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Bah, we've been playing with dangerous shit since fire, electricity, and atomic theory.

“We will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period,” Hawking said.

And how the fuck does he know for sure?

I *would* prefer to see some experimentation done in some other gravity well than Earth's, to be honest. I've read sci-fi.

Quantum singularities, and such.



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It's fantastically expensive to blast things past gravitational pull. We ain't going anywhere outside Mars until that shit gets worked out. Even Mars is way outside the zone of possibility at this second.

Hawking said most of the threats humans now face come from advances in science and technology, such as nuclear weapons and genetically engineered viruses.

Only a real threat if a big enough conflict erupts and someone effectively weaponizes it. Fission didn't mean dick until someone minimized it into a bomb-sized package and stuck a detonator on it. The end of civilization isn't going to come about by some lab accident. It'll be, like always, the byproduct of a well-meaning psycho. When (because it's not a question of "if") it happens, it'll be the worst setback since the Dark Ages in Europe.

100 years? Steve's insane.

Hawking makes more Doomsday predictions.

What the hell happened to Stephen Hawkings? Why is he now a fire and brimstone guy?

I agree with him completely that as a species we have to leave our crib to grow, but I'm not digging the "sky is falling" marketing.

Yeah, I'm down with the exploration stuff, let's do it. That's all I needed.