Stephen Hawking: Humans Should Ride a Beam of Light to Other Planets

[Judi Lynn]

By Tia Ghose, Senior Writer | June 20, 2017 04:02pm ET


Humanity should focus its efforts on exploring other worlds that we might inhabit, and to get there, Earthlings may need to ride on a beam of light, famed physicist Stephen Hawking says.

Hawking made his remarks today (June 20) at Starmus, an arts and science festival in Norway whose advisory board he sits on. In his speech, he reiterated his belief that humans need to explore space to avoid the dangers of our own finite world. And then he described how humans could one day travel on a beam of light, harnessing the power of Einstein's theory of relativity to reach mind-bogglingly distant planets. [8 Shocking Things We Learned from Stephen Hawking's Book]

Earth in peril

The human imagination has led us to peer ever deeper into the universe with scientific tools, Hawking said. Yet despite this ability to investigate the most distant reaches of the universe without leaving our backyards, humans shouldn't be content with this sedentary approach.

"Shouldn't we be content to be cosmic sloths, enjoying the universe from the comfort of Earth? The answer is, no," Hawking said in his address. "The Earth is under threat from so many areas that it is difficult for me to be positive."

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[HopeAgain]

1. Maybe we should just stop trashing where we are...

[Duppers]

2. Exactly!

Hawking never talks about the critical condition this planet is in. He keeps bringing up what amounts to garbage under the circumstances. We'll all be dead before we're advanced enough to do the things Hawking keeps suggesting.

[SCantiGOP]

4. Fly Me to the Moon.....

[friendly_iconoclast]

5. ...let me sing among the stars...

[Jim__]

6. "... where 1 light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles (10 million kilometers)" ???

Should be almost 10 trillion kilometers.

[hunter]

7. "Rails Across the Galaxy" The rails in this story are beams of light.

*Rails Across the Galaxy*

Richard K. Lyon and Andrew J. Offutt

Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact

August, September, mid-September, 1982

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1032861

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Space is a very hostile place for humans. We barely get by with the International Space Station because it is somewhat protected by earth's magnetic field. Conditions beyond are much harsher.

Exploring mars as depicted in the novel and movie "The Martian" simply isn't possible. The explorers would all be incapacitated by the radiation they'd be exposed to. Eventually it would kill them. Establishing a protective magnetic field around a spacecraft or space base is not a trivial task; it would require a lot of energy, just as it would take a lot of energy to move massive shielding, maybe thick walls of water ice shielding or some other substance that won't make the high energy particle radiation worse...

I doubt humans will ever make themselves home in space. Hell, we can't even properly maintain the earthly "space ship" we are all riding on. If we are lucky maybe our intellectual children will live in space, mechanical beings perhaps, or enhanced biological beings capable of walking around on the surface of mars naked.

My own speculative solution to the Fermi paradox is simple. Creatures such as ourselves, like most animal species, are flashes in the pan, blinking in and out of existence, the vast majority of them extinct. The few species that do survive to thrive beyond their home planets establish themselves in places forever inaccessible to us, perhaps places of their own making, but not in the universe we humans perceive.

For those wanting to explore space the most promising research isn't fancy space craft, it's Artificial Intelligence. We already know robots can survive for long periods in deep space, or places like the surface of mars. Now we just need to make our robots smarter and more capable.