

Stephen Hawking: mankind must move to outer space within a century - d4nt
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7935505/Stephen-Hawking-mankind-must-move-to-outer-space-within-a-century.html

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d4nt
Given the distances involved, I'd say our best bet would be build self
sustaining "arks" that would travel around indefinitely. Rather than aiming
for another planet.

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anigbrowl
This idea is treated (lightly, but deftly) in _Wall-E_ and _The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy_. Both seem to hint at the same underlying premise: if you
want to preserve human life in giant space ships, then resource management
will need to be largely automated - otherwise you probably won't make it out
of the solar system before people start shooting each other for control of the
steering wheel. Kurt Vonnegut offers more cynical vision (surprise) in a short
story called _The Big Space Fuck_ : by the time we reach a consensus on the
necessity, the most we can hope for is to put a tiny subset of our society in
deep freeze and hope it hits fertile ground elsewhere.

I'm a bit surprised by Hawking's rather apocalyptic tone; then again, few
people are as well qualified to contrast our scientific potential and
relatively abundant resources with the way our species actually distributes
their fruits. Hawking says relatively little about his own disability, but I
imagine he's keenly aware that his prospects in a future resource-depleted
society would be no better than those in a past or present underdeveloped one.

I'm unsure why reports of his remarks invariably mention planets and
interstellar travel. Certainly that's the long-term scenario, but in the
meantime we have to deal with the significant but manageable transition to an
interplanetary economy rather than an intercontinental one. As a practical
matter that requires more space stations and a way to exploit the
mineral/energy resources of asteroids to facilitate in-space construction by
robots. We really need to get away from the tropes of heroic humans in
spacesuits. Individual 'first person on the planet' moments are over - that is
no more sensible than Columbus setting sail across the Atlantic in order to
dig up some gold with a shovel. Future great explorers will be directing large
industrial fleets, not firing thrusters on a control panel or monkeying about
in zero-g.

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Aegean
I didn't know about this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis>

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Aegean
That which who downvoted me, did you actually read Hawking's article?

