Stephen Hawking Warns Against Confining Ourselves To Earth 414
alancronin writes with this excerpt from CNet:
"Stephen Hawking, one of the world's greatest physicists and cosmologists, is once again warning his fellow humans that our extinction is on the horizon unless we figure out a way to live in space. Not known for conspiracy theories, Hawking's rationale is that the Earth is far too delicate a planet to continue to withstand the barrage of human battering. 'We must continue to go into space for humanity,' Hawking said today, according to the Los Angeles Times. 'We won't survive another 1,000 years without escaping our fragile planet.'"
Earth isn't delicate, (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans are. Earth will continue even in an environment not hospitable to us, and life too will probably go on.
Re: Earth isn't delicate, (Score:5, Insightful)
Earth, as a system for sustaining human life, most certainly is delicate. Which would be what Stephen Hawking is talking about, and what you should be concerned about. Whether or not there are rotifers once we've managed to murder ourselves is something of an academic question.
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
The sad part is that those who decide where our resources go can't see further than 10 years. (and being optimistic, here)
If we can't manage a planets resources... (Score:3, Insightful)
...then we are basically a cosmic cancer.
Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
The sad part is where our resources have gone every time in the last century that somebody decided they had 'figured it out' and knew how to direct everyone else's resources.
Just as it is dubious to claim that mankind is all-powerful enough to completely destroy the earth, it's dubious to act like any human agency is capable of directing the 'whole show' to fix things.
Hundreds of millions of people died in the 20th century because of zealous 'leaders' who had the plan all figured out and achieved enough power to 'implement' their plans.
Re: Earth isn't delicate, (Score:5, Insightful)
So let's just become a horde of locusts jumping from planet to planet consuming their resources and polluting them into lifeless rocks until a coalition of alien species has to band together to eliminate the threat humanity represents to the galaxy.
Or, learn how to survive on this planet before going out and colonizing another one.
Re:If we can't manage a planets resources... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fragile. (Score:2, Insightful)
The planet is not fragile.
- The planet is fine - the people are fucked.
What a load of crap, coming from a idol.
Obligitory XKCD (Score:4, Insightful)
http://what-if.xkcd.com/7/ [xkcd.com]
Basically, this advice either boils down to "get out if/while you can", or else we're going to have to take some amazing steps to even get a small portion of the population out of the gravity well.
Which is actually good advice from one perspective - it's a very good negotiating approach.
We know that all paths we see before us seem to lead to epic population tragedies.
The cost of each of them is almost unlimited, in terms of taking away a meaningful future for humanity.
The private sector very strongly resists any attempt to do basic non-commercial research that can lead to a solution to any of these tragedies (and in fact is at least the indirect cause of many of them).
The reasonable answer, without requesting it, would seem to be an increase in funding by many of the nations of the earth for basic research. An increase in space exploration by China, for instance, would lead to a new space race, meaning more research and education.
More research and education will lead to progress towards solving basic problems, and possible escape from earth.
But for now in the US, conservatives think it will lead to more liberals, so it will be opposed strongly until they fear China enough to allow some progress.
Ryan Fenton
Re:CORRECTION (Score:5, Insightful)
It's extremely small minded/short sighted of the worlds most famous physicist, to assume the current system will keep chugging along, with business as usual, for a THOUSAND more years. He should do a little historical research...
You're right. Given the historical precedent, I'd say mankind will probably find faster, more efficient ways to deplete the planet of its resources in well under a thousand years.
Re: Earth isn't delicate, (Score:3, Insightful)
Or we can just send Hawking and be done with his babble if he wants to go so bad. You got it right though, Human beings are just a Virus, moving into areas just to consume it's resources, only to move on to another after we've laid barren the lands. Guy down below is right also, at the rate we are going, I doubt we'll survive another 100 years without change.
The problem is, we can't change because all we care about is money. The day we stop caring about money and start working to better Humanity and our tiny place in this Universe, that's the day I'll start having faith in Humans. At this point, looking at TV and all the topics on the Internet, I can't say that we are even worth saving. It wouldn't bother me at all if I got word that our end was imminent, no disrespect to any of you, we're just not doing enough to matter.
He's right in one respect (Score:3, Insightful)
Population.
To continue at the way we intelligent monkeys are going, the 'earth' will soon give up.
Lets take a quick look at how quick this could happen:
In the UK there about 60,000,000 people. Lets suppose only half of that number eat eggs. Lets suppose that only half of that number have an egg (or a product that contains eggs) a day.
That is STILL 15,000,000 eggs a day that need to be produced in the UK alone ~ let alone the rest of the World.
Now consider other things in a similar vain: heat(power/fuel et al), water, rice, wheat, potatoes etc.
It soon gets pretty scary thinking what can happen if/(when) the infrastructure breaks down.
The only way to get on is to EXPAND into other places ~ but there isn't any left here on Earth now.
Re:If we can't manage a planets resources... (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, we can continue to have century after century of bad ideas on how to deal with human population on Earth - things like divine providence, eugenics, dictatorship of the proletariat, urban planned development, arcologies, etc. In space settlements, you have to get most of that right or you die.
So what is better, a comfortable place where we can continue to goof around for many lifetimes to come (that is the true "heavy lid" of which you speak), or a tough environment that forces us to be better? To actually solve the problems that you apparently care about?
Re: Earth isn't delicate, (Score:5, Insightful)
What misanthropic crap. We can survive on this planet just fine, despite this planet's repeated, persistent, and very nearly successful efforts to wipe us out many times throughout history. The realisation of what we were doing to the biosphere has been slow in coming but I'm greatly encouraged by recent developments. Mother nature has done far worse before we humans ever made an appearance, and in case you've forgotten, the fate of the planet and all its glorious diversity WITHOUT humanity is to become cold stellar dust.
We are also the first and perhaps only living beings to have adapted sufficiently to the environment to be able to go into space, and like it or not that makes us special. We do need to take advantage of that.
Re:Barmy littlle twat, this Hawking fellow. (Score:2, Insightful)
Seems to think we need to change EVERYTHING but our selves.
"Here, we've been first-rate buggers and pissed all over this trash heap.Let's move n to our next noble and inspiring endeavour - locating the next places where we can foul our own nest."
Why doesn't he get out and run around a little more often? Fresh air and sunshine! It'd clear the cobwebs in that addled brain of his.
Perhaps it is because one of the most intelligent people to ever live among is isn't anywhere near as ignorant as you are in thinking that 7 billion people will EVER change their ways enough to survive here.
We won't.
Speaking of fresh air and sunshine, feel free to remove your head from your ass and get some yourself.
Why do we take these statements seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
One thousand years? Seriously? If we think that the planet we currently inhabit is going to become more hostile for human habitation than any other place in the solar system in the next thousand years, what sorts of scenarios are we talking about? Even if we got hit by another major comet, this planet ould STILL be tremendously more habitable for humans than anywhere else. What sort of extraterrestrial habitation do we envision that wouldn't be orders of magnitude less expensive without leaving the gravity well?
By far, the greatest threats to humanity are certain non-malevolent activities of other humans. Might some extraterrestrial science help in solving some of the problems created by these activities? Sure. However, we need to keep in mind that sending some 'seed' of humanity to space isn't going to improve the lives of other humans here on Earth. Thinking that everyone is better off because of the 'success' of a few is the very sort of thinking which makes it more difficult to solve the social problems which are causing us to think this way to begin with. So, as much as I respect cosmologists and other space scientists, they need to set their egos aside before making policy recommendations to improve the lot of humanity.
Re:Paradox (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is full of misanthropes (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow, the pervasive misanthropic comments are remarkable. Why do you all hate humans so much? We are a virus? By that definition, what living thing isn't? All life expands to the limits of the environment to support, we just happen to be very good and modifying our environment.
I'm a species-ist. I value humans more than other species...because I am one. Is that wrong? What rational logic is there for any other way of thinking?
Hawking's comment was a single line in the interview, and regardless of your political tilt, it is fundamentally true. The only thing you can reasonably argue about is the specific time frame. The earth will become uninhabitable. It might be in 50 years when hit by a asteroid, or in a couple billion years when the sun expands, but it is inevitable. Ultimately to beat extinction we need to leave the planet and eventually the solar system.
So do we wait until extinction is imminent? Do we wait to solve every problem here on earth before we start (as if that will ever happen)?
Or do we start now, with the understanding that it will take hundreds of years to accomplish? I vote start now.
Re:CORRECTION (Score:2, Insightful)
nonsense, human population growth will peak in 60 years. almost all the resources we "used" are still around, and moreover the crust of the earth is miles thick (we won't run out of anything, not helium, not rare earths, not minerals). there's an xkcd cartoon for your type, you must think pregnant women will be one mile in diameter after two years.....
Re:Not too bright (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if there's a literal Heavenly Paradise a mere 1000 light years away, that's as unfriendly to humans as the surface of Venus.
How, pray tell, is one supposed to make the six quadrillion mile journey to get there?
With the amount of energy you'd need to send just a single schoolbus-sized Space Shuttle that distance fast enough that the astronauts wouldn't be collecting Social Security several hundred millennia before they got there (which actually is physically possible thanks to relativistic time dilation), you could power the most ludicrous imaginable planet-wide environmental cleanup program here on Earth. Hell, with that much energy, you could probably terraform Mars as a side job, turn it into a luscious garden. And that's just a single ship....
Suggesting we colonize the Solar System to protect the species, as Professor Hawking has done, is simply idiotic. But the stars? They're beyond idiocy.
Cheers,
b&
Re:Paradox (Score:5, Insightful)
The Earth is one collision or one solar event away from complete sterilization.
Agreed.
... even without anthropocentric global warming and the like.
ITYM "anthropogenic."
Humans spreading across the stars is our only know chance of intelligent life sustaining an existence.
Once done (my opinion's mostly based on SF reading I've done), what's the point? All those far-flung human colonies are going to immediately differentiate from each other, leading to "us vs. them" on a galactic scale, so what really is the point of this exercise? Preservation of homo sapiens' DNA regardless? What for?
What's the point of the universe if there is nothing to appreciate it?
Now, that's anthropocentric. The Universe managed quite well for aeons before we dropped in and it'll continue to do so long after we're extinct. We're not the raison d'etre (despite many of us being convinced we are).
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
That is the question. Why?
Hawking is a proponent that everything that we know about the universe happened on its own, there is no higher power, no purpose, none of that. The fact that we are here discussing all of this is just because of randomness. As such, what difference does it make if the human race goes on or not? What are we preserving for future generations or even the rest of the universe? Our (the human race) contributions to the universe are no more important than that of an ameoba. We are here because of pure chance and whether we are here a 1000 years from now or not doesn't change anything. It is only our own eqotism that would lead to the conclusion that we must leave the planet because eventually we will become extinct here. Everyone reading this will eventually die, too. That is how the universe works.
Wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
I think he's wrong. While escaping our planet is a great way of increasing our chances of survival as a species in the extremely long run, even if we completely destroy the ecosystem that keeps us alive, planet earth is still a vastly less hostile environment than just about the entire known universe.
Leaving Earth really won't help us at all. Only finding an exact copy Earth will help us. And chances of doing so are pretty much zero. We might find something that provides us with energy, resources and a magnetic field, though, but finding a place were we'd be able to breathe outside, even after terraforming the hell out of it, is an unrealistic goal. And even then, I'd rather be locked up in a biosphere on a dead planet earth than on some foreign world.
And even that would be pretty damn hard; possibly the biggest hurdle to take would be to create a proper artificial self-sustaining isolated ecosystem to keep us alive. I don't think we've managed to do that yet, though ESA, amongst others, is working on that.
Re: Earth isn't delicate, (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, living on Earth under a rain of poison flaming gas and ash is still a heck of a lot easier than living in space (or the Moon or Mars). If you can't survive and thrive in the very worst conditions this planet has to offer, then you won't do better off outside the atmosphere.
Re:Paradox (Score:4, Insightful)
Our population grows at an exponential rate. Strictly speaking, we're not overpopulated now, but in a few generations we will be. We probably won't run out of room before food production can no longer keep up. We may find a more efficient way to produce food that can keep up, but the fact is that this will only slow down the problem. When we do run out of room (or approach that point, anyway), illness will spread quite readily, the end result being plagues, regardless of our collective hygiene. We could solve this by having regularly scheduled mass death events every few hundred years, such as nuclear wars, or maybe we can get playful with it and do some kind of gladiatorial games. Perhaps better yet, is to just get a large portion of our population to colonize new worlds. That's perhaps the only practical solution that doesn't directly involve people dieing.
This solution doesn't address the environment. This is not meant to be a solution for the environment. This is a solution for human kind. There's no reason why we can't continue to develop environmentally friendly technologies while working toward colonizing other worlds. In fact, I'd say the goals are quite compatible, as technologies which require fewer resources will contribute nicely to founding new civilizations.
Re:Barmy littlle twat, this Hawking fellow. (Score:4, Insightful)