Stephen Hawking: mankind must move to outer space within a century

This idea is treated (lightly, but deftly) in Wall-E and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Both seem to hint at the same underlying premise: if you want to preserve human life in giant space ships, then resource management will need to be largely automated - otherwise you probably won't make it out of the solar system before people start shooting each other for control of the steering wheel. Kurt Vonnegut offers more cynical vision (surprise) in a short story called The Big Space Fuck: by the time we reach a consensus on the necessity, the most we can hope for is to put a tiny subset of our society in deep freeze and hope it hits fertile ground elsewhere.

I'm a bit surprised by Hawking's rather apocalyptic tone; then again, few people are as well qualified to contrast our scientific potential and relatively abundant resources with the way our species actually distributes their fruits. Hawking says relatively little about his own disability, but I imagine he's keenly aware that his prospects in a future resource-depleted society would be no better than those in a past or present underdeveloped one.

I'm unsure why reports of his remarks invariably mention planets and interstellar travel. Certainly that's the long-term scenario, but in the meantime we have to deal with the significant but manageable transition to an interplanetary economy rather than an intercontinental one. As a practical matter that requires more space stations and a way to exploit the mineral/energy resources of asteroids to facilitate in-space construction by robots. We really need to get away from the tropes of heroic humans in spacesuits. Individual 'first person on the planet' moments are over - that is no more sensible than Columbus setting sail across the Atlantic in order to dig up some gold with a shovel. Future great explorers will be directing large industrial fleets, not firing thrusters on a control panel or monkeying about in zero-g.

That which who downvoted me, did you actually read Hawking's article?