Many of Stephen Hawking’s ideas don’t seem plausible without the ability to understand some of the most complex concepts of physics. One that doesn’t as much need mathematical equations as it does technological advancement. In an interview with Richard Alleyne, a science correspondent for the British website “The Journalist”, Stephen Hawking addresses the idea that humans need to leave planet Earth for a new planet within one-hundred years.
Hawking looks to problems such as major war and natural resource issues as a threat to our race if we don’t figure something out now. This is where the physics matters immensely.
In a interview with the astrophysicist Katherine Freese from the University of Michigan, She exclaimed to the website Big Think that “the nearest star [to Earth] is Proxima Centauri which is 4.2 light years away. That means that, if you were travelling at the speed of light the whole time, it would take 4.2 years to get there” – or about 50,000 years using current rocket science.
This quote brings back Stephen Hawking’s theory of time travel, where at extreme fast speeds time can be avoided. Hawking sees this possibility as the theory of wormholes. He believes that these possibly portals into future and past time are all around just too molecular to ever see. Actually being able to use the fourth dimension of a wormhole is what Hawking thinks could be the only way to save our resources. It would allow the ideas about society to be expressed to less developed times, perhaps saving their future, and our present. He says, there is another kind of length, a length in time. While a human may survive for 80 years, the stones at Stonehenge, for instance, have stood around for thousands of years. And the solar system will last for billions of years. Everything has a length in time as well as space. Traveling in time means travelling through this fourth dimension.”
Using time travel as a way to combat the Earth’s resource issue isn’t plausible for Stephen Hawking’s one-hundred year plan on fixing or leaving this Earth, so what else could he believe could work. Unbelievable amounts of power are needed to generate a major human society without a resource immediately in front or you. His thought is spreading into space. He believes that humans need a good amount of time to be able to do this, which means keeping ourselves from destroying the planet. Hawking when talking about the timetable states, “I see great dangers for the human race. There have been a number of times in the past when its survival has been a question of touch and go. The Cuban missile crisis in 1963 was one of these. The frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future.”
“But I’m an optimist. If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe, as we spread into space,” he said.
As far-fetched as it may sound, solutions such as the ones Hawking’s is presenting may soon be more of a reality if not in my lifetime but within a few generations. It’s going to take great minds similar the the likes of Stephen Hawking to tackle these great issues of our species and this will happen first through technological advancements and educational advancements in the area of physics, and other sciences and mathematics.