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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday June 21 2017, @05:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the to-infinity-and-beyond dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @07:12AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @07:12AM (#529396)

    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

    by kaszz (4211) on Thursday June 22 2017, @07:23AM (#529401) Journal

    Any good ideas how to make sure these not improve or change people from ones life?