Posted on 04/21/2008 11:18:04 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Stephen Hawking called for a massive investment in establishing colonies on the Moon and Mars in a lecture in honour of NASA's 50th anniversary. He argued that the world should devote about 10 times as much as NASA's current budget – or 0.25% of the world's financial resources – to space.
The renowned University of Cambridge physicist has previously spoken in favour of colonising space as an insurance policy against the possibility of humanity being wiped out by catastrophes like nuclear war and climate change. He argues that humanity should eventually expand to other solar systems.
But in a speech in Washington, DC, US, delivered in honour of NASA's 50th anniversary in 2008, Hawking focused on near-term possibilities, backing the space agency's goals of returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020 and sending humans to Mars soon after that.
The Moon is a good place to start because it is "close by and relatively easy to reach", Hawking said. "The Moon could be a base for travel to the rest of the solar system," he added. Mars would be "the obvious next target", with its abundant supplies of frozen water, and the tantalising possibility that life may have been present there in the past.
Some space experts have recently called for NASA to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid instead of the Moon as a next step.
Hawking did not mention the idea, but said that any long-term site for a human base should have a significant gravity field. That's because long missions in microgravity lead to health issues such as bone loss.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.newscientist.com ...
What a joke. As if the moon would be safe from climate change or an asteroid.
Let's get this frigging show on the road allready so my great grandchildren will have a shot at doing the things I had dreamed of doing as a boy, and which we could have done by now.
Instead, the treasure and sweat of this country has been whizzed away trying to support a class of voluntarily nonproductive and unappeasable people who are only expanding.
I like the idea in theory, but realistically we’re still a couple hundred years from actually being able to do it successfully.
Sometimes even geniuses have silly ideas. Humanity’s problems will follow us wherever we run. I say we solve our problems on Earth before we spend so much energy flying into space trying to escape ourselves.
Anyway, its all covered in this book Mining the Sky
The resources described show how even such a high cost, high risk venture could return nearly unlimited profit. Earth's entire "domestic" GDP would be insignificant.
Ad Astra per aspera
A rough road leads to the stars...
Having all of humanity in one fragile ecosystem will inevitablly lead to our extinction. Extinction events do happen, the last one being 70,000 years ago when the Toba supervolcano exploded. Only a few thousand humans are thought to have survived. The yellowstone supervolcano is about twice the size that Toba was, and could go anytime, or in 100,000 years. Multiple self-sufficient space colonies would guarentee our survival as a species no matter the event.
Hawking dumped his wife, married his nurse, and lost my interest.
I have this image in my head...
...of Alvin and the Chipmunks joining Hawking,
accompanied by Joan Baez, singing
In the Year 2525....
We call those people "Democrats".
well! now that hawkins is on board maybe something will finally get done. Sure. When we think of what we stand to gain from the project, I wonder why peopel need convincing, but then there are always critics of other people’s gain, even if they will share that gain.
Having had pretty much the same hot and extremely dry climate for the past almost 4 Billion years, it's a pretty safe bet the Moon is in little risk of climate "change," which is a redundancy regardless since "change" is a part of climate. Asteroids? As safe as Earth, underground.
What cruel is that Richard Branson plans on risking this mans's life in a suborbital ride... and performing a marriage on that first flight, too.
In the unlikely event Obama is elected, you can kiss this good bye, because he is so ignorant of the NASA budget he thinks he can nationalize Day Care throughout the US on a budget exceeded by the Department of education by almost 4 times.
And don't give up on the Moon. The Japanese Kayuga has discovered Uranium on the surface... turns out lunar morphology ain't what was suspected.
There's a solid metal asteroid out there, by the way... no one is quite sure what kind of metal, but it's a half-mile of something heavy, and it ain't carbon.
“Hawking dumped his wife, married his nurse, and lost my interest.”
That affects his scientific credibility how?
Besides which, neither you nor I have any idea why his marriage really ended, so what gives you the right to judge?
U kiddin us? Two hundred years ago was just a few short years after Franklin had done his kite deal and got zapped.
There were no electric motors. There were no lightbulbs. Clocks and paper itself were still an expensive rarity. As was a good soap.
We could easily have a base on the moon in a decade if we had the stones to decide to do it.
Hawking thinks mankind is it’s own worst enemy. I think he’s bitter about his condition.
If you look back at the Age of Exploration, you will find that the European nations were motivated primarily by trade considerations, and later by the extraction of the wealth of the New World, in gold, silver, and other commodities. The explorations were done primarily from a profit motive, and direct state subsidies ended as the explorations became self-sustaining. In the case of the Dutch and the English, a state licensed private company was in charge of much of the exploration of the New World.
“Besides which, neither you nor I have any idea why his marriage really ended, so what gives you the right to judge?”
The same thing that gives you the right to ask him.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.