by Robert Carbery
While we are all busy discussing a healthcare bill that was passed by the Republican-held House of Representatives on Thursday that could very well doom the GOP, world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking believes our planet is already doomed.
Hawking has been discussing the impending expiration of the human race for years now and on a few occasions he has warned us of the increasing likelihood of an alien species finding and colonizing us, not much unlike Columbus and Native Americans’ encounter and we all know how that turned out.
As a human race, we are constantly putting out signals to the rest of outer space to see if there is any other intelligent life out there. But think about it, do we really want anyone else to know of our existence out there in the farthest edges of space? This other species will likely be an advanced civilization far past our capabilities and with the capacity to annihilate our entire population on Earth within a short amount of time.
“One day we might receive a signal from a planet like this, but we should be wary of answering back,” Hawking said. Encountering a far superior organism with a much more advanced civilization will not end up well for the party on the less technologically superior side.
It’s only a matter of time until Earth is destroyed, so says Hawking and other doomsday enthusiasts. “Although the chance of disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years,” he said in November. His solution is to colonize not just the moon, but Mars as well.
Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk is hoping to start an actual settlement on Mars within the next few decades. Musk seems to be another one of these folks who realizes that we are not meant for this planet forever. Yet, I would imagine we will probably be under attack by super advanced robots that have the ability to fight back against its human creators before we are overtaken by an alien race from another planet.
Is science becoming what used to be seen as science fiction? Will we get to Mars in my lifetime? Advances in technology seem to be increasing exponentially year after year. And the recent increased investments in space technology from the likes of Musk and Amazon CEO and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos have furthered the world’s interest in not only seeing what else is out there beyond our atmosphere but where else we humans can live!
In a 2016 Newsweek interview, Musk said he doesn’t have a doomsday prophecy, although he does say that “history suggests some doomsday event will happen.” It is an exciting time to think about the possibilities beyond this planet, yet also quite alarming if you put real stock into what Hawking and Musk are saying.
If we don’t destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons or out of control robots in the coming years, we will need to look to other planets to expand our great civilization. Perhaps as soon as in the next 100 years, according to Hawking.
It might be nice to get off this planet with how politically-obsessed everyone is these days anyway. Either way, it’s sounding like we will have to find somewhere else eventually.