Skip to main content

Hawking Says — Beware Mankind!

Stephen Hawking says that humanity must find an alternate to planet Earth in the next couple of centuries failing which our chances of long-term survival are slim.

I am hopeful that we will certainly find habitable planets in the vast oceans of space that is our visible universe.

I am sure there will be many good candidate planets for colonization in the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy itself.

What is disheartening is to realize the enormous vastness of galaxies. When you talk about interstellar space and interstellar travel, distances inevitably need to be measured in hundreds and thousands of light years just to begin with.

And the rocket technology that we have mastered so far is woefully inadequate for the task of making these interstellar journeys even inside our own galaxy.

Certainly, our little, tiny planet Earth will be found to be suffocatingly small for an ever burgeoning population of billions of humans.

But there's an irony there though. As long as parts of the human race continue to have babies in significant numbers, the battle for scare resources becomes that much more desperate. And we have to waste our energy and effort to find answers to the basic challenges of feeding the teeming multitudes.

Broadly speaking, we can't devote our attention and energy fully to the task of developing a 'sufficiently advanced form of technology' unless we rise above more basic problems.

We are yet to eradicate polio and TB, malaria, and HIV.

Surely, their eradication will come to pass though nobody can give an accurate prediction of when that will happen.

I think I should preserve my brain using cryonics techniques so that I can be brought back to life in another thousand years ...

I want to see where humanity will be in 3001 A.D.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Longforms and 'Best of 2017' Lists and Favorite Books by Ashutosh Joglekar and Scott Aaronson

Ashutosh Joglekar's books list. http://wavefunction.fieldofscience.com/2018/03/30-favorite-books.html Scott Aaronson' list https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3679 https://www.wired.com/story/most-read-wired-magazine-stories-2017/ https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/12/the-best-books-we-read-in-2017/548912/ https://longreads.com/2017/12/21/longreads-best-of-2017-essays/ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/21/world/asia/how-the-rohingya-escaped.html https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-journalists-covered-rise-mussolini-hitler-180961407/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/artificial-intelligence-future-scenarios-180968403/ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/01/20/citizen-kay https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/where-we-are-hunt-cancer-vaccine-180968391/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/dna-based-attack-against-cancer-may-work-180968407/ https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/12/22/dona