Stephen Hawking says we should colonise space

Stephen Hawking, in a talk in NASA's 50th Anniversary Lecture Series, says we should go out into space and colonise other planets.

Transcript of the lecture - scroll down a bit past all the waffle from the introductory speakers. There's also a link to a Youtube video of him delivering the lecture, but watching Stephen Hawking on video is a bit like watching paint dry.




Sounds good on paper, but could we? Should we? We're not talking about a cheap weekend package deal to the Moon, or even a year-long luxury cruise to Mars and back. It would take - what? half a lifetime? - to get to, say, Saturn, and centuries or millennia to reach other stars. What's worse? - being born and growing up knowing nothing but the inside of an Austrian cellar, or of an interstellar spaceship? Would they all go stir crazy? What about the long-term effects of weightlessness, and cosmic radiation? Or is Hawking right, and have we already buggered up Planet Earth to the point where our only chance now is to go out and find another planet to wreck?

No

Too many poeple on the earth? Pack them all off into space ships that will take a life-time to get to their destination - problem solved.

Crime could indeed be a career, in the past we shoved off down under, tomorrow we will ship then off to some are end of the galaxy planet to set up a colony.

It would be natural progression to head out towards the stars when and if we develop the tech to do so. People have always travelled to new places out of either need of interest.

Space is just the next place to go.

Yo, perfect. We can't get our act together here, so we'll all just search out our own little piece of heaven so we can continue to be the same ol' dirtballs we've always been. If I were a highly developed alien culture, I'd put a quarantine around this solar system and not let us out until we learn to pull our heads out of our asses.

I am not going anywhere without Scotty manning the engines.

AlcoKirk:Scotty I need that warp drive in 3min.

Scotty:But Käptain I need at least 2days to...yada yada yada.

Why is Interstellar travel beyond so many peoples imagination? It's not like were gonna fall of the edge of earth. If the human race could have walked to mars they would already be there.

After all this evolution we have to sit here and bitch about starvation. But if your stomachs full you usually have sex cause theres nothing else to do. Then the kids come yada yada yada. But where will they all go after a few cycles? we cant always count on the global warming scam to solve the sex problem.

Is there a chart out yet with a temp/sex ratio?

Would we still be able to get real bacon and brown sauce?

More's to the point, who's going to do the ex-pat web forum?

And who is going to bitch that it is only a forum for expats on Mars?

Or complain about the spelling of the little green men! Or about letting Neptunians onto a forum for native speakers. Is there weather in outer space? What am I going to complain about?
This bit was simply great, really, should we go out there and spread our genes? Or should we rather let Planet X destroy us and do the universe a favour?

Sin & eurovol
But MajorBummer: Mars IS a chocolate bar, isn't it???

Has the Mars bar company sued the planet for using there name?

@thefirelane: According to that Wiki article about Project Orion:


We might have to travel even farther than that to find a nice cozy planet we would want to call "home". 50 light-years is still quite local on a galactic scale. That would take over 500 years (including the time needed to accelerate/decelerate). Could the starship carry enough fuel for such a long journey?

I think Hawking is right, and we should rise to the challenge. But just think of the timescales involved. No point sending humans to found a new colony unless they know where they're heading, so we would first want to send some unmanned reconnaissance probes. That would be at least 500 years just waiting for the results of that mission. Is there any chance of keeping a science project running that long? How many world wars and other upheavals would ravage civilisation on Earth during that time?

Maybe we should start terraforming some of our closer neighbours - gradually (over 1000's of years) transforming them into nice places to live, with a biosphere, and an atmosphere, and - yes, dear MajorBummer - weather. I think it would be really cool to live on one of the moons of Jupiter. Just look at the spectacular view:


(image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Weather doesn't get much more awesome than that.


Job requirements: megageek technical skills, interstellar diplomacy, and an appreciation of the finer points of Marmite.

Our ancestors used to start building a cathedral, knowing that their great great great great grandchildren wouldn't get to see it finished. The Kölner dome might be a bit extreme but that was a 800 year building program. And churches aren't even useful.

Obviously society had gone backwards. If it doesn't pay off with 1.5 years you're not going to get funding.

Step 1: Have NASA convince engineers it can grant eternal everlasting happiness after life.
Step 2: NASA engineers work tirelessly their entire life for a fruitless project.

It is very expensive and complicated putting humans into space.
I think, until we have developed the technology for humans to travel to other planets worth inhabiting, we should concentrate our efforts and money on micro-robotic type experiments. Those two previous Martian rovers were fantastic but can easily be improved upon.
So Stephen Hawking is right in that the colonization of space should be our long term goal but right now I don’t see the point in putting humans into space or on dead planets.

I think the first thing that people will do after finding a particular location on some planet in space, is to test WMD's on that planet.

On the flip side, colonising has its own advantages. All the folks (or countries) who wanna fight a war on Mother-Earth should be told to "Go And Fight There!". There should also be a warning that they shouldnt use WMD's which would uproot a speck of that planet, force it out of its gravitation and make it fall on Earth (we being dumb, would think of that as a Meteor)..wuhahha

Apart from that, it can be used for toursim. We can work for sometime over here and spend some 'light years' there for vacation (hope they have some Riviera regions). Also, we can use 'Black-holes' as garbage bins.

@fRe4k,

Close but what will happen is that we will say that the single or 4 cellular inhabitants of the planet have WMD's and are planning to use them against us.

We will then get the UN to ask, when they don't answer we will send an inspector. He will report that the locals are not cooperating and have refused to answer his/her questions.

We will then be forced to invade to remove this very obvious, invisible and non-existent threat.

Years down the line while our troops and people are dieing from all kinds of unknown infections we will stand up and say..

'Hey, guys, it may seem the intelligence was not quite 100% on the mark but we are still looking and asking the locals'...

After a few years a leaf, 1 branch, a tri-cellular animal and the petal of a local flower will be tried and sentanced to execution by a green bush and a purple rose.

Oh, and before all that oil will be detected. Forgot to mention that bit, not on purpose, just a simple, little mistake that no one will take as being in any way deliberate...