Funk Babblings

The post I linked to in my previous entry starts out with a section I skipped over before, but don't want to ignore.

Apparently Stephen Hawking has now joined the chorus saying that humanity needs to start colonizing space in order to survive. JMS made it clear in Babylon 5 that he agrees with a version of this view, and it seems to be quite common among sci-fi geeks.

But it strikes me as wrong-headed.

Before going on I should distinguish between the Hawking view and the JMS view. JMS basically said we need to colonize space because our Sun won't last forever, and we want humanity to outlast the Sun. Hawking, however, points to "sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of." All of which are man-made and relatively short-term dangers, quite a bit different from the Sun eventually running out of fuel.

So anyway, let's imagine that we get to the point, 50 or 100 years from now, that we can start colonizing Mars or Alpha Centauri or whatever. In the meantime, things here on Earth continue going downhill as global warming worsens, more people get their hands on nuclear weapons, the population keeps increasing, natural resources are depleted, and so on. But according to Hawking, that's OK, because we pick up and move. Billions of us. By that time probably tens of billions unless we have a massively deadly global disaster first.

Let's be realistic. When things get that bad, and there's a way out, that way out will not be available to everyone at once. Only the people of means will be able to get out early; as time goes on it may get either more expensive or less expensive to become a space colonist (depending on how things advance Out There vs how quickly things get worse Back Here). Those without money and power will be left behind on an increasingly inhospitable planet.

The thing is, if the people in power now would spend their resources on fixing the problems on Earth rather than on finding an escape route, it would be more likely to benefit everybody rather than only themselves.

I just realized, getting back to the whole Star Trek thing of yesterday, that one reason I've never been a huge Trek fan (though I don't dislike it and of course I like sci-fi in general) is that the Star Trek view of the future seems unrealistically idealistic. Roddenberry imagined that somehow mankind would magically change its nature in the next few centuries, and his legion of fans romanticize space colonization without thinking about (or at least mentioning) how to politically and socially get from where we are now to that idealistic point.