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Hawking: Humans Must Spread Out in Space
Tue Jun 13, 2006 7:50 AM EDT
Renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking from the University of Cambridge, front, is accompanied by his nurse during a visit at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong Tuesday, June 13, 2006. Hawking, author of the global best-seller a "Brief History of Time", arrived in Hong Kong on Monday and plans to give a lecture on Tuesday. Hawking is on a six-day visit in Hong Kong before going to Beijing.(AP Photo/Vincent Yu)
HONG KONG — The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy Earth, world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday.
Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years, the British scientist told a news conference.
"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Hawking, who came to Hong Kong to a rock star's welcome Monday. Tickets for his lecture Thursday were sold out.
Hawking said that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.
"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."
The 64-year-old scientist — author of the global best-seller "A Brief History of Time" — uses a wheelchair and communicates with the help of a computer because he suffers from a neurological disorder called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
One of the best-known theoretical physicists of his generation, Hawking has done groundbreaking research on black holes and the origins of the universe, proposing that space and time have no beginning and no end.
However, Alan Guth, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Hawking's latest observations were something of a departure from his usual research and more applicable to survival over the long-term.
Renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking from the University of Cambridge listens to reporter's questions at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Hong Kong Tuesday, June 13, 2006. The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, Hawking said Tuesday. Hawking arrived Hong Kong on Monday for a six-day visit before going to Beijing.(AP Photo/Vincent Yu)
"It is a new area for him to look at," Guth said. "If he's talking about the next 100 years and beyond, it does make sense to think about space as the ultimate lifeboat."
But, he added, "I don't see the likely possibility within the next 50 years of science technology making it easier to survive on Mars and on the moon than it would be to survive on earth."
"I would still think that an underground base, for example in Antarctica, would be easier to build than building on the moon," Guth said.
Joshua Winn, an astrophysicist at MIT, agreed. "The prospect of colonizing other planets is very far off, you must realize," he said.
Hawking's "work has been highly theoretical physics, not in astrophysics or global politics or anything like that," Winn added. "He is certainly stepping outside his research domain."
Hawking's comments Tuesday were reminiscent of the work of American astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who was a believer in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Sagan, a Cornell University professor and NASA-decorated scientist who died in 1996, noted that organic molecules, the kind that life on Earth is dependent on, appear to be almost everywhere in the solar system.
Sagan played a leading role in the U.S. space program, helping design robotic missions and contributing to the Mariner, Viking, Voyager and Galileo expeditions.
But his work also focused on the search for habitable worlds and intelligent life beyond the solar system, as well as theories about life's origins, ideas popularized in his best-selling 1985 novel, "Contact," which was made into a film starring Jodie Foster.
At Tuesday's news conference, Hawking said he too was venturing into the world of fiction. He plans to team up with his daughter, 35-year-old journalist and novelist Lucy Hawking, to write a children's book about the universe aimed at the same age group as the Harry Potter books.
"It is a story for children, which explains the wonders of the universe," said Lucy Hawking. They did not provide further details.
___
Associated Press Writer Katie Fretland in London contributed to this report.
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Comments:
Humans must go into space, huh?
Has Hawking specified which ones?
If not I could make a few suggestions.
:-)
I'll go. *raises hand, shakes it around for all to see*
This started as a thought that I had as a consequence of the old adage, "Don't keep all your eggs in a single Basket" as metaphor to People and Earth.
Ad astra!
per aspera?
I would like to say that Stephen Hawking was doing the right thing . We human is creating more and more trouble to our planet . Moving to another galaxy or space we called is vital for the next decades .
He has a point. At this rate the planet is going to become uninhabitable by humans and we'll need somewhere else to go. Let's hope we don't mess up the next nice planet we land on.
Vote for a Republican Free Mars? ;)
...sorry Haliburton is already there...didn`t you know there's oil on Mars...
his daughter is kinda cute....
The woman pictured with Stephen is not his daughter -- the caption says she is his nurse. Speaking of which, kodos to Vincent the photographer on the timing of this picture - obviously taking a good photograph of Stephen was the last thing on his mind.
Well, hello nurse!
Wait, are you saying that is a good picture or a bad picture of Hawking? I'd say it looks like one of the best ones I've seen.
ALS is such a horrible condition... it's amazing how well he is doing and how long he has survived. It usually takes only a few years after the onset of symptoms before people succumb to it. Survival is a matter of whether or not respiratory function is compromised, I think.
No, I wasn't commenting about the physical appearance of Stephen - simply that the choice of photographs could have been better, as it doesn't appear that Stephen was the main subject of this picture.
Hawkins' Nurse is a hottie. :)
If wearing a surprisingly low cut top for a nurse makes her a "hottie" then maybe.
She looks less than animated though - rather sullen.
Still, this discussion is getting more off-topic than off-planet.
Agreed.
I have a weakness for low cut top.
Cut the crap about the cleavage. It's the hand that catches my eye. She is steadying his head so he can type. She is a health care worker. If not for the likes of her Stephen would have been silenced years ago. Just wait until you need a helper to do everything. I have a new appreciation for such things with aging parents and all. With the wear and tear involved with lifting patients, health care workers get very strong. It is a job for the young and athletic. In other words, she could probably kick all your butt-cracked asses :-)
Well, I think that Mr. H should pay for the trip.
If space travel is good idea to some people, then those people should be prepared to fund their own trip.
Then if and when this world becomes near uninhabitable, you can stay and doom your family.
Unfortunately, Mr. Hawking is right.
The odds are stacked against us that there is a killer Earth asteroid or comet with our name on it considering there are countless ones just spinning aimlessly through space.
Unless something is done, there may not be an Earth to eventually come back to, if at all.
I'd say the chances are better that we will kill ourselves with war or the pressure our growing population puts on scarce resources (or war over said resources). That scares me a lot more than big flying rocks.
I think that the world works best when people are in charge of themselves, without violating others autonomy. So, everyone going with Mr. H, don' t forget to write, because in my lifetime (nor in my future grand-children's) I don't see a need to leave the whole planet behind.
Is it possible that his science is biased from his own health situation, and that that has been a part of the formation of how he interprets both science and the world?
I doubt his science is biased since he works in the mostly 'mathematics' world. Not much room for bias unless you count the reasonable assumptions that would take a highly-respected physicist to even understand. However, if you mean his opinion reflecting his situation, then I must reply, "Who's opinion doesn't reflect their situation/experiences? And does it make it any less valid?"There's nothing wrong with the government spending money on a space program, in my opinion. It's the job of the government to fund things that could never get done without a sprawling, sometimes wasteful, bureacracy. It's the reason why we have federal armed forces and not just a militia.
Space science is the same thing. Of course, you may not agree with it, but this is a democracy and the majority rules. So go vote your pro-space congressional representative or senator out of office and be done with it. Of course you'll have to find an anti-space candidate as an alternative....
Everyone views from personal biases, math or science or history or love. Math and science themselves are viewed as "ideal systems" that, if understood fully, would reveal their perfection. Math and science are as flawed as anything else. If not, even the simplest problem would reveal itself.
About governmental funding, and the US system, it is an internally consistent system. Therefore, a person asking questions outside the system isn't accepted.
No offense, but his kind of argument really gets my goat. Do you suppose that your great grand children are going to just jump on a rocket ship and go live on Mars when the doomsday comet comes? No, not without the effort, sacrifices and research of your children and your children's children.No one can even predict 12 seconds into the future, and I just can't get overly excited or concerned about 123 years from now. Simply too many things could change in the interim that change what once was rational into the irrational, and vice versa.
Good timing for his comments. Right now humans are working on a more efficient earth to space travel device. Known as the Space Elevator, here is the main link
And here is a wikipedia article covering the topic. The project is led by two Israeli's in Mountain View California (Silicon Valley) and they believe that with an investment as small as $5,000,000,000 this device can be created. In short, the elevator will be able to carry loads up into space at a cost of $100/lb (at first, then cheaper), while current space rockets cost up to $20,000/lb to carry a load.
-----> Stairway to heaven anyone?
-----> Stairway to heaven anyone?
I just did a Page air guitar riff of the last 3/4 of the song in my mind. Thanks for that work break.
Yes, and we'll all be buying one! *rimshot*
Here's another project that kind of blew me away by its simplicity. JP Aerospace has a program that uses gigantic balloons to float cargo into space.
The deeper point here is we must first learn to love each other if we want to survive long enough to walk on other terran worlds. And who's to say we wouldn't destroy those, as well, if we haven't yet learned to love each other?
We won't be able to contemplate true colonization of space until there are no poor among us.
Actually, if we can increase the rate of colonization such that it is greater than the rate of self-destruction, then we'll be okay. I have a feeling, though, that those two rates are pretty comparable. I guess I can do nothing more than to resort to holding my breath.
Neo_Brutus,
That's very poetic and all, but it makes absolutely no sense. If we decided to love each other before making any historically significant effort, where the hell would we be now? In caves!
All we need is love.. and the ability to survive a vacuum.
This leads me to speculate that on a 'deeper' level. Love itself might require stabilising elements of atmospheric indifference.
(reminder to self; never post pre coffee)
Earth is a test-tube. If it breaks this experiment is over.
We need more than one test tube.
It doesn't take a genius.
http://aohell.newsvine.com/_news/2006/06/14/254775-first-things-first-mr-hawking
.... and that's my take on things.
It ain't poetry, what I said. It's hard science.
Why go to Mars though? What's wrong with just living in ships and space stations permanently and mining asteroids? Practical long term ships wouldn't be anything like what we have now though, they'd have huge areas of gardens to recycle waste and water, to provide food and air, little contained biospheres.
You also mention not being able to communicate with Mars? I'm pretty sure we communicate just fine with the rovers we have on Mars right now.
If we could travel to other planets outside our solar system we wouldn't really need to worry about destroying them. The only problem is that I don't think there will ever be a way to transport 7 billion+ people from one planet to another. Even from Earth to the Moon. We could prbably only let a select few people go. Even if you could fit 100 people in the space elevator at a time it would take 70,000,000 trips to get everyone there; and that's not even counting supplies.
You could build a couple elevators, especially since a great deal of the cost of the first one should be in R&D;, which makes going to the moon easy. Taking people to other planets, not just the moon, would be impossibl to do on a massive scale on short notice. You would have better chances moving or destroying whatever was threatening to destroy the Earth than evacuating billions of people.
Stephen Hawking gets it.
Here's an idea I've been kicking around for awhile. We can study stars with planets that pass between the star and Earth. Some of these planets may be in the habitable zone around their star, the place where the atmosphere is warm enough for water to be in the liquid phase to support life as we know it. With enough resolution we could look for spectral absorption in light that passes through the atmosphere of these planets. This should give us some hints about some possible worlds for colonies. The distances will be vast, perhaps 20 to 200 light years from Earth. It would take thousands of years to traverse such distances with ion drives.
Instead of sending people on such a long journey, we could send genetic material with automated labs to grow humans, plants, and animals once the spaceship arrives in orbit about a distant prospective home. Computers, robots and genetic engineering will be required to nurture our new genesis. We could start by designing caches of seeds and essential building blocks in safe places around our own planet, so that civilization could get a jumpstart start in case some disaster befalls us.
That is an interesting idea but how would the babies of all species be raiesed? if it's just them and a spaceship then we would need some extremely advanced robots or something.
Can you imagine the stress of spending 10 or 20 generations on a spaceship? And what if the first planet turned out to be inhabitable? It seems easier to send embryos and seeds and such. Just covering the distance is going to require the use of some sort of fuel that can be picked up along the way, like interstellar hydrogen. Lowering the payload mass is going to make the task less daunting. I agree that the automated systems to train the first generation is going to be complicated. We will have a lot of robotic assistants, particularly for the aged and people with disabilities. Even though I wouldn't want my kid to have his diapers changed by a robot, you can bet that will come to pass. I am just making a humble suggestion that needs to be refined. I believe we have the creative potential. All we need is a goal and political will to fund it. A lot of the technology will develop over time, in any case.
( Even though I wouldn't want my kid to have his diapers changed by a robot, you can bet that will come to pass )
Nice sentence ! Well , the parents of the early stone age never expect that their next generation is wearing diapers , or even Burberry , DKNY or Guess Kids . People changed , and technology affected our lives . It's time for another change , get to the space and we all suck the nourishing liquid !
Why don't we start with this solar system first? Giant space stations throughout the solar system are a more realistic medium term goal than interstellar flight.
Space stations are inherently unstable because they are in a vacuum. To really live we need air, ground beneath our feet, an ecosystem for food and clothing, minerals, and water. Mars may work. Space stations seem so temporary.
There are huge amounts of resources to be mined in the asteroids, especially a lot of water ice. Space stations aren't a closed loop, but they don't need to be as long as you have ample raw materials to put into the system. The stations I'm imagining would be closer to the failed biosphere experimental closed habitat than to the metal tubes we have today. Using plants to recycle oxygen and waste is much easier than any mechanical or crude chemical system we'll have in any forseeable time.
I think another great resource to us would be Jupiter and Saturn. There is an abundance of gasses there that are relatively rare on Earth, such as hydrogen, helium, methane, ammonia, ethane, ethylene, propane, hydrogen sulfide, neon, argon, krypton, and xenon.
If we can access mass quantities of these chemicals, our dependence on fossil fuels can be eliminated.
The first thing we need to do is move industry off the Earth. If we reserve the Earth for living, and move our polluting activities into orbit, the load we place on the planet will go down immensely. Using current technology, there is no way tha we can extend first world levels of affluence to the rest of the world without causing environmental collapse, but if manufacturing is done is space, that becomes a strong possibility.
As universal affluence rises, birth rates should drop off, and we can then reduce the human load on the planet through simple attrition. Eventually, the Earth could be a garden again, as it once was.
In a thousand years, perhaps the Earth will be a vacation spot where people go to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for a few years, just to get in touch with their roots. But if we don't get started with the project soon, in a thousand years, people will be living hunter-gatherer lives because there won't be any resources to provide a better lifestyle.
Right and who will be doing the work associated with this industry? All automated? All robots? No people?
What about transporting the goods produced to/from Earth?
Can you separate living from working so cleanly that all the people can live on Earth and all the production is carried on elsewhere?
I don't think it vastly far-fetched that if we had the technology to move industrial processes off of the Earth, then we may have or may be close to obtaining the technology to safely man those processes by automation or by humans. I realize it's far-fetched to begin with...but who knows what the future holds? I think it's an interesting idea, at worst. I like it, Jimmy :)
If our technology gets that good we can solve all the pollution/environmental problems anyway - we won't need to send all our production off-planet.
Moving the industrial base off of Earth seems dangerous. The energy budget would be too expensive, even with space elevators. What happens if the link to space gets broken?
We need to design sustainable systems that minimize the use of mined resources, waste, and energy. Future generations cannot afford to go on having babies at the same rate we do today. I hope the population level will be regulated by personal volition. Population has really taken off since the invention of vaccines and flush toilets. If all people (especially women) could grow up educated and hopeful instead of a large proportion relegated to ignorance and hunger, maybe the population would stablilize at something sustainable like 1 1/2 billion or so...
It doesn't seem too likely that we will solve our earthly problems, does it? I think this underscores the importance of colonization. It may actually be easier to start new colonies than to solve our problems. Human nature is not a fixed quantity. There is an internal basis of our character, but most of our behavior is governed by conditions beyond our control. Maybe we could finally get it right by sending out colonies with different governing philosophies.
Thats a really interesting idea. I can see it now."You go first."
"No you go first."
"No really I insist, you go first."
"After you."
" Look this is silly, just get in the spaceship."
etc
*smirk*
I was thinking more like this:
The Ayn Randists (selfishness is a virtue types) set up a system for one spaceship and future civilization
The Ghandi-MLK (altruistic types) set up another spaceship and future civilization.
The Clintonian triangulationists set up theirs.
...
Then they all go off in different directions and promise to get back together in a million years.
If they all end up the same way, then we can say human nature is immutable.
If not, the winning world will be fruitful and multiple without forcing the other parties into submission. That way, sentient life stands a better chance for survival without coming to blows.
Seriously wise concept there Greg.
Mirrored in lots of SF.
Another thought: One of the boatloads should definitely not be told the history of how they were packaged and sent off to another star system. Then we will have so much fun tapping into their version of Newsvine listening to the debate about intelligent design vs. random acts of DNA. What laughs we'll have, knowing full well about the humble truth behind their genesis!
Dennis: our technology will never be so good that there isn't waste and pollution. That's why the only path to an affluent future is into space. The waste and pollution will be meaningless there, since the vast emptiness will absorb it (though it has been pointed out that industry on the moon would create an atmosphere sufficiently dense that it would lose its value as a clean vacuum environment).
Our choices are to poison the Earth until our civilization is no longer viable, quit now before we poison it, or move the pollution off site. If we do that last one soon enough, we could save our world and keep it as a hospitable place to live.
Greg: Moving the industrial base off of Earth seems dangerous. The energy budget would be too expensive, even with space elevators. What happens if the link to space gets broken?
Going down costs very little, only the cost of surviving entry into the atmosphere. The raw materials are already out there to be used. The only way the link could be broken is if gravity no longer worked.
Going up is expensive, but there are cheaper alternative methods being worked on right now, and the only thing that needs to go up is organic matter.
I think the first thing is to take everyone who thinks that colonization of space is stupid put them on a rocket and fly their dumb asses into the sun just to watch them do the hot foot dance.
..can we name it Enterprise....(((((-;}