Physicist Stephen Hawking has warned humanity that we probably only have about 1,000 years left on Earth, and the only thing that could save us from certain extinction is setting up colonies elsewhere in the Solar System.
"I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet. We must continue to go into space for the future of humanity," Hawking said in a lecture at the University of Cambridge this week.
As Heather Saul from The Independent reports, Hawking has estimated that self-sustaining human colonies on Mars are not going to be a viable option for another 100 years or so, which means we need to be "very careful" in the coming decades.
Late last year, Hawking added his name to a coalition of more than 20,000 researchers and experts, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and Noam Chomsky, calling for a ban on anyone developing autonomous weapons that can fire on targets without human intervention.
"our robots are perfectly submissive now, but what happens when we remove one too many restrictions? " Musk’s new research initiative dedicated to the ethics of artificial intelligence, said last year.
"It seems that we'll keep whittling away at their constraints, and in the extreme case they will reach human performance on virtually every intellectual task. It's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, and it's equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly."
As Hawking says in his film, "I am more convinced than ever that we are not alone," but if the aliens are finding us, "they will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria".
"Try to make sense of what you see, wonder about what makes the Universe exist. Be curious," he told students at the Cambridge lecture. "However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up."
source: Science Alert
source: Science Alert
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