Considering that he's used that exact phrase before, it's very likely that it *is* programmed into his synthesizer. Otherwise he'd be spending an awful lot of time laboriously repeating himself to every two-bit whack-off reporter who comes along ;-)

  (Note that I am NOT calling CNN's science reporters "two-bit" reporters. That would be ungentlemanly and only partially true, and I don't want to get sued)

Even a Yucatan-sized hit would still leave the earth much more survivable than anywhere else.

  Really? You know this... how?

  It would be WAY more practical to design underground bunkers and habitats here on earth than to try to move colonies to the moon or Mars.

  When the ground shocks from a large impact destroy your underground bunkers, then what? What happens if the impact destroys food production for so long that your bunker's stored food supplies run out? Who chooses who gets to stay in the bunker? What would the survivors do once their stored resources ran out, and they emerge into a world where civilizations infrastructure was completely or nearly completely demolished?

  Is that all really easier to do than building a large enough space infrastructure to be able to detect and deal with a Yucatan sized asteroid before it even hits?

  The whole point here is that if some sort of disaster occurs that makes it impossible or nearly so for civilization on earth to reboot itself from the ashes, at least there would be a working colony elsewhere, and the human race would survive, and perhaps recolonize earth after the climate had settled down.

  What if it's not an asteroid, but our own stupidity? What if it's a virus that wipes us out? Bunkers aren't likely to help, there, but being isolated by some hundreds of thousands or millions of miles might.

  This is the first time, EVER, in our history, that we have the technological potential to build such a colony. Yeah, it'll be difficult, and expensive, but aren't the potential benefits worth it?

If our future is on worlds beyond earth, then we need to start with a space transportation, of the form of a single stage vehicle that can at least go to the moon and back repeatedly, with a turn around time of less than two days. Additionally the vehicle needs to be able to return from the moon without having to depend on an already established infrastructure.

  If we wait until we feel like developing a vehicle that good, we'll wait forever, because there won't be a need for it. There has to be a demand for a vehicle that good, and the best way to provide that demand is to start trying to expand into space using what we have. Private industry didn't start building and launching it's own rockets until the demand was there....

  In any case, that's reaching too far ahead. What we need is a single stage to orbit (SSTO) vehicle that can be reused without expensive rebuilds, long turnaround times, and that has a decent cargo capacity. Spacecraft that will travel from orbit to the moon and beyond have entirely different engineering requirements and should be built to those, not to the requirements of an SSTO.

It's that there isn't anywhere to go in space. It's all about economics. Transport grows and prospers because it fills a need in moving people and goods from point A to point B, and in space there is no point B.

  I disagree with this. From an economic standpoint, the resources available to us in the solar system massively dwarf the resources available here on Earth, and we won't be destroying our ecology or people's homes in order to get at them. Just the amount of metals/silicates/organics available in the earth-crossing asteroids are thousands of times more than we can possibly ever mine out of the earth's crust. Energy is free - solar arrays, with no worries about day/night cycles or storage - need more, just make the array bigger. Industrial pollution is not a problem. NIMBY is not a problem (save for perhaps some misguided individuals who worry about "polluting space" - snort)

  I'm not talking about shipping food back to earth - we can do that easier here, especially if we have enough energy and materials. I'm talking about metals, which is our worse future resource problem. Transporting the metals back isn't hard, either once one has the mining facilities up there - just kick them out the door on the proper vector and they'll eventually end up in earth orbit.

  All this has been hashed out many times by a lot of smart people over the last few decades. It's not impossible, just, as you point out, an engineering problem. The first century's worth of explorers of the north american continent did it on a lot less, with a lot less of an idea what awaited them there (save for perhaps slaves...) and with fewer resources.

  We worry about colonizing space *after* we build the infrastructure necessary to do so up there. By the time that's done we'll likely not have to worry about colonization at all, it'll be taking care of itself...

  GSVEMR

Well and good, but where do we get the energy to boost enough humans and tools into space to create a viable life-supporting ecosystem elsewhere?

  We can and have already done that. Doing it on a larger scale just requires scaling up the technology we already have. It's highly likely that a large effort to scale it up would result in improvements in existing technology - as is already happening albeit on a much smaller scale - and perhaps technological breakthroughs Historically massive R&D efforts have nearly always resulted in breakthroughs. Self-supporting ecosystems in space are certainly possible - difficult, but possible even given today's tech. We just have to get really serious about it.

  When JFK proposed going to the moon, we didn't know how to do it. We made the effort and did it anyway. It took a lot of work by a lot of people, and cost remarkably few lives - but we did - and it really didn't even cost that much, not as a function of our GNP. The problem with doing it is not technology, it's money and willingness. We can certainly do it better and cheaper nowadays, if we care to do so (and quit porking out our aerospace industry) because the tech has improved - and it's improved rather slowly because we haven't been trying very hard. Look at the massive improvements in technology (military and civilian) that came about as a result of WWII and tell me I'm wrong.

  Hell, if we *really* needed to move massive amounts of material into orbit, fast, there's always Orion. It's not like we have a shortage of nuclear weapons to use as a booster technology. Unfortunately the argument as to where to launch the thing would rage for decades. As a way of shortcutting that process, I propose using Washington, DC for a launch site. We could even encourage some of the less savory inhabitants there to stay and watch the most spectacular engineering achievement of the human race from the front row seats.

  Yeah 5 billion years into the future. During the previous 1 billion we evolved from amino acids to cells to amphibians, lizards, and intelligent mammals. So by the time the earth expires, we'll likely have moved into Q-like beings. Even if we stayed on this planet, its eventual scalding by the nearby star wouldn't affect us.

  It's extremely unlikely that the human species, or even the entirety of life on this planet, shares that same "expiration date".

  There's a small but non-zero chance that we could get creamed by a comet on a hyperbolic orbit next year, or a radiation front washes over us that sterilizes a fair portion of life on the surface, or... and that's just two of the more likely external possibilities. There are all sorts of ways that we could kill ourselves off.

  What Hawking is trying to say here is that we should not trust the future of the human species to chance, now that we have potential of changing that, and he's absolutely right.

  Three dimensions: The Care, and the Care Nots.

  (I am of course talking about caring about the overall welfare of the human species. People who don't comprehend why some of us care about that can likely never be shown why, as they are so bound up in the first two dimension they can't see beyond their own lives.)

  Well geez, you know, master_p is just one single member of a species with billions upon billions of members, he's not very important...

  Probably true, but it certainly wouldn't hurt if the average level of ignorance were reduced.

  Horseshit. The US is still pursuing the course it is because in the process of trying to "win" the nuclear standoff with the soviets, it remodeled itself all to closely to the enemy "it"* despised. Now that it's "won" that "war", all the gloves came off.

  The ROK has been on the course it is for over half a century, and there's damned all anyone, including the Old Soviets or China, can do about that without direct interference.

* During the decades of the cold war that I lived thru, I often found the accusations by the US of the Soviets using "propaganda" amusing... as if the US didn't.

GSVEMR

Can we please do some basic math and stop the stupid "it's all about oil" line of attack - it makes you look like an idiot.

  Bad figures aside, what do you figure it's about?

  Bringing democracy to the middle east? Believing that is what it was about really shows up the complete, utter, ignorant stupidity of the people who thought it up.

  Bush Jr wanting revenge on the guy that, supposedly, was responsible for a hit team targeting his dad? Ditto.

  Corporate lobbyists looking for a war to fill their coffers?

  Then what, exactly?

  While that is all true, the Soviets thought they could pacify Afghanistan, too - and this was when the US was supplying weapons to the insurgents.

  Ain't Imperialism Fun?

  Half a century since WWII, two decades since the USSR collapsed, and we're STILL THERE.

  The Korean peninsula? The US lets other places around the world eat themselves in violence in strife, but we just can't seem to let that go.

  It's profitable.

  But but but but, but the Saudis are our "allies" in the War Against UnAmerican Values. /sarcasm

GSVEMR

Thanks for your well thought out remarks. As has been pointed out here on slashdot before and is especially transparent in this thread, rational discourse is a rare occurrence in modern society.

  Your remarks about partisan rancor on slashdot are spot on, as far as I'm concerned. I've been haunting this site for a long time, and it seems to be devolving into another echo of the partisan idiocy that is sweeping our country lately.

  I'd gladly pay four or five times that thousand dollars a year in extra taxes, even at my (under "poverty level") current income, if it gets me at least the level of health care that my friends in Canada and Europe get merely from being taxpaying citizens. As far as I am concerned, one of the things that government *should* be doing is taking care of it's citizens, ensuring they are in good health, and, er, "productive" (yeah, there's some sarcastic irony there...)

  You have said more truth in those last two sentence than I have read in a long time.

  It's no truth that ain't been said before here.

  For what it's worth, which ain't much, I think that Shuttleworth was spot on with what he was talking about - and specifically about the FOSS community.

  Keep beating the odds.

  I don't know any other way to live.

  GSVEMR