Stephen Hawking Calls for Moon Base for Manned Exploration of the Solar System

Stephen Hawking, world-celebrated expert on the cosmological theories of gravity and black holes who holds Issac Newton's Lucasian Chair at Cambridge University, called for a massive investment in establishing colonies on the Moon and in a lecture in honor of NASA's 50th anniversary. Hawking proposed 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 exploration.

In a speech in Washington, DC, US, delivered in honor of NASA's 50th anniversary in 2008, Hawking backed the space agency's goals of returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020 and sending humans to Mars shortly 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. would be "the obvious next target", with its abundant supplies of frozen water, and the intriguing possibility that life may have been present there in the past.

"A goal of a base on the Moon by 2020 and of a manned landing on Mars by 2025 would reignite the space program and give it a sense of purpose in the same way that President Kennedy's Moon target did in the 1960s," he said.

Hawking said that any long-term site for a human base should have a significant gravity field, because long missions in microgravity lead to health issues such as bone loss.

Hawking favors human space exploration, rather than just sending robots to explore space, a position taken by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, among others.

"Robotic missions are much cheaper and may provide more scientific information, but they don't catch the public imagination in the same way, and they don't spread the human race into space, which I'm arguing should be our long-term strategy," Hawking said. "If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before."

Eventually, Hawking said, humanity should try to expand to Earth-like planets around other stars. If only 1% of the 1000 or so stars within 30 light years of Earth has an Earth-size planet at the right distance from its star for liquid water to exist, that would make for 10 such planets in our solar system's neighbourhood, he said.

"We cannot envision visiting them with current technology, but we should make interstellar travel a long-term aim," he said. "By long term, I mean over the next 200 to 500 years." Humanity can afford to battle earthly problems like climate change and still have plenty of resources left over for colonizing space, he said.

"Even if we were to increase the international [space exploration] budget 20 times to make a serious effort to go into space, it would only be a small fraction of world GDP," he said. GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, is a measure of a country's economic activity.

Hawking  believes that traveling into space is the only way humans will be able to survive in the long-term.

"Life on Earth," Hawking has said, "is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers ... I think the human race has no future if it doesn't go into space."

Another of his famous quotes reiterates his position that we need to get off the planet relatively soon. "I don't think the human race will survive the next 1,000 years unless we spread into space."

The problems with Hawking’s solution is that while it may save a “seed” of human life- a few lucky specimens- it won’t save Earth’s inhabitants. The majority of Earthlings would surely be left behind on a planet increasingly unfit for life.

Hawking argued that the world can afford 0.25% of its collective GDP to devote to space colonization. "Isn't our future worth a quarter of a percent?" he asked. The physicist also speculated on the reasons that SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) projects have not yet detected any alien civilizations, offering three possibilities: that life of any kind is very rare in the universe; that simple life forms are common, but intelligent life rare; or that intelligent life tends to quickly destroy itself.

"Personally, I favour the second possibility – that primitive life is relatively common, but that intelligent life is very rare," he said. "Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth."

Posted by Casey Kazan with Rebecca Sato, adapted from NASA materials.

Link:

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn13748-stephen-hawking-calls-for-moon-and-mars-colonies.html

Comments

[Tony Iovino]

In a related story, both the Obama and the Clinton campaigns announced that their candidate was the only one who could relate to truly alien cultures, thus reaching out to intergalactic primary voters, and, of course, listeners of Air America, the "progressive" radio network.

[Scott Smith]

If some "PLANETARY LAW" made war or preparations for war on our planet illegal, with condign consequences, maybe humanity could set about truly noble goals that truly serve the earths collective on grand scales.

[jer35mx]

To Toni Lovino, remembering the Deep Space Nine game of baseball with the romulans, what if the politicians could arrange a game of chess with them or golf between Annika or Lorena with them, always the best to study the unknown is to test the ability.