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.'"
Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:3, Insightful)
Human mentality...
Re:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:5, Funny)
You're asking a user named "TrisexualPuppy"
One word - Spanktervision
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Interplanetary service fees.
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Internet: 15 USD a month (yeah, they upped the price, used to be 10 USD a month). 100 Mbit metropolitan speed. 20 Mbit external speed. 41 WebTV channels for free. Also free phone landline (and free unlimited calls within the same network). Granted, there's no extras in it, but I don't watch TV, I don't need any of those dumb TV channels.
Furthermore, I need no extra hardware, just plug the LAN cable in to my router and that's it.
Now regarding moving to other planets,
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Re:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:4, Insightful)
Human mentality, indeed. This is why modern democracy doesn't work well. It's infinitely preferably to many of the alternatives, but it is still the belief that selfish, short-sighted and just plain stupid people are fit to rule a country.
Since power corrupts so completely, it's likely impossible to change this -- either you end up with idiot dictators, or idiot voters. Who both will ensure that safeguards against that situation becomes impossible to implement, for their own selfish reasons.
What's possible, though, is to exert influence and make plans that bet on not getting government support.
While establishing an Asimovian Foundation is utopian, it's not infeasible that private interests may be able to get off the ground, despite selfish and spiteful attempts at sabotage from the couch potatoes and ruling politicos (but I repeat myself), and with enough attempts, even survive.
But leave important decisions to voters, and you ensure that nothing ever gets done.
Re:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think human longevity advances are the only way to "cure" this. Make it so that human lifetimes can span more than a few decades, and people will suddenly be *way* more interested in not pissing in our own nest. Even if only the very rich can afford it, they're the ones with all the power, so it would still help.
Re:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:4, Insightful)
No good, my friend. You are thinking, which is more than most people do. But, people will STILL think in the short term. Precious few people think 4 years into the future today. Double their lifespans, you MIGHT get them to think four years ahead. MAYBE. Most likely, they won't be able to think any further into the future than "Wonder if I can get laid tonight?" It's human nature. Sucks, don't it?
Re:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would I want to have my tax dollars on this.
Better spending tax dollars on saving the human race than blowing it up in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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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:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about we solve our problems here on Earth before attempting to export them into insanely expensive and hostile environments?
Because there will always be another problem to solve. Waiting until everything is perfect here on Earth is equivalent to saying that we're never going to try.
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Re:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because your great-great-great-great-google-grandpa was really into NASCAR and porn and couldn't spare the dough to fund our species-saving research.
Oh - I see. I'm glad he had his priorities straight. The entire sum of human existence shouldn't be forgotten for nothing, you know?
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The entire sum of human existence shouldn't be forgotten for nothing, you know?
Yes. Why not? we are so unimportant anyway. Supposing that a great comet destroys the human race in the next 1000 years, humans would exist for, let's say, 100,000 years, which is 1/130,000 of the universe's age (13 billion years).
Re:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:5, Insightful)
The meaning of life is to plant trees that we will not live to sit in the shade of.
Thousands of generations of people who are no longer living gave you everything you have now. Will you give something to the future, or will you just be another leech?
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Will you give something to the future, or will you just be another leech?
Does one hell of a mess to clean up and having them pick up the tab count?
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What you just said sounds really nice--only, that argument doesn't actually work in RL (real life).
GP was playing devil's advocate, but it's the reality of the situation. People can indeed be fundamentally divided using the two orthogonal dimensions: the have and have nots; and the want and want nots. And the majority of the people fall somewhere in the the have not and want quadrant.
Which means that the majority's not really thinking of their successive generations (especially those who do not have direct
Re:Yeah, but where does this get ME? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, rule of thumb for a standard 30-yr fixed rate mortgage is that 28% of your gross pay is the maximum mortgage payment you should be making. That's a bit more than 25% of your take-home.
And what if you passionately and eloquently communicate your views, and your representative pockets another $5k donation from Comcast and ignores you? Or you passionately and eloquently communicate your views, and your representative says, "I disagree with you, and 52% of my constituents disagree with you, and I want to get re-elected... so you lose kid, sorry?" Have we lost our right to complain then, too? And why do I get the sneaking sense that to you, "disagreeing with what I think" == "doing it Glenn Beck style and looking like a tard?"
Shit. Does this mean that the world isn't as simply black and white as you'd like to imagine it?
This is pretty much what I've been telling people (Score:5, Interesting)
We either leave this planet together, or we die on it divided. I think the greed inherent in human nature will prevent us from ever getting organized enough to leave this planet for another.
This actually kinda reminds me of a conversation we had last night....we watched the original V miniseries, and were talking about how stupid it was that they allowed the aliens into factories around the world simultaneously instead of just a factory or two at a time...but then, if they did that, countries would argue over who got to host them first. ::shakes head:: stupid human beings...
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:5, Insightful)
Earth's "best if lived on by" date is far enough away that I'm not terribly worried about it, but even aside from that, there are always asteroids out there that could blindside us. And I'm sure that's the sort of thing Hawking is referring to anyways.
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>This planet has an expiration date.
Yeah 5 billion years into the future. During the previous 1 billion we evolved from amino acids to cells to amphibians, lizards, and intelligent mammals. So by the time the earth expires, we'll likely have moved into Q-like beings. Even if we stayed on this planet, its eventual scalding by the nearby star wouldn't affect us.
As for asteroids that caused massive extinctions, the previous one was 70 million years ago. And 250 million years ago. During that timespan we evolved from small rodent-like lizards into modern mammals. Who knows where we'll be in another 70 million years.
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:5, Interesting)
Even if all of humanity was unified, we'd still die eventually if we stayed here. This planet has an expiration date. It's nice to pretend that if we were all hippies and lived like cavemen, that it'd last forever, but that isn't the case.
Unfortunately, everything you say is also true of the Universe as a whole. Eventually, heat death will mean that thought itself will become physically impossible. Is it possible to escape into other universes? Maybe. Does that mean we should forget about space travel and put all our efforts into figuring that out?
But wait a minute. Supposing we had descendants traveling around space a billion years from now. It is far from certain they would be recognizably human. They might not even be mammals.
So should we give up on the future?
I think the notion that we should explore space in preparation for abandoning the Earth is misguided. I have no doubt that people sincerely believe this, and I even recognize that interesting philosophical arguments can be made for it. For example, the idea we might have to move off the Earth prematurely because we'd fouled our own nest raises the question why we might survive in hostile space when we could not survive on the benign Earth. The answer might be that humans are not very good at dealing rationally with plenty, but we have our minds wonderfully concentrated by imminent death.
Even so, I think that it is somewhat unnatural to be all that concerned with the fate of the human race in the distant future. How many of us let our day to day actions be guided by a concern for humanity ten generations in the future, much less ten thousand?
The real reason to explore space is not for the extension of the human species' longevity, but for the maximization of human experience. Imagine human experience as a rectangle which sits on a two dimension axis. The X-axis is time, and the "escape Earth" position seeks to maximize the area of the rectangle by stretching it as wide as possible. I have no fundamental objection to this, but it should not be undertaken at the expense of the Y axis, which is the personal growth of individuals in any single generation. At some point humanity will be facing the end of its term and can rationally seek the extension of the species' lifespan, but that is not anytime soon. When that point comes, we will be best served by developing a culture which is creative, informed, and adventurous.
That's the real reason we want to explore space. Space exploration is an adventure both metaphorically and manifestly so. That it is a multi-generational adventure only makes it better. When we have lost the zest for exploration, we have lost the capacity to grow, and are running on the momentum of prior generations.
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As far as "only so many jobs" goes, theres always government... [wikipedia.org]
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:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:5, Insightful)
Well and good, but where do we get the energy to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable life-supporting ecosystem elsewhere? Hawking is a physicist, so I'm a bit surprised to hear him proposing something like this without explaining where the lift capacity is going to come from. There's a reason why Pan Am never began the orbital shuttle service depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey (aside, of course, from the fact that they went out of business).
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, there's the ethical question then of whether or not this is justified when there could be other forms of life already there on the planets we've targeted with our life-form "bombs".
And besides, wouldn't you feel foolish if all we did was manage to evolve cockroaches and influenza everywhere? They suck enough here on Earth, let's not help them colonize other planets!
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:4, Interesting)
Use electricity to create liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. No, really, it's just that simple.
Well, now you're moving the goalposts - first you ask about energy and then you blame it on lift capacity, which isn't the same thing at all. But the answer is equally simple - if we need that much lift capacity, we simply build that much lift capacity. As with energy, it's just an engineering problem.
The real problem has nothing to do with engineering, or cash, as many posters like to think. (Mostly because it lets them get their Twenty Minutes Hate in, using the current or past Administrations as the topic.) It's that there isn't anywhere to go in space. It's all about economics. Transport grows and prospers because it fills a need in moving people and goods from point A to point B, and in space there is no point B. (This is why the 'colonization of North America' and 'subsidize rockets like the government did railroads and airmail' models so beloved of space enthusiasts won't work.)
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:4, Interesting)
Well and good, but where do we get the energy to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable life-supporting ecosystem elsewhere? Hawking is a physicist, so I'm a bit surprised to hear him proposing something like this without explaining where the lift capacity is going to come from. There's a reason why Pan Am never began the orbital shuttle service depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey (aside, of course, from the fact that they went out of business).
The most important reason why nothing like the Space Clipper was ever built is not due to the launch energy required. It is the cost of building and maintaining an incredibly complex vehicle. Even if the energy used to launch the Space Shuttle were free its launch cost would be virtually unchanged. It costs NASA 450 million dollars per launch, the cost of actual LH2/O2 fuel (not just energy) is on the order of 40 cents per kilogram (for example) so the total fuel cost is on the order of one million dollars (!).
The ticket price for the 30 passengers of the Space Clipper would be $30,000 or so if energy was the only cost, still quite steep compared to air travel, but nothing like the $15 million of the Space Shuttle launch bill.
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:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:4, Insightful)
The space race was sped up by the arms race between the USA and the USSR. Both just wanted to prove they were better.
War may be a costly way to advance technology and not a nice one, but it is an very effective one.
I would also prefer global peace as I do not think it's worth the suffering, but it would most probably hamper advancement, not speed it up.
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:5, Interesting)
The space race was sped up by the arms race between the USA and the USSR. Both just wanted to prove they were better.
But this isn't really "war" in the conventional sense is it? And it was the period during which the fastest and most impressive aerospace advances came. So it would seem that a good dickwaving competition is at least as good as an actual war.
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:5, Insightful)
It amazes me that people can stand there and that war has some unique property that causes development.
The only reason that 'war' advances development is that we're willing to spend tax money on development during war.
We could get all the effect (In fact, more, as war sucks resources.) and none of the deaths if we'd just spend money on development.
Of course, I live in the US, where we can't even spend tax money on bridges. War is about the only thing we're willing to spend tax money on at all.
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:4, Insightful)
The federal budget would like to disagree with that statement. The majority of our federal budget is tied up in providing social programs and infrastructure, not in "war". Yes, the defense department gets a comparatively large portion of the budget. NO, it does not comprise all or even the bulk, of government spending. This is a facile talking point that is, unfortunately, entirely false as well.
Of course, as all the recent administrations have shown us, not having the tax money to spend doesn't mean you can't rack up a hell of a credit card bill. Why let things like "insufficient tax revenues" ruin the party?
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite obviously, during any war worthy of the name, much of the population busies itself with the neccessary-but-useless tasks of filling catridges and emptying them. Substantial amounts of human and physical capital are reduced to rubble. Oil wells get set on fire, roads, rails and bridges get bombed, fields and forests get mined, etc, etc.
Wars represent a vast quantity of resources simply thrown away(in many cases this is the rational act on both parties' part, given the costs of being conquered; but from the overall welfare numbers, war is expensive), compared to peacetime. If, in fact, more R&D gets done during wartime, despite the reduced resources available, this suggests that peacetime could dedicate the same R&D resources, with less sacrifice(because a smaller slice of the bigger pie would be needed) or even more R&D resources for the same level of sacrifice(because getting X% of the larger pie is better than getting X% of the smaller one).
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:4, Interesting)
War is one impetus to evolve technology, but it's hardly the only one. Pure curiosity is one that would as well, just not when people are behaving in such a belligerent, greedy fashion as they do currently.
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Unless a event occurs that is so impacting and unprecedented in known human history. Humans will never learn to unite and live in cooperation with each other. Like you said, it's not in our nature.
And with 'impacting and unprecedented' I'm thinking in terms of Divine intervention, alien visits (which might turn out to be the same thing), natural disaster killing 70/80+ percent of the human population, the made up Mayan prophecy turning out to be true after all..
That sort of stuff.
In other words, ain't gonna
Re:This is pretty much what I've been telling peop (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>I think the greed inherent in human nature will prevent us from ever getting organized enough to leave this planet for another.
In Robert's Heinlein's "Man Who Sold the Moon" it was greed that propelled humans to the Moon and Mars and outer planets. In fact that's pretty much true in every science fiction universe, even the utopian Star Trek. People don't do things for rational reasons like "we might go extinct" - they do them for personal gain, or a desire for a better life than the crappy one they have now.
Probably True (Re:This is pretty much what I've) (Score:4, Insightful)
If Armstrong reported back from Applo 11 he saw precious gems the size of beach balls we'd had bases on The Moon long ago. If Viking 1 and Viking 2 turned on their cameras and saw the ground was litered gold and silver we'd have bases there too. But the truth at the moment turns out they are just barren. On Earth people avoid vast stretches of barren "bad lands" and consider them mostly worthless. Why go out to The Moon and beyond just for really expensive "bad lands"?
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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
I submit this possibility (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yes, I remember seeing that on Battlestar Galactica just recently. Though the whole ending with Katie Sackhoff being an angel (falling into a sinkhole on an alien world?) and God using MAGIC to create a Viper spacefighter did suck.
Re:I submit this possibility (Score:5, Insightful)
It's always been an intriguing thought, but the fact is, the evidence that homo sapiens evolved from native primate species here on Earth is quite clear, and grows clearer with each passing year.
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OK it's a fantastic improbability, but an alternative explanation in which you're both right has been posited by James P Hogan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giants_series [wikipedia.org]
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it may be easier to primorial goo with all the building blocks
Easier it sure would be, but the point is about spreading the human race, not just life. And seeding primordial (missed a 'd' there) goo is like giving a dozen kids a random assortment of Lego blocks (plus enough time to forget about the Spongebob episode they just watched) and expecting identical results. Because of how evolution works, there's no guarantee you'd get anything like humans, and it would take far too long to see results.
Re:I submit this possibility (Score:4, Funny)
What if Earth isn't the first human colony, and these disasters have merely wiped out the evidence of our migration...
I am more comfortable being a descendant of some ape, than a bunch of hairdressers or telephone cleaners.
His motives are showing... (Score:3, Funny)
A bit early for leaving (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A bit early for leaving (Score:5, Funny)
Nah, let's just write this one off as a practice planet. We won't make the same mistakes again since we're human after all :)
Re:A bit early for leaving (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a mentality that will lead to problems. Issues, particularly issues that cannot be solved (like the whole of mankind's problems here on Earth) cannot be worked on in a serial fashion. You wind up deadlocked if you need to solve one problem before working on the next. It's like thinking that I need $300 per month to spend on food, so I better save up enough money for 75 years worth of food before I even think about paying any rent. Short-signtedness taken to it's extreme.
The reality is we need to be researching this stuff now. When we can colonize another rock in space, we need to do so. Waiting for all of our problems to be solved before going into space will ensure that either some natural disaster or one of those many problems you're hoping to solve will wipe us out rather soon.
Re:A bit early for leaving (Score:5, Insightful)
Where to, how? (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, I'm quite happy to go find a new home amongst the stars, but at this point the only way that is going to happen is if the earth explodes and my ashes get distributed through space.
If our future is on worlds beyond earth, then we need to start with a space transportation, of the form of a single stage vehicle that can at least go to the moon and back repeatedly, with a turn around time of less than two days. Additionally the vehicle needs to be able to return from the moon without having to depend on an already established infrastructure.
I am a big fan of travelling to Mars and beyond, but the truth is we should establish a solid space flight foundation first. At the moment the technology we have is expensive and suitable in most cases only for one-way flights and of a crew of no more than seven people. Once we resolve the transportation issue, then we the Moon and Mars suddenly become relatively easy. One way flights are great for automated payloads, but for anything intended to transport humans, then we still have a ways to go.
I really believe that we need an x-prize designed for a single stage reusable space vehicle. The aim: launch into orbit with a single stage, do a full orbit, return to earth and do the same thing a second time within two days. The x-prize would be split into two parts: unmanned for the first offering and manned for the second offering.
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I fundamentally agree with single stage reusable, but I don't know if we should aim for doing that from Earth's surface. Earth is a deep gravity well and has an atmosphere which necessitates extra power to counteract atmospheric friction and extra power to carry the extra weight that comes with heat shielding. We should instead establish a space base in GSO [wikipedia.org], with space elevators and Earth-based railguns to get humans and materials up there, so we can then have an interplanetary spaceflight system between th
Voice Over (Score:5, Funny)
Die. (Score:5, Interesting)
Fulfill our destiny! (Score:5, Interesting)
What's wrong with dying? We all do it sooner or later as individuals. Why should the race last forever?
Because we may be the only chance for life on earth to spread to other planets, ... ever.
If we botch it this time, life may not have enough time to evolve another space faring civilisation. Think about it. Though doing nothing we may seal the fate for all of life.
We are part of a much larger ecosystem, without which we cannot survive. If we travel to the stars, so does life - which will continue to evolve.
If there is some great project humanity should try to tackle, it would be this.
Re:Die. (Score:4, Informative)
Death is biological problem, but there are signs in organisms that it is a problem that can be solved.
Not even practical (Score:5, Interesting)
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Even after Earth has be engulfed by the sun?
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Short of a direct hit into the Sun by some other largish body (from our observations - an exceedingly rare event), which would "flame up" the Sun quite a bit and perhaps push it off the main sequence prematurely (most likely not, so it would be at most just atmosphere & part ocean stripping solar flare - which will happen anyway, to much larger degree, in 1 billion years - so would be fine underground, and certainly not much different in other places in the system), what you're saying will happen in 5 B
Re:Not even practical (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, and cosmological timescales are so much larger than ours. If we wait another 10000 years then it'll go from 65.50 to 65.51 million years since the dinosaurs went extinct. There's nothing here that needs doing now or in the next ten or hundred or even thousand years. We could easily have spent another million years on the monkey stage, there's no reason to think we need to get off this rock the same cosmological millisecond we figure out how. We're much better off figuring how to head off killer asteroids and hope 12000 km of earth means someone will survive on the back side if we're hit by a massive gamma blast. And if shit happens in our solar system then the whole system may be FUBAR, it's not really until we have a habitable exoplanet that we have a real backup to earth.
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]
Just need a way to ascend to a higher plane (Score:3, Insightful)
Just need a way to ascend to a higher plane
I'm not a super-genius (Score:3, Insightful)
-Oz
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:Oh, look, a content mill getting attention (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, it may not necessarily be plagiarism, because he's been saying this for years
Little known fact is that he has sentences pre-programmed into his voice synthesizer. Things like:
So yes, he does quite often mistakenly say it while ordering a cup of coffee, during a casual interview about his work.
Bacteria (Score:3, Interesting)
I think a more realistic plan would be to seed suitable planets with bacteria and just let evolution take care of the rest. Simpler lifeforms are much more resilient to extremes of temperature and atmosphere and are suitable for cryogenic storage for the long journeys. Animals higher up the evolutionary chain are too closely adapted to Earth to survive elsewhere really.
Assumptions (Score:3, Insightful)
It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million.
Right, because space and non-earthlike planets are so much less prone to disaster.
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.
The survivors joke (Score:5, Funny)
Meh... (Score:3, Interesting)
Me thinks that the future of the human race is where we belong, here. We are probably thousands of years away from workable space travel. Perhaps we are stuck here for a reason, and perhaps this is an opportunity for all of us to start working out our issues and learn to live together with reasonable differences.
Easy (Score:4, Insightful)
No, you're right (Score:5, Interesting)
Some people, however, are likely to misunderstand your post because, quite simply, they don't even begin to appreciate how much energy it would require to colonise another planet, or how likely we would be to exterminate ourselves by destroying our atmosphere if we even diverted significant resources to putting lots of stuff outside it. Basically, between "let's get off Earth" and "oh look, space colony", they engage in lots of vague handwaving about nonexistent technologies, nonexistent methods of energy generation, and nonexistent materials, the ability to create any of which in great enough quantities would imply a civilisation that really wouldn't need to waste them on a colonial experiment.
Re:No, you're right (Score:4, Interesting)
Farmers don't manually mix soil and humus on a daily basis. They don't spend huge amounts of energy aerating their soil. They just make sure that worms live happily in it, the worms increase at an exponential rate, and they do (most of) the work of tilling the soil. :-)
I think that if you approach the problems of space colonization from a point of view that you have to do it all by yourself, with only the available energy that you have when you start your Moon or Mars colony, that you're doing it wrong
Also I think developing a toolkit for space colonization is very intellectually stimulating and exciting.
There should be an X-prize for a solar cell production facility that operates only on sunlight.
And another one for finding lichens that (veeeeeery slowly) weather Lunar regolith.
And another one for airtight cement locally produced from excavated asteroid bits.
Etc. etc. (you get the idea).
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OK, Steve (Score:3, Insightful)
Why and who gets to leave? (Score:3, Insightful)
Stephen Hawking is taking the survival of the species slant to preserve human space exploration. Let's look at it another way. Who gets to go? Only the wealthy? The 'geniuses'? The 'artists'? Random sampling?
Human beings are arrogant enough to think that the universe couldn't go on without them...
Other options (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems like we could incrementally approach this goal by doing less-expensive, lower-risk things first, like colonizing harsh terrestrial environments (Ocean bottoms, antarctica, salt flats, sterile deserts, etc.).
If we can make a self-contained, self-sustaining colony on the earth, then our species is more robust (we can survive the loss of all the plants, for instance, or if we've colonized the ocean floor, we can survive when supervillains ignite the atmosphere), and we get some experience learning the ins and outs of closed ecosystems.
Once they work reliably, then we can add "in space" to the project description, with all the additional cost and complexity that implies.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky said it first. (Score:4, Interesting)
"The Earth is the cradle of mankind, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever."
- Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935)
Stating the obvious (Score:3, Informative)
This is stating the obvious. Not exactly sure why this is news.
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).
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.
I know this has been said a thousand times, but.. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's our mess, we need to live with it. The planet is still *exceptionally* salvageable, in the lifetime of genX even. No matter how cool we make the spacecraft, they'll still need raw materials from time to time, which would still mean strip-mining another planet somewhere.
Also, and I'm a cold-hearted bastard for saying this (obviously), but I think Hawkings underestimates the value of going hiking, climbing a mountain, going surfing, rolling around on the beach under a blanket just after watching a sunset, etc. Would there be new activities avail in space? Sure, but if we can't "sustain" our environment when it has massive automated systems for cleaning our air, producing food, breaking down waste, cleaning water, etc...then what makes us think we'd do better in a metal can where we have to recreate all those systems ourselves? The Earth should never be left because it's not sustainable. If it should ever be left, it should be because we want to learn and explore. G-d, why can't we have pure motives.
Re:Well...uh thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the point is that since, in addition to all those people, someone like Hawking is saying it as well just adds credence to the idea. No one is claiming that Hawking invented the idea; they're just pointing out that Hawking is one of the many who follow this particular line of thinking.
Re:Why sometimes astrophysicists are dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it depends on what frame of reference you're measuring from.
Re:Why sometimes astrophysicists are dumb (Score:4, Insightful)
Nowhere in that statement does she say it is. There's a second quote further on which could be taken together with this to imply, kinda, that she was making the statement from the traveler's perspective, but it's far from clear, and, I also think, "Which is more likely, the physicist doesn't know basic relativity or the reporter botched it and gave quotes out of context?" The question pretty much answers itself.
Re:This guy needs to be quiet (Score:5, Insightful)
He clearly needs to get over himself! You can totally hear the smugness in that voice synthesiser of his!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As with most things, it is pure cost that prevents in-system colonization not technological failings. The main cost is simply the size and fuel for the launch vehicle especially as it must be quite heavy to include enough radiation shielding.
Re:Time schedule? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (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]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I stand by the statement, your paranoia notwithstanding. I fear my great grandchildren dying not of something falling out of the sky, but by the effects of ecosystems gone bad, the dying ocean then bereft of fish to eat and poisoned by fertilizer and pesticide runoff.
They'll die because some idiot took up the battles of their ancestors, hijacked a nuke, and used it to settle some perceived debt that's hundreds of years old.
The doomsday sayers have been using the excuse to leave, find a new nirvana, only to
Re:Time schedule? (Score:4, Insightful)
The only true problem is that humanity as a whole has yet to determine that either is as or more important than their self-centered point of view.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Presumably your enemies.
The migrations to the US are a great case in point. Get those (fill in these blanks) away from here, they're apostates, heretics, and they dress funny and have bad breath.
It gives a whole new meaning to Gleason's "To the moon, Alice!"