Post by Swamp Gas on Mar 31, 2006 22:41:03 GMT -5
www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_71769.html
My fears for human race' - Hawking
Top physicist Professor Stephen Hawking fears the human race will not survive another millennium.
The Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University and author of A Brief History Of Time is worried an accident or global warming will wipe out life on Earth and says only by settling on other planets can humanity guarantee its survival.
The physicist spoke of his fears ahead of a lecture to be given on Friday evening to the Royal Society of Edinburgh entitled The Universe In A Nutshell, the title of his new book.
"I am afraid the atmosphere might get hotter and hotter until it will be like Venus with boiling sulphuric acid," he said. "I am worried about the greenhouse effect."
Prof Hawking, who is confined to a wheelchair and speaks with the aid of a computer, has motor neurone disease, a degenerative disease of the brain.
He said space travel would not solve the problems of over-population but, without colonising other planets, humans were presented with the possibility of becoming extinct.
"It takes too many resources to send each person into space," he said. "Earth is the most suitable planet in the solar system. But unless the human race spreads into space, I doubt it will survive the next thousand years. Some accident can wipe out life on a single planet."
Prof Hawking also said the challenge for physics was to produce an explanation of everything - a complete unified theory.
"The major challenge for theoretical physics in the 21st century is to combine gravity with quantum theory to produce a complete theory that explains everything in the universe," he said.
"It is like a jigsaw. We think we have the edges of complete unified theory but there is a lot to be filled in, in the middle. This is the challenge for the 21st century."
My fears for human race' - Hawking
Top physicist Professor Stephen Hawking fears the human race will not survive another millennium.
The Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University and author of A Brief History Of Time is worried an accident or global warming will wipe out life on Earth and says only by settling on other planets can humanity guarantee its survival.
The physicist spoke of his fears ahead of a lecture to be given on Friday evening to the Royal Society of Edinburgh entitled The Universe In A Nutshell, the title of his new book.
"I am afraid the atmosphere might get hotter and hotter until it will be like Venus with boiling sulphuric acid," he said. "I am worried about the greenhouse effect."
Prof Hawking, who is confined to a wheelchair and speaks with the aid of a computer, has motor neurone disease, a degenerative disease of the brain.
He said space travel would not solve the problems of over-population but, without colonising other planets, humans were presented with the possibility of becoming extinct.
"It takes too many resources to send each person into space," he said. "Earth is the most suitable planet in the solar system. But unless the human race spreads into space, I doubt it will survive the next thousand years. Some accident can wipe out life on a single planet."
Prof Hawking also said the challenge for physics was to produce an explanation of everything - a complete unified theory.
"The major challenge for theoretical physics in the 21st century is to combine gravity with quantum theory to produce a complete theory that explains everything in the universe," he said.
"It is like a jigsaw. We think we have the edges of complete unified theory but there is a lot to be filled in, in the middle. This is the challenge for the 21st century."