Stephen Hawking: Humans need to leave Earth or risk being annihilated by war
43 replies, posted
Nuclear war is not even on my radar, to be honest. It's not something I think about or even entertain as a likelihood; I think if we die out, it'll be an environmental factor.
Nuclear war doesn't seem far-fetched if society is heavily destabilized, which is exactly what's going to happen during the next few decades.
I think it's much easier for the big countries to slice up the smaller countries and take all their resources than for them to attack each other
Seems to be a likely way of things going down (Lithuania will be the first country to eat shit once again yay)
Makes sense though. Nuking useful objects (especially vital farmlands) to uselessness would be dumb as fuck.
Then I think that nuclear war wouldn't happen because the wars will we have will simply be like the wars we've ALWAYS had: a proxy war in a small country loaded with natural resources. If we win it, yay. If we lose it, boo hoo but Viet Nam/Iraq aren't worth destroying the human race over, there will always be smaller countries to slice up.
Hardly. If the rich were THAT afraid of a nuclear war they'd have moved into Fallout style vaults already. An interplanetary settlement would be like pretty much just like a vault, except much more simple, cramped and with little to no goods and services from the outside. Wealth will not mean anything on a settlement of a few dozen people. I think you have some misguided ideas how being rich works.
Why exactly would interplanetary settlements make states reconsider using nukes?
I mean... they have personal vaults already, but that's no fun (no seriously, it recently made headlines that someone dropped a few hundred million on their own shelter, rated to have them and 100 friends, plus staff, living in style for the foreseeable after life ends on the surface). But... why get stuck on a dead, irradiated world when space beckons? An interplanetary settlement will not remain a few pods and feel akin to a vault for long. Not if significant $$$ gets involved. They're just waiting for the technology. Everything the rich do, is designed to put barrier between them and the plebs (in private jet terminals there are video feeds of people queuing to get through passport control, no, seriously). The ultimate barrier is to leave the planet, trading your string of numbers on a screen for multiple rockets laden with the material wealth of the world you scorn.
Interplanetary settlements = whoever launches will not exterminate the human race. Hell, the government of the launching nation could leave earth before pressing the button or already have left. Nukes are a big thing now because of the idea if you launch you're killing everyone and yourself. It takes some of the risk away. Not saying it's probable of course, but you're short-sighted if you think becoming an interplanetary species would somehow discourage the nuclear option rather than make it seem more acceptable.
Is that really so common? That instance was evidently newsorthy.
A nuked earth is still less dead and more hospitable than any other planet in our solar system, I'm pretty sure. The challenge of moving out of an apocalypse shelter is roughly the same as expanding a space colony, except resources and technology are closer.
It may seem that way but being rich doesn't inherently make your goal to be as far from the poor as possible, as you seem to be implying. People tend to prefer groups like themselves, and for rich it's convenient to avoid the poor because of many reasons stemming from social inequality. But like I iterated before, without the poor, the rich wouldn't be rich. After all wealth is nothing but power over those with less wealth.
The fact is if you're rich enough to jumpstart a settlement on another planet and move there yourself, you will forgo almost every luxury in your life. I can't believe this is something most wealthy people would want.
We don't disagree here. I thought by "states will reconsider the consequences of using nukes" you meant they would think it through harder. Naturally if there's colonies outside of Earth, deciding to fire nukes no longer makes you responsible for ending all human life so it's more likely to happen.
I suspect us going to the stars would be more "the expanse" than "star trek"
It actually is, I only remembered that instance becuase it seemed extravagant, but if you look online there are numerous companies that now offer luxury bunker services (and the owner of one said it's the trend right now to have cocktail parties in them and show them off lmao).
It depends on how many nukes get dropped, where. It is true however that we no longer posses enough nukes to destroy the entire world. We also don't know the exact science of what will happen when everyone launches everything they've got too. There might be some patches of hospitable land but we simply cannot know for certain.
How do you know all luxury will be removed? Elon Musk wants to go up there, I doubt he'd abandon his creature comforts. Hell, the first spaceX voyage around the moon is full of the rich and the rich's stooges. I, for one, can foresee regular rockets being dispatched from Earth containing all of the luxuries that cannot be cultivated on Mars. It also likely won't be *just* rich people up there, as you say, they'll likely be a subservient class, paid well, maybe remitting their pay to middle-class families left on Earth, but also happy to be away from an Earth where geopolitical and ecological instability is rising rapidly. Plus maybe the other stooges that I mentioned above, such as artists.
I mean, regardless of the probability of nuclear war, he is right, we need to get more planets to survive as a race, if we spread to multiple planets then it would take way more than just nuclear weapons to actually drives us to extinction even not taking into account war but just natural disasters, it is best we have colonised multiple planets just in case something happens to Earth.
Don't have all your eggs in a single basket etc etc, basically it would be way harder for us to be wiped/wipe ourselves out.
My conjecture is based on how expensive it is to ship anything to other planets. Sure you can ship things over there, but your money will be worth but a fraction of what it's worth on earth. Kind of defeats the point of being rich doesn't it. I can't speculate on Elon Musk's motivations though.
If the rich really were as hellbent on getting away from the poor as you say, why don't they move into their apocalypse vaults already? They'd be just as sealed off from the plebs if they wish, but as long as society exists they can ship themselves whatever stuff they want.
Could it be that the wealthy want more than seclusion, and perhaps they actually enjoy and benefit from having a society around them?
or we could just genetically engineer space humans that can live outside of Earths gravity, you know, when that technology is sufficiently advanced enough to actually do that.
"Don't Put All your Eggs in One Basket" applies to everything, even Humanity. If Earth doesn't kick the bucket from man-made, natural, or meteor disaster, the sun will die out. By spreading out across the galaxy, Humanity is sure to survive for far, far longer than we would otherwise, nothing could wipe us out totally in every place short from sheer galactic or universal collapse, and who knows what kind of creatures we'll have evolved into by then.
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