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.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry, but it’s a dumb idea. Humans are not adapted to space flight or to life on a world with different gravity and other conditions. Will cost far too much money. A better plan is to put demented scientists out to pasture and to fix up this planet.
“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.”
Unless the moon or mars can be made self sufficient, it will need to be supplied from earth. Food, water, air, etc. If Earth dies, people on the moon die also.
Hawking may be a genius but he is also a crackpot who has stated that global warming threatens to make the earth as hot as venus.
Earth to Hawking ...global warming is happening on Mars.
The United States will not be the country who does it.
“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.”
I never understood why atheists (and Hawking is arguably one) see any value, let alone so much value, in the perpetuation of the human race.
If the creation of the human race was a random, meaningless, cosmic accident, then the extinction of the human race would be an equally random, meaningless, cosmic accident. No?