Mankind must abandon earth or face extinction: Hawking

I guess i'd agree with everything he says there

We are already at over carrying capacity for this planet, which means natural disasters (famine, drought) are only going to increase, consequently leading to wars. Which will lead eventually to nuclear weapons being launched. I agree that eventually we are going to have to find a way of expanding beyond this planet.

The part about aliens i think he is also right about. I don't think the human race are ready for contact with aliens. I don't think we would be able to deal with it.

 

Of course we're not ready for contact with them. We're not ready for contact with ourselves!

And if extra-terrestrials ARE visiting Earth, I don't blame them if they're doing it clandestinely. Think about all the people calling for the death of others just because they are different, how many people do you think would shout "ANNIHILATE THEM" just because of pure fear? (I don't blame them to be honest, you never know with something so completely unknown, you can never know what would happen, though I wouldn't call for their destruction had they let everyone in the world know of their existence until ya know... they try to kill us or something xD)

 

those that visit our world must look on us as an adult does a child...the naivety and mild disgust they must feel at lesser beings...joey is right we arent ready to accept ourselves...humans cannot accept others it would lead to fear and intolerance.

sadly our destiny does lay on 1 path to swarm and grow across the galaxy like a plague of insects or to stay here and die...

we have grown to fast and to many, we are no longer able to support ourselves as we are... we have always wanted to colonise the moon but now it must be clear that could never be enough and worthless doing as a whole but should be used as a space port...

of course space travel and warp/hyper/space/drive... terrify's people..its sad really.

space flight inst enough tho we need an immediate push forward, we need to work on the ability to travel at the speed of light and colonise planets... Mars is the most logical choice, solid rock we believe there's plenty of water ...set up colony's

will be a long time before i see any of this tho .

 

All I'm going to say is "Do whatever Hawking says." He's a brilliant mind, and I think he may be in touch with parts of the universe others of us can't understand. Man is an intellectual beast!

 

He is a genius. But not only that, he can explain these highly intellectual concepts in an interesting, understandable and accessible way. When you add that he has vastly out lived his life expectancy, then the only conclusion is that he's great man.

Oh, and he comes from the same place as me...does that make me clever by association :lol:

 

I agree if we don't get the hell out of here we are going down and quickly nad don't you think it would be irresponsible to think aliens have no importance we might meet them and we might not they might be friendly nad they might not be

 

Manifest Destiny space style? No thank you.

I'd rather keep our destructive species down here where it won't cause trouble for the rest of the universe no matter how big it is.

Just because one very brilliant, and I do mean brilliant, astrophysicist says this is the only way to keep the species alive doesn't mean it's necessarily true to the word. I see this as a simple Plan B. Oh sure, Earth has finite resources but it can be rationed with sustainability if people were just smarter and willing to do it.

So therefore, our focus shouldn't be to leave the Earth but to educate the people already down here about how to keep it running for as long as possible. Our species will adapt to lessening resources as it has adapted to abundant resources. Populations will fluctuate but eventually level off as it adjusts to whatever resources we have left. This is why I don't support NASA or space exploration in general. They keep thinking that the only way to live is to leave eventually.

Although I agree with him in that we should not meet aliens.
~One: we can't assume that they will be friendly. Better safe than dead.
~Two: what happened to the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas will happen to us.

 

Well to be honest, we don't have long. Unless we can find some way to support our ever growing population, we're screwed in just a few generations.

Populations don't just "level off", that's the issue. We lose resources, so more people fight for the remaining ones in wars. We can only "level off" by killing each other or going through a mass famine/disease. Only way it can happen. Hawking is saying the way to avoid this is go through space.

NASA is right. Humans cannot survive on Earth forever. You have to spread and find new resources to survive. Hence why all the Alien invasion movies have that same theme going on.

 

I doubt we're going anywhere. We can't even handle the situations on earth let alone flying out into a new planet and having a party.

 

We are trying to find ways to support the ever growing populations. And yes, populations do level off. It's called the demographic transition. Example? Europe. The industrial revolution caused a boom in population because of advances in medicine and transport of food (more births, less deaths). But now, it's stabilizing and population increase is beginning to slow (Denmark and Finland) and some are actually shrinking (Germany and Russia).

I'm not going to deny that we cannot survive on Earth forever. But saying we don't have long is silly. There is ongoing research on how to address shrinking supplies of resources (water will be more valuable than oil).

I would also like to point out that war is an amazing tool for population control. And if war doesn't reduce our population, then reaching over the Earth's carrying capacity will. Once we get to the population where the Earth can't support that many people, a lot of us will die off.

I just feel like theories saying that we have to leave make people give up on actually trying to make use of the Earth for as long as possible because all our thoughts are focused on leaving.

 

we are already far over capacity for food and especially fresh water. Both will be the cause of war within 100 years, if not 50. Egypt has already threatened Ethiopia over its plans to divert the nile. Ditto Syria, Jordan and Israel, which all share the same water resource.

We do have a method to produce enough food, however many people seem to be very against it: Genetically Modified Crops. They are the only way we can provide enough food for the whole world.

However, we do not currently have a way of providing water to the world.

It's a very bleak outlook.

The Malthusian idea that populations will level out is easy for us to promote, we aren't the ones going to be affected. We will have enough food due to our economic position in the world. It will be the millions of people in Africa, South America and Central America who will die.

Also, it simply won't happen that way, that populations will steadily decline to carrying capacity of our planet. Countries won't let that happen. They will start war before they let their populations die out, thus leading to massive losses of people.

Unfortunately i don't think we will master space travel in time to prevent all this.

 

ROFLOLMAO. Are you serious? You do know that the cause of widespread famine in developing countries isn't our inability to produce food but is in fact because of our inability to distribute it right?

The only real resource worth fighting for is water. And there are people where water is scarce and therefore they will over stress the local sources. If they fight each other, then its their problem.

Perhaps in some parts of the world (certainly not the civilized ones), but the point is people will die because we over exceeded the carrying capacity. War is just another way to get rid of them. The reason they die does not matter. They will die regardless because we are too numerous for the Earth to sustain. The number of people will thus hover along the carrying capacity no matter what.

 

where did i say anything about distribution? I simply put forward GM crops as how we could produce enough food. Unfair economics of distribution is a whole other argument. GM crops can also produce bigger crop yields, in more severe conditions. Which would help developing countries.

Anyway i'm not sure there is any point in us arguing. You seem very comfortable with large scale drought, famine and war, leading to the death of millions of people. I'm not comfortable with that. I would rather we found ways of dealing with that, that just letting millions die.

 

LOL. Sorry quoted the wrong part of your post. I meant to quote the "we are already far over capacity for food" part. Which is false... as you later state in your post so I don't know why you open with that statement.

And as for the second part, I am not comfortable with large scale death. It's just a simple theory that most likely may happen.

 

I believe we are already at carrying capacity, if not over. I believe even if resources were shared equally there would not be enough to go around.

But I'm gonna stop there. I don't want to get into a debate/argument. My university degree comprises largely of this topic, and others like it, so I really don't wanna spend time in my holiday getting into a discussion about it I'm gonna have plenty of that over the next two years lol

 

But but. Fine. Oh and what a fun college degree you're pursuing! I was thinking of doing the same thing but decided against it thinking that history would be a safer bet for me. Good luck in the next two years of discussions! There's going to be soo much to talk about.