Ah... you guys aren't getting it.
Hawkings isn't saying we need to leave the Earth
right now. He's saying that as long as we're confined to this single rock, the life span of
our species is directly tied to that of the planet. Earth WILL die one day. It's
inevitable.
Quick list of things that could kill the Earth:
- It could be struck by a massive celesital object (comet, astoroid, rogue planet, or some other big chunk of rock) which would breach our orbit,
sending us flying into deep space or falling into the sun (unpleasent either way).
- We could take a "squirt" from a pulsar which would delever enough radiation to flash-cook everything on the surface AND blow away our
atmosphear.
- Our solar system could be eaten by a blackhole (which is looking like a higher and high possibility).
BBC Black Hole Vid
Even if we are lucky and managed to avoid all that, one day our sun
will die. Most likely it will go nova and burn so hot that the entire
surface of our planet will be liquified. It could expand so much that it's raidus would evelop Mercury (which would cese to exist at all, of
cource).
SO... if we're stuck only on this rock of ours, when it dies, so do we.
We aren't talking about tomorrow. We aren't talking in a hundred years... we're talking hundreds of thousands or even billions of years (the sun is
only expected to last for another five billion years or so).
This sounds like a rediculous amount of time... but it remains true that if the human race is to exist forever, we must move beyond our
solarsystem.
By establishing a selfsuficent colony on Mars, we could extend our chances of survivel by quite a bit. It wouldn't be possible for one big chunk of
rock (alnog with a bit of bad luck) to wipe out the whole of mankind. Still... when the sun goes, so does Earth, Mars, and the rest of the
solarsystem.
Is this making sence?
[edit on 8-12-2006 by BitRaiser]