Stephen Hawking warned that space colonies are humanity's last great hope for survival in the long-term. He believes that space exploration is crucial, and it is time to go.
The scary thing is that the astrophysicist thinks that the world will face a disaster within the next 100 years, which is very soon. Stephen Hawking believes that space exploration is the world's most pressing concern. Other leaders certainly don't seem to agree. The U.S. even drastically cut its plans for space exploration over the past couple of years.
According to Hawking, "We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space."
Do you think this is feasible, or likely for the health and good of the human race? Exploring with robots isn't good enough either. The great thinker, who suffers from Lou Gehrig's disease, believes that space probes must be done with human beings on board to accelerate the timeline for human colonization of space.
Would you volunteer for a personed mission to Mars or somewhere else in space? Could you imagine yourself, your children or your grandchildren living off of Earth? It is starting to seem more and more likely as the world's population grows.
Like this article? See more by Kate James at Gather.com
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Comments: 11
Perhaps if Dr. Hawking put his faith in God--with respect to the future of Mankind--he might be better off.
Brett...There are many kinds of "space colonization"...The technology is well within our grasp if we would stop pissing money away propagating an under-class of dung machines who's only function in life is to vote democrat...
Otherwise, what you say, here, merely sounds like it comes from an optimistic imagination, without scientific evidence.
NASA has an entire section devoted to the varius methods of colonization of space...very under funded, of course, because it is more politically expedient to wage war, feed the great sea of lazy, stupid, hapless morons that the welfare state has created and piss away R&D funds on Gas-o-hol...
Think about it...the only real problems are money and engineering...suppose that we had to get off the earth in, say, 20 years and the world stopped all of the above stupidity and devoted its resourses to space colonization...
So, with that introduction, I will simply say that Hawking is dead wrong. Predictions of his type have been made constantly for the past 50 years, and none have come true. It has become very fashionable again to predict imminent doom, in the face of greatly improving conditions. I wish Hawking (who is not at all speaking as a scientist here, since he is basing his remarks on very bad data) would tear himself away from the web sites, and look at the facts. Not only is the Earth in great shape, but the rest of space is way out of range for any sort of realistic human habitation. Sorry to see this, but I guess its the next step after his recent catastrophic book about... well, nothing.
Not to get into a great debate with you--your knowledge, in this area, very likely trumps my own--but what scientific evidence is out there to suggest that our planet is in great shape?
Can I go to respected information outlets on par with NSF, NOAA, National Geographic, Smithsonian or, for example, Woods Hole--in order to review the indicators for 'greatly improving conditions'?
Are many of us being influenced by the 'politics of Doom'?
Yup, there are lots of good web sites, including the World Watch Institute, the EPA, that show trends for everything from pollution to human nutrition to salvation of endangered species. I used all of this information (which is very hard to extract, because it goes so strongly against the grain) for my book, published 4 years ago, but still true.
You could look for "Where We Stand: A Surprising Look at the Real State of Our Planet (AMACOM Press 2007) I think its still being sold on Amazon. Its aslo available for Kindle, and there are cheap used copies. (I dont make any money on it, so I am not pushing it, just letting you know that all the data in the book are well referenced.).
It didnt sell very well, because absolutely nobody wants to believe that we have been fed a big lie for the past 5 decades. Namely that we are on the edge of doom. Meanwhile the air and water have gotten cleaner, hunger has decreased, life span is increasing in a linear fashion, and the loss of habitats and species are slowing while population growth rate is decreasing. Yes, all of this is true. But nobody wants to admit it.
So, I gave up. Now I am just a lone crackpot, wandering around the internet, muttering my speech of anti doom, while everyone shakes their heads in disbelief and continues to preach the world wide mantra of imminent doom. BTW, ever wonder what imminent means, since this song has been playing since 1970, and um, we are still here?
And...Hawking isn't even a first class physicist...IMHO...he is just cashing in...