Posted on 08/25/2010 9:06:20 AM PDT by LibWhacker
Send all the Liberals away, Earth will be saved.
/mark
IMO Hawkings is whacked out. Yes, if you absolutely deny God, then the fate of humanity rests solely with... humanity. If that were the case, then we would have all perished long ago.
Unfortunately, what Steven may not know, is that God gave man dominion over the earth and its creatures, but not over space. We may visit the moon and beyond but we’re not equipped by God to have fruitful lives in that environment.
Perhaps Hawkings would be more comfortable at zero gravity.
JMHO...
Read his book and some articles - he is smart but not overly so - a good polemicist and very glib writer - he certainly knows how to build a ‘castle’ on top of a mountain of ‘sandy’ assumptions.
Anyone who believes this is horribly naive or deceived. Mankind would just spread its nonsense more widely.
The only true hope for the future is Jesus Christ.
Why would we all have perished long ago, if the fate of humanity rested solely with...humanity? How do you know this?
While you can throw out the whole idea of global warming, or a genetically engineered virus wiping out humanity we’re quite vulnerable. A nice meteor strike, a big enough solar flare, or who knows what else could easily wipe out humanity. Or at best destroy civilization to the point where we’re hammering rubble together and worshiping sun gods.
We need to get off this miserable ball of mud and expand. Not large scale colonization for centuries or millenia yet but at least we can start mining asteroids and scraping helium 3 off the moon for fusion.
Why is the whole idea of space colonization so insane to most of you? This lump of rock can’t sustain humanity forever.
Colonizing another world sounds nice, although extremely difficult if even humanly possible, but a civilization cannot be made up of just a few people. Soon enough resources run out, and you need lots of people to create and process new resources.
There is no planet in our solar system that will currently support human life, and it would take a gargantuan effort if even possible to change the climate of another planet or moon to make human life suitable.
If the closest habitable planet in another solar system is 10 light years away it would take a space vehicle 10 years to reach it if we can travel that fast which is doubtful at best. If it was accomplished, it would take even longer to create a civilization assuming there wasn't one already and it didn't particularly like us being there.
Hawkings sees life a bit differently than most of us, being restrained in a wheel chair and depending on technology and other humans in order for him to survive. He also has a lot of time on his hands to think and ponder about things most of us don't have the time to even consider. So he is removed from the daily stuff we have to deal with, and this is the part that he doesn't apply to his thinking. What is practical for the average human.
I'm not much for Global Warming so I don't count that as our downfall, more likely a nuclear holocaust or some viral/bacteria thing will kill us off, but most likely not all of us. I'm betting that a few of us will survive to start again, and I think that has a higher probability of success than a few astronauts trying to create a new world somewhere else.
what is a post-singularity civilisation??
But I've never heard of a post-singularity civilization before. I always thought once your civilization hits the singularity point, there's no telling what will come after. Kind of like entering a black hole, which, of course, is where the term as applied to civilizations comes from.
‘If the closest habitable planet in another solar system is 10 light years away it would take a space vehicle 10 years to reach it if we can travel that fast which is doubtful at best. If it was accomplished, it would take even longer to create a civilization assuming there wasn’t one already and it didn’t particularly like us being there.’
Not only this, but you have the iron shackles of relativity to consider. If you travelled at 0.9 c, it would take you 11 years to get there ship time and 28 years earth time just to travel there.
So you are basically limited to 0.5c, which would take 22 years to travel there ship time, and 24 years earth time. Paradoxically, travelling faster actually takes you longer to travel.
I understand. In addition, communicating with earth (assuming anyone is left) will be a problem the further away the craft gets, and the older earthlings get while you (space traveller) don’t age nearly as fast.
Just ask Superman.
I think you've got your time dilation backwards.
At 0.9c, it seems rather self-evident that a ten-light-year trip would take roughly 11 years as viewed by the non-traveling observer.
To the traveler, the trip would seem to be just short of five years.
My apologies, I’ve gotten it reversed. My bad.
The point about 0.5c still stands.
As we have some scientists posting, here is a question I have:
Would it not be very dangerous for a ship to travel across space at such a high velocity because eventually the ship might hit a piece of space rock, and my thinking that the “velocity squared” portion of the kinetic energy equation would make the impact with such a space rock seem like a major explosion.
I would think that extremely fast travel through space is not realistic. If some future civilization accomplishes it, maybe the technology will be something entirely different (like creating a warp in space and zapping over there kind of like Battlestar Galactica).
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