The answer, Dr Hawking, is...

Tom got this email:

Dr. Barnett,

Professor Stephen Hawking recently posted the following question on Yahoo! Answers: "In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?"

Perhaps you should consider visiting Cambridge to discuss “a future worth creating” with arguably the most brilliant thinker of his generation. Maybe he could be convinced that continued strides in economic connectivity, along with many attendant changes, have us staring not into oblivion but into a world filled with unprecedented promise, where more than half of humanity is ready to emerge from relative poverty and the threat of great power war can be all but eliminated.

My questions are simple: If you could choose one word to answer Prof. Hawking’s question above, what would it be? What one word would you select if the question read, “how can the human race fail to sustain another 100 years?”?

Since I get copied on Ask Toms, I actually took a stab at this one in a reply:

Great email.

From what I know of Tom, I'll take a stab at answers for fun:

1. connection

2. China

But, I was off. Not surprisingly, Tom's answer was better:

Easy. Ingenuity.

Scientists do this a lot in old age: they get scared and think that the ingenuity of their generation was unique and will never be repeated again. It is complete bullshit, and arrogant to boot.

But somehow humanity not only gets smarter, we constantly reinvent ourselves and this world.

Comments

[david]

No one doubt professor Hawkins's credential. However, he cannot save the world with his expertise in physics. To save this world, it takes good leadership, knowledgeable of human behavior and human history plus some luck.
Unfortunately the Bush Administration lack depth in the aforementioned. Former secretary of defense McNamara has credential in statistics and logic but lack depth in understanding of human behavior and human history. Most likely, if he had depth in understanding of human history, he could have persuaded Johnson to get out of Vietnam and saved thousands of lives.

[LT C]

This one i can't take credit for, but:

It's the (global) economy, stupid.

[Tom Barnett]

I fully intend to die in outer space.

This will happen naturally, once we allow near-space (here to moon) to get more commercialized (private space travel). Think of where we would be if the government controlled air travel way back when like it's monopolized space travel since the late 1950s.

This is nothing sacred about dying in space. I say, let the private sector take as many risks as people are willing to handle. Let'em die trying and let's get on with it, especially travel beyond the moon.