For less than the cost of a Shuttle launch, you can get scientific breakthrough after breakthrough, as long as you're not trying to keep primates alive on the thing.
It's also about inspiring people and radically changing people's worldviews. After all, once we're on two planets, it becomes "best in the worlds".
The implications this has on people's imaginations is non-trivial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbIZU8cQWXc
We'll never be on two planets in any meaningful way. Antarctica is a paradise compared to everywhere else, and nobody wants to live in Antarctica. There is no other place for us in the Solar System.
If we're not on two planets in any meaningful way, it only takes one big rock to be on zero planets.
Nature intended for me to die of starvation within weeks of being born due to a congenital disorder preventing me from digesting anything. I'd wager that nature probably didn't intend for you to have 20/20 eyesight, or to have all of your teeth, or for you to type on a magic glowing box that allows you to communicate with people halfway around the planet.
Imagine another asteroid hits Earth, humanity becomes extinct, and a new sentient species evolves after 200 million years. This species will dig up human and dinosaur bones. Reminds me of: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."
An example that makes the point: nature intends for us to spread to every habitable planet in the galaxy. Nature wants humanity to dominate.
There is also no such thing as fate. Humans aren't fated to a pre-set outcome. If I step on a spider, that doesn't mean bad karma is going to have a tornado rip my house apart. If some humans cause the extinction of some species, that doesn't mean the human race is going to be wiped out.
Depends how you look at it. Our bodies are built to live on parts of this planet in this specific era. We don't do so well in space and microgravity. We're not going to do so well on Mars, or Mercury or Triton. That's never going to change.
Life spreads. It will eventually jump from planet to planets. Let's hope we're on the right ship.
Once we have the ability to freeze our bodies in stasis to wake at intervals and check progress, time taken to travel huge distances may become meaningless. Set probe for x light years away, program the alarm for arrival. Of course, communication with anyone not travelling with you becomes a bit meaningless.
Obviously a huge deal of progress to be made in terms of energy and replication, maintenance, etc.
We're a bunch of stupid animals on average, but I wouldn't bet against the best of us making this sort of thing happen eventually. "Never" is a very definite thing to say!
A better approach is to send self-building/self-replicating droids, with human DNA or hard-drive saved consciousness. Let AI deal with the hazards of navigating interstellar space and building up a colony before 'birthing' humans. No freezing necessary (just a waste of resources)
The only way I see it happening is a multi-generational trip. Or sending some raw material with instructions and a platform to reconstruct DNA and grow out some embryos. Or we modify ourselves genetically to the point it isn't the current hominid species making the trip.
Unless of course we find some sort of shortcut through space time. But it's all far fetched science fiction of course.
Raw material sent for construction is more likely, but I do like the idea of an individual being frozen enabling them to live almost as long as they wish and travel almost any distance.
A much better statement should be we need to create a self-sustaining civilization here on Earth at any cost. Don't take it easy, it's no longer business as usual.
Hawking believes humanity needs to figure out space colonization ASAP.
Although the UN is predicting continued growth until 2100. It would be pretty amazing if we stopped expanding in 2025.
Nuclear power can easily solve our energy problems as desired. If it comes down to it, and there are no other options, they'll turn back to nuclear power. Most likely the radical acceleration of solar will solve half of our energy problem all by itself.
I see no reason why a die-off would occur due to population growth.
'Peak child' has already been reached so I struggle to understand what you don't think peak population will follow.
Huge asteroid? Just dive into a deep trench. Gamma ray burst? You'll barely detect any radiation under a few meters of water. War? The ocean's a big place and you can hide somewhere and weather a war that might last centuries.
The argument that we need space exploration so humanity doesn't go extinct is a ridiculous last-ditch effort to save people's sci-fi fantasies.
In particular a 'huge asteroid' could not be mitigated by "diving into a trench", water is incompressible by nature and the impact of an asteroid in the ocean would cause a huge over-pressure event in your habitats, where ever they are, resulting in their destruction. Today, such an impact would destroy every submarine in the same ocean where it hit.
Gamma rays would be fine, water does make an excellent radiation blocker. That could be achieved on land by building a structure that was inside the middle of a water reservoir. (imagine a large water storage tank with underwater living space in the middle of it.)
I didn't mean to talk about it as if it were a commonplace thing, but compared to settlements on other worlds, it is. I'm not sure what the state of the art is, though as I recall the navy had some habitats in the 70's that they stopped reporting on, so either they closed them down or there's some secret underwater laboratory Deus Ex-style somewhere.
>In particular a 'huge asteroid' could not be mitigated by "diving into a trench", water is incompressible by nature and the impact of an asteroid in the ocean would cause a huge over-pressure event in your habitats, where ever they are, resulting in their destruction. Today, such an impact would destroy every submarine in the same ocean where it hit.
Well, yes, that is true for submarines. But an undersea settlement would most likely be anchored to the ocean floor and have access to it, mostly for mining, geomethermal power and storage, but you could use it as a shelter in case the main habitat is destroyed.
>Gamma rays would be fine, water does make an excellent radiation blocker. That could be achieved on land by building a structure that was inside the middle of a water reservoir. (imagine a large water storage tank with underwater living space in the middle of it.)
The ocean has the advantage that it's a single massive body of water, so it's harder to boil all of it off.
How do you move a big settlement into a trench? How do you even move enough submersibles, given little warning?
But this is all a moot point, any realistic asteroid that threatens this planet can be blown to smithereens and will probably be spotted unless it's coming perpendicular to the ecliptic.
Usually, at this point someone links to some NDT interview with Jon Stewart or something where he says "but if you blow up an asteroid, the chunks will still hit you".
Yes, well, if you blow up an asteroid the ratio of surface area to volume will change, and a greater percentage of the asteroid's mass will be
I'm not trying to be dreary, but I do think Hawking is completely wrong on this point, not to mention its feasibility in the next 100 years.
I mean, I'm also appalled by what we're doing on this one, but say we all decide to curl up and die, saving countless planets from our interference. Who's going to care? Universe will go on, and so far there's no evidence that there are other beings like us, who could reflect on themselves and the state of the world they live in.
We may not be the centre of the universe, but it is still ours for the taking, we're the only Player Characters around. There's no point in making honourable self-sacrifice when there won't be anyone to appreciate it.
I'm not yet convinced that we're going to destroy ourselves, but it wouldn't surprise me to find that self-destruction is in our nature.
To put some numbers on it, if humanity has a 25% chance of destroying itself within 1000 years of discovering nuclear power, how many planets do we need to colonize to have a reasonable chance of surviving another 10,000 years? (survival = no catastrophic nuclear event, survival != a subset of humans barely making it in a post-apocalyptic world)
Additionally, spaceflight is not just about scientific research. Manned spaceflight is not just about exploration, it's also about colonization. At the end of the day space is just a place, a place where we live, though we have been restricted to a tiny corner of it for most of human history. We can do manned spaceflight cost effectively (orders of magnitude better than the Shuttle, ISS, or Apollo), and as our technology improves our capabilities will only increase while costs fall.
If we can do human spaceflight orders of magnitude cheaper than all attempts to date, that's great news. But I'll believe it when I see it.
Why not both? The bottom of the sea is as unexplored as space, creating self-sufficient habitats in both places poses similar technological challenges. I for one would love to see more deep submersion research.
As for "what is the purpose", are you asking for "a purpose" or "a commercial purpose"? Because most of the time I see this question the person asking usually means the latter, and that is IMO a very, very limited view of the world. Not everything worthwhile makes commercial sense, and not everything that makes commercial sense is worthwhile.