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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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly! I realize that he was (maybe still is on some level) absolutely brilliant but in his own way he's doing the same thing my Uncle Rudy is doing at that age. Slowly losing all sense of reality and proportion. Unfortunate but mostly inevitable.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
He's trying to establish his immortality. Science is his god, and his faith is in himself. IF we manage to get off planet, he'll be hailed as a great visionary who made it all possible (not really), while if we fail, and mankind destroys itself, there will be nobody to remember who Stephen Hawking was, and his whole life would be in vain.
Our Mortality makes us do irrational things, because as inevitable as it is, it is something we will never get comfortable with.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Yeah, but we're in the only livable part of space that we know of. Every other part that we can get to, and all of the parts that we can't get to but observe, hold nothing but beautiful views and death. If we can't survive on the only livable spot in the universe that we know of (and only making it worse over time) what chance do we out there? Forget about terraforming Mars, we'll need to be terraforming Earth before too long.
Well, I'll be long dead in 100 years, so, not terribly worried about it.
I"m having fun, and enjoying my life and lifestyle on earth right now thank you.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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)
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
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/