Hawking Says Space Colonies Needed
Jun 13 8:49 PM US/Eastern

By SYLVIA HUI
Associated Press Writer

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 Earth, world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday.

Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years, the British scientist told a news conference.

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

Hawking said that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever- increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

The 64-year-old scientist _ author of the global best-seller "A Brief History of Time" _ uses a wheelchair and communicates with the help of a computer because he suffers from a neurological disorder called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

One of the best-known theoretical physicists of his generation, Hawking has done groundbreaking research on black holes and the origins of the universe, proposing that space and time have no beginning and no end.

However, Alan Guth, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Hawking's latest observations were something of a departure from his usual research and more applicable to survival over the long-term.

"It is a new area for him to look at," Guth said. "If he's talking about the next 100 years and beyond, it does make sense to think about space as the ultimate lifeboat."

But, he added, "I don't see the likely possibility within the next 50 years of science technology making it easier to survive on Mars and on the moon than it would be to survive on earth."

"I would still think that an underground base, for example in Antarctica, would be easier to build than building on the moon," Guth said.

Joshua Winn, an astrophysicist at MIT, agreed. "The prospect of colonizing other planets is very far off, you must realize," he said.

Hawking's "work has been highly theoretical physics, not in astrophysics or global politics or anything like that," Winn added. "He is certainly stepping outside his research domain."

Hawking's comments Tuesday were reminiscent of the work of American astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who was a believer in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Sagan, a Cornell University professor and NASA-decorated scientist who died in 1996, noted that organic molecules, the kind that life on Earth is dependent on, appear to be almost everywhere in the solar system.

Sagan played a leading role in the U.S. space program, helping design robotic missions and contributing to the Mariner, Viking, Voyager and Galileo expeditions.

But his work also focused on the search for habitable worlds and intelligent life beyond the solar system, as well as theories about life's origins, ideas popularized in his best-selling 1985 novel, "Contact," which was made into a film starring Jodie Foster.

At Tuesday's news conference, Hawking said he too was venturing into the world of fiction. He plans to team up with his daughter, 35-year- old journalist and novelist Lucy Hawking, to write a children's book about the universe aimed at the same age group as the Harry Potter books.

"It is a story for children, which explains the wonders of the universe," said Lucy Hawking. They did not provide further details.

__________________
-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

Alan Guth and Joshua Winn for two, will argue, I suppose

Whack Job..

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Matt (SD,CA)

1984 300SD.. White/Chrome Bunts..Green

1997 2500 Dodge Ram 5.9 Cummins 12 Valve 36 PSI of Boost = 400+hp & 800+tQ .. ..Greenspeed

2004 Dodge Ram 2500 4x4 Quad Cab Cummins 5.9 H.O "596hp/1225tq" 6 spd. Man. Leather Heated seats/Loaded..Flame Red....GREENSPEED

Global warming...Doing my part, Smokin da hippies..

Fight the good fight!......

I'm going to invest my money in the new biosphere to be built 1/4 mile from the south pole, with the raising of bananas and pineapples in the gynormous greenhouse and several heated swimming pools for the guests.

Such an enterprise would be approximately 100,000 times more likely to thrive than an outpost on Mars or the moon. I always wondered if Hawkings was for real. He's way off on this one.

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

He was hawking trinkets.

I guess there is a reason why many of the main characters in Arthur Clarke books are Indian and from 3rd world countries.

__________________
-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

HAH!!

I mean, I don't doubt that he's a quadrapalegic and a mathematician. I just wonder about the degree to which his repuatation is a media creation. Just the way people think that blind black people are going to be good musicians, people also are attracted to the idea of the genius mind trapped in a non-functioning body.

Sounds kinda harsh on my part, I'll admit, but I'm just not as impressed with Hawkings as the crowd is.

One of his recent pronouncements, that time and space have no beginning and no end, is not exactly a scoop. Li'l ol' peon me has been thinking that for years. What, the mass that eventually exploded into the big bang pehnomenon was just sitting there for untold, unmeasureable eons, surrounded by limitless black nothingness?

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K

I think it's also interesting that this man, who occupies the same position as Isaac Newton, appeared to a sold out audience in Hong Kong. I feel that he will fail miserably in at least one of his endeavors (bold highlight below)

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Hawking says humans close to finding answers to origin of universe
Jun 15 8:15 AM US/Eastern
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Acclaimed British physicist Stephen Hawking has said that humanity is finally getting close to understanding the origin of the universe.

Speaking at a lecture in Hong Kong, Hawking said that despite some theoretical advances in the past years, there are still mysteries as to how the universe began.

"Despite having had some great successes, not everything is solved. We do not yet have good theoretical understanding of the observation of the expansion of the universe," he told an audience of 2,500 at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Thursday.

"Without such understanding, we cannot be sure of the future of the universe.

"New observational results and theoretical advances are coming in rapidly; cosmology is a very exciting subject. We are getting close to answering these old questions: why are we here, where did we come from?"

The 64-year-old also said his unfulfilled ambitions, among many, were to find out what happens inside black holes, how the universe began and how the human race can survive in the next 100 years.

Above all, he joked, he wants to understand women.

On Tuesday Hawking said the human race should reach for the stars to survive as the Earth is at risk of being wiped out by a disaster.

He believes humans should settle in space, predicting a lunar settlement within 20 years and a Martian colony in 40.

Hawking, a Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, speaks with a voice synthesiser and has been in a wheelchair since developing motor neurone disease.

During his Hong Kong visit he also revealed he is writing a children's book with his daughter about theoretical physics.

Hawking is the author of international best seller "A Brief History of Time", which attempted to explain a range of subjects in cosmology, including the Big Bang, black holes, light cones and superstring theory.

He is on a six-day visit to Hong Kong and will meet Chief Executive Donald Tsang Friday before heading to Beijing Saturday where he will give a lecture on string theory.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

Hopefuly I'll be dead within 20-40 years so none of this will matter......

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You needn't wait for it not to matter. Carpe theorem.

Maybe this is why string theory makes no sense to me. It ain't the lack of Psilicybe cubensis after-all.

Bot

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NOT EVEN WRONG: The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics
by Peter Woit
Cape £18.99 pp290

What is the basic, unifying stuff of our universe? One philosopher in ancient Greece thought that everything was reducible to water; another plumped for air. Later, a philosopher called Democritus taught that the world is ultimately made up of tiny, eternal particles of varying weight known as “atoms”, which form and reform as nature undergoes its constant round of change, death and rebirth. Today, 2,500 years on, and after several great revolutions in modern physics, a large and expanding community of scientists believes that the basic stuff of our universe is “strings”. Hence “string theory”.

These are no ordinary strings. The physicists envisage tiny, vibrating, folding and elongating coils of energy, each 100 billion billion times smaller than the protons at the nucleus of an atom; so small,indeed, that they can be understood only in terms of extremely sophisticated mathematics impenetrable to all but an elite of specialists.

String theory, which nowadays dominates the research programmes and main funding of theoretical physics in many western universities (at a recent conference in Cambridge some 440 of them gathered to discuss their subject), was not so much discovered as invented in order to solve a vexing explanatory deficit. In the early 1970s, physicists announced the so-called “standard model” — a theory that seeks agreement between the contrasting realms of super-huge objects, such as stars and planets, (known as relativity) and the super-small realms of the subatomic (known as quantum). The standard model, however, failed to explain gravity. Enter string theory to rectify the problem. In its simplest terms, this complex set of notions claims 10 or 11 space dimensions (as opposed to the three of everyday human perception), and assumes a “landscape” of myriad elementary bundles of energy (strings) that interface not only with the universe we inhabit but a multiplicity of unseen and unknowable parallel universes.

But is string theory true? Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia University, has challenged the entire string-theory discipline by proclaiming that its topic is not a genuine theory at all and that many of its exponents do not understand the complex mathematics it employs. String theory, he avers, has become a form of science fiction. Hence his book’s title, Not Even Wrong: an epithet created by Wolfgang Pauli, an irascible early 20th-century German physicist. Pauli had three escalating levels of insult for colleagues he deemed to be talking nonsense: “Wrong!”, “Completely wrong!” and finally “Not even wrong!”. By which he meant that a proposal was so completely outside the scientific ballpark as not to merit the least consideration.

More at: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-2214707,00.html

I think that this can only be good for the science in general. Let the proponents of string theory defend it and tear down Mr. Woit's arguments or vice versa.

Einstein seemed wrapped up in trying to reconcile reletivity to things that didn't quite match his world view. Hopefully someone will come up with a unifying theory sometime soon. Hawking seems to allude to this. Something verifiable would be nice.

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-livin' in the terminally flippant zone

Hawking said he looks forward to understanding what happens inside black holes. Doesn't he know that when you go into one, you shoot out the other side into another dimension? Everybody knows that.

I'm thinking some things, like the realities of the guts of black holes, are going to remain unknown to the large brain of man. Hell, we're not even too certain about what happens 2, 3, and 4 thousand miles beneath our feet. I submit that a study of the innards of black holes is going to be 284,787.184 raised to the power of 8,578,746 times harder than a study of our earth's core.... approximately, as Spock would say.

I'm wondering if space holds as many universes as our known universe holds galaxies -- of course, by definition "Universe" would mean everything. But look at the vast distances between galaxies. Is it inconceivable that the universe as we know it is as far away from another universe, in scale, as distant galaxies are away from each other? That our big bang was a product of the collected, compressed, giant black hole of matter that our known universe collapsed into before starting the whole process over again?

I have trouble imagining that the big bang we know and love came from a tight ball of EVERY last bit of matter in the universe, in toto.

Even tougher to get comfy with is the notion that our universe is a neutron in another universe, and that every neutron and electon in our universe holds vast worlds that move at a pace unfathomably faster than ours. But who knows -- time and physical dimension are relative.

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1986 300SDL, 362K
1984 300D, 138K