When I read that in the news my reaction was exactly this: Duh
I mean really, was that a hard deduction?
Easier said than done Hawkings my man.
Like what are we going to live off of with the current or even foreseeable technology? We going to eat asteroids and space debris? These distances in space are ridiculously far, and unless we have some kind of wormhole technology or stargate we're not really going to travel to another solar system. It takes like a year to get to Mars, and we're talking about things that are thousands of times further away.
Sorry, reality is harsh. Technology isn't something magical, like the media and science magazines lead people to believe. Just because they release technology progressively to not break the economy and systematically squeeze profits off people it doesn't mean that eventually things are going to double up into whatever we will. There are actually scale limitations. It's like saying a bacteria will one day figure out a way to change the channel on your TV remote.
It's more about nanotechnology and genetic engineering. Is it actually possible to reconstruct matter into anything without tons of lost energy and are there renewable energy resources? If not then we're fucked, so sad, too bad. The organic plague known as humanity will die off like countless other species do on a regular basis throughout the universe. We need some kind way to sustain ourselves indefinitely to actually "survive". So we propagate for another million years in space spending our time trying to propagate indefinitely, but we run out of resources and die anyway.
Meanwhile this guy is still in a wheelchair and we're shooting people off the planet with really powerful missiles.
Now, I'm not against space exploration at all. I think it would be cool. I always wanted to be a space pirate. It would be exciting times, and "we" (I use that term loosely as the collective I incidentally belong to against my will) would just let the middle east enrich uranium all day and blow themselves up.
Added this----
Eldo wrote:This is easily said then done...first, we need to have the money for it, which would cost the same amount of cash as eradicating poverty in a country, and secondly, I don't think we have the technology to start a settlement or colony in outer space, without the budget. This all sounds so cool, but I think the money should be better spent on dealing with the problems here on Earth. Unless there's a dozen tycoons that are willing to fund and provide the budget for this, it doesn't seem at all possible for now.
I agree naturally with the first part.
Money isn't a fact of life. It's an imaginary currency we made up and abide by and regulate to control societies labor and production. You're making it sound like money has been around forever. People actually survived before money was invented. They grew or hunted their own food and drank from the streams.
Welfare as well as money is a relative concept, and can change and adapt if people are willing to accept it. What if we had a way to reproduce something from almost nothing? If you had a machine that turned your trash into a new computer? Would there be any value to money? Would you still work?
See it's a classic catch 22. We only have this many people and the system we do, because we have so many people and the system that we have. So this is one of those "for your own good" type of bullshit systems that only progresses the problem from the idea of an old solution.
Imagine a society where no one works and we have machines do all our labor and we just hang out all day and do whatever we want without a care in the world. It couldn't happen overnight obviously. I think it kind of contributes to the problem by trying to focus on "money" and "taking care of the problems on Earth". That can all end tomorrow with an nice giant rock from space.
I guarantee you won't be worrying about what kind of money is going into the school systems if you wake up to find the sun blocked out for the next 1000 years.
The society problems are all relative. You can't fix these systems, they weren't devised with reality of today in mind. It's just patching a leaky roof that's going to continue to erode.
Bottom line here, you actually have to survive to bitch about problems with things.
