Physicist Stephen Hawking says that the human species has only 100 years to populate another planet to ensure its survival. His claim, for a new series of BBC science show Tomorrow´s World, has stirred controversy.
The big question is why Hawking has revised his previous estimate, voiced just last year, that we have 1000 years to enact an escape plan. Why bring the timeframe forward to within a single human lifetime?
Sure, politically the world feels edgier than it did a year ago, and certainly scarier than at the end of the cold war and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But do we have scientifically valid reasons to conclude that the existential threat has risen drastically of late?
The chances of being hit by a big asteroid or fried by a nearby star going supernova have not increased. Contact with potentially hostile aliens does not seem to be any closer. There is no evidence so far of intelligent life out there and we are emitting fewer deliberate signs of our existence (even if a few messages are still being beamed into space, such as one in the direction of the star Polaris on 10 October 2016).
So, Hawking´s reasoning must be based on something else. Perhaps he’s worried that nanotechnology will take on a life of its own and transform the planet into grey goo? And he has certainly pondered the rise of artificial intelligence smarter than humans, which could eventually deem us a threat and extinguish us.
Bottom line, is that it is highly doubtful that humanity in its present societal form, will ever be allowed to expand beyond the solar system. Colonists living on the moon, Mars, Titan, and other isolated solar system outposts, would face a harsh, lonely, and torturous slow death should something catastrophic befall Earth. Our only truly long term hope, is for some kind of serendipitous global awakening of human consciousness beyond avarice and institutional violence and warfare. But that is looking increasingly unlikely by the day. To read more, click here.