40 replies to this topic

[Live Forever]

Here is the link to the story

Hawking says humans must go into space
Predicts increased risk of disaster that will destroy our planet
AP June 13, 2006

HONG KONG - The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday.

The British astrophysicist told a news conference in Hong Kong that humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years.

"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Hawking, who arrived to a rock star's welcome Monday. Tickets for his lecture planned for Wednesday were sold out.

HONG KONG - The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday.

The British astrophysicist told a news conference in Hong Kong that humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years.

"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Hawking, who arrived to a rock star's welcome Monday. Tickets for his lecture planned for Wednesday were sold out.


Hawking with his nurse during a visit to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

[Live Forever]

So, what do you guys think? I think it is a wise strategy, also for the ability to sustain a larger population. I am down for living on the moon or Mars for awhile.

[stephen]

I tend to lean towards space travel / research as being a waste of valuable funds... that could be put towards life extension.

A lot of current space travel (humans to the moon and long-range probes) don't really give us many benefits. Satisfies some curiousity, and serves primarily as a "my space program's bigger than yours, nyah-nyah" for countries.

I want my NASA taxes back so I can give it to the M-Prize. [lol]

[Live Forever]

Luckily it is not an "either/or" option. We could do both. Plus the fact that I don't think if they took funds away from NASA any of it would go to life extension research. I am much more for science and technology improvements over other the other "pork" projects, personal wars, and other stuff that Congress funds.

[rjws]

Id live on the moon, but i dont think its gonna happen anytime soon. What ever happened to the artemis project?

[knite]

I tend to lean towards space travel / research as being a waste of valuable funds... that could be put towards life extension.

If you dont bother to leave the planet, eventually you will outlive it.

[maestro949]

Until we can generate much larger amounts of energy on a whim I would suggest we hold on trying to build the tech to build extra-terrestrial habitats unless it can be done economically. Lots of energy will be required to terraform the landscape into something more hospitable and also transform the molecular landscape into biologically useful organic materials. I'd rather see us focus investments in life sciences (health and aging via reduction), energy research (efficiency & nuclear) and physics (e.g. CERN type projects) so we can life a more effective life here.

[Athanasios]

I agree maestro, but i also want to see the space elevator built.

[quadclops]

RJWS

What ever happened to the artemis project?

Seems to still be running. Here's the homepage:
http://www.asi.org/

[jaydfox]

Well, we can definitely work on both. If there weren't enough funds to work on both full tilt, I'd say work on life extension tech first. But there's funds to spare (~2 trillion dollar budget, less than 1% being spent on NASA and NIA combined).

[maestro949]

NASA Budget & 10 Year Plan

NASA Budget. Seems adequate to me. I don't see a need for a rush to get there unless we can haul a lot of material, and a few dozen 4th gen nuclear reactors and enough fuel rods for a few hundred years to ensure any colony built could be self sustaining and could return to earth many years after whatever disaster happens to happen. Otherwise it seems pointless to have people doing experiments on a dead rock that could just as easily be done here.

[Live Forever]

They keep cutting the NASA Budget, which keeps leading to projects being cut. I had heard that a lot of the science based projects were being looked at to be cut to focus more on sending people back to the moon and eventually to Mars. I think this would be a travesty.

The cost of the Iraq war so far has been in the neighborhood of $320 billion, and the proposed budget (according to the link maestro provided) for fiscal year 2007 is about $1.7 billion.

This is just the Iraq war, and not all the other pork barrel projects going on. We should be funding more science and technology, not less of it. I think everyone agrees that life extension should come first, but that isn't a choice to have to make. Now, I would say I would rather space (or life extension, or health care, or a million other things) be funded rather than the Iraq war, (or other nonsense they spend their budget on). I might agree with you maestro, if the cost to do the experiments on the "dead rock" took up even a fraction of the cost of the war, or other stuff, but their budget is so exceedingly small at the moment (in comparison to other stuff) that I say let them do what they want, and in fact I would be in favor of giving them more.

[knite]

Until we can generate much larger amounts of energy on a whim I would suggest we hold on trying to build the tech to build extra-terrestrial habitats unless it can be done economically. Lots of energy will be required to terraform the landscape into something more hospitable and also transform the molecular landscape into biologically useful organic materials. I'd rather see us focus investments in life sciences (health and aging via reduction), energy research (efficiency & nuclear) and physics (e.g. CERN type projects) so we can life a more effective life here.

The thing that most interests me about space travel is the amount of energy you can create by dropping stuff into a strong gravity well, seems to me that it promises to be the most efficient form of energy generation possible, main drawbacks are finding a sufficient well (black hole would be best), and figuring a way to transfer that energy. Certainly NOT trivial, but the 99% matter/energy conversion is pretty enticing.

[Infernity]

He is right, I always thought how sad it would be if the World War III would begin before we can escape any elsewhere. I always thought this is sad we have no where to escape. On the one hand, sounds sucks to live there, on the other hand, safeier after all heh.


-Infernity

[Mind]

I like the tought of space travel because it fulfills the human desire for exploration and discovery and it would be a nice back-up plan (space colonization) if something terrible did happen on this planet. What I think might limit the desire for space travel in the future is the creation of realistic virtual reality (maybe within 10 years). Why travel to the moon or Mars when virtual worlds will be 1,000 times more exciting, thrilling, beautiful, exotic, whatever. Space might be kind-of boring for younger generations who grow up with VR.

[Athanasios]

I was thinking the opposite, Mind. I was thinking that there would be no way people would space travel without the "holodeck"

[emerson]

I always thought how sad it would be if the World War III would begin before we can escape any elsewhere.

As much as I tend to be more aprehensive about our planet being hit by a giant space rock, I have to admit that I've had the same thought that you're expressing. Though on top of it, I also usually find those thoughts drifting to how tragic it would be if humanity 'did' manage to have a colony on the moon, mars, or somewhere else during that time. Tragic in the sense that I could see us having that one last chance at life, at rising further to something greater than what we are now, and then throwing it all away to fight one last great war in that coloney in a fit of displaced anger and desire for revenge against an enemy which is allready dead.

[maestro949]

It's a good point emerson. The problems we have here on this rock we would simply take with us to the little one orbiting us.

[Infernity]

We'd grow so fat on the moon though [mellow]

-Infernity

[tomjones]

I myself would prefer to live on venus than mars or the moon...
But I agree we need to seriously start thinking about moving.

.::~Jack~::.

[psudoname]

Well, we definitly should go to space sometime, but in the immediate future - pre singularity - it's farly impractical.

You are basically talking about the aim of http://lifeboat.com/ex/main. Evan if you could get a self sustaining colony working, while it might manage to preserve the human race, the catastrophy you were running away from would kill eveyone left on earth- which would be almost everyone. Even if you were on the caolony, the catastrophy would slow progress to the extent that you would die before lie extention gets going.

So it might save the human race, but we would all die.

On a brighter note, in the post singularity future exploring the univerce will be easy :-)

[psudoname]

Assuming WWIII hasn't destroyed the world, that is.

[MichaelAnissimov]

Seriously, Stephen Hawking should join Lifeboat, or shut up. He's one of those people that doesn't realize - a human-indifferent superintelligence can hunt you down in space just as easily as anywhere else...

Stephen Hawking is starting to turn into the master of half-baked transhumanist suggestions. After the "humans need to enhance themselves to beat AI thing", this follows suit nicely.

[psudoname]

A space colony would be no defence from AIs but could survive grey goo or biowarfare.

And humans could possibly enhance themselves to beat AI by uploading/DNI, but Stephen Hawking sugested we enhance ourselves with genetic engenering which will always lose to AI in the long run.

[jaydfox]

And humans could possibly enhance themselves to beat AI by uploading/DNI, but Stephen Hawking sugested we enhance ourselves with genetic engenering which will always lose to AI in the long run.

Agreed. In the long run, AI will always have the advantage. Our legacy biological substrate will either hinder us, or become obsolete. The best we can hope for, in order to "stay ahead", is that human consciousness can safely be "uploaded" and slowly modified until we're basically AI's ourselves. I'm not convinced this option is remotely likely, but I can't prove it's wrong, and others seem rather fond of this option, so I mention it...

While we can't stay ahead, enchancement can raise our intelligence significantly enough to give us better control over the initial direction the singularity takes. That alone is worth it. It may also help us to be more compatible in the post-singularity world (Please welcome our new software overlords...).

(BTW, when I say that uploading and becoming AIs isn't remotely likely, I'm not referring to whether our thoughts and memories and style of thinking can be uploaded. This seems obviously feasible at some point. I'm referring to whether we ourselves can be uploaded. This is a philosophical question, not a technical one, at least at this point. As far as I'm concerned, it's all "dark" in the computer.)

[knite]

Well, I think many here overestimate how intelligent an AI would be, or could be I suppose. It will not be an all-seeing proto-god. The one general requirement for learning, which is what any AI would excel at to such a degree as we could not comprehend, is experience. This could come in the form of print, but as we all know, print gives you tools, and one must learn how they are to be used in the real world. So, an AI could possibly absorb the whole of human knowledge, after which he would need to begin the very slow process of garnering his own knowledge, which requires experiment and experience, to become any better than us in a technological/civilization standpoint. The one thing an AI could not do is predict and prepare for any and every contingincy. There could be a race of extremely stupid creatures, who eat uranium, and bodies contain enriched plutonium, and take over a planet by commiting kamikaze nuclear strikes over every square inch of the thing in the first few seconds. No way to beat that, the AI would have no logical path to follow for that possibility to come about, but it did, and by the time it learned it, it would most likely be much too late. If it survived this (or enough possibilities beforehand ran through its logical switches about being attacked planetside) the first thing it would do is leave the planet, because a planet is probably the worst defensive position possible. Trying to defend every direction in a 3 dimensional space against a concentrated force is like trying to protect yourself from a bullet by taking one kevlar vest and spreading the material completely around your body, it becomes dilute and ineffective. Sorry, I got to rambling, it just an interesting subject to think about. Anyway, all I'm saying is that a superhyperincreditelligence would not be infallible and invincible, logically it cant be.

[Live Forever]

I don't think Hawking was speaking chiefly of AI when he made his comment. There are other things (nukes, a meteor, etc.) that he was probably thinking about.

[emerson]

So it might save the human race, but we would all die.

This is one of the very few instances where I place the species above myself. For all our failings, I love consciousness. And when we speak of consciousness, there's an implicit statement that that we're talking about a mishmash of higher level reasoning constrained, influenced, and pushed into a position of rationaliser for actions brought about by our nature as a great ape. I strongly suspect that there's other life in the universe able to apply reason, deduction, and abstract thought to problem solving. What I'm not so sure about is whether intelligence removed from not only the influence of those great ape thrones, and even mamalian genetics for that matter, would function in a similar enough manner to put me at ease about the universe being left without active intelligence.

I 'hope' that in some ways there would be similarities. That human intelligence is far enough along that at our very best, when we're actively working with it, we're able to lift one mental foot, or even just a toe, off the ground of apehood into a totally theoretical realm of universally applicable reason. But that too is just one bit of speculation floating around with the equally possible notion that enough of our existence is driven by unconscious processes later rationalised into seemingly purposeful motivation that we'd appear just as unthinking and mechanically driven to an alien intelligence as an ant does to us. And, that progression brings up yet another question as to whether it really matters to me, personally, if human appreciation of the universe is removed were something much greater ,even if totally alien to our own, still around. It goes back a bit to another question within this forum, of whether a dead universe would have had any meaning in the long run once there's nobody left to appreciate it.

It can be fun to muse on, but I agree that the better option is to just not die in the first place. [thumb]

[featherheadfop]

Hawking is right, I say. As far as where it falls on the list of things we need to fund: There are so many things we ought to fund, I don't have any decided preferences, but just reading the news makes me quite apprehensive about the future of the human race. If we're putting a premium on genuine human life, not AI, it might be easier to just head outside of our solar system for new homes (ones which would be already hospitable to human life), despite the tremendous fuel requirements and difficulties associated.

[Shannon Vyff]

Proud to now be supporting Lifeboat-- you know--kids really like the idea!