• Stephen Hawking: Humans need to leave Earth or risk being annihilated by war
    43 replies, posted
https://www.businessinsider.com/stephen-hawking-humans-leave-earth-or-be-annihilated-2018-10?r=US&IR=T "Our souls are weighed down by Earth's gravity" - Zeon Hawking
I still worry about nuclear war a lot. And not a global USA vs Russia scenario but rather something like India vs Pakistan where even a limited nuclear exchange will have dire consequences for the entire planet. Billions could die.
I think final years before his death are seemly more Survivalist and reactionary crap influenced his views.
"Humans need to leave Earth to avoid being annihilated by War. So we can have Wars in the Stars"
I go to bed worried about not waking up sometimes because of it. Sounds silly, but it's the world we live in, never know when someone's gonna finally fucking do it, and that's a sad state of affairs if you ask me. To worry that we won't live to see tomorrow, we are really doing something wrong.
Star Wars
I can feel that gravity in my browser, we better hurry up and leave the solar system
It's not "survivalist reactionary crap" to say that having humanity spread out would drastically increase our survival if there was a nuclear war or global scale disaster. It's more just, factually correct.
Even a random meteor can wipe out everything if we're all sat here on one rock.
And also allowing ourselves to become a Space-faring civilization, Especially with the access of the near-infinite amount of resources within our Star System, We can fix Earth and revert it back into a Pre- Climate Change state through the use of Terraforming. In a way. Our answer to fixing Earth lies among the Stars.
We just need to find way to get artificial gravity in space and on the surfaces of other celestial bodies. We really really need earth level gravity to be healthy.
Well the former is already self-controlled by every nation who carrying them is so far since WW2 ended with small attempted by SU but never happen because some their officials or military personnels know this is bad and because of how society is slowly good ways of preventing how not used. The latter is just depends of having safety rule to survived local/regional/national side disasters but not yea global sized ones.
I think the more likely scenario will be for the super rich to abandon the rest of us here after they have extracted all the wealth they can. 'The meek shall inherit the earth but not it's mineral rights'.
This is objectively true. All futures that involve humanity staying confined to earth are futures where humanity goes extinct.
On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Space ships are going to end up looking like a series of tubes because the rooms will have to be spinning so centripetal force can simulate gravity. Unless we can sci-fi up something better.
Don't think the universe would be missing our species in any case
Can we start worshipping Stephen hawking as a god
I disagree. I used to think this way once but if you think about it Earth is the most perfect environment for a human to possibly live in because we evolved there. We lose so much basic necessities by moving to space and we would be dealing with dangers far worse than radioactive fallout from a war on earth. For instance no other planet we could colonize has an atmosphere close to Earth's. Space is full of deadly radiation that penetrates any suit you could comfortably wear and there is no building material you can come up with that can fully protect you from space debris flying around faster than the speed of sound constantly chipping away at your home. An atmosphere takes care of that. Plus ours doubles as a full on oxygen & water supply. We would have a limitless dependence on rocket fuel just to fetch shit from earth and back. And if we were running out of habitable space on Earth, we would get even less room to live moving to space. The newly terraformed planet would even be more sensitive to things like nuclear war; The huge crutch we built just to exist in this extreme environment needs to be actively maintained and will never be as efficient as the self healing environment we had on Earth. (crutch being : power systems, temperature control, oxygen containing domes, buildings, and your only connection to earth: the rocket & fuel) Removing that crutch would result in rapid extinction. It would be even easier to go extinct. The energy required to terraform any planet or space station easily exceeds the energy it takes to maintain what you already have. This is why this dream of Steven's will never happen. Unless there is some kind of revolution in human biology that can make us super adaptable or even immune to an environment harsher than anything Earth can come up with.
Yeah, thanks captain obvious.
It never used to bother me before; but there has been a couple of nights lately where I was unable to fall asleep when my mind drifted and thought about how fast the world could change in a second; even if I was lucky enough to not be in the blast radius. Then again even if it's not nukes, it's some other equally horrifying event or certainty for mankind keeping me from resting.
Why it might be obvious, people need to keep repeating it to people in power. Hell, sometimes I wish aliens would just show up, so it would scare the shit out of a bunch of governments.
We already know how to do this, and it requires having a massive spinning ring. A lot of Sci-Fi movies use this to explain artificial gravity like 2001, Sunshine and Europa Report, and the science on it is sound. is it like the internet?
If there were insterstellar spaceships transporting colonies, they would most likely be structured as towers soaring upwards, with a constant 1g of acceleration providing artificial gravity. But even that is completely unrealistic. The most likely interstellar spaceships would carry fertilised eggs which would be grown in laboratories and raised by robots once they reach their destination. Even if such a spaceship was launched from Earth this very second, it would still be tens if not hundreds of thousands of years before a human ever sets foot on a planet outside of the solar system.
Is this heresy?
How about we just don't eliminate all human life on earth in a nuclear holocaust instead?
But then space war, Stephen. Evidently didn't watch any scifi series
They would do that if they could but that's not very realistic, is it? The whole point of being wealthy is to have power over people around you and have them produce luxuries for you. Becoming a Mars settler means there'll be no people and no luxuries for a long time. When the settlements evolve into cities and countries though, and the rich decide to move into them, much of Earth could become like a third world country slaving away to produce luxuries to be shipped to other planets.
Need to find a way to get artificial gravity planetside.
Obviously all of the rich aren't just going to up and leave all at once, like they all agree on a date or something. But you're deluded if you think that the rich won't be some of the first to leave, because the second we are off the planet, states will reconsider the consequences of using nukes.
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