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Stephen Hawking, best selling author of “A Brief History of Time” and the children’s book “George’s Secret Key to the Universe” written along with his daughter Lucy, will be sending his digitized DNA into space as part of NCsoft’s® Operation Immortality™.
Lucy Hawking is also participating in the project. Together, the father and daughter are hoping the project will raise awareness of the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics, a competition that will award $10 million to the first person or team that can sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days or less.
Continue reading ‘Stephen Hawking to Send DNA into Space on Garriott Flight’
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.
Continue reading ‘Hawking: Build Space Colonies in Case We Blow Ourselves Up’
Britain’s Channel 4 will be airing a two-part series about famed physicist Stephen Hawking this week. Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe, which will be aired on March 3-4.. The channel’s website has extensive information about the series and physics in general.
The Guardian has a story here by Rachel Cooke, who interviewed Hawking. There are quotes from the physicist and his colleagues, with discussions about space exploration, philosophy, religion and alien beings. The story also includes an interesting account of what it is like to interview Hawking, who is confined to a wheelchair and can only speak with the help of a computer.
Noted science fiction writer Ben Bova has an op-ed in the Naples News about physicist Stephen Hawking’s upcoming micro-gravity flight with Zero-G. He sees flights like this as the beginning of man’s evolution in space.
“The old adage is wrong: The meek will inherit not the Earth, but the gentler low-gravity environments of space,” Bova writes.
For the complete article, click here.
