Worried that humanity could destroy itself and the Earth with it, famed physicist Stephen Hawking on Monday advocated a massive global spending effort to establish off-world colonies as an insurance policy against a global holocaust, New Scientist reports.
Speaking in Washington, DC, in honor of NASA’s 50th anniversary, Hawking advocated spending about 10 times more than NASA’s current $17 billion budget on the initiative. This expenditure would amount to about 0.25 percent of global GDP.
“Even if we were to increase the international [space exploration] budget 20 times to make a serious effort to go into space, it would only be a small fraction of world GDP,” Hawking told the crowd. “Isn’t our future worth a quarter of a percent?”
Hawking advocated speeding up NASA’s plans to establish a settlement on the moon and send humans off to the Red Planet. “A goal of a base on the Moon by 2020 and of a manned landing on Mars by 2025 would reignite the space program and give it a sense of purpose in the same way that President Kennedy’s Moon target did in the 1960s,” he said.
As much as I admire Hawking, I wonder about the effectiveness of his approach. It would pretty much involve overturning the way politics are practiced.
There’s a great scene at the beginning of Act III in “Ghostbusters” that illustrates the problem. The Ghostbusters are at City Hall, trying to convince the mayor that the city faces a crisis of Biblical proportions as poltergeists run amok. Bill Murray’s character, Peter Venkman, finally hits upon the one thing that truly terrifies the mayor most of all.
“If I’m wrong, nothing happens! We go to jail - peacefully, quietly. We’ll enjoy it!” Venkman tells His Honor. “But if I’m *right*, and we *can* stop this thing… Lenny, you will have saved the lives of millions of registered voters.”
The mayor realizes that Venkman is right. Unless he can find some way to stop this, the city will be devastated and the survivors of the Five Boroughs will be in no mood to re-elect him to another term. And so he sends the Ghostbusters off to battle the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
Hawking has a vastly more difficult case to make. He’s asking political leaders to spend a large amount of tax money to preserve a small portion of the electorate in the face of an undefined disaster that could happen at some point in the indefinite future.
That’s a pretty difficult platform for any politician to run on. Most voters would likely argue - and quite reasonably so - that their tax dollars would be better spent avoiding the very catastrophes that threaten to wipe them out in the first place.
To the extent Hawking’s approach might work, it’s probably best to focus on a problem he didn’t mention in his speech - asteroid strikes. It’s a catastrophic threat that is easy to grasp, and one we might be able to do something about. Deflecting one before it hits Earth would save billions of voters. And it’s definitely an interesting aspect of space exploration and settlement that’s pretty interesting.
Anyway, that’s my view of things. Please feel free to disagree.
I say that we should build colonies on the moon so that we don’t blow ourselves up. Having such a productive goal for the whole of our species will serve to have a profound impact on bringing peace and unity to the planet, as well as give big defense contractors some other way to keep food on their tables without having to rely on wars to keep production up.