Abandon Earth Or Die, Warns Hawking 973
siliconbits writes "According to famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, it's time to free ourselves from Mother Earth. 'I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space,' Hawking tells Big Think. 'It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.'"
Re:I submit this possibility (Score:1, Informative)
Then you get into Intelligent Design. If this were the case we wouldn't be seeing evidence that humans evolved here. Let alone matching the life here so closely.
Well, minus a super genesis machine that sped up evo... wait, nm. Carbon dating. Earth would be colony prime, the home world. Now, past disasters removing signs of past emigration....
We've seen this twice before. (Score:5, Informative)
Back in 2006: Hawking Says Humans Must Go Into Space [slashdot.org]
And again in 2000: Hawking on Earth's Lifespan [slashdot.org]
Oh, look, a content mill getting attention (Score:5, Informative)
No, he doesn't. He said that exact quote two years ago, to CNN [cnn.com]. Of course, it may not necessarily be plagiarism, because he's been saying this for years [slashdot.org], and it isn't like he types off the cuff.
Re:Assumptions (Score:4, Informative)
If we live on multiple planets/moons/space stations, then any one disaster would have to be truly fantastic in scope (enormous gamma ray burst large enough to wipe out a large area of space) to take out all of us at the same time.
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:3, Informative)
Not greed but fear. There are a lot of people who live in the same 25 mile radius all their lives. The idea of moving away from this area and from their friends family and other protective sources makes them scared. Why did Europeans Colonize the United States Was it because they were less greedy then the others... No. There were people who were more Greedy who wanted Gold, or people who were more afraid to live in their homeland then to move.
If I were Greedy enough I would form a group of people who are just as greedy as me to move to Mars and mine for materials. Or go to a place with others of like minded to start a new civilization, free of those ideas I find scary and wrong.
Re:Time schedule? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:3, Informative)
Stating the obvious (Score:3, Informative)
This is stating the obvious. Not exactly sure why this is news.
Re:Time schedule? (Score:3, Informative)
That wouldn't be an accurate statement. They've cataloged about 10% of the local sky.
http://www.space.com/news/earth-asteroid-impact-congress-commision-100719.html [space.com]
We don't know what's out there, and won't catalogue every object for a very long time. There will always be unknown and unmapped objects, at least in the foreseeable future. Even when they do see these objects in advance, the accuracy for impact zones, although improved, still has a rather large variance until a rather short time before they actually hit.
Although you might have a warm fuzzy about such ambiguity, I don't, and I don't imagine many other do either.
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:5, Informative)
Most of those rules were invented AFTER the language was invented, by people with anal tendencies. Such as outlawing the double negative. Prior to ~1700 the double negative was not only an accepted part of language, but often ran into triple or quadruple negatives. The purpose was to add additional emphasis.
The blue book claim "Who refers to people. That and which refer to groups or things," sounds like an invented rule, not a reflection of the actual speakers of the language. i.e Prescriptive rather than descriptive. Real wordsmiths like ee cummins, Shakespeare, and Chaucer didn't give a fuck about rules. They wrote whatever they felt like writing.
- "Ther nas no man no wher so vertuous" (i.e., "There was not no man nowhere so virtuous")
- "He nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde / In all his lyf unto no maner wight." (i.e., "He never yet no vileness not said / In all his life to no sort of man.")
Re:Die. (Score:4, Informative)
Death is biological problem, but there are signs in organisms that it is a problem that can be solved.
What about the rest of us? (Score:4, Informative)
Much better to spend the money on fixing the problems here (but that might cost corporations profits so not likely to happen).
Re:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:2, Informative)
For all those quibbling about lift capacity ... (Score:3, Informative)
I am sure it can be made even more risk free in terms of radiation spread ( which is already very small), and it absolutely can get us to mars or launch heavy stuff for constructing O'Neil cylinders [wikipedia.org]. And with a large enough space vehicle/station, asteriod belt can practically provide all the material we need for making more orion crafts.
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:4, Informative)
In fairness, quite a bit has expanded in our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of life. DNA was first described in 1953... 57 years later, we are mapping genomes (with some organisms fully mapped), manipulating, replacing and removing genes, and discovering the genetic basis for numerous diseases and other traits at an ever-increasing pace.
Just because it ain't silicon & metal doesn't mean it ain't technology.
Re:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:3, Informative)
Even better, build a station on Mars, then personally vet every person you let up there and once you have all the best people, nuke the Earth from orbit - that way you accomplish both goals.
Don't be silly. Mars is no place to raise a kid, and there's no one there to raise 'em if you did...
Besides, you can't blow up the Earth without an Illudium PU-32 Explosive Space Modulator.
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:3, Informative)
Tell that to the people of Ketchikan, Alaska: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge [wikipedia.org]
The majority of our federal budget is tied up in providing social programs and infrastructure, not in "war"
The federal budget would like to disagree with that statement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fy2010_spending_by_category.jpg [wikipedia.org]
The pentagon's budget is the #2 slice of the pie. 3/4 of a trillion dollars of that budget is spent overseas.
You're right about social programs, they make up about 65% of the budget* (which is absolutely fucking insane), and with defense spending added in you get about 85% of the budget, but transportation and the department of the interior only make up about 3% of the budget.
We are not spending much federally on infrastructure at all.
* It kinda depends on how you slice it. The department of veteran's affairs is welfare tied to defense that accounts for 16% of the budget - nearly as much as the defense budget itself (18+%). I included it in the welfare programs, though it wouldn't be entirely improper to include it in defense spending (it is taking care of the soldiers, after all). That would make the defense/welfare split about 50/50, with social programs being slightly higher. In either case, we spend very little on infrastructure, relative to the rest of the budget.
Re:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:2, Informative)
You obviously haven't read much history. History mostly tells us that no-one will ever learn from someone else's mistakes. Which, I guess is probably why history keeps repeating itself.
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:1, Informative)
Hilarious. Ten years ago, bicycles were made almost entirely of carbon fiber, including the wheels. You can't find these wheels anymore, because they break. Bike shops are once again filled with traditional metal rim wheels with metal spokes, with a paper-thin carbon fiber "trim" to give a profile to the wheel. This trim could be made of paper for all it does.
We can't even build a carbon-fiber part to sustain the tremendous stresses of cycling, but you think we can build a space elevator?
Get some help, preferably in the form of some reality-based engineering classes. Oh, and also prepare for living the rest of your life right here.
Re:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, the administration is focusing more on robotic exploration and cancelled Ares -- but Ares was a huge boondoggle that had already been surpassed by a private company using a fraction as much money. Congress is currently trying to keep the pork flowing by keeping the development of various Ares components going even though the rocket that they're to be used for has been cancelled.
A manned mission to Mars is meaningless apart from being a feel-good thing that future alien species could read about in the ruins of our civilization. A manned colony on Mars is not. A manned colony means becoming a two-planet species (and eventually, a near-infinite planet species). The distinction is that a colony is either self-sustaining or is capable of becoming self-sustaining if an emergency makes it necessary. A colony doesn't expand itself with inflatable habitats imported from Earth covered in martian regolith; it makes the habitats, too. A colony doesn't build with regolith bricks cemented with plastics from Earth; it makes the plastics. A colony doesn't fill Earth-made rockets with methane made on Mars; it makes the rockets. It's not enough just to use local resources; you have to be capable of producing every last part for every last system locally -- and all of the parts and raw materials needed to make such a production line, and all of the parts and raw materials needed to make *that*, and so forth.
Various presidents have committed to putting a person on Mars. None have committed to building a *colony* on Mars. And that's what really matters. We shouldn't be blowing our budget on feel-good joyrides. We should be spending it on lowering launch costs and on the obscenely massive amount of engineering needed to make a true Mars colony feasable. This will take a long, long time, and huge amounts of money. But if we never start, we'll never reach the finish line.
I did a series on the subject over here, called "The Colonization Of Other Worlds":
Part 1: Beyond the Space Elevator: A Glimpse of Alternative Methods for Space Launch [dailykos.com]
Part 2: Where Will We Begin? [dailykos.com]
Part 3: Who Will Bring It About And Why? [dailykos.com]
Part 4: The Industry Dilemma [dailykos.com]
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:1, Informative)
Who knows where we'll be in another 70 million years.
The same place the dinosaurs are now?
Re:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:2, Informative)
Those are the facts, as far as I know them. Consider the situation in Afghanistan though. More than a half-million casualties, over a decade of war. The country was blown to pieces. Then the Soviets back out, and so does the US, without much, if any, further aid to get Afghanistan back on its feet. Considering that the US was giving weapons, but no people, to the effort, one could feel like one just got used as the personal army of a third party pretty easily.
The wikipedia section (mind, I didn't edit it, promise) you point to goes on to say that after the Soviets (and the US) left in 1989, Afghanistan experienced a leadership vacuum that led to civil war and the eventual rise of the Taliban. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe they're purported to have something to do with the attacks on the WTC.
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:1, Informative)
Here is the actual fiscal budget.
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy11/pdf/budget.pdf
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy11/sheets/hist01z1.xls
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy11/sheets/hist03z1.xls
As you can see, you are wrong. National efens and benefits consume a large portion of the pie. In fact national defense is listed as the first line item and bolded. There are other significant entitlements but the don't compare to national defense.
Re:Fulfill our destiny! (Score:3, Informative)
Many asked you the same question, you didn't respond.
Why do we care about death of life on this planet or in the Universe at all, once you are dead, what is it to you if the entire Universe ends as well? You did not answer that.