"The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy Earth, world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday.
"Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years, the British scientist told a news conference."
San Francisco Chronicle, June 14, 2006
When Stephen Hawking, the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, begins sounding like a Doomsday nut, it behooves us to pay attention. You could say, without exaggeration, that our lives depend on it. Hawking is one of those seminal thinkers occuring on a semi-regular basis, say every hundred years or so, whose incomprehensible brilliance is paired with a paradigm-shifting imagination enabling outlandish predictions about remote and arcane phenomena in the Universe (black holes, for example) - that are then confirmed in the physical universe. Einstein, making up an entire new reality in his head, predicted that light would undergo bending by gravity, and then astronomers confirmed that just such a bizarre thing happened during the next solar eclipse. And Newton, whose chair Hawking now occupies at Cambridge, demonstrated that physical forces could be understood through the abstractions of mathematics. Heady company, to be sure.
My first, bar-stool reaction to colonizing Mars, the Moon or some distant Earth-like planet with a whole bunch of humans reflects, no doubt, the disillusionments of our age. Why take this sorry-ass show on the road? Haven't we sent one blue and white paradise to the FUBAR bin already? Leave the universe alone, goddamit. There might be nice animals on some likely candidate near Alpha Centauri.
Hawking seems to be talking about three likely catastrophes in the near term: nuclear armageddon, genetically-engineered viruses and the runaway greenhouse effect. He has appeared, in recent years, to devote considerable attention on this last disaster, a disturbing development when you consider how valuable his brain-time is.
I would describe the runaway greenhouse effect, or Venus Scenario, but I don't have the heart today. I don't even see the point. The United States of America, which would have to lead the way immediately with an emergency program to slash greenhouse emissions to mere fractions of current levels, is instead engaged in political games of gotcha concerning one, moderately populated country in the Middle East, an enterprise which is at bottom about releasing Iraq's one-trillion-barrel reserves of fossil fuels into the overheated atmosphere as soon as possible. And that, dear fellow humans, is the crux of the problem. Because of the egotistical demands of Homo sapiens, right here, right now, of the insecurities which must be dealt with, right here, right now, of the personality dysfunctions of one President, right here, right now, we cannot react to the danger that we may be hurtling toward a world, not so long from today, swathed in dense, steamy clouds of water vapor, where the oceans boil and dry up and tin and lead melt on the land. Where the skyscrapers will stand as mute tombstones above a world where all life has vanished, until they too ooze and melt away.
So don't worry, Mars. And goodnight, Moon. You'll be safe. Other Cosmo Men, Alan Guth, other big thinkers, seeing Hawking's (at last) exposed intellectual flank, have taken issue with his timing. We can't colonize the Moon in 20 years, or Mars in 40. Better to build subterranean caverns in Antarctica, hunker down beneath the rivers of melting ice. We can plan our Comeback there, just as soon as it's safe to go outside. A Green Zone for the entire Human Race.
Gee, I feel better already.
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