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.
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
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.
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)