First he was warning us about potentially hostile aliens. Now it’s a warning that if we don’t start making a move off Earth, humanity is doomed to extinction.
Dr. Stephen Hawking warns that if humanity doesn’t make moves toward colonizing and inhabiting outer space in the next two centuries, we’re doomed to extinction.
His tinge of optimism is painted in quite muted colors. “If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe as we spread into space,” he told BigThink.
But those two centuries might well be fraught with far more crises than ever before, he said.
Hawking is worried about the way humans are eating up finite resources and commented that our genetic code “carries selfish and aggressive instincts,” which have helped humanity survive so often in times gone by.
Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on Planet Earth, but to spread out into space,” he said.
Now I know that one man’s long term is another man’s second marriage of four, but it isn’t exactly easy to imagine large-scale human life in outer space. However, Hawking believes that greater space exploration now is vital to humanity’s future.
“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,” he said.
“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.” – Very good point
With the cutbacks to NASA I just don’t see that happening. Besides we’ll probably do ourselves in before we could possibly ever make colonization a reality. But then again perhaps the hostile aliens will get us first (lol)…he seems to be obsessed with the end of the human race.
“Is it worth it? Should we just pull back, forget the whole thing as a bad idea and take care of our own problems at home?”
“No. We have to stay here and there’s a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you’ll get ten different answers, but there’s one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won’t just take us. It’ll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu and Einstein and Morobuto and Buddy Holly and Aristophenes .. and all of this .. all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars.”
— Mary Ann Cramer interviews Cmdr. Sinclair in Babylon 5:”Infection”
“With the cutbacks to NASA I just don’t see that happening.”
I wonder if the Chinese will become bolder in space exploration then we have been lately. I hope so if only to put a fire under our government’s but; and the American people in general, to get into real space exploration again.
Stephen Hawking has first hand knowledge of the brief time
We spend alive. Humanity needs to think Global; as one race
” Humanity” the effort , time , cost could only be a Global project
Perhaps it is our new tower of Babel?? Its a nice thought .
To think we could venture where no man has gone befor,
Space the final frontier. Que music. Que spacecraft. WoW!!