Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has some advice for the people of Earth - it's time to get off. "I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be in space," Hawking said to Big Think , a global forum that includes interviews with experts. "It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let's hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load." The physicist called humankind's survival "a question of touch and go" and referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1963 as one time people narrowly avoided extinction. He also referred to the 22,600 stockpiled nuclear weapons, including 7,770 still operational, scattered around the planet. http://www.myfoxnepa.com/dpps/news/stephen-hawking-abandon-the-earth-dpgoha-20100809-fc_9088678
If it wasn't for the money wasted on wars and other stupid shit we'd occupy dozens of planets by now.
What a BOLD prediction! He's lately had theories that are impossible to prove, but if he is correct, he'll look prophetic. Its kind of a no-lose situation for him. His previous thoughts were regarding intelligent life and that if there are aliens are out there, they would fucking own the fuck out of us.
I'm putting my eggs in the world's governments have alien technologies they're holding on to until we have to use them to save the planet basket! I'd also like to add that Steve and I share the same birthday.
He doesn't say to abandon the earth, just that if we have humans in at least two places, we're more likely to survive some sort of catastrophic event.
Exactly. And I agree with Vinyard, if it wasn't for these dumb wars, we'd spend billions more on speeding up going to more planets and designing a plan for having people live in the space.
The search is on for exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) that are "Earth-like." They've found a couple that they think might be. The main problem is that exoplanets are too far away to currently "look at" its surface. They have to guess by checking how far it is away from its star (and how hot the star is) to determine whether it would be the right temperature and also seeing what it looks like in other light spectrums, which can help them evaluate what gasses make up its atmosphere.
being nit-picky here, but you don't need "other" light spectrum, the visual works just fine! to the rest of that!
Hmm, well I'm not an expert, but the shows I've seen about it talked about using light signatures in things like infrared in order to figure out the composition of the atmosphere.
I'd venture to put forth the theory that, were it not for wars/military spending, there would be a lot less and/or slower technological and medical advance.
If we all get wiped out by some catastrophic event, why do we care if we all got wiped out? Nobody would know the difference.
fair enough, my memories from school of spectroscopy were of elements, not compounds, so they could have a lower wavelength, but that seems counter intuitive with more mass.
