Posted on 10/15/2001 11:36:41 PM PDT by butter pecan fan
THE human race is likely to be wiped out by a doomsday virus before the Millennium is out, unless we set up colonies in space, Prof Stephen Hawking warns today.
THE human race is likely to be wiped out by a
doomsday virus before the Millennium is out, unless
we set up colonies in space, Prof Stephen Hawking
warns today.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Prof Hawking,
the world's best known cosmologist, says that
biology, rather than physics, presents the biggest
challenge to human survival.
"Although September 11 was horrible, it didn't
threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear
weapons do," said the Cambridge University
scientist.
"In the long term, I am more worried about biology.
Nuclear weapons need large facilities, but genetic
engineering can be done in a small lab. You can't
regulate every lab in the world. The danger is that
either by accident or design, we create a virus that
destroys us.
"I don't think the human race will survive the next
thousand years, unless we spread into space. There
are too many accidents that can befall life on a
single planet. But I'm an optimist. We will reach out
to the stars."
Current theories suggest that space travel will be
tedious, using spaceships travelling slower than
light.
But Prof Hawking, Lucasian professor of
mathematics at Cambridge, says that a warp drive,
of the kind seen in Star Trek, cannot be ruled out.
This method of space exploration and colonisation,
apparently the stuff of science fiction, could be one
possible escape from the human predicament.
Prof Hawking believes that genetic engineering
could be used to "improve" human beings to meet
the challenges of long duration space travel.
Cyborgs, humans with computers linked to their
brains, will be needed to prevent intelligent
computers taking over. "I think humans will have to
learn to live in space," he said.
The Universe in a Nutshell, Prof Hawking's
long-awaited follow-up to the 1988 bestseller A Brief
History of Time, is being serialised in the Daily
Telegraph, starting tomorrow.
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Cyborgs, humans with computers linked to their
brains, will be needed to prevent intelligent
computers taking over.
Intelligent computers will no more take over
than I will have to race my car home on foot.
Only those who are ignorant of Hawkins would make a statement like yours equating him to a god. Nobody that tries to understand the physical world your God created has a need create even more gods to explain it.
Interplanetary isolation is at least one -sure- way to stop an airborne communicable disease...think about it. It's not too difficult if you try.
Not at all. Definitely not a FReeper, though.
Stephen Hawking has survived more than three decades beyond his original prognosis with an incurable disease...
But he's sure the rest of us are doomed?
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