Stephen Hawking responds to Yahoo Answers Community

Posted by Arsalan

August 3, 2006

Almost a month before, Dr. Stephen Hawking asked a question to Yahoo Answers “How can the human race survive the next hundred years?“. His question received 25,395 answers. The Yahoo Answers editors selected the best answer by someone by the nick Semi-Mad Scientist and his answer was:

Political and social chaos has been with us for a very long time. Given the revolutions of the past and present, class warfare, and scheming of those seeking power, the human race has shown a remarkable resilience and managed to survive thus far.

The new factors in the equation of the balance of mankind and the rest of nature are the technological advances that have changed how political and social chaos can develop, and the advances in industry that have the potential to inflict serious environmental alterations. Threats of nuclear war, biological catastrophe, and climate change now bring into question as to how humanity can continue to survive.

Personally, I think that with the growth of true threats to survival, there has been growth of human ingenuity as well. We have yet to release a Frankenstein’s monster of technology upon the world. Despite the stockpiles of nuclear weapons, there has been no global warfare. Medical research is in a renaissance of advance. Climate change remains a concern, but I believe that we are an adaptable species, as we have adapted before and will again.

The larger question is how will humanity survive, which is what is asked. It’s very likely that the resources of today may no longer be available in a century. But consider the resources available today that were not available a century before. As stated before, we are an adaptable species, and when one window of resources closes, it’s likely that other windows will be openable.

Of course, the speed that everything progresses at has increased. Will we be able to adapt in time? Perhaps not for a lot of us, but consider that in the 14th century, the Black Death wiped out over a third of Europe’s population. Yet Europe survived and prospered. We may again have a catastophe that has similarly devestating effects, but I feel confident that after the catastrophe, humankind will prosper.

Why do I place this faith in humanity? Because I must. Without the belief that we will continue to grow and overcome the pains of social chaos as we mature as a species, we might as well not have any faith at all. I’m not talking religion (although that may or may not be a part in its current forms), but simply the same belief that we will survive just as much as the sun will rise the next day.

Stephen Hawking responded to the Yahoo Answer Community’s involvement in his question through his audio message. The complete transcript of his message is as follows:

How can the human race survive the next hundred years. I don’t know the answer. That is why I asked the question, to get people to think about it, and to be aware of the dangers we now face. Before the 1940s, the main threat to our survival came from collisions with asteroids such collisions have caused mass extinctions in the past, but the last one was 70 million years ago, so the likelihood that we will need the services of Bruce Willis in the next hundred years, is very small. A much more immediate danger, is nuclear war. America and Russia, each have more than enough warheads to kill everyone on Earth, several times over, and the same may now be true of China. The world came perilously close to nuclear annihilation, on more than one occasion in the last 50 years. With the ending of the Cold War, the threat has become less acute, but it has not gone away. There are still enough nuclear weapons stock piled, to kill us all, and their use might be triggered by an accident that convinced a country that it was under attack.

There is now a new danger from small and potentially unstable countries, acquiring nuclear weapons. Such minor nuclear powers might cause millions of deaths, but they would not threaten the survival of the entire human race, unless they sparked a conflict between the major powers.

These dangers of asteroid collision and nuclear war, have now been joined by a host of other threats to our survival. Climate change is happening at an ever increasing rate. While we are hoping to stabilize it, and maybe even reverse it, by reducing our CO2 emissions, the danger is that the climate change may pass a tipping point at which the temperature rise becomes self sustaining. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice reduces the amount of solar energy that is reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of CO2, trapped at the bottom of the ocean, which will further increase the green house effect. Let’s hope we don’t end up like our sister planet, Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees Centigrade, and raining sulphuric acid.

There are other dangers, such as the accidental or intentional release of a genetically engineered virus. Each time we increase our technological powers, we add new possible ways in which things could go disastrously wrong. The human race faces an increasingly dangerous future. There’s a sick joke, that the reason we haven’t been visited by aliens, is that when a civilization reaches our stage of development, it becomes unstable, and destroys itself. In fact, I think there are other reasons why we haven’t seen any aliens, but the story shows how perilous the situation is. The long term survival of the human race, will be safe only if we spread out into space, and then to other stars. This won’t happen for at least a hundred years, so we have to be very careful. Perhaps, we must hope that genetic engineering will make us wise and less aggressive.

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