Stephen Hawking has been making this stance in public for some months now. At a time where our public interest in space might be on the wane, he sets us the bar.
Stephen Hawking, one of the world's most venerated scientific minds, has said abandoning terra firma is inevitable since a nuclear war or some sort of asteroid collision could at some point wipe Earth off the chart as a viable place to live.It's no laughing matter, it's not science fiction, it's Stephen Hawking saying his piece. The future of humanity lies in space.
"The long-term survival of the human race is at risk as long as it is confined to a single planet," the usually publicity-shy Hawking told BBC radio.
Incidentally, if humans have any hope of reaching hospitable planets in other solar systems using the rocket technology that took us to the moon, it'll take, oh, around 50,000 years.
But the wheelchair-bound Cambridge University professor has a way around that: propulsion systems, a la Star Trek. "Science fiction has developed the idea of warp drive, which takes you instantly to your destination," he said.
Though it's scientifically impossible for anything to travel faster than the speed of light, Hawking believes people could eventually go just under that speed using a process known as called matter-antimatter annihilation.
Star Trek aficionados will be well aware that ships such as the Enterprise are propelled using antimatter, a process which is still unworkable in reality though has for years been investigated by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.
Were the method indeed possible, travelers could conceivably reach the closest star in around six years.
It might be decades before today's would-be space travelers get to visit such planets, though Hawking, for one, is still keen to visit the final frontier. "My next goal is to go into space," he said. "Maybe Richard Branson will help me."
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