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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
bySpazmania ( 174582 ) writes:
Stephen Hawking is a brilliant man and solid scientist. His abilities as a futurist leave something to be desired.
byDutch Gun ( 899105 ) writes:
Agreed. What I'd like to know is what makes anyone think that he's got the answers to our future when everyone else who's made such far-sighted doomsday predictions has so far demonstrated to be ridiculously wrong. Remember, by now billions were supposed to be starving to death, we'd be out of oil, the ice caps were supposed to be gone, and/or we'd have destroyed ourselves in nuclear hellfire.
I do agree that we should strive to spread out into space, so as to avoid leaving all our eggs in one basket, but
byPenguinisto ( 415985 ) writes:
Devil's Advocate: There is a problem with the phrase "...but unless its something completely out of our control, like a massive cosmic event, then sorry, I'm not buying the doom and gloom anymore."
By the time humanity comes to the realization that something terminally wrong is occurring, it may well be too late to reach out into space as a second home.
If the calamity involves resource depletion, we will have run out of sufficient resources to create a self-sustaining colony somewhere else. If it involves so
bylgw ( 121541 ) writes:
If the calamity involves resource depletion, we will have run out of sufficient resources to create a self-sustaining colony somewhere else.
You're "not even wrong". There is no meaningful form of "resource depletion" that we face - the concept doesn't even make sense, unless we're talking post-SciFi-apocalypse.
When we build something out of iron, we don't change the amount of iron. We're not likely to run out of fossil fuels, since we keep discovering them faster than we burn them - the problem with fossil fuels is that they're too plentiful, not the other way around - but even if we did, we're not going to run out of solar power in the life
bymark-t ( 151149 ) writes:
We're not likely to run out of fossil fuels, since we keep discovering them faster than we burn them
Uhmmm... no. Do the math here... it takes only moments to burn what can take many tens of thousands of years to form. Anyone should realize that even if what you said happened to ever be true at one point in time (and at one point, it may have been), it is not indefinitely sustainable. The only thing that will keep us from literally running out is that the costs of obtaining it are going to continue to r
bytnk1 ( 899206 ) writes:
You have a point, to some degree, and I agree with the fact that eventually, there has to be an end.
But bear in mind that there have been a lot of ten thousand year cycles in the history of the Earth. I mean a whole lot of them. This means that there may well be less oil than we would want, but probably not as little as we fear.
In any event, the real argument against burning oil has always been pollution and the fact that oil is much more efficiently used in making plastics. I do think we should move away from fossil fuels, but I don't think we should do so in an economically unsustainable manner.
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