From Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience:
Stephen Hawking thinks humanity has only 1,000 years left of survival on Earth and that our species needs to colonize other planets.
The famed physicist made the statement in a speech at Oxford University Union, in which he promoted the goal of searching for and colonizing Earth-like exoplanets. Developing the technology to allow humans to travel to and live on faraway alien worlds is a challenge, to say the least. But is Hawking right that humanity has only 1,000 years to figure it out?
The dangers Hawking cited — from climate change, to nuclear weapons, to genetically engineered viruses — could indeed pose existential threats to our species, experts say, but predicting a millennium into the future is a murky business.More.
It sure is murky. Thought experiment: If we lived in 1016, what would we have predicted about the future? Interestingly, most people in western Europe thought the world was going to blazes back then but the causes cited were all different: Vikings, bandits, invading peoples, warlords in conflict… It would be hard for people back then to imagine a Europe where war is not a common state of affairs. Come to think of it, would a North American in 1016 would have expected New York or NASA?
The trouble with prophesying at that distance is that one cannot factor in future developments not yet imagined.
See also: Stephen Hawking disappointed by Brexit
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It seems a nice new spin on the atheist canard: “Science got is to other planets: what’s religion ever done for us?”
New version: “Science screwed up the world in just a couple of centuries so we had to evacuate it for other planets.”
Funnily enough, it was in the 11th century (though after 1098 rather than 1016) that the Cistercians started a reform movement based on simple ideals of “work, love, prayer and self-denial”. Part of that involved harnessing technology for the common good:
For example, they insisted on siting their monasteries on undeveloped land and improving it (the terracing on the famous Glastonbury Tor is a graphic example of that).
So I think their prediction – no doubt wrong, but reasonable – would have been that the world would have become a richer and better place for all the children of mankind. But then they didn’t buy into scientific and technological progress as ends in themselves, and they certainly never had hubristic ambitions to colonise heaven if they messed up life on earth.
On current track, we can be colonising the Moon, Mars, asteroids and the Gas Giant Moons in 100 – 200 years.
1,000 years to go / 4,500,000,000 years so far — is a pretty precise prediction. No doubt he has some science to back that number up? Maybe a chart with some error bars?
Interestingly, being a Bible lover, I agree with him that there’s not much more than a thousand years left. But my authority says there will be a new heaven and new earth at that time. Humans around then won’t have to strive go anywhere.
IMHO, People who think that the Moon, Mars, asteroids and the Gas Giant Moons can be colonized and support human civilization for any extended period of time are not being realistic to the evidence we now have in hand. Here are a few notes to that effect:
It is interesting to note man’s failure to build, right here on ‘friendly’ Earth, a miniature, self-enclosed, ecology that could sustain human life for any extended periods of time.
Transforming a toxic planet into a bio-friendly planet, that is capable of supporting human civilization, simply is not as easy as it is imagined to be:
These following sites have illustrations that show some of the interdependent biogeochemical complexity of different types of bacterial life on Earth.,,,
This crucial interdependent complexity of various bacteria is ancient:
,,,Please note, that if even one type of bacteria group did not exist in this complex cycle of biogeochemical interdependence, that was illustrated on the third page of the preceding site, then all of the different bacteria would soon die out. This essential biogeochemical interdependence, of the most primitive different types of bacteria that we have evidence of on ancient earth, makes the origin of life ‘problem’ for neo-Darwinists that much worse. For now not only do neo-Darwinists have to explain how the ‘miracle of life’ happened once with the origin of photosynthetic bacteria, but they now also must explain how all these different types bacteria, in this irreducibly complex biogeochemical web, miraculously arose just in time to supply the necessary nutrients, in their biogeochemical link in the chain, for photosynthetic bacteria to continue to survive.
Interestingly, while the photo-synthetic bacteria were reducing greenhouse gases and producing oxygen and minerals, which would all be of benefit to modern man, other types of bacteria were also producing their own natural resources which would be very useful to modern man. Some types of bacteria helped prepare the earth for advanced life by detoxifying the primeval earth and oceans of poisonous levels of heavy metals while depositing them as relatively inert metal ores. Metal ores which are very useful for modern man, as well as fairly easy for man to extract today (mercury, cadmium, zinc, cobalt, arsenic, chromate, tellurium and copper to name a few). To this day, various types of bacteria maintain an essential minimal level of these heavy metals in the ecosystem which are high enough so as to be available to the biological systems of the higher life forms that need them yet low enough so as not to be poisonous to those very same higher life forms.
And on top of the fact that poisonous heavy metals on the primordial earth were brought into ‘life-enabling’ balance by complex, interdependent, biogeochemical processes, there was also an explosion of minerals on earth which were a result of that first life, as well as being a result of each subsequent ‘Big Bang of life’ there afterwards.
To put it mildly, this minimization of poisonous elements, and ‘explosion’ of useful minerals, is strong evidence for Intelligently Designed terra-forming of the earth that ‘just so happens’ to be of great benefit to modern man.
Clearly many, if not all, of the metal ores and minerals laid down by these sulfate-reducing bacteria, as well as laid down by the biogeochemistry of more complex life, as well as laid down by finely-tuned geological conditions throughout the early history of the earth, have many unique properties which are crucial for technologically advanced life, and are thus indispensable to man’s rise above the stone age to the advanced ‘space-age’ technology of modern civilization.
Verse:
Of supplemental note:
Mr. Hawking, please stick to physics. When you go off that topic you tend to spout wacky stuff.
Why should I care about humanity dying out? I and everyone I care about will be dead within a few decades. Plus, it’s all just one big cosmic accident anyway, right?
Jon Garvey @ 1 – Great post. Exactly. They founded monasteries on the worst sites and cultivated them to become so productive that they fed thousands of people from neighboring areas.
Yes, but part of that prediction would have included “if people accept or at least support our ideal”. And the world contains much that is renewable as well as many new resources that we discover each year.