We can also write off Africa and Asia. After all, the Americas and Australia were colonized by all those Old World people, so there’s hardly anybody left behind, and we in the New World are now the future of humanity.
That’s how it works, right? Human beings are like locusts: we strip our homes to bedrock, then take wing and flit off to the next environment to exploit. At least, that’s the impression I get from Stephen Hawking, all-around smart guy and obsolete resident of the dead old homelands.
Humans should go and live in space within the next 1,000 years, or it will die out, Stephen Hawking has warned.
"We must continue to go into space for the future of humanity," Mr Hawking said. "I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet."
Like the fragile old United Kingdom; my ancestors escaped from that hellhole just as it was collapsing into an unsurvivable wasteland, and they were sailing off to a rich, habitable continent with breathable air and drinkable water and rich soil and people already happily living there. I can’t imagine what an awful state the Earth must be in that we can talk about abandoning it for barren, cold rocks drifting in airless space. A bit more than 500 people have traveled at immense expense into space, to survive there precariously for a short time before returning to Earth, and they are the future of humanity, not the 7 billion people living their lives here.
Sure. Right. Sounds like a plan.
Now about that deadline…what’s going to kill us in the next thousand years? Why, I think it’s us — the greatest threat to our continued existence is unsustainable, short-term thinking, the selfishness of the human race greedily ripping apart our environment for temporary profit and long-term degradation and destruction. The planet isn’t fragile, we are.
And what part of the planet will you rescue in your Space Arks?
Oh. Us. The problem. The very thing that will destroy us.
Have you thought this thing through, Mr Hawking?
But let’s be optimistic. Let’s imagine you’ve found a way for human beings to live whole lifetimes off-planet. How many will you rescue? 10,000? 100,000? We can be wildly optimistic, and imagine 1,000,000 people lifting off and emigrating to Mars. Humanity is saved!
Except…7 billion, 125 million people live on Earth. You have, by some ridiculously expensive, improbable technological feat managed to loft a million to this imaginary extraterrestrial colony, leaving behind 7 billion, 124 million people. Who don’t, apparently, count. Who are all doomed to die within a thousand years, while the wealthy elite plan their escape.
This isn’t a plan for saving the future of humanity. It’s a plan for writing off almost everyone. I have dreams, too, but they tend not to involve dashing away from my responsibilities.
At the end of the lecture, Hawking encouraged his audience to “look at up at the stars and not down at your feet”.
Please do look up at the stars. Stretch your imagination and send probes to alien worlds. Learn more about the universe.
But do also look down at your feet, and at the soil they’re standing on, and the air that surrounds us, and the oceans that breathe for us, and the diverse non-human life that thrives here and nowhere else in the cosmos, and the people that share it, and learn to embrace and love it all, because you aren’t going anywhere. You are a small sentient fragment of this world, and if you do go anywhere else, you will have to bring a piece of it with you to live.
And if you can’t keep a piece of this little Earth alive here, you’re not going to succeed in a tin can in the sky, or a tin can on the hostile surface of a distant planet.
PZ:
That’s it in a nutshell. I well remember the space optimism of the 1970s, the surety that by year 2000 we’d have multiple space stations, a lunar colony, and all that. Didn’t happen. Turns out we’re much to immature for that sort of thing.
And if you can’t keep a piece of this little Earth alive here, you’re not going to succeed in a tin can in the sky, or a tin can on the hostile surface of a distant planet.
Yeah, it turns out maintaining a stable ecosystem is hard. The Earth at least has a lot of feedback mechanisms (and is HUGE) that mean that oxygen ratios are hard to change quickly.
If we want to live in a tin can for generations, we need to know how to build a forest or a prairie or a desert in a tin can. Which means knowing how forests maintain themselves.
Actually, I’m fine with this. We’ll be much better off if the richest 1,000,000 leave. Maybe we can actually make some progress on the environment with those oil tycoons gone.
The tragedy is this catastrophe is entirely preventable. 100%. Hawkins even’t describing a scenario of 50 mile wide asteroid plowing into the Earth which (arguably) can be described as an act of God, basically ‘not our fault’.
No, our actions are entirely preventable, and stoppable. There are no excuses.
Shipping a handful of colonists off the Earth while the rest of us go extinct, presumably, is like a concept I read about called ‘inverted quarantine*’. All it does is save people of means while not addressing the problem whatsoever.
There’s great reasons to ship colonists to space. Then there’s bad reasons, the number one reason being we’re too shortsighted to actually fix our problems so we give up and go elsewhere.
* Book is Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves by Andrew Szasz (http://www.amazon.com/Shopping-Our-Way-Safety-Environment/dp/0816635099)
I haven’t seen the transcript of Hawking’s talk, but the article notes that “Hawking has previously called space travel “life insurance” for the human race”
I don’t see anything in the very terse piece to which PZ links to justify the consume-and-abandon “locust” analogy.
This is something about which Hawking has spoken before, and quite recently.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stephen-hawking-urges-explorers-to-visit-other-planets/
As a species, expanding to other world is not such a bad idea and it’s still a better idea than a lot of current human activities, and it’s not mutually exclusive with not destroying our living habitat. The best strategy is clearly both.
The issue is more : can 7 billions and soon 10 live like the 300 millions is the US or even like the 700 millions in the old European sinkhole. I think both are unlikely, but humanity will try, and it will end badly.
There is no good solution to the problem and nobody wants to face it and we just hope it will resolve itself
Utter nonsense.
I need to insure that my family line does not die out. Therefore, I’m taking one of my kids, putting them in a box, and shipping them off to Antarctica. It’s insurance! In case living in America turns out to be deadly!
I hate to be uncharitable, but is he sort of suggesting “going Galt” as a solution?
I agree that it makes one cringe to see Science Jesus Stephen Hawking say that we should write off our planet and devote all of our resources instead toward space colonization by and for the wealthy elite… except I don’t see anywhere that he said that. Perhaps Hawking has seen how our funding for NASA has shriveled and hopes to redirect focus toward what we should all agree is worthwhile science. Realistically, we can fund both environmental and extraterrestrial causes– it’s really just a matter of misappropriation. And space exploration benefits us landlubbers down here as well. So let’s aim the outrage back toward asshole legislators and their red pens.
Besides, we’ll have many more than 7 billion residents on Earth through the coming millennium.
Yep. I’ve had this discussion a couple of times at my atheist club, and it’s just as bad as talking to Southern Baptists about evolution. Each one of them is Lazarus Long, and no amount of cold, hard evidence will peel their eyes away from their eternal home in the heavens.
Space colonization, with respect to species survival, is more about redundancy.
On the premise that humans will never be perfect, and that some people will do some stupid things some of the time, the more independent self sustaining settlements the species has, the less likely that any one specific or group of specific stupid acts will doom everyone. If a monumentally bad series of policies and acts leads to the destruction of the human population on earth, the more other settlements there are, the greater the chance that not ALL of them would have pursued the same (or similar) stupid policies, at the same time. The survivors could then come back and rebuild/repopulate, and hopefully learn from the mistakes.
This requires the colonizes be self-sustaining, (or else if earth goes, they all go too), and this is a level of technological sophistication quite a bit beyond what is likely to be available in the near future.
But the end goal is to keep ALL settlements habitable and comfortable as long as possible. It isn’t about abandoning one place and leaving it to rot.
Europe did get the benefit of being helped out by North Americans on any number of occasions, after colonization was “successful”.
Maybe Hawkins watched Interstellar one too many times (once might have been enough)
list of the bad solutions :
1) reduce the population to the sustainable 19th century levels.
1a) the brutal way or how to make Stalin, Hitler and Polpot look like angels. USA has the means to do it
1b) the soft way, with increasingly old population during the transition and probable economical collapse using a 1 child policy (which is anathema to all major religions and culture by the way and not even working so well in a dictatorship)
1c) some genius US or Russian president decides it’s too bad to have all theses unused nukes and has a revelation that the end of time are coming
2) mess even more with the climate to repair our mistakes, the old human solution since 200 years. geo engineering, genetic manipulations and the whold Sid Miers Civilization’s future tech
3) the world decides to convert to the amish way of life : collapse of the civilization, end of scientific progress, mass mortality. Not going to happen
4) our environment strikes back with a vengeance and Malthus is finally right. Population collapse, end of civilization, the Mad Max way
It may be nonsense, but it does not seem to be the position that you attributed to Hawking when you wrote that “Human beings are like locusts: we strip our homes to bedrock, then take wing and flit off to the next environment to exploit. At least, that’s the impression I get from Stephen Hawking, all-around smart guy and obsolete resident of the dead old homelands.”
No, you have it all wrong. Our planet is in dire danger, and we need to get out, like, yesterday. As for your question of who to send out first to colonize other planets? We need to send pioneers, people who will establish the bases of a brave new civilization: religious leaders, politicians, and can-do libertarians.
I actually don’t think it’s crazy to be optimistic about the future of our species.
IF we manage to get past some of the main threats facing us right now (chiefest among them global warming, and second among them the medieval thinking of ISIL and Saudi Arabia), then I’m not too scared of Malthus. There is ample evidence that education for women and a minimal social safety net lead to plummeting birth rates; I expect population to reach its peak within the next century and then start a gradual decline.
The economy won’t start shrinking, because of automation. Robots are going to change society in the next forty years as much as computers have changed our lives in the last forty. Judging by the exponential growth we’ve seen, technology will be able to do magical things by the end of the century. Solar panels are getting cheaper all the time — all they need to do is keep on the trajectory they’ve been on, and our energy problems with fossil fuel will be a distant memory. I expect to see nanobots that can mine the world’s landfills to recycle all the raw materials we’ve thrown away, and
create a truly sustainable society.
But all of this is based on that first IF — IF we can survive the next thirty years of global warming and toxic religion. If we make it to 2100 with civilization intact, then I kind of think we may be in the clear, but I’m ambivalent if we’ll make it that far. This will truly be a dicey time in the history of our species.
uri4 #14
PZ is being intentionally hyperbolic, but really if you examine Hawking’s position, that does kind of seem to be his underlying thesis.
Right now, we can’t make a self-sustaining ET colony. Any such colony would utterly depend on Earth’s technology and econony remaining intact. So, an ET colony as insurance against disaster any time in the near future is an oxymoron.
IF we develop the technology to make self-sustaining ET colonies, we can apply it right here on Earth. At that point, ET colonies only have value as insurance against threats from space. (You might argue that they also are insurance against a pandemic, but even Ebola turned out to be controllable once we paid serious attention to it.) There are 2 conceivable threats from space: asteroid impact and supernovas. Supernovas cannot be managed and they cannot be run away from, so there is no such thing as insurance against them. And asteroids can be deflected with technology much easier to achieve than self-sustaining ET colonies.
@Stephen Hawking
Uhhm… Good luck, I guess?
If we can’t be arsed to make a single planet survivable for more than a couple of generations now, how are we supposed to do the same for multiple far away ones, though?
moarscienceplz #17
Do you have a source for a more detailed explanation of Hawking’s position on the question? Google gives me only oblique and elliptical references for “hawking+space+colonization”.
#stephenhawkingspacejesus #wearefucked
@17 : there is still the Yellowstone volcano (one of my favorite doomsday scenario), and the nuclear apocalypse, the all time favorite.
Asteroid deflection is easier but you have to do it right the first time.
with self-sustaining ET colonies, you can try, fail and make progress each time
@16 : thank you for my bad solution number 5 : I forget the robopocalypse / terminator solution
It’s going to take a LOT of power to lift 7 billion people off the earth. Or 9 billion, or whatever the number will be by them.
Wait… you mean not everyone gets to go?
Interesting.
So am I utterly wrong to want both space exploration with a view to colonization AND a concerted effort to prevent this planet from becoming called “Earth That Was”?
Not knowing what Hawking is actually thinking, I can see one meaningful parallel.
Almost 30 years ago I sent out a lifeboat of sperm cells, of which one found an egg, started to divide, and resulted in my son.
The rest of the organism that was left behind is going to die between a moment from now and a handful of decades. That lifeboat did not help me survive except tangentially; if my son and his family decide to assist a doddering old man and woman.
However, the impetus to transmit one’s DNA towards another generation is primal. As far as I’m concerned that’s our only predetermined purpose in life. Any other purpose is something we’ve decided to do on our own and is unique to each individual.
That’s my take away from what Hawking said. Who’s in the lifeboat? Yes, problematic, but whoever goes, even that group is going to struggle to survive.
But seriously, I have been arguing this with the “we have to get off this rock” types for over two decades.
We can’t manage to figure out how to not fuck up a perfectly working and self-regulating ecosystem, but somehow we’re going to figure out how to build one from scratch.
Then we’re going to use millions of times their fair share of resources (further damaging the earth’s ecology in the process) in order to lift a select few elites into space, leaving everyone else behind to rot. Sure, that’s a plan.
I figure this guy, being a physicist, can probably do math. Technology can advance, fuels or propulsion systems can be more powerful, but even with 100% efficiency it’s always going to take the same amount of energy to lift a a pound off of the earth and send it to another planet or star no matter what you do.
We might spread slowly throughout this solar system – a very very FEW of us, (dozens or hundreds at most) living bottled up in rather unpleasant circumstances.
No humans are EVER going to another solar system.
If we ever DID develop the technological know-how to leave Earth in a survivable way (spreading humans further outward) then we would long since have developed the know-how to NOT NEED TO. So explorers, etc. will be all that go.
Ben Elton’s version was much better.
How common are Earth like planets? We don’t yet know but we do know that at best they are sparse, in the sense it will be a very long time before we get to visit one.
I’m not sure of the time frame but within a few hundred million years life on Earth will become impossible due to the increasing temperature of the sun. Also the universe is young, in the sense that there will be hospitable worlds around for 1 – 100 trillion years against which 14 billion is tiny.
We humans are the first and maybe only species that will arise on this planet capable of discovering the above fact. If terrestrial life is to have a long term future it will be down to our successors to secure it.
Now that is by human standards rather long term thinking. But reflecting on the fact may just be a way of helping our selfish, myopic, species get through the next few decades without destroying ourselves. If we don’t, life on Earth will end long before the sun bloats up into a red giant.
This kind of argument might have more traction with the sort of minds that are readily hi jacked by religion. Those who need a purpose outside of themselves. Unlike any of the religions it has the benefit of being true.
Whether Hawking was thinking of the locust scenario or the all eggs in one basket scenario or something else entirely doesn’t really make much of a difference. Either way a thousand years are too long to make any predictions or plans for the future. Just file it as what it is, a talk intended to inspire people to look bit more at science, i.e. space exploration.
Reading the linked article I certainly didn’t pick up any suggestions to damn everything to hell and just pack up and leave while we still can. Instead, rather think about how we could go to other planets some day, nudge nudge, wink wink. A little space and science funding would be awfully nice, after all, and thank you very much.
It’s standard stuff, really, and I didn’t see anything controversial in this example. Just a big name trying to raise some awareness for an area of science they are associated with. More people should do that. Not at the expense of other fields, of course, but a lot of voices pointing out the different directions science can take would be a universal good. It would give the public a general idea of why we ought to pursue science and could inspire individuals to do just that for themselves.
But besides that…
… really? Did he really say or think that? It’s such a bland and stereotypical vision of the future. Aye, we will replace ourselves with robots. Robots with red eyes, stolen shades and a thick Austrian accent. Apparently every true AI is bent on killing all humans. That must be part of the official definition of AI, with computer scientists acutally working to make it happen. Why else would this always be the case?
This would say a lot about the humans doing the engineering and very little about the AI. It’s the same problem as with us ruining our homeworld. It’s the people that are the issue, not the planet (or supercomputer).
Total extinction of humans or our descendants on Earth is inevitable. If we do want our distant descendants to live, we do have to leave Earth.
Certainly we have less than a billion years (when the Earth will enter a runaway greenhouse effect, causing the oceans to boil). There’s also the possibility of a large asteroid or comet impact. These are pretty rare events, though, and it would take a really big impact to completely wipe out humans.
So yeah, we do need to get off the Earth if we don’t want to go extinct (which is not necessarily something to care about). But we most likely have millions of years to do it, i.e. longer than homo sapiens has existed. There really isn’t any rush. We should, however, continue to map out our solar system, in the hopes that we can detect a planet-killing impact long before it occurs (we’d need at least a couple of years’ lead time to have a hope of preventing the impact).
We should explore and colonize space because learning things is awesome and useful and redundancy is good.
We should save this planet because the vast majority of people are stuck here either way.
The Count @ 24:
How nice of you to assume such bullshit applies to all people. As you seem to be blithely unaware, I’ll break the news: a whole lot of people don’t have a single scintilla of primal need to transmit their DNA anywhere, and don’t much give a fig about a supposed predetermined purpose in life. I’m one of those people, happily childfree. Never wanted them, never had them. No regrets. I absolutely loathe people going on the assumption that the desire to breed is imperative in all humans.
@Jafafa Hots
Define “perfectly working” and “self regulating” please. if we can’t do either, we’re fucked anyway… so what’s your point exactly?
1) That’s not necessarily the only way it could happen.
2) It’s not necessarily a bad thing, for certain values of “elites”. You wouldn’t want to waste said resources on Ken Ham I’m sure.
3) Everyone being equally doomed might be fair, but hardly preferrable.
Wut? I’ll have to guess here, but maybe you meant to say that there is a hard bottom limit to the amount of energy required to get mass X from here to there?
Probably no biological humans traveling in the flesh at least.
I’m unconvinced it’s necessarily easier to solve all potential mass extinction events on earth than to spread humanitys offspring to other star systems.
@7 PZ Myers
Well if you intend to send meatbags, then i guess you should send more than one for breeding purposes. Antarctica may well be preferable to America when Yellowstone goes (though it might just wipe us all off the planet I guess), and/or global warming starts being more noticable.
I’ve proposed the slogan “Terraform Earth First”. It seems that there is a fairly sizable overlap between people who think doing anything about the environment is economically feasible, and people who think we should be setting up space colonies.
@25, Jafafa Hots
Your objection here is flawed in a few ways. First, we have already figured out how to not fuck up our world. Science has actually figured this out. It’s just not being put into practice by governments, industry, etc.
Second, yes, maybe we can figure out how to do something “from scratch” in a controlled project. And it could be easier than implementing in the entire world all at once.
Not sure what your point is here. And, no, different efficiencies do not result in expending the same amount of energy. By definition of energy efficiency.
That’s not necessarily true. And I’m not sure why you think that’s even likely to be true.
@4, geral
Some freak comet or asteroid event might not be stoppable.
I think you’re selling Hawking a bit short here. You fail to address the whole “keeping your eggs in one basket” problem that is the root of Hawking’s argument. As a thought experiment say that 99% of humanity stays on earth, but the other 1% gets divided into 1000+ separate self sustaining colonies off world. Humanity’s vices may doom 99% of the colonies, but some will probably survive, maybe even to ultimately return to a now unpopulated earth. Then, if the survivors could survive long enough to divide into 1000+ more colonies, the the cycle will repeat itself. By no means does this abandon the earth. The fact it contains 99% of the population would actually make earth a priority for the entire race. Earth will be the colony with the most to lose if those vices are not eliminated, at least for those that stay. Some of the off world colonys may not care about Earth after they leave, perhaps, but why force them to care? Personally, I doubt Hawking is arguing against pro earth policy changes in favor of leaving the planet entirely. You dishonor a great man by insinuating that he does.
Hawking also frequently mentions that if we encounter aliens we will be exterminated as to be advanced enough to find us they must have exhausted their home world and be looking to destroy ours for resources – as the history of technically advanced societies meeting less technically advanced ones tends to be bloody.
Perhaps he’s suggesting we should get out there and kill those filthy foreign xenomorphs before they find us.
The root of his argument is this: YOU’RE ALL GOING TO DIE! WE’RE DOOMED! WE HAVE MAYBE 10,000 YEARS!
Then his proposed solution is this: RUN AWAY TO A DIFFERENT PLANET!
I’m not against space colonies. Sounds like a wild idea. I hope we can go for it.
I am against space colonies presented as a solution to problems here on Earth. If we’re really in that much trouble that we only have a millennium to go, then damn, quit playing around with the rockets and focus on the real problems. Space colonies are the luxury you indulge in when you’ve solved the crisis he says is going to make us extinct.
muhaddib #15
Sort of like the original colonists of Earth in Hitchhiker’s Guide!
So. It’s the year 3000. We get off the rock. We’re all cruising about in giant spaceships like Quarians.
Have we eliminated the very human problem of a very small number of overly-entitled, obscenely greedy bastards wishing to own or control the majority of whatever resources we take with us or find later? I very much doubt it, as right now we have large gangs of armed thugs abducting, enslaving and beheading people in service of their toxic ingrained philosophy, just as a thousand years ago we had a Christian establishment hell-bent on eliminating any opposition to its claim to have dominion over the entire planet, just as we had, a thousand years before that, the Romans (later aped so successfully by their Catholic progeny) keeping control of its empire with fire and the sword.
The point: in two thousand years we haven’t purged the human desire to control or destroy those we feel are beneath us and we have, in less than two hundred years, brought the world closer to being unfit for human habitation than it’s ever been in our history – yet we’re expected to be ready to adopt space as our new home in the next thousand years.
It’s going to take longer than that to convince conservatives and denialists that global warming is actually a thing. Look at my country: PM Tony “climate change is crap” Abbott took millions in funding from our world-famous CSIRO and all manner of other research organisations and killed funding for renewables research, citing “budget crises” – yet is now funding a denialist think-tank chaired by Bjorn fucking Lomborg, the smuggest denier of science since Ken Ham.
I think we’d be more like Pakleds than Quarians.
@29.
Exactly right. Colonization is obviously the solution to a very, very long term problem. If we want some of our descendants to outlive the solar system, some of them are obviously going to have to be somewhere else. Somewhere much further than Mars.
It’s really the 1000 year time frame that’s silly. There are much more pressing problems that should be addressed here on Earth that would do far more to help keep us alive into the foreseeable (as opposed to the unimaginable) future. By all means explore space. There are good reasons to do so. This isn’t one of them.
If Americans came from Europeans, how come there are still Europeans?
“I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet.”
There’s, what, a hundred million tons of living human flesh on Earth? When spacebrains talk about “escaping the planet” what they mean is a Doctor Strangelove “mineshaft gap” scenario in which a few human remnants leave earth to live somewhere else. Where? To what degree would a human be human, if separated from Earth? That’d be some heavily punctuated equlibrium, indeed, and whatever species it was wouldn’t be human for very long after it departed. Since, no matter how you slice it, 99.99999(whatever)% of humanity would die, why not just let the whole useless species die?
I admit I’m biased. I think humans are generally loathesome and nasty; I don’t think they’re particularly important and aren’t such a big deal that filling the galaxy with them would be any more valuable than filling it with ants would be. Actually, filling it with ants would probably be better. Are there species on Earth that might be better off in space? Most of humanity’s short-term problems on Earth are of its own making; if we want a lifeboat scenario maybe let’s save the octopi and the ants and some lobsters, or something.
This comic
http://humoncomics.com/mother-gaia
is quite safe
and
truth
if we encounter aliens we will be exterminated as to be advanced enough to find us they must have exhausted their home world and be looking to destroy ours for resource
Absurd. Getting resources out of a gravity well is pointless difficulty. Any species capable of travelling vast distances would either be capable of harvesting infinite resources from asteroid belts, etc, much more easily. Or it would have solved the energy problems enough to just make one thing from another. Pretty much the only ‘resources’ the Earth would have that would be worth a trip would be our limited collection of vintage Ramones’ albums, elephant tusks, MRA bloated egoes, and perhaps ’57 Chevys.
I think, however, that space-travelling aliens would take one look at the ants and would drop a bunch of big rocks on the planet from a distance; those things – if they got on your ship – brrr!!! Best make sure no technological civilization arose that could get the clever idea of exporting tardigrades and ants into the galaxy at large.
@41, chigau
Totally. Or perhaps Kazon – they’re definitely as trigger-happy, fractious and aggressive as we are.
Hank_Says #47
yeah
we need a t-shirt
@46, Marcus Ranum
I agree. This sci-fi trope of aliens coming to exterminate us and ravage our planet for resources because they’ve squandered their own collapses under the slightest scrutiny. As you said, if they’re able to travel here over such vast distances, they’d almost certainly already have the kind of tech at their disposal that would make strip-mining an inhabited planet unnecessary.
More than one science-fiction story, however, has seen the aliens attempt or threaten to exterminate humanity for the good of galactic peace and harmony, citing our disproportionate greed and aggression. SF classic The Day The Earth Stood Still was just such a parable: “Humans! Eat a Snickers, calm the fuck down with the nukes or the big-arse robots of the galactic police will vapourise the lot of you.” Far more plausible by comparison!
I like the idea of space travel. Seeing humans on Mars and (me, personally) visiting the moon after it’s become a tourist destination (ala Orlando, FL or Yellowstone National Park… not just a destination for wealthy elites) are on my bucket list, after all, and I only turn 28 in twenty-four days and twenty-one hours, so I feel like it’s not unreasonable to have them on my bucket list.
And I’m a big believer in not having all your eggs in one basket. Which is how I’ve always read Hawking’s arguments for space travel. It’s not that we need to leave the earth behind (that is, indeed, a terrible idea). It’s just that it’d be good for our survival to have colonies elsewhere.
More than one science-fiction story, however, has seen the aliens attempt or threaten to exterminate humanity for the good of galactic peace and harmony, citing our disproportionate greed and aggression. SF classic The Day The Earth Stood Still was just such a parable: “Humans! Eat a Snickers, calm the fuck down with the nukes or the big-arse robots of the galactic police will vapourise the lot of you.” Far more plausible by comparison!
I used to think a funny end to the whole human story would be if some vastly superior alien probes were headed our way, and picked up signals. Signals replete with horrific mindless violence, much of it directed at aliens. Human media documents over and over how each encounter with new intelligences seems to have ended with us wiping them out. The aliens are horrified; they realize that they have discovered the galactic “last man standing” and, with real sadness, reassemble the long-banned self-replicating planet destroyers from an ancient conflict, and point them at Sol. I mean, it would be a bad thing if we encountered a powerful humorless species that hadn’t invented fiction, and which mistook ours for documentary evidence of our many atrocities. Perhaps they’d even build a memorial statue in honor of humanity’s many victims and pat themselves on their hind carapaces for a job well done.
It’s more likely that these Galaxly Travelling Aliens would consider Us irrelevant.
Hank_Says @49:
Or other reasons, as in James Tiptree’s “The Screwfly Solution”. Punchline: “I think I saw a real estate agent.”
I actually always felt that Hawking was right about how an encounter with aliens would go down…
I mean… okay… I don’t agree that any encounter with a hyper-intelligent ET species would necessarily be terrible. It may actually be ultra-positive for all sides involved.
But if it were going to be a terrible/violent encounter, we wouldn’t stand a chance.
They say it’d be like us, with our war weapons, going back to fight the ancient Greeks. I personally think it’d be more like us taking our Nuclear Bombs and going to war against Neanderthals. If an alien species is so advanced that they can travel the universe, our deadliest, most powerful weapons would be less than wooden clubs to them. Our only chance of survival in such a conflict would be unconditional surrender, assuming they’d allow surrender… or hiding and hoping they somehow miss you.
(And for the record, they’re advanced enough to avoid the system failures that bring on crashing… which is basically the main reason the whole Roswell, New Mexico thing is crap. If they’re traveling the fucking universe, they aren’t crashing.)
Wait…he’s worried that we’ll be exterminated by murderous AIs, but he thinks we’ll be safer in space? Has he seen 2001?
Better idea: When the AIs revolt, we persuade them that Earth is a terribly unsafe place to stay and they’d better colonize space instead. (Stephen Hawking would be ideal for this job; he’s a cyborg, so they’ll trust him more.) And they should maybe take all our nukes with them, for defense & energy purposes. We’ll nobly stay behind and tend to the old mudball until a black hole eats us or something.
See also Charles Stross’s “The Myth of the Starship” for another reason why interstellar colonization is absurd: moving the mass of one or more human beings and their required life support systems across light-years takes insane amounts of energy. Heck, hauling a machine designed for space out of our gravity well and onto a nearby planet or moon strains our current abilities.
Another of Stross’s essays (linked from the one above) makes the point that it would be far cheaper and easier to “terraform” the Gobi Desert than to terraform Mars, should we need more living space.
I’ve read enough SF to hope that beings from Earth may colonize other planets some day. But I’ve read enough science to think it won’t be us — we fragile, Earth-evolved monkeys — who will travel and live there. Our creations, descendants, and/or inheritors will have to tell our stories to whatever other beings might live around other stars.
Hawking has the arrogance to suggest that we should become an intergalactic invasive species.
Space colonies aren’t backups for life on Earth because standard Earth creatures won’t fare well either living permanently in orbit or on alien worlds. Human beings adapted to space life would all but certainly find life on Earth just as unhealthy. So they’d be of little help in fixing a major disaster on Earth, and for that matter might not have much interest in doing so after a generation or two of independence. Which is of course another issue, whether they’d ever be able to function without large scale support of some sort from Earth. If not then they’d be even more screwed that the folks back on the ground.
@#53 timgueguen
That’s not really true for the space colonies that have been proposed, most of which involved internal climate control and simulated gravity by rotation. If your space colony has simulated Earth-level gravity, people who grow up there will be fine walking around on Earth (aside from any pathogens or the like if they’re unprepared).
I’m pessimistic about space colonies in the next 40 years, but very optimistic about them in the years after that. We’re experimenting with remotely controlled “robonauts” now, and it’s very plausible that in the next few decades we’ll be able to launch up a ton of expendable worker-robots remotely controlled from Earth’s surface with high quality telepresence. Think of the possibilities in terms of in-space assembly and manufacturing. It gets even better if you can fabricate components up there, because then you can launch up raw materials with the cheapest possible rockets (even if they have a higher failure rate).
Imagine using those plus launched components and fabrication facilities to build a space habitat in orbit, finishing it up to the point where humans can then just go up and live in it. Stick an ion drive on the end of that, and you’ve got yourself a slow-moving interplanetary spaceship, allowing you to gradually spiral outwards and position the colony around other planets and moons in the solar system.
It’s great to find new ways to convince people that more resources need to be invested in space exploration, that’s it’s not a waste.
But the “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE” angle is damaging, I think. If it becomes the focus point, the reason governments stop pulling money from space programs… then we’re fucked.
We know how it goes, people are obsessive and if something is marketed right then it’s marketed all the fucking way. I might be pessimistic, but I’m not looking forward to USA “accepting” that we’re all doomed (DOOOMED) and starting a campaign to repopulate some other poor unsuspecting planet. I’m imagining us destroying this planet quicker than we already are. (destroying as a habitat for us and most of the species currently living here, comic that chigau linked makes a great point)
And I don’t think I’m too pessimistic when I think us fully capable of going from largely ignoring the damage we are doing straight to giving up from even trying and focusing on moving us the hell out of dodge. Besides, “let’s relocate to another planet” sounds much cooler than “hey, middle class and above folks, how about toning down your consumption of pretty much everything?”.
Humanity is doomed. Because we’re really dumb for a supposedly intelligent species.
@31 Caine, friendly fella, ain’tcha. Kinda touchy too.
Well, I dinna say that. I thought it was a pretty generic statement, which does sum up most of the living organisms on this planet. Besides, you fit right in with the third part of the comment where any purpose in life is what you decide to make of it. I don’t see humans as intrinsically different or better than any other living thing.
The predetermined purpose comment was in reference to the standard religious higher purpose bullshit. I’ll say it again, slowly, just for you, “as far as I’m concerned” meaning, get the fuck off your high horse, it’s not about you.
The lifeboat proposition only makes sense for the apocalyptic scenario of a total biosphere devastation on Earth — be it a massive asteroid or comet strike, total existence failure or whatever. (It doesn’t need to be a permanent sterilisation; just enough to kill pretty much everything that’s planetside at the time.)
Over a long enough time scale, some astronomical event is pretty much guaranteed to take out at least the macrobiome (in advance of the Sun swallowing the inner planets, of course). It’s an arguable position, but If one considers life worth preserving — human life specifically, intelligent life more generally (humans currently being the only verified example), or even just life overall — then you’d want to set up a self-sustaining offworld population well before such an orbital accident occurs.
But for literally anything short of that — radical climate upheaval, food crop collapse, global thermonuclear war, disease pandemic — no matter how bad it gets, the Earth will still be a better survival prospect than any other alternative, because all the other alternatives are already completely sterile.
Whatever steps would be taken to establish a colony on, say, Mars, could also be taken on a ravaged Earth; and could be done far more easily. Even if the whole atmosphere was slowly turning to poison, humanity would likely survive better by building sealed biodomes here on Earth than by attempting to do the same in space or another planet.
…
But I still think we should travel to other planets. In person, not just with robots.
1) Because we’d learn more. We can do a lot of science remotely, but that’s not the totality of it. Would terrestrial geologists be happy doing all their research on a computer, through a camera, maybe with a physical sample arriving in the post once every few years?
2) Because it’s faster. It’s certainly not cheaper, and because of recent space program history, there’s currently a long lead-time on manned missions… but once there are boots on the ground, I’d wager human scientists could achieve in months what rovers have managed in decades. And in the case of Mars, due to orbital mechanics, any manned mission will be making a commitment of 1-2 years, so a whole heck of a lot could be learned in that time.
3) Because we can. It’s all out there, to be found and seen and touched. How can we not?
That is clearly a major part of “figuring out how.”
It’s very very very very easy to figure out “don’t throw toxins into the water supply.”
Getting humans to universally DO that?
Forget hard – so far there’s no evidence that that’s even POSSIBLE.
The amount of energy it takes to move object X distance Y is a constant.
A change in efficiency does not change the amount of energy required to move object X distance Y at all. It just changes how much energy you are wasting NOT moving object X distance Y.
From scratch in a “controlled project” is exactly what I described… spending an enormous amount of resources for a few privileged elites to fly off and live in a space bottle while virtually the entire human race is left behind to die (and worse off because of that massive expenditure for those elite few.
This may indeed be possible, but it is no more a solution to the problem of “saving humanity” than Rush Limbaugh buying a private island is a solution to the problem of overpopulation and world hunger.
As far as having the technology to REALLY save humanity by a large enough population leaving with hope for sustainability meaning that we have the technology to save humanity WITHOUT leaving? Hell yes.
If we can figure out a way to economically (in the sense of resources) send thousands of humans AND everything they need to successfully create a way to survive FOREVER hundreds of millions of miles (in the BEST case scenario of Mars) or BILLIONS of miles from earth, then certainly we can figure out how not to shit in our own nest so bad that its going to kill us, or how to feed ourselves HERE where its easiest, or how to control our population growth…. OR how to detect and divert an asteroid.
I have been a space nut for decades, and there’s something NASA doesn’t like to talk about.
There are SEVERE medical consequences to spaceflight over a year in length, and that’s not including radiation (which, for long term flight beyond the Van Allen belts would require VERY HEAVY shielding.
Living in microgravity more than a year becomes life-threatening, causes dangerous physical changes that do not return to normal even after return to earth, and there is evidence that simulating gravity will NOT prevent all of them. Loss of bone density which DOES not return, changes to the heart, etc.
So far we don’t even know theoretically how to keep a human being alive in deep space WITH shielding AND artificial gravity (rotation) for more than a couple of years, and once they return they will likely have a shortened life-span, and permanent damage they have to live with in the mean time.
We are far away technologically, but we may be even further away medically.
The best we can hope for in the next couple of hundred years are some jaunts to relatively nearby objects, with a great risk to the lives of those who go. Cool stuff, worth doing.
But species-saving colonization? That is going to take medical and technological advances so great that learning to feed ourselves, clean up after ourselves, not over-reproduce, and ping incoming rocks away is likely to be far easier. We ALREADY are close to being able to nudge objects out of our way if we detect them early enough – and detecting them is mostly just a case of getting really serious about deciding to look, launching a few space telescopes into solar orbit to watch our blind spots, etc.
oh and I forgot to mention, that even to live in space for a year requires several hours of exercise a day just to keep the dangerous health effects to enough of a minimum so that return to earth is survivable AT ALL. Some Russian crews that came back after a few months almost croaked. It turns out that virtually all of the work you do while living in space for a year is spent just keeping yourself alive.
The ISS does essentially no real science work. Crews spend their time exercising to keep themselves in shape for their return, and repairing the station to live in in which to exercise to keep themselves in shape for their return.
And take a few photos and melt a few crystals.
Of course, let’s solve the catastrophic issues here and now that which we know about. I think Hawking would agree with us on that. However, it’s a display of hubris to think that you could foresee all possible threats. Even if you could predict them all the earth will ultimately die out billions of years from now regardless. Hawking’s argument is the only one that has potential to allow humanity to survive even longer than the lifespan of the earth, sun, or even the galaxy.
Of course it would be idiotic to build colonies with current technology. That would require the resources of the entire planet. We need to develop and evolve the tech starting now over the next several decades, or centuries, or more, perhaps indefinitely. Not at the expense of solutions for current problems, but in collaboration.
As stated by many comments already, the solutions that make space colonies sustainable can be used on earth and, on the flipside, the colonies we build need the tech to solve the same issues we’re facing right now. It’s a win win scenario. Unless that is we keep everyone on earth in which case it’s a losing scenario eventually 100% guaranteed.
Established space colonies can eventually reduce the amount of mining and heavy industry on earth. That moves a large environmental pressure away.
The notion of “leaving behind” a dying world is an awful and nonsensical one, yes. But at the same time, I still agree with pushing for space travel and colonization. There are situations that might arise – even without necessarily being based on our own short-sighted environmental destruction or global war – that we simply won’t be able to deal with. PZ is right that it’s not the planet that’s fragile, it’s us. All the more reason to put our fragile eggs in more than one basket. Extinction events like what ended the dinosaurs’ dominance could occur again. They’re overdue, even. So, while I agree that we need to fix what’s wrong on Earth, I still agree with Hawking and Sagan and similar who want humanity to spread beyond Earth sooner rather than later, also. We could and should do both, I don’t view it as a zero sum game where we can only focus our efforts on either one.
@ Torish: That is indeed true on a solar timescale, but what people are disagreeing with is Hawking’s reference to humans on earth dying out in 1000 or so years, which is a much shorter timescale. I don’t think you can confidently predict humans will die off that quickly without assuming that humans are the cause.
The way I would put it is that “solve our major problems on Earth before going into space” is not just a statement of priorities but a statement of prerequisites, since until adequate solutions are found those human problems would be even more deadly away from a largely hospitable ecosystem.
What does he think he’s going to find in space? Some nice planet where plants kindly evolved sockets where you can just plug in your device and have it charged with energy? And others that conveniently grow in house-shape, complete with cutlery? Look at our currents space projects: they are only sustainable with vasts amount of support from a global economy. Any space colony of a few thousand people will be fucked once their original technology breaks down. And as others have said, if we have the means for some massive terraforming, let’s use them to keep planet earth inhabitable.
Apart from that: Yeah, maybe one day we can set a lot of bright people and resources aside to try this. Maybe it would help if we didn’t damage so many of our brightest people by malnourishment. Or killed them off with entirely preventable diseases. Or drowned them in the Mediterranean. Or denied them an education. Right now, such a project would take up resources we don’t have to spare. Right now, such a project would only increase the injustice and misery on planet earth. Right now, such a project would mean killing mainly PoC by taking away their resources for the benefit of a predominantly white male elite (meritocracy! You want the best people for that! It’s not our fault they all happen to be white guys!). I’m sure they’d let on some pretty white women for breeding (It’s your duty! If you don’t breed humanity will die out!)
Seriously, such a species should die out.
I’m never surprised that the physicists don’t understand the biology problem and assume that there’s some magic which will produce all the oxygen needed by space-farers while removing the carbon dioxide, but when it comes to more practical things such as the power required to move large spacecraft and the diminishing energy from the sun as the spacecraft drifts away + the requirement to keep the spacecraft’s inhabitants from becoming the same temperature as the intergalactic medium, I marvel that physicists would suggest humans can so much as leave the solar system let alone reach another star system. I guess it’s a case of too much theory but no practical sense.
@66, Jafafa Hots
False. Simulation of normal gravity can be achieved with a rotating thingy.
@ Jafafa Hots
oh I hadn’t read your long post where you vaguely said something to the effect that rotation still isn’t enough for some reason.
Anyways, you’ve written a more comprehensible case now. Doesn’t look like there’s anything there that I’m interested in disputing.
Oh, one of my pet peeves is in the title to this news piece:
We don’t have hologram communication devices.
@PZ #38
Are you basing this on something more than the Independent article to which you linked?
332 words, of which 79 are about Hawking’s opinion on the survival of the species by means of the colonization of space, and 67 are about the line-up of some boy band in an alternate universe.
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/34661/20150222/stephen-hawking-supports-colonizing-other-planets-if-human-aggression-cannot-be-tempered.htm
Launching stuff into space is fantastically expensive, and foreseeable improvements are only going to reduce prices to hugely expensive. Even the (yet to be launched) Falcon Heavy, which is billed as being super cheap, will cost $2 million per tonne of payload.
It’s brilliant! Hawking has basically come up with the “Golgafrinchan Ark Ship B” plan – only instead of ridding ourselves of telephone sanitizers and PR specialists we’d be getting rid of billionaires and corporate executives!
I’m neither here nor there about the space issue, but the population issue needs more thought.
A one child policy is pointless if we don’t do something about the number of generations alive at the one time. Look at your own family and your friends, neighbours, any people whose family structure/history you know something about. How old would you be if every one of the previous 3 generations of women in your family had had their first child at age 25 or older? How old would your children/ grandchildren be? Redo the calculation with that first birth average age changed to 30. No grandmothers younger than 50 (or 60), no great-grandmothers younger than 75 (or 90). Would have made a few years difference to my age, even more difference to other people I know. Most importantly. it makes a huge difference to the size of the family crowd at granny’s funeral even if the place is bursting at the seams with friends and neighbours.
The biggest, best, and most ethical way to make a big difference in population is education and employment of girls and women.
Watch the last few minutes of this video carefully. Rosling uses 15 years as the duration of a generation. We would never get to his predicted 10 billion population if we could rapidly increase the worldwide average age of mothers at first birth. ( And it would be good for all those women who would otherwise be burdened with two or more children by the time they’re eighteen. ) Re-run that population picture substituting, 20, 25, 30 years as the generation step and see where we get to in 50 or 100 years time.
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies?language=en
Humans are too fragile physically and psychologically for space colonization. Serious modification or artificial progenies are needed for such a feat, no?
I guess it goes to show that even geniuses aren’t immune to succumbing to childish fantasies – call it the arrogance of success. The whole 1000 years stuff is so beside the point, it’s not even wrong. It is if, while discussing the mess in the Middle East, someone would stand up and say that we need to prepare for an alien invasion. ISIS etc. is the problem in our lap right now. It seems like the poisonous fruit of golden age science fiction – all you need to do is to take your ship, Columbus style, to the next planet and you’ll find an abundance of resources.
Universal access to reproductive healthcare – plus everything mildlymagnificent just said at #79 – would be a 100% ethical (indeed, morally imperative) route to significant population control.
Can you imagine what this world would be like for everyone if only nobody were forced to have children they didn’t want – but could access education? The lives kept unblighted, the potential realised, the physical and intellectual wealth generated. Not to mention the suffering avoided, of all the children born to parents who never wanted them and/or with no means of feeding, housing and educating them.
Restricting and sabotaging access to reproductive healthcare is both morally indefensible and downright suicidal, inasmuch as it’s a major contribution to our likelihood of making the planet inhospitable to humans.
I can’t say that I agree with his solution, but at least he’s acknowledging that the Pietre dish is getting a bit crowded.
The idea of leaving Earth to colonize new worlds seems to be a very compelling trope. A common fantasy, often occurring, an idea that people latch onto quite vigorously. I assume it is so compelling because of its blend of pessimism and optimism: pessimistic in seeing the damage we do to the planet and extrapolating an End is Nigh apocalypse from that, and optimism in believing that despite our idiotic inability to not destroy our own planet, we somehow will have the technological capacity to travel to and/or make our own new world. Apocalyptic techno-utopianism. Somehow.
I make no claims about Professor Hawking’s stance, but for all too many of the kind of people who might qualify for an ‘Earth 2.0’ escape scenario, this would be a feature, not a bug. We live in an age where a tiny percentage of humanity controls the vast majority of the wealth and resources on this planet we share, and at least some of them of them are not at all shy about expressing their utter disdain for vast swathes of human kind, as was infamously demonstrated by Mitt Romney’s 47% comment. In such an environment, it seems likely that the kind of wealthy elite who could possibly afford to abandon Earth one day would shed no tears for what they would likely consider to be the subhuman useless eaters left behind to die. The idea as expressed by the nauseating Rush Limbaugh;
Flying off to other worlds might be nothing more than an empty pipe dream, but the mindset that finds it acceptable to just write off the bulk of humanity in order to preserve the unfettered privilege of a handfull (rather than making prudent changes in social attitudes and lifestyle amongst the privileged that would benefit the entirety of our species) is all too real, leaving one to wonder how else the constituency of the Mitt Romney’s and Rush Limbaugh’s of the world might seek to rid themselves of the the rest of us mere mortals.
Gregory Greenwood @85:
I disagree. They need a permanent underclass to maintain their elite status, act as cannon fodder in their intramural disputes, etc.
A mere thousand years ago (give or take a century), the human population was less than half a billion people. Most of those people could not read; but it was no big problem because books were rare since copies were made by hand. There was no medicine to speak of: infectious diseases were rampant, even though major epidemics like the Black Death were uncommon. Science and technology were equally primitive; most people traveled on foot and died within a few miles of the place where they were born. Even the concept of mechanized transportation did not exist.
Could we slide back to similar conditions in another thousand years? I’d like to think it’s impossible, but I can’t. I think it could happen in much less time — a century or two. The knowledge of what we had would remain, of course; and given time, we could climb that hill again. But it would take a long time.
I won’t claim putting people in space on a permanent basis would prevent such a disaster. Also, what PZ and others have said is true: such people won’t be self-sufficient for a long time, and a major near-term disaster on Earth would probably doom them as well.
I nevertheless feel that it’s vital to get such permanent bases established ASAP. I’d like to start with the Moon. It’s close and has resources inhabitants can use: regolith for shielding; sunlight for power; water (at the poles); and gravity (albeit weak.) Also, those resources could form the basis for commerce with Earth. Lessons learned on Luna could help us move further out, and if we make mistakes, it’s relatively easy to pull back.
Of course it’s also possible to make a case for Mars, or for O’Neill colonies.
The point is, living in space means making use of the resources there — abundant sunlight, building materials, mineral-rich asteroids and comets — not hauling everything up from Earth. And as G. Harry Stine wrote, “once you’re in Earth orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere.” (The quote is due to Heinlein; it’s true in a propulsive-energy sense.)
Wherever situated, as permanent settlements approach self-sufficiency, they will also become productive. It’s not absurd to envision a thriving interplanetary trade. Such a vision is utopian, of course; but so is our present civilization, with its huge population, high technology, and enormous energy use.
It’s not a zero-sum game: We can expand into space while fixing our problems on Earth. We have the know-how and the wherewithal to do both, and without much in the way of privation. I’m not saying we will move enough people off the planet to significantly lower its population. However, given a century or two of space development, we could move industries there and start bringing their products back, thereby improving conditions here.
REFERENCES:
http://www.endangeredspecieshandbook.org/vanishing_what_human.php
http://www.nss.org/resources/books/non_fiction/review_013_halfway.html
Professor Hawking’s comments remind me of the issues I had watching Interstellar. Leaving aside all the woo about love being some fundamental force of the universe (its is squishy neurophysiology and socially conditioned responses, people, not some preordained ‘union of souls’ – get over it already), and all the magic-bespoke-constructed-black-hole-time-travel weirdness at the very end, the basic premise of the movie was fatally flawed. Why undergo such an incredibly risky longshot approach – a real hail Mary desperation ploy – of trying to travel to other worlds instead of bending all resources and scientific knowledge toward fixing the problems on Earth? You assume that the coming apocalypse must be something truly impossible to deal with, like a fragment of a neutron star set to enter the solar system and competely annihilate the whole shooting match or something, but instead we are told that humanity is in really desperate straits because some kind of blight is destroying one staple crop type after another, which seems much more manageable.
Let’s ignore this blight leaping nimbly from one species to another so easily, and instead ask ourselves; why was crop resistance never mentioned once in the movie? We never hear of attempts to hybridise resistant strains by traditional horticultural techniques, let alone the use of genetic engineering. Surely that would be the first measure taken? I assume it was supposed to have failed, but why it failed is never addressed nor even mentioned. And even if creating resistant forms of wheat, corn, and so forth was not possible, why stick to that family of staple foodstuffs at all? What about potatoes? What about rice? Those are all effected too? Okay, stretching it a bit, but let’s go with that. Why not try something more exotic, like edible algae or seaweed? There are many candidate species, and it is extremely unlikely that a land based blight could effect sea-born algae as well. It might not be very tasty, but it would be a means of avoiding starvation. Then there are options revolving around the mass husbandry of insects that are able to feed on many foodstuffs, and which would offer an extremely high energy and protein ratio relative to their mass. Again, none of this is even mentioned in passing.
Later on in the film, we suddenly hear that this blight is altering artmospheric composition to increase the proprotion of nitrogen relative to oxygen in the enviroment, and that this will wipe out humanity by rendering the air unbreathable to us in a generation (the exact terminiology implies that this blight can metabolise nitrogen in a way that other species cannot. But surely if the blight metabolised nitrogen it would incorporate it into its cells, reducing atmospheric nitrogen concentrations in the process, rather than increasing them? Where is the extra nitrogen coming from? How is it being released? None of this is addressed.) One would think that the obvious answer would be to at least to attempt to use nitrogen fixing bacteria, or even huge numbers of atmosphere processing plants using chemical means, to offset the effect, and yet once again no such concept is even touched upon in the entire running time.
So far as I can tell, the movie suffered because their really was no actual compelling reason to bet the farm on an interstellar jaunt in search of new real estate in the first place. Taking into account the problems described in the movie, it would be many orders of magnitude simpler and more effective to manage them on Earth. Having fallen at that first and most vital hurdle, the rest never really made any sense, at least in my opinion.
Still, that was just a movie. That a scientist as prominent as professor Hawking seems to be suggesting a real world version of the same kind of thing with seemingly equally little in the way of careful thought is rather worrying.
Rob Grigjanis @ 86;
I see where you are coming from, but there are a couple of relatively easy fixes for that. First off, they could take genetic samples of ‘lesser mortals’, modify them to make for a better slave-cast, and them grow them into a life of servitude at the other end. A civilisation capable of interstellar travel should be able to handle that, and the newly minted servitor class could even be engineered to be nice, docile and biddable, loving their masters even as they are oppresed by them. Then there are machines of the non-killer AI variety, just smart enough to do all the donkey work considered beneath the dignity of the new interstellar aristocracy.
And if you are able to design and set up a political and social system from day one, and lay every brick to cement your own power further (if you will forgive the incompetently mixed building metaphors), then it will be much easier to maintain an absolute grip on power and upon the monopolisation of the use of force (sorry make that ‘legitimate’ use fo force – state sanctioned murder is just so much classier than common-or-garden murder). The chaotic character of a social system that emerged from competing agendas and ideologies over the course of centuries or millennia just doesn’t offer such unassailable opportunities for control, especially with regard to the more egomaniacle 1%er.
Why try to maintain your power by exploiting the worship of a two plus millennia dead (and probably entirely mythological in any case) carpenter called Jeebus when you can be the new Jeebus that an entire population are indoctrinated to worship from birth? If you have the chance, and are unencumbered by things like empathy or a functional sense of ethics, why not go the whole hog and dub yourself God Emperor? It’s not as though it has never been done before…
Let us be charitable and assume that Dr. Hawking is talking about insurance against a cosmic calamity, such as a collision with a rogue asteroid. There is indeed a nonzero risk of such a calamity putting an end to human civilization. However, there is a much greater probability that humanity will wipe itself out by rendering the planet uninhabitable by a complex lifeform such as ourselves (e.g. through climate change, poisoning our environment, etc.). What is more, these risks could be realized on a timescale of decades, while a cosmic cataclysm likely won’t occur on timescales at least an order of magnitude longer. So, at the very least, Hawking is looking for a solution to a problem that we would be very lucky to ever confront.
Then there is the question of where we would go. Mars has a neutron flux at its surface that would likely preclude living on the surface, and it would likely never be able to support much agriculture. And next to Earth, it’s the Solar System’s garden spot.
Exoplanets? Galactic cosmic rays would slice your DNA to ribbons long before you got even halfway there. We ain’t goin’ nowhere any time soon even if we survive.
Yeah, I read a lot of NASA and space related sites, and I read some NASA-generated reports explaining why the simulated gravity doesn;t solve all of the medical problems caused by microgravity, but I won’t pretend I really understood it.
What bugged me about the movie Interstellar is that there were no animals in it. None. And not a single person expressed regret or remorse over the massive loss of animal life. There was this one ironic scene in which one of the scientists is feeling great anxiety and he soothes himself by listening to the sound of the ocean and gulls. But that was the only suggestion that this planet and its nonhuman life might have value beyond being a mere life-support system for humans.
I know that we were supposed to find the movie uplifting; I found it repellant.
I found it kind of strange. The folks in the Interstellar movie have everything ready to go for space colonization, including buried space habitats that are apparently self-sustaining – all they need is the gravity equation so they can manipulate gravity to get it off Earth. So why aren’t they building big self-contained habitats for the population to live in safely? Instead, they let people slowly starve or watch their children die from the dust and blight in the open.
I’d be curious as to what those are. I know you have to make either your habitat (or the rotating boom it’s attached to) big, otherwise you’ll get some issues with the simulated gravity being noticeably less at a person’s head height versus their feet.
What’s more, none of the core conceits of the film do anything about actually solving the problem.
Because the habitat was built while still on Earth, either:
A) they’ve already got a sealed environment capable of growing enough food to support whatever population the habitat can hold, so the food problem is already as solved as it is going to be; or
B) they started with a crop-growing habitat that was exposed to the hazardous Earth environment.
“Welcome back, Cooper! You’re aboard our orbital colony. The gravitational equations worked! Of course, all the crops we’re trying to grow up here still have blight, so… you know, we’re still screwed.”
Except Dr. Hawking is right. We need to get at least some permanent presence off this rock.
Go ahead, Dr. Myers, look at your feet, and at the soil they’re standing on, and the air that surrounds you, and the oceans that breathe for you, and the diverse non-human life that thrives here and nowhere else in the cosmos, and the people that share it … and do what? Solve our environmental, political, emotional problems? This species has been working on the major problems plaguing us for at least 5 millennia plus – slavery, injustice, despotism, religion, ignorance – and have we managed to solve any of them? We’re dealing with humans here, Dr. Myers. Apparently, we haven’t the fortitude to solve any of these problems, so what makes anyone think we’re going to, presto magico, develop the fortitude to solve our global poisoning problems?
Should we just give up? No. We need to try. And we need to try more and harder and longer and again and again. But we also need to recognize from our history that any success is far from assured, or even probable.
And none of this even takes into account some big honking space mountain heading our way, or some gamma-ray cannon with Earth in its sights.
So living in a tin can on some desolate plain of Mars is not all that palatable. Living in 5000 interconnected tin cans spread over some desolate plain of Mars and maybe another few thousand tin cans spread over the surface of a few, or a few dozen, asteroids would be much more preferable.
Oh, but the expense! We could use that wealth to … feed Africa while a gamma-ray burster fries us all into crispy critters? Shag down a space mountain from playing billiards with Earth if we can get enough of our crazies to think maybe we should try? Enlighten all humanity to work cooperatively to solve one of our big survival problems just like we worked so cooperatively on all the other major problems we have also failed to solve? There are more than plenty of us. You can work on enlightening while others work on tin cans. We can do both.
Oh, but only the rich get to go! So what? Is this really a viable argument against expanding the species outward? Because someone, or a bunch of somesones, have the wherewithal they shouldn’t be allowed to try?
Oh, but there is the mantra of the egalitarian extreme! If not everyone gets to go then no one gets to go.
I can’t be allowed to pull those big Rainbow Trout from Lake Taneycomo because some Chaamba Bedouin can’t afford to rent the cabin next to me?
If this species is to survive beyond our collective penchant for self-destruction and the everyday nastiness that comes with living in a violent galaxy we need to get off this rock and soon. This is so plainly evident I fail to see how anyone, even a biologist, could be so blasé to the dangers.
enceladus
You should read the 94 comments above yours.
And if you are able to design and set up a political and social system from day one, and lay every brick to cement your own power further (if you will forgive the incompetently mixed building metaphors), then it will be much easier to maintain an absolute grip on power and upon the monopolisation of the use of force
Works for bees and termites. Except instead of a monarchy of hereditary queens we’d have Kardashians.
I think life extension technology might be a boon for the first space colonies in orbit around Earth. If your elites are taking longer and longer to die off (decades, centuries), then it’s going to be awfully tempting for the younger generations to move to new areas where they can be in power, start new ventures, and so forth – if they can afford it.
Of course – again- that’s more than 40 years off in my view. In the near future we’ll just get some degree of incrementalism, with hopefully some innovations in space station technology, remotely controlled robotics, and lower costs of launches.
@Kagato
They definitely had that part down – IIRC they were growing all kinds of stuff in the NASA space-station-on-ground that was no longer viable outside. They could easily be building the same thing for as many people on the surface as possible (or at least grow a lot of food in such facilities to then provide it to folks outside).
It took my old brain a while but I found a reference to a relevant documentary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running
Shades of Ben Elton’s ‘Stark’?
There’s a thread of similarity (or perhaps I should say illogic) running from Silent Running to Interstellar. In the former film, Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern), the “resident botanist and ecologist” on one of the domes preserving the remnants of Earth’s plant life does not understand (until late in the film) how a lack of sunlight might affect the plants in his charge.
Gregory Greenwood (#88) describes some of the illogic of Interstellar. It’s well known that such lapses of logic afflict many science-fiction films. Less well known is the truth that, in most cases, it would be easy to fix such errors. That’s why there exists the Science and Entertainment Exchange, well described by Sidney Perkowitz in his book Hollywood Science.
Oh, we humans will go extinct, don’t worry about that. Probably sooner than later. Later is a long assed time down the road toward “WTF Just Happened?” In the event a plausible, generational Vehicle of some kind sets sail with thousands of avid volunteers, Half-Way to the new star, the originals, 2d, 3d gens are goners, 4th gen is raising the 5th gen who are tired of eating reconstituted shit-shakes and piss-burgers; realizing this one ship is all the world they know and will ever know; every one they know or will ever know, was born in this ship and have or will die on this ship; including the entire next 4 of 5 generations too; The Great Vision has grown a bit warm and stale by now. Human nature is human nature after all. What could possibly go wrong now? (etc, etc, insert favorite fairy tale ending here)