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.

Comments

However bad he thinks Earth is

[Anonymous Coward]

Space is way, way worse. Unimaginably worse. Like, instant death worse.

Re:However bad he thinks Earth is

[Tailhook]

We're in space. There is this thin layer of atmosphere confusing you about your location.

Re:However bad he thinks Earth is

[timmee]

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.

Re:However bad he thinks Earth is

[110010001000]

OR you could work to improve things here on Earth, rather than dreaming about leaving it. You can't live anywhere else but Earth anyway.

Re:However bad he thinks Earth is

[Sumus Semper Una]

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.

There is a distinct advantage in attempting to terraform Mars before Earth: if it fails, then we didn't wipe out the human race.

Also, there are livable parts of space that we created that are now orbiting the Earth in ways that were previously utterly devoid of all life. It's not unreasonable to think that we might be able to extend our ability to adapt to even more previously completely inhospitable and deadly environments. That's pretty much been the pattern for humanity for thousands of years.

Re:However bad he thinks Earth is

[swillden]

Yeah, but we're in the only livable part of space that we know of.

You are under the mistaken impression that unaided humans can live on Earth. This is not true. There is nowhere on this planet that I could drop you, sans technology (remember; clothing is technology) or any knowledge of the local environment, and reasonably expect you to still be alive in a few months. The only way humans can survive anywhere on Earth is through the application of specialized knowledge and tools.

There are some regions where the tools and knowledge required are fairly minimal, where temperature swings are mild, food is easy to identify and obtain, and there aren't too many dangerous plants or animals. But much of the human population today lives in regions where the required tooling and knowledge for survival is quite extensive. For example where, I live no human could survive the winter without knowing how to obtain or make heavy protective clothing, a good insulated shelter, some method for generating external heat (e.g. fire), and extensive knowledge on the collection and preservation of food. Other places have steeper survival requirements yet.

I'll readily grant that Mars, for example, requires more technology that any place on Earth where significant populations of people are found. It requires less, though, than is required to live in orbit, and we've had people doing that almost continuously for the last half century or so.

The key thing to note is that all human survival, everywhere, including on Earth, is technology-dependent. Our evolution has lost us the physical characteristics and instinctual knowledge that our distant ancestor species had. We survive by the use of our big brains, but even with them we generally aren't capable of figuring out enough stuff, fast enough, to stay alive. Culturally-received knowledge is indispensable to us. That is true whether the knowledge in question is how to make crude fire-hardened spears or build space ships. It's just a matter of degree.

Given that it's a matter of degree, there is no reason why we cannot survive and thrive just as well on other planets as we do here. Doing so will require creating lots of new knowledge and technology, certainly. That's a good thing. We should do it just for the opportunity to learn. Moving some of our eggs to another basket is another good reason to do it.

Re:However bad he thinks Earth is

[swillden]

OR you could work to improve things here on Earth, rather than dreaming about leaving it.

Or we could do both.

You can't live anywhere else but Earth anyway.

This is both illogical and demonstrably false, since people have been living off of this planet for most of the last half century. All human life is technology-dependent. Many of the places lots of people live are unsurvivable without fairly extensive technology. Living on other planets, or in space, will require more and different technology, but there's nothing inherently impossible about it.

It's so sad....

[Holi]

It's so sad when scientists get old and turn in to crackpots.

Re:It's so sad....

[JudgeFurious]

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.

Re:It's so sad....

[Archangel Michael]

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.

Earth has room for 36 Billion

[UnknownSoldier]

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.

Re:Earth has room for 36 Billion

[gnick]

Granted, there are vast areas of Russia & Africa that are uninhabitable...

Uninhabitable compared to Mars?

Re:Earth has room for 36 Billion

[Sperbels]

Yes. Blanket the Earth in humans! I can't imagine anything awesomer.

Re:Earth has room for 36 Billion

[swillden]

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.

We'll never need to do that. The global birth rate (babies per year) has already peaked and has been declining steadily for a while; it looks like global population will peak at 10B and then start falling. But in any case overpopulation isn't the only issue (and space travel wouldn't be a solution for it if it were the problem). The motivation for getting off of Earth is that having the entire species on one planet means that if something Really Bad happens to this planet, we're gone.

And something Really Bad will happen. Whether it's a chain of supervolcano explosions, a mega meteor, a world war with planet-shattering doomsday weapons or out of control bioweapons, or gray goo, something will happen. Maybe we can figure out how to address each of the existential risks, eventually, but there's no way of knowing if we'll do it soon enough.

To put it in a nutshell: We have no disaster recovery strategy. We need an offsite backup of our species.

Plus, we'll learn one hell of a lot in the process of trying to colonize another planet. It's worth doing just for that reason.

Stephen Hawking is a brilliant... nutter.

[Baron_Yam]

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.

Re:Stephen Hawking is a brilliant... nutter.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Nothing has happened in Earth's history that would make it a worse place for humans than anywhere else in the solar system. For example, whatever did actually kill off the dinosaurs can't be worse than trying to survive on Mars.

As for another solar system? Not likely. I think the probable explanation for the Fermi Paradox is distance, and there is just no way to get around it.

Mixed feelings about this

[Oswald McWeany]

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.

Famous People Syndrome

[moehoward]

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.

Prepper Hawking

[BinBoy]

Stephen Hawking, the ultimate prepper.

Re:After the 2016 election

[Archangel Michael]

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.

Easy to break things, hard to improve

[XXongo]

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.

No argument from the Earth

[s1d3track3D]

I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth - Hawking

I completely agree! - Earth

Well, what's the alternative to NOT going?

[shoor]

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.

Earth is the only game in town for a LONG time.

[sbaker]

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.