"Spreading out into space will completely change the future of humanity," says Stephen Hawking. It "may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth".
The world-famous physicist was talking at a recent science festival in Trondheim, Norway. And his keynote speech to the Starmus Festival about giving humanity a sense of purpose raises some very important questions about our views of positive futures.
For Hawking "a new and ambitious spaceprogramme would excite (young people), and stimulate interest in other areas, such as astrophysics and cosmology". Humans have to leave Earth, he explained, due to an array of threats including asteroid strikes, resource depletion, overpopulation, deforestation, decimation of animal species, and the effects of human made climate change (particularly rising temperatures and melting ice caps).
Yet hearing such a viewpoint in response to the challenges we face leaves me cold. We cannot flee theapocalypse forever, leaving a chosen few to flourish on other planets; we need positive visions for humanity here on Earth.
I am not a physicist, I research and teach in a business school about how people andorganisations go about taking action to address sustainability challenges, such as the global ecological threats mentioned by Hawking.
The concept of sustainability has been traced back to ideas that emerged in forestry about 300 years ago to sustain yields. The general implication of this expansive and slippery concept is that we need to work out ways to sustain both the social (including economic) and ecological processes that enable us to live in ways that we value.
Key questions are raised by Hawking's speech and we can use these questions to briefly explore Hawking's ideas about a future for humanity:
Hawking's suggestion is that by establishing colonies on the moon or Mars we are helping to guarantee that some form of human life will continue beyond Earth being humanly habitable. What is being sustained is a protected bubble of a small selection of humans in artificially created Earth-styled environments somewhere in space.
"Spreading out into space will completely change the future of humanity," says Stephen Hawking. It "may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth".
The world-famous physicist was talking at a recent science festival in Trondheim, Norway. And his keynote speech to the Starmus Festival about giving humanity a sense of purpose raises some very important questions about our views of positive futures.
For Hawking "a new and ambitious space programme would excite (young people), and stimulate interest in other areas, such as astrophysics and cosmology". Humans have to leave Earth, he explained, due to an array of threats including asteroid strikes, resource depletion, overpopulation, deforestation, decimation of animal species, and the effects of human made climate change (particularly rising temperatures and melting ice caps).
Yet hearing such a viewpoint in response to the challenges we face leaves me cold. We cannot flee the apocalypse forever, leaving a chosen few to flourish on other planets; we need positive visions for humanity here on Earth.
I am not a physicist, I research and teach in a business school about how people and organisations go about taking action to address sustainability challenges, such as the global ecological threats mentioned by Hawking.
The concept of sustainability has been traced back to ideas that emerged in forestry about 300 years ago to sustain yields. The general implication of this expansive and slippery concept is that we need to work out ways to sustain both the social (including economic) and ecological processes that enable us to live in ways that we value.
Key questions are raised by Hawking's speech and we can use these questions to briefly explore Hawking's ideas about a future for humanity:
What is being sustained?
Hawking's suggestion is that by establishing colonies on the moon or Mars we are helping to guarantee that some form of human life will continue beyond Earth being humanly habitable. What is being sustained is a protected bubble of a small selection of humans in artificially created Earth-styled environments somewhere in space.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-humanity-sustainability-abandoning-planet-earth.html#jCp