WHY WE MUST LEAVE EARTH
Perhaps you are familiar with Stephen Hawking, a scientist who has made astounding leaps in the study of time, space and black holes. He is considered to be an extremely reliable source for scientific speculation. Well, he recently made an argument in favor of space colonization. I recently read an article called “Why We Must Flee the Planet: The Geometry of Earth is All Wrong” at the website of SPACE. I learned the following information from that article.
Stephen Hawking is an advocate of space colonization. According to the previously mentioned article, Stephen Hawking stated that “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers.”
Seth Shostak, the author of the article, asserts that another reason that life on Earth is impractical is because the shape of Earth is inefficient. A sphere has minimal surface area, while a square has maximum surface space. He claims that the population of humans doubles every fifty years, and that in 4810 CE the mass of humans would reach the moon. A physicist named Freeman Dyson suggests that humans move to asteroids in the Kuiper Belt, a band of asteroids and space junk surrounding the solar system.
Seth Stostak argues that moving to solar system bodies is not practical, for a planet like Mars “is not a cheap fixer-upper.
Another possibility seems much more practical: that humans construct huge aluminum cylinders in space and live in them. In the 1970’s some scientists predicted that by the year 2000 millions of humans would be living in space. Of course, that may yet come to pass.
Perhaps you are familiar with Stephen Hawking, a scientist who has made astounding leaps in the study of time, space and black holes. He is considered to be an extremely reliable source for scientific speculation. Well, he recently made an argument in favor of space colonization. I recently read an article called “Why We Must Flee the Planet: The Geometry of Earth is All Wrong” at the website of SPACE. I learned the following information from that article.
Stephen Hawking is an advocate of space colonization. According to the previously mentioned article, Stephen Hawking stated that “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers.”
Seth Shostak, the author of the article, asserts that another reason that life on Earth is impractical is because the shape of Earth is inefficient. A sphere has minimal surface area, while a square has maximum surface space. He claims that the population of humans doubles every fifty years, and that in 4810 CE the mass of humans would reach the moon. A physicist named Freeman Dyson suggests that humans move to asteroids in the Kuiper Belt, a band of asteroids and space junk surrounding the solar system.
Seth Stostak argues that moving to solar system bodies is not practical, for a planet like Mars “is not a cheap fixer-upper.
Another possibility seems much more practical: that humans construct huge aluminum cylinders in space and live in them. In the 1970’s some scientists predicted that by the year 2000 millions of humans would be living in space. Of course, that may yet come to pass.
posted by Caroline at 3:09 PM
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