either. I am simply making an observation as a neutral observer (as neutral as one can be, being part of the culture one is observing).
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.
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?!
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.
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.