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Stephen Hawking wants humanity to pursue a Mars mission in the mid-2020s rather than the mid-2030s:
Prof Stephen Hawking has called for leading nations to send astronauts to the Moon by 2020. They should also aim to build a lunar base in 30 years' time and send people to Mars by 2025. Prof Hawking said that the goal would re-ignite the space programme, forge new alliances and give humanity a sense of purpose.
He was speaking at the Starmus Festival celebrating science and the arts, which is being held in Trondheim, Norway. "Spreading out into space will completely change the future of humanity," he said. "I hope it would unite competitive nations in a single goal, to face the common challenge for us all. "A new and ambitious space programme would excite (young people), and stimulate interest in other areas, such as astrophysics and cosmology".
Prof. Hawking also talked about interstellar travel:
[We'll] never know how hospitable Proxima b is unless we can get there. At current speeds, using chemical propulsion, it would take 3 million years to reach the exoplanet, Hawking said. Thus, space colonization requires a radical departure in our travel technology. "To go faster would require a much higher exhaust speed than chemical rockets can provide — that of light itself," Hawking said. "A powerful beam of light from the rear could drive the spaceship forward. Nuclear fusion could provide 1 percent of the spaceship's mass energy, which would accelerate it to a tenth of the speed of light."
NASA usually talks about planning for "Mars 2035". Who is trying to get there by 2025?
A Mars mission architecture SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk will unveil in September will call for a series of missions starting in 2018 leading up to the first crewed mission to the planet in 2024, Musk said June 1.
Related: Elon Musk's Plans for Mars and Beyond Revealed
Elon Musk Publishes Mars Colonization Plan
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2017, @07:06PM (7 children)
Humanity needs a purpose. I think the whole 'social justice' movement is a perfect example of this. If there is no clear problem people will invent one to wage a quixotic battle against. And this in turn degrades society as it eats itself alive trying to destroy the windmill armies of the perceived enemy. In total it's likely that literally hundreds of billions of manhours (oops, sorry - person hours...) have been spent with people bickering at one another over this with the only result being what has likely been a net decline in social equanimity and cohesion. Imagine if people had a way to filter that energy into something that could have, with no ambiguity, benefited all of humanity.
Programs like Zooniverse [zooniverse.org] are a huge step forward, but the problem remains - I imagine 99% of even Soylenters, which are going to be in the top percentile of science/tech information, have even heard of it. It's hard for people to think they can make a change in something if they don't know such things even exist. And now imagine starting to provide extrinsic motivation to such programs. Get some universities involved and give credits towards the ability to take free online courses or something. There's so much potential.
But yes, massive space programs would be even more direct since it's something everybody can once again participate in at some level and take some shared pride in. Perhaps that is really the thing this is all about. People need to feel pride in something. Social justice lets people feel pride, but at the expense of attacking other people. Those people then reciprocate and it's all turning into a flaming mess just because people want to try to make the world a better place, but can't find any better method of doing so. So give them one!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2017, @09:23PM (2 children)
I think you're grinding a personal axe by glossing over all the benefits of social justice movements. Should we have disregarded the civil rights movement? Should women be allowed to vote? Maybe we should have kept slavery?
Just because the massive inequalities have been dealt with does not mean there aren't still more to deal with. Much of the Middle East needs to get with the times, even the bastion of freedom that is the US (cough cough) has some pretty big problems. It would be better for humanity to address these problems before trying to export them into fragile colonies.
What this tells me is that you wish everyone would go back to their own communities and leave you and yours to live the American Dream with a white picket fence and church on Sundays. That is a generalization, but it is the truth. There is more cohesion and sanity across countries and the globe, the unrest that you are seeing is the result of the internet. People can now learn about far away areas, and local issues are easily made into national news. The blanket has been pulled off from society so we all can see the ugly bigotry that still squats underneath.
You are advocating for a return to ignorance instead of facing the hard truths and trying to grow as a society. Sure space travel and colonization would help focus humanity, but these problems would only go back under the surface for a short while. Only those who have not suffered the indignities of prejudice can disregard them with such flippant arrogance.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @07:12AM (1 child)
Modern 'social justice' has very little to do with the social justice movements of the past. Note how everything you referenced was decades to a century past. Women used to be legally prevented from voting and the civil rights movement came at a time when blacks would be legally excluded from schools or jobs would have signs up in the window 'Negros need not apply.' Those were heinous times, but more importantly they were caused by clearly and overtly discriminatory systems. This enabled clear, realistic goals for activists that could be summed up as "It should not be illegal for [discriminated class] to [issue]." It should not be illegal for women to vote. It should not be illegal for blacks to attend the same schools as whites.
For the most part, no such things exist today so we're left to invent problems. "Microaggressions" are a very literal example of this. Or we begin to look at things in terms of outcome as opposed to opportunity and equality, with egregious double standards and hypocrisy abounds. Humanity has this inherent desire to change and improve things. If we put the 1000 most agreeable, tolerant, and embracing individuals in a city - given enough time they would begin to find certain parts of themselves 'problematic', even going so far as to invent problems, without something more productive to turn their energies towards. This feature is undoubtedly one of humanity's most powerful traits and likely the reason we have gone from isolated barely self aware tribal groups to where we are today in less than 200,000 years. But as we reach an era in time where it becomes harder and harder to find something any individual can play any meaningful role in, our desire to improve and change ourselves is something that's beginning to hurt more than help us. Nobody, of decent social conscience, wants to serve no use to society - but for better or for worse that is exactly the scenario we approach as humanity continues to improve itself.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday June 22 2017, @07:23AM
Any good ideas how to make sure these not improve or change people from ones life?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday June 21 2017, @10:55PM
The social justice people have some people that have a cause based in real grievances that have a workable solution. But a lot of it are the people that just pick fights over imaginary things. The best tend to stay far away from these kind of persons.
Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience. Another take on is that of WOPR in WarGames.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 22 2017, @02:17AM (2 children)
So, maybe humanity needs a purpose, maybe not.
Your Zooniverse reminds me of an idea I had to relocate the family to Hilo a few years back. Hilo is not exactly paradise on earth, but it does have some good points - technical employment isn't really one of them. I briefly considered what I might do with the University and the telescopes, and I could contribute to what they are doing in a big positive way, if they would give me the opportunity to (unlikely, for a host of reasons.) I considered doing independent astronomy work as a hobby to at least marginally increase my chances of being considered - but, in reality, the way to do astronomy today is to crunch numbers remotely from the publicly available data, and with all the Zooniverse crowd doing that all around the world, it would do little to impress the Hilo site regarding me, vs a thousand other candidates. And, anyway, my intrinsic motivator wasn't to further humanity, it was to find a decent place for my kids to grow up with a little less redneck prejudice than the town we were living in at the time. Short term goals, maybe not short term enough to become CEO of a major company, but not truly long term thinking like a guy stuck in a wheelchair for 50 years does.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday June 22 2017, @07:26AM (1 child)
Figure out what you can export and work from that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 22 2017, @04:49PM
If humanity is looking for an export to the universal market, I think our absurdity is potentially very entertaining.
🌻🌻 [google.com]