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Hawking: Life must leave Earth or perish

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published June 14, 2006

HONG KONG - The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy Earth, world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday.

Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years, the British scientist said at a news conference.

"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Hawking, who came to Hong Kong to a rock star's welcome Monday. Tickets for his lecture today were sold out.

Hawking said that if humans can avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that can continue without support from Earth.

"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," Hawking said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

The 64-year-old scientist - one of the best-known theoretical physicists of his generation and author of the bestseller A Brief History of Time - uses a wheelchair and communicates with the help of a computer because he suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Joshua Winn, an astrophysicist at the Masschusetts Institute of Technology, agreed. "The prospect of colonizing other planets is very far off, you must realize," he said. Hawking's "work has been highly theoretical physics, not in astrophysics or global politics or anything like that," Winn added. "He is certainly stepping outside his research domain."

[Last modified June 14, 2006, 07:11:15]