147 / Please explain, Stephen Hawking
According to theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking (he of 'A Brief History of Time' fame) our time on Mother Earth is coming to an end.
Not today or tomorrow, but in no less than a few billion years, when the sun will expand and swallow earth. However, that's the smaller of a variety of problems that will make it desirable to emigrate. Others are that we may nuke ourselves, destroy our home with accelerated global warming, over-populate to the point of collapse. And that's not even mentioning threats from supernovae, astroids, black holes and the like. All good reasons, according to Hawking, to pack our bags … read more and watch his interview.
But there's a problem he's not going into. The tyranny of distance. With current technology it would take 50,000 years to travel to a near-by star some 4 light years away. The bottom line here is: Humans will never step into a spaceship on earth, blast off and step off the spaceship in some distant world … it just won't happen. How do I know? Read on …
Many years ago I read a book by Frank J. Tippler, The Physics of Immortality, in which he postulates that humans will
never be able to space-travel science-fiction-like. The physics just won't allow it. So what's the solution? We will eventually develop computers and software that are able to store all information required to replicate all of life (not just human life.) The spaceships with this computer & software (that payload will be just a few kilograms; but: The computers of this ultimate age will not be vulgar hardware, but ethereal entities composed of bent space and structured energy. John J. Reilly) shall be dispatched to outer space. They will travel for tens or hundreds of thousands - if indeed not millions - of years, until they find a suitable planet. There they will replicate our world, with all its inhabitants, present and past - in a process that probably will take millions of years. Resurrection of the Dead, see?!
Cool, what a great concept. I wrote an essay about it.
Oh, btw … we don't know if this hasn't already happened in the past. Ha! Hang on a minute, you may say, does that mean creationists, those crackpots claiming the world is only 6,000 years old, may be right in some queer way? Tipler says: "Theology is either nonsense and hence doomed to fade away, or else it will one day become a branch of physics."
I love this stuff.