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

[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.

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.

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.