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.'"

Comments

Earth isn't delicate,

[Anonymous Coward]

Humans are. Earth will continue even in an environment not hospitable to us, and life too will probably go on.

Re: Earth isn't delicate,

[Anonymous Coward]

Earth, as a system for sustaining human life, most certainly is delicate. Which would be what Stephen Hawking is talking about, and what you should be concerned about. Whether or not there are rotifers once we've managed to murder ourselves is something of an academic question.

Re: Earth isn't delicate,

[gatkinso]

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.

Re: Earth isn't delicate,

[Anonymous Coward]

I vote we go the locust route

Re: Earth isn't delicate,

[Jason1729]

Yes, I'm aware this is slashdot, but not everyone is happy living in their parents basement. For your own sake, try to stay off the internet for a little while and see what the world is really like.

Re: Earth isn't delicate,

[Smallpond]

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.

Yes. Because when you think about luxurious comfort "designed by engineers" is the first thing that comes to mind.

Re: Earth isn't delicate,

[JWSmythe]

    Humans don't actually handle low G all that well.. Vision degrades. Bones weaken. Muscle tone is lost. It would be many generations in that environment before we adapted or evolved to live comfortably in it. We need gravity. We need bugs (and the whole ecosystem). We need changing weather. Without the later two, you won't have well sustained food crops.

Re: Earth isn't delicate,

[Intrepid imaginaut]

What misanthropic crap. We can survive on this planet just fine, despite this planet's repeated, persistent, and very nearly successful efforts to wipe us out many times throughout history. The realisation of what we were doing to the biosphere has been slow in coming but I'm greatly encouraged by recent developments. Mother nature has done far worse before we humans ever made an appearance, and in case you've forgotten, the fate of the planet and all its glorious diversity WITHOUT humanity is to become cold stellar dust.

We are also the first and perhaps only living beings to have adapted sufficiently to the environment to be able to go into space, and like it or not that makes us special. We do need to take advantage of that.

Re: Earth isn't delicate,

[hawguy]

Or, learn how to survive on this planet before going out and colonizing another one.

There are things that could happen that would make it very difficult if not impossible to survive on this planet no matter how much we've learned about surviving. Like a supervolcano eruption putting enough ash in the air to shade the entire planet, sudden release of ocean methane stores, a large asteroid strike, etc.

Any of these events are unlikely, but any of them could happen tomorrow. Even if they don't lead to extinction, the collapse of civilization would prevent us from leaving the planet for a long long time.

Re: Earth isn't delicate,

[ZoobieWa]

The planet needs humanity or it will turn to dust? You sound religious.

We are not the only living beings who have gone to space. Bacteria regularly take trips there encased in their own protective shuttles. Here's an article from a few months ago.

http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/loads-of-bacteria-hiding-out-in-storm-clouds-130124.htm

Re: Earth isn't delicate,

[femtobyte]

Unfortunately, living on Earth under a rain of poison flaming gas and ash is still a heck of a lot easier than living in space (or the Moon or Mars). If you can't survive and thrive in the very worst conditions this planet has to offer, then you won't do better off outside the atmosphere.

Well...

[Nrrqshrr]

"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)

If we can't manage a planets resources...

[gatkinso]

...then we are basically a cosmic cancer.

Re:If we can't manage a planets resources...

[gerf]

no, entropy is a cosmic cancer.

Re:If we can't manage a planets resources...

[khallow]

I think that idiots and their "proper" ways to address environmental issues are one of the problems that we can solve by moving into space. There won't be any natural biospheres in most of space to interfere with human endeavors. And we can work out the environmental issues there without input from the people who think we should do that in only a particular way.

For example, we can continue to have century after century of bad ideas on how to deal with human population on Earth - things like divine providence, eugenics, dictatorship of the proletariat, urban planned development, arcologies, etc. In space settlements, you have to get most of that right or you die.

So what is better, a comfortable place where we can continue to goof around for many lifetimes to come (that is the true "heavy lid" of which you speak), or a tough environment that forces us to be better? To actually solve the problems that you apparently care about?

Paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Paradox

[khallow]

Hawking ought to be more concerned about remaining confined to his chair.

Hawking ought to be long dead by now. And he currently speaks at about one word per minute (via a twitch of a muscle on his cheek). Do you really think he doesn't get that? "Concern" doesn't magically reverse a medical condition for which we have no clue how to cure.

But his concern may help save the human race. I think his priorities are in order.

Re:Paradox

[killkillkill]

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?

Re:Paradox

[tqk]

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).

Re:Paradox

[VanGarrett]

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.

Short-sighted thinking

[CRCulver]

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.

Obligitory XKCD

[RyanFenton]

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

Re:CORRECTION

[benf_2004]

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.

A common human viewpoint:

[Hartree]

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."

Why do we take these statements seriously?

[mothlos]

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.

Re:Not too bright

[TrumpetPower!]

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&

Why?

[Dcnjoe60]

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.

Wrong

[zmooc]

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.

Re:Barmy littlle twat, this Hawking fellow.

[WindBourne]

And yet, that is true of most men. Hell, that is true of a number of women as well.