Hawking: colonise other worlds or face extinction
Stephen Hawking says if we can survive another 200 years, humans should be safe
PHYSICIST Stephen Hawking, who recently said humans should avoid seeking out aliens because they might colonise our planet if they noticed us, has now warned that mankind must colonise other planets or face extinction.
"I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space," Hawking tells BigThink.com. "It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million.
"There have been a number of times in the past when survival has been a question of touch and go. The Cuban missile crisis in 1963 is one of these. The frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future."
It's not just nuclear oblivion we have to fear though. Thanks to our selfish genes, Hawking appears to believe it is inevitable that we will destroy the earth.
"Our genetic code carries selfish and aggressive instincts that were a survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next 100 years let alone the next thousand or a million." Overpopulation or runaway global warming, for instance.
Even if we can go against our animal instincts and preserve the earth, the sun will have scorched our planet into a dry ball of rock within just 1bn years, according to scientists.
Hawking thinks we should be able to develop interstellar space flight long before then: "I am an optimist," he claims, surprisingly. "If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries our species should be safe as we spread into space."
By which time, of course, humans' rapacious instincts will again become an advantage. In April, Hawking suggested we might want to stop trying to contact extraterrestrials because an advanced race might "perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach".
We didn't realise until now that he was talking about homeless earthlings. ·
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Considering that estimates given by esteemed archaeologists and scientists who have studied the Archimedes Palimpset suggest that had this venerated Greek's workbook not been lost, we, the human race, may well have had a nuclear capability by the time of the Renaissance, then my guess is that we are already living on borrowed time. For those who do not know of it, the Palimpset (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest) contains enough information that logically, if all the theories in it were fully explored and exploited, nuclear capability within about a millennium was a reasonable conclusion. This coincides with a period when the term 'rogue state', as we understand it, could have been applied to almost every leading regime of the day. Imagine Cromwell with The Bomb, or perhaps Cortez trekking through South America with a dozen or so nuclear warheads at his disposal. Yep. If you ask me we have had at least one close shave with globally destructive technology. We may claim to be less reactionary, more temperate in our international behaviour, but two hundred years still seems a heck of a long time to keep the peace and allow us to escape the worst of our capabilities. Perhaps we ought to have applied Stephen Hawking's advice in the last century when we left our little planet for the first time instead of playing out the Soviet/US dance of death that kept us all on the edge of existence for so long.
Ever since Hawking suggested that Earth could turn into Venus if people keep driving SUV's he's lost a lot of credibility in the scientific community. This is just another example.
I think he's more interested in getting headlines that science anymore. It's a shame really.
"he sun will have scorched our planet into a dry ball of rock within just 1bn years" Phew and I was panicking because I thought it was in only Imn years...
Who cares? Why should we worry about imaginary futures? If we did develop inter-stellar flight it seems it must be limited to sending up a few to re-start a new human race. Why should anyone be interested in that? Seems to be arrogance, as if our race is so important it must go on. Rather than waste money on such ideas, I'd rather buy fish and chips.
Yes, lets take the greed cycle into space. Offer rip-off banking services to aliens and when it all goes sideways watch with wonder as a battlefleet swarms above the planet, not delivering an interstellar bailout, but a guarantee that it will never happen again.