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Stephen Hawking Says He Is Convinced That Humans Need To Leave Earth (sciencealert.com)
Reader dryriver writes: Back in May, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking made yet another doomsday prediction. He said that humanity has 100 years left on Earth, which knocked 900 years off the prediction he made in November 2016, which had given humanity 1,000 years left. With his new estimate, Hawking suggested the only way to prolong humanity's existence is for us to find a new home, on another planet (alternative source). Speaking at the Starmus Festival in Trondheim, Norway on Tuesday, Hawking reiterated his point: "If humanity is to continue for another million years, our future lies in boldly going where no one else has gone before," he explained, according to the BBC. Specifically, Hawking said that we should aim for another Moon landing by 2020, and work to build a lunar base in the next 30 years -- projects that could help prepare us to send human beings to Mars by 2025. "We are running out of space and the only places to go to are other worlds. It is time to explore other solar systems. Spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth," Hawking added.
Space is way, way worse. Unimaginably worse. Like, instant death worse.
It's so sad when scientists get old and turn in to crackpots.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
The earth has been pummeled with catastrophic meteor strikes for billions of years.
Guess he needs to get started on figuring out FTL drive. Because even the worst place on earth is far better than Mars.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Our species needs to die out here so we don't destroy any other planets we can get our hands on.
The problem is NOT that we don't have room -- the problem is that we as a species are so stupid, short-sighted, and greedy-as-fuck to figure out a way to make room for everyone.
If we would spend less time focused on killing one over trivial shit such as oil and religion and more on putting our petty differences aside we sure as hell could easily support 30+ billion on this planet.
I'll be REAL interesting to hear his perspective in ~2025 after First Contact happens.
Human colonies on non-habitable planets would only last a little longer than the people on the ISS would without support from Earth - thanks to their greater amount of storage space. Things would turn ugly real fast after the second or third missed resupply shipment.
Now obviously there are no habitable planets in the solar system, so to get to one, we'll either need to crack physics wide open and invent FTL travel, or gamble all our resources on a generation ship that will become a debris field sprinkled with freeze-dried corpses the first time something goes seriously wrong with it on its seven-zillion mile, centuries-long journey through space.
Nobody's living outside of Earth long-term any time soon.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Before we leave Earth we need to learn how to live with one Earth. Until then I think we're not mature enough to leave. We'd just keep expanding and fight over resources.
I'm inclined to agree.
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Yes, any terrestrial species that wants its descendants to survive more than another 700 million years or so must expand its territory beyond Earth orbit before that time has passed and the Sun cooks the Earth dry.
Any species that wants its descendants to survive any arbitrary amount of time less that that still has to work on the same issue in case of asteroid strike or other major catastrophe that could happen somewhere in the next five minutes to 700 million years.
So yes, we ought to be working on how to survive and thrive in space with just an energy gradient and a source of raw materials to keep us going.
However, Hawking also beaks off about aliens wanting to invade and kill/enslave us, so however good he may be at figuring out the math of black holes, he's not so great at interstellar economics. Sometimes he talks about how we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust next Thursday, just for variety.
Personally, I think he likes staying in the public eye and nobody's talking about A Brief History of Time any more.
Hawkings is obviously a very intelligent man who has made some very important contributions.
He's also right, we should be trying to establish outposts outside of earth; but his claiming we have 100 years left is alarmist and unscientific.
We don't know when the earth might collide with a giant asteroid or if nuclear war might erupt and wipeout mankind. We certainly couldn't say it will happen within 100 years with any scientific certainty.
Even with the worst case global warming, the earth will still be more hospitable than any body in the universe outside of earth.
Yes, we should be trying hard to find alternative places to settle, but let's not go nutso and alarmist about this and make claims that no one can accurately back up.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
While it is likely bad for the long term effects of the environment, we are not running out of space. The best scientific minds 130 years ago thought today's population was impossible, and they were right (using 1890s tech). More people means more geniuses who can solve problems. We will likely achieve fusion within 50 years, and have cheap automation driven by weak AI. In the long term nothing is stopping artificial farms from reaching a half mile depth around the globe, we stack nearly 30k people per square mile in cities already and just the land mass of earth has roughly 200 million sq miles. That's 6 trillion people considering we can up the current city density through nearly unlimited energy and cheap power. Further we could start using the oceans too, floating cities are already being planned. While I am in favor of expanding humanity, we need to realize that there is plenty of room right now if we take into account increases in technology. Within 500 years we may see the planet support over one trillion people, it seems likely to me at least.
Dear Mr.Hawkings,
Please stick to calculating black holes. You are making an ass out of yourself by playing an oracle.
Why do we hype anything someone famous has to say? Would Slashdot run the story if Justin Bieber said the same thing? Why not? It would be exactly as meaningful. Unless Hawking thinks that a black hole is sneaking up on us, he is out of his league.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
As a geek and lover of science, I have mad respect for Stephen Hawking, but the man has seems now to just be saying outrageous things to stay relevant in the over-saturated cesspool of current events.
"Earth, man. What a shithole."
Just stop making all these crazy predictions. You don't know, seriously, you cannot know any of these things.
I applaud your theoretical work on astrophysics and agree that it's ground breaking work, but stop with the rest of this stuff. You are just soiling your name, diminishing your reputation with this garbage. I know you face your forthcoming mortality and it must be hard to realize that it will very soon be over for you, but these recent PR ploys are only going to damage your memory. Please stop. I beg you. Let us remember you for the good stuff you've done, not this craziness.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Stephen Hawking, the ultimate prepper.
One planet among many. Why should humanity stay just here?
We would need exactly the same gravity, exactly the same atmospheric pressure, exactly the same minerals in our diet, exactly the same level of radiation, etc. Humans cannot survive even on Mars and living there is a lie. Every serious scientist knows that. The probability of finding a habitable planet is effectively zero.
If we had fusion power, we could economically grow crops in vertical farms. If we did this, then we could house many times the whole planet’s population JUST along the coastlines in tall buildings and give every person ample personal space.
Even if we didn’t do that, there’s plenty of uninhabited space on earth that we could utilize as long as we brought water in and improved farming efficiency.
While I agree that we’re wrecking our environment, any other place in the solar system will be far more inhospitable.
Won't the Rapture take care of the "too crowded" problem?
He just wants the place to himself and enough people to fly him around in the Concorde and eat steak... Oh wait, that's Al Gore... Never mind.... bitch!
Spend the few years you still have left on what you are good at: physics.
The Babylon Project was a dream given form. It's goal -- to prevent another war by creating a place where humans and aliens could work out their differences peacefully. It's a port of call. Home away from home for diplomats, smugglers, entrepreneurs and wanders. Humans and aliens living together peacefully wrapped in two million five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal...all alone in the night.
Close as I could get to reciting it from memory....
We're in luck there is an earthlike world just 50 ly from earth in the Liaedin system just one or two hyperspace jumps depending on range of your star ship.
Average surface temperature is a slightly chilly 270 k. It weighs in at 2.3 earth masses /w 1.55 g surface gravity so best to lay off Cheetos or you'll regret it.
Other fun facts years are 720 earth days, each day about 14 and a half hours.
Visitors should keep in mind atmosphere contains only 6% oxygen. Breathing equipment required at all times.
Nothing has been able to kill all life on earth for the 3.8 billion years that it has existed, and I believe human intelligence gives us a huge advantage to surviving catastrophic events, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.
If he's afraid that we will kill ourselves, then what's to prevent us from doing the same thing in short order on any other planet we colonize?
Here's my thesis, if you believe that one person has THAT much power, then we are already slaves to the power class
Here's a useful observation: one person can make things considerably worse, but it takes a lot of people working together to make things better.
This is the central problem with humans: breaking stuff is always much easier than making stuff.
I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth - Hawking
I completely agree! - Earth
Actually no, microbes are far better suited to survive catastrophic events than large animals like apes or theropods. For instance, there is no way human species survives the Permian extinction event if it were to happen today. The Cretaceous asteroid, maybe. Those luxury survival bunkers built inside missile silos might make it, depending on how much food they stored and how good their water supply is.
Anyways the "species survival depends on getting to Mars" trope is getting old. I'm all in favor of going to Mars but honestly it would be so much easier and cheaper to build bunkers. Costwise you're looking at around $1 trillion for a self-sustaining Mars colony, and maybe like 0.01 percent of that for building that same colony underground.
You don't even need nuclear power (although it would be nice to have it). You can build the bunker near a reliable geothermal source.
Stephen Hawking repeatedly demonstrates the disconnect between high intelligence and wisdom or good judgement.
The Cretaceous asteroid took over a hundred years and maybe as long as 500 years just to kill all the dinosaurs so -- no -- a lot more humans would survive than just the few crammed into missile silos. The Permian extinction happened in stages too. We aren't sure of the causes but there too the extinctions took place over centuries. Humans can engineer around anything that gives them centuries to do it.
YOU FIRST! And take all of your "man made" global warming clowns like Algore with you!
http://www.zo.utexas.edu/cours...
And he has extrapolated with another set of bits and pieces & in turn he is cracking up into bits and pieces.
Who gets to leave and who gets to stay? The lead professor on "When Worlds Collide" got pushed in his wheelchair behind the rocket engines.
> Stephen Hawking Says He Is Convinced That Humans Need To Leave Earth
More specifically: Trump supporters.
Linus Pauling was a certified genius, and basically created the field of molecular biology.
He was also a complete crank who thought Vitamin C could cure any disease, people with genetic defects should be branded so people wouldn't mate with them, and basically shilled for the Soviet Union for decades.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
The futility in all of the comments here lies in the fact that they are based on the oversimplified and over-extrapolated assumptions that evolution is correct in the atheistic sense. The word of Jehovah (The Bible ~ HIS legal logbook for man), is that man will live for eternity on earth (absolute certainty ~ zero uncertainty).
If we're going to destroy Earth, why would we want to spread humanity to other planets? We'd be like an infection that kills its hosts.
What the hell would he know about leaving earth, dude cannot even leave his wheelchair.
Joke aside: This, like his rant about the dangers of AI when no general AI is even being developed, shows that brilliant people can be utter morons as soon as they leave their areas of expertise.
Perhaps we should shoot Stephen Hawking into space since he wants to leave Earth so bad!
...there you are.
human beings will always need to leave where human beings are.
Humans can engineer around anything that gives them centuries to do it.
Only if there's a source of funding and a societal structure (i.e. other humans) providing the engineers with food and other things.
I think you underestimate the Permian event. There are competing theories but the most plausible one I've seen says a giant asteroid (bigger than the Cretaceous one) hit, and the antipodal side of earth ruptured out, forming the Siberian traps. It functioned basically like a super volcano, but instead of one brief eruption, it kept going and going for centuries. Result was that it rained sulfuric acid all over the world, nonstop. The very air you breathe became a poisonous fume (to paraphrase Boromir).
I do not see human species surviving this. The initial impact would pretty much wipe out governments and civilization so it wouldn't be possible to put together a large expensive engineering project. The remaining survivors would gradually die out in the following decades of acid rain and poisonous fumes.
But I think a large self-sustaining underground colony can be built that can survive it, for a tiny fraction of the cost of a Mars colony. Any of the big tech billionaires could fund it solo.
Where he thinks that settling other planets will increase mankind's chances of survival, I believe they will lead to war. Interplanetary war that will see planets being nuked or targeted with swarms of asteroids.
There doesn't have to be a reason, we'll find one. And if we can't find one, we'll manufacture one.
A new religion. Economics. A new way of running society. Differences in life expectancy. Mutations caused by the environment. Genetic engineering leading to a superior strain of humanity.
Leave it to us. We'll find a reason. We always do. Together on o planet we need to show some restraint, 'cause we're on the same planet. Throw that out and why not bomb a world?
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Go underwater in the oceans.
* Closer to home.
* Plenty of raw materials, food, water, oxygen, etc.
* Good practice for going out in to actual space.
* Large areas of ocean to work with compared to land.
We could easily create underwater cities and things if we put our minds to it and have shorter supply lines that don't require expensive rockets.
Who get to choose who stays and who goes? Is it voluntary or involuntary?
No seriously. If you believe in God then I suppose there is an argument for exploring creation, but it isn't all the strong because it isn't and doesn't seem to be very practical in the near future.
If you don't believe in God, like Hawkings, what logical reason can you possible give to have any concern about the survival of the species? Your personal survival or happiness is not going to be affected by anything so far term and when you are dead it won't make the slightest difference.
I guess maybe to make you feel like you are doing something useful? How could the survival of the species be useful to you?
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
We stay here and...? A thousand years from now we're just here? A million years?
Personally, I think if we do go in to space in a big way, it will be to live in space habitats with artificial gravity and so on, though probably mining raw materials from asteroids or the Moon to build them.
Things change no matter what. We may become transhuman cyborgs, or we may be replaced by AI's (not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion, the AI's could be considered our children and could be the best part of us, or it could turn out a lot grimmer.)
We may just go extinct. Global warming (our fault) may turn earth into another Venus, in which case we've not just driven ourselves extinct but all life on earth.
If we continue to be more or less conventionally human, with our meatsuits, and if the population continues to grow, it will be an explosion. Imagine layers of population out from the earth, out from the solar system. And the population growing in each of those layers. People would have to keep moving outward. And the people in the inner layers who wanted to move out would either have to skip over the layers outwards from them to find fresh empty space, or push the people in those layers out so they could take their place. I just don't believe it could come to that. Assuming the more dismal scenarios like extinction don't happen first, something, and probably something literally unimaginable to us 21st century humans, will happen before it comes to that.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
I'm convinced that Stephen Hawking needs to leave Earth. It may be the only way for us to prove that there really is intelligent life out there.
Are humans destined to be those planet killers from the movies sucking up all the resources and moving on to the next planet?
We are going to have to get it together and solve issues here first otherwise it is same crap different pile.
Besides, I don't think my kids can afford to move that far.
is right twice a day. The sun will one day explode and if the species lasts until that happens no shit they'll have to leave to survive. Why does everything this android spit out get posted on Slashdot as gospel?
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that there's more habitable space on the roof of my apartment building than in the whole rest of the solar-system off-earth.
The urge to quit Earth is the urge to dump our problems without fixing them. This will not help us survive in more hostile environments. If we send a tiny group of people, or even somehow hundreds or thousands, they will take the lessons our species learned on Earth. Long after a few brave adventurers have fallen to the same challenges we face here (times x), the many billions (or even if disaster strikes millions) of adaptable people at home will be muddling on.
Space exploration is an interesting fantasy. It may be worthwhile, but as an alternative to creating better conditions in the real world, it is a sad escapist trap.
"Ruthlessly pursuing the idea that the accordion is just another instrument."
if the humans leave, the climate will restabilize and the rest of the planet will be better off.
Overpopulation is a Myth. The population trend is stabilizing faster than previously thought.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA5BM7CE5-8 (Hans Rosling on TED)
Maybe physicists should stick to physics and leave sociology ans antropology to the experts of those subjects
The entirety of the world's population could fit within the any single Western US state of if people lived as densely as people do in Manhattan. We are nowhere near running out of space. But yes, the best spots have been claimed a long, long time ago.
We know for sure that the only other halfway usable planet that we can possibly ever reach is Mars. Elon Musk claims he can get us there soon and cheaply - and I believe him. BUT he didn't address how we'd be able to live there after his re-usable spacecraft drops off 100 people and 450 tonnes of cargo.
1) We have no idea of the health risks of 1/3rd g gravity - we know zero g is very unhealthy. That's all we know.
2) On a 2700 calorie/day diet, with a reasonable mix of nutrients - you need one acre of farmland per person to keep them fed...so 100 acres of farmland per 100 person "team".
3) On Mars, it's too cold for crops to grow. Mean temps of -55 C are what you get - plants don't grow below +5 degC.
4) To heat one acre of land to +5 degC will require 1.7MWatts of power - and 170MW of solar power requires about 3.7 acres of solar panels - weighing 10kg per sq.meter. To keep ourselves warm and with lights, vehicles, etc will add another 2 to 3 acres of solar panels. Crunch the numbers and roughly 250 tonnes out of our 450- tonne cargo allowance will be Solar panels. How many tonnes does it take to build 100 acres of well insulated, pressurized, heated greenhouses? Probably another 100 tonnes. That leaves just 1 tonne per person for housing, recycling, water mining, vehicles, space suits, etc.
5) There isn't enough nitrogen in Mars soil to grow plants (one part per 1000 or so is what we've seen in rover sampling). So we'll either need around 6 tonnes of fertilizer...and some means to very efficiently recycle nitrogen....or a way to mine about 6,000 tonnes of Martial soil and heat it enough to release it's nitrogen. NASA deems nitrogen too impractical to recycle aboard the ISS - so we know this ain't gonna be easy.
6) Setting up all of those acres of greenhouses and solar panels will take a long time - and the plants will take many months to produce crops. Realistically, we're going to need a year's worth of food...that's another 100 tonnes.
So for sure, there isn't enough cargo capacity in Elon's otherwise excellent plan. So instead of getting people there for $200,000 per person - it's going to be more like twice that...just for the cargo. At $400,000 per ticket - vastly fewer people can go there.
The only way out of this is to make MUCH lighter solar panels...and to come up with ways to make an acre of greenhouse that weighs a LOT less than a ton!
So, with what we currently know - I think a self-sustaining Mars colony is a bust...sadly.
If we can't get Mars up and going like that - we're talking slow, painful terraforming - bioengineered greenhous-gas-producing bacteria to warm the planet - then bioengineered algae to sit in those new lakes and make oxygen - and the problem with THAT is finding someone to pay for a project that won't produce results for 1000 years. No project in all of human history has taken more than a couple of human lifetimes (I'm thinking of the great Cathedrals of Europe and arguably, the Pyramids)...in both cases each generation who worked on them believed they'd get their reward in heaven...so it wasn't a total waste for them.
But between taxpayers and government - NOBODY will pay for a trillion dollar, 1000 year project.
So - we're not going to colonize Mars, there is no place else in the solar system that's even as good at that - and we stand ZERO chance of making it outside the solar system (see funding issues, above).
We'd better make the best of what we've got. Ways out are to become longer lived so that a 1000 year project doesn't seem quite so bad - or scan our brains into computers and shoot computers out into space where we can all be immortal.
www.sjbaker.org
Why should we be so concerned about the species surviving?
I mean the 'species' doesn't want anything only individuals.
No one currently living affected if the species goes extinct any time after the next 150 years.
I mean I guess a person could want you great great great grandchildren to survive, but really what are they to you other then other people possible future people who may or may not ever exists.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Exploring new places and developing whatever tech it takes to survive there is worthwhile because each new colony represents a new place for us to put our eggs in, not because there was ever any instance of 'everyone has to move there'. Every group of people living in a new place, be it Massachusetts or McMurdo Bay or Mars, gets to discover new things and organize in potentially interesting new ways. If a colony becomes self-sustaining, it can develop brainpower that influences the older world, as in Ben Franklin being ambassador to France.
We're more likely to kill ourselves as a species than we are to be destroyed by some external force. Wherever we go, we will take our problems with us. As the saying goes, "wherever you go, there you are". If we face violence, poverty, hunger, and overpopulation now, we will eventually face the same problems on the moon, Mars, or wherever. Our challenge as a species is going to be working together to solve these internal problems. If we can do this, we can colonize the galaxy as benevolent stewards instead of as a destructive virus.
In conversations like this, a question we should be asking is whether it does more good or harm to bring our species to another place, with our species as it is right now. Is it really right to bring pollution, global warming, and the potential for nuclear destruction with us anywhere? To me it seems very speciesist to look at the problem from only the human point of view. Is it good for the universe for us to carry our problems with us right now?
I think the reason why Hawking thinks this way is actually very logical. As much as we might believe that we're absolutely above nature, we are not. Most biological systems such as bacteria will grow exponentially provided they have their needs met. It's only when they're suffering from massive shortages that they stop growing exponentially. As smart as humans are, this trend doesn't appear to be stopping which means we need more space and places to expand to in order to keep our rich lifestyles.
The irony of it is space is mostly empty space. Too much empty space in fact. I remember someone showing a scale where if the sun was a pea, the solar system would be a football field and the nearest star is an hour's drive away at least! Considering how long it took us to shoot the Horizon's Probe to Pluto, it's an understatement to say things are far apart!
More likely he'll die from laughing after reading about something fatally stupid that you did.
As a biologist, Hawkins may be close in his prediction of 100 years. pH in the ocean is falling so fast that 300 years is an outer limit to human survival (people seem to forget that about 50% of all protein consumed comes from the sea). However, getting off Earth because we will have to will be the easy part. Getting to Mars will be no panacea. Its cold there. Make sure you take your jacket.
If you think we're out of space you should take a plane ride sometime. Get a window seat.
He can send us a postcard to let us know how much better it is there.
This makes absolutely no logical sense. Maybe some 4chan jokester has hacked into Hawking's "voice" computer and is trolling us all.
So whenever Hawking tries to correct the outrageous statement by entering something else into his computer, the hacker changes it to something like: "I need an enema NOW!"
Now, i'm thinking from Earth to Blackhole. ...)
Don't pollute Earth, Mars, Moon, etc.
In the outer space race, they will have pirates like America's and Pacific's.
There is not another plan B of Noah's ark from flood.
There are not dinosaurs on another planets, so that there is not oil for extraction.
In Earth, there is much water. In planet B, no water. So don't pollute Earth again.
Don't nuke more! (Nevada, Chernobyl, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Fukushima,
Just like a married couple who think that going on a vacation is going to solve their problems... Or having a kid will solve their problems...
Doesn't work.
Or was he pissed off that transsexuals got their own bathroom at Cambridge before they put in a handicapped one?
Hawking sayeth, "We are running out of space and the only places to go to are other worlds."
Obviously Hawking has never been to Wyoming.
When the intelligence is a computer program.
Interesting that nobody on this thread, nor Hawkins, realizes that the age of man is almost over. Maybe 100 years, maybe 200 years, but over.
Why would intelligent computers want to keep parasitic humans around? Computers need humans today to build and program them, just like an Apple tree needs humans. But once the computer can do that for itself, the humans are expensive appendages.
http://www.computersthink.com/
I am ready to leave Earf. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
At this rate, by November 2017 we'll only have 10 years left.
Just making a blanket assertion that humanity needs to get off this rock to survive is pointless unless one actually has a plan that considers all the logistical hurdles of limitations on technology, reasonable expectations on the limitations of human labor, funding, etc, and still be able to demonstrate that it is realistically achievable. Has Hawking provided such a detailed plan, and been able to show that it would actually work in the real world? I doubt it..... just like every other crackpot who says the same thing.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I believe within that 100 years, if we don't nuke ourselves, we will have the capability to digitize our brains and become immortal pieces of code. At that point I think it's likely flesh and blood human populations will shrink considerably. And even if it doesn't those individuals who have chosen to be digitized can now leave this planet and explore the universe without the need for all that stuff required to support fleshy life.
If that does occur then humanity will live forever - just not in its current form.
Some humans need to leave Earth for the rest of us to survive.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The odds of an event wiping out the entire population on this planet in a thousand years is not that small that you'd want to take the risk if you can help it. Would be nice if you could restore from a copy.
I don't like the idea of a large underground colony for survival of a really big asteroid impact. Big asteroid means big earthquakes and unpredictable lava flows. Collapse of underground structures is a real risk. You'd want multiple structures just to improve the odd of not being at ground zero.
Nothing survives any collision that's a significant fraction of the collision that created the moon. Maybe not even a moon colony.
Mars is a better bet, but much more difficult and expensive.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Please--just look at any SciFi from decades ago and tell me if the future turned out as they "predicted." (Heinlein anyone?) It's become a joke at this point to bring up "in the future..." memes. Retro SciFi -is- entertaining, but only for getting to see the future as it was imagined by people of that era. SciFi authors tell stories, not the future.
Go back to smoking rope or whatever gives you colorful dreams. You are full of shit.
I rather like Dr. Tyson's answer on this topic: "the effort required to establish a self sustaining colony of humans on another world far exceeds any effort that would be required to fix this one."
"...100 years left..." I am convinced that Stephen Hawking may be suffering from the lack of Oxygen and has gone loopy on us. However I do agree that Mankind must leave earth in order to survive.
I would say that the moon, rather than Mars, for now, is where we should really focus. The moo is in our own "back yard", its cheaper and safer as well. We can learn things that might otherwise be too late to learn on the way to mars. Plus a moon base/colony would make an excellent base from which to launch interplanetary craft.
But Mars has the public and political clout that the moon does not.
Ultimately Mars colonies are a good thing however. And hopefully during out planet hopping years we might figure how to do FTL, Warp or Worm hole, folded space or some such travel that will allow us to travel to the stars.
We have a few deadlines, a hard deadline, a moving deadline and a random deadline.
The hard deadline; in ~5 billion years or so the sun will go red dwarf, we probably need to be out of the solar system by then. Unless you'd like to lather up in a nice BBQ sauce.
The moving deadline, this will happen and will become more predictable as we get better at recognizing that our actions are effecting how long we are going to be around. This dead line will come much sooner than the hard deadline, this deadline will be driven by human events, as we poison the earth, wage war and generally self destruct.
The random deadline, which is probably not so much a dead line as it is a random occurrence, these include things like asteroids, alien invasion and such.
If mankind wish to survive we must leave earth, the sooner the sooner we become more resilient to tragedy.
The obvious solution is for humans to control their sex drive and stop making so many babies!
Humanity is just too stupid to control themselves, and having no more natural predators capable of limiting humanity, they are heading towards extinction by environmental destruction and starvation. If I were the planet, I'd say good riddance.
Does this solution quest take into effect the other than durr trump effect. Whereby we the people put our foot down and defeat idiocy by altering the low IQ neauveau riches and change the paradigm to renew the face of the earth. Logic says that only the rich and their kids will go forth. Guess what they do not even know how to dig a hole pitch a tent or bang nail and ego wise their failure is a foregon conclusion... Better that we who can get the job done take over planet management and go inside the planet while fixing its surface and using the space ships to replenish the face of the earth with depleting resources. Steve like you, I am bright too but I took a course in all things practical and survible before becoming disabled and then as you becoming enabled.
Space travel is a silly, immature waste of money better spent on social programs.
Matches my numbers. :D
"There are only two types of men in this world: those who lead and those who are lead."
Nobody knows how long humanity has on this rock. 5 years, 5 million years, it's anybody's guess. In a hundred years, it may well be that we have jacked our climate and environment up horribly. But I'd be willing to be that at least a few hundred million humans will exist. More likely it will be 30 billion. Go speculate about parallel universes instead. Much more interesting stuff.
Moderate? Is that what we are calling mentally handicapped fascists nowadays? So was Hitler just a tad bit to the right?
Quite trying to rewrite history. Read some more about Hitler. Here's a quote.
Idiots
Try to guess the idiot again. You'll get it right eventually.
Let's leave, and go screw up some more planets.
Neo-Malthusian. Always wrong.
Neo-Malthusian. Always wrong. Space is great. Love it. Reason to explore is silly.
First thing I think of when people say we need to colonize other worlds in other star systems is how Europeans came over to the Americas and pushed the native peoples aside or worse yet subjugated them. Have we sufficiently learned our lessons in that regard? I'm not sure we have learned our lessons. Human nature hasn't progressed much further than the state it was in the fifteenth century...