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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 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.
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
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
Stephen Hawking, the ultimate prepper.
So, you're saying Hillary would be better for the planet?
Here's my thesis, if you believe that one person has THAT much power, then we are already slaves to the power class (and either don't know it, or don't want to admit it). And being slaves to the power class, we are already doomed to whatever whim they might have.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
The odds are pretty good that you'll be dead long before we reach that point.
Log in or piss off.
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.
We're not really going to find any place significantly better than a few of locations in the Solar System. Giving a planet a breathable atmosphere and letting that atmosphere stay will upset its heat budget so much the current values hardly matter. Not in comparison in what we can do by making that atmosphere more opaque or more greenhousey.
And we don't need FTL: if you want to get there in the flesh, I guess it's 50-100 years before we get a breakthrough that defeats aging. We'll then see a lot of health conditions that don't matter today but are fatal by the age of 200. Once we figure those out, there'll be another iteration at 1000 or so.
But then, hard AI can also be expected within those 50-100 years. That's a form of earthlings who don't suffer from biological limitations and can be beamed as a stream of bits as soon as you get a suitable receiver to the destination.
So while engineering issues on the way will be quite interesting, no fundamental research is needed to colonize the galaxy. Then we'll proceed to the Local Group, then shake our fists at the redshifted ghosts of galaxies that are not gravitationally bound to us.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
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?
Option 3: Forget the planets. Work on self-sustaining space stations. Start by working out how to make an arctic colony self sustaining.
SO all we need is give a planet an atmosphere, defeat aging and develop hard AI. Meanwhile, on planet Earth, we have global warming, we can barely develop software that is reliable and haven't cured the common cold. But yeah, I'm sure some breakthrough is coming real soon now!
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 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."
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
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?
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?
Thoughtful questions. I think it's probably driven by two things. One, basic survival instinct. Even if it wouldn't affect us personally, it would make sense from an evolutionary point of view for us to have a drive to not just preserve ourselves, but the species as a whole.
Second, I think behind it there's idea driven by hope. That the human species is capable of great deal. That we can be much more than we are now. That we can become something that can do good for ourselves, other life forms, and the places we inhabit.
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.
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.