54 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen HawkingBrief Answers to the Big Questions
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Should We Colonize Space?”
Humanity must venture into space in search of new homes; if not, and if we destroy Earth, no one will be alive to carry on. People object that space flight wastes resources needed to help people on Earth, but even NASA spends only a fraction of 1% of the US’s gross domestic product. It’s both possible and necessary to fund improvements at home and exploration of space.
Going to the moon in 1969 advanced earthbound technology and inspired many to become scientists. After that project ended in 1972, interest and confidence in science waned: It hadn’t solved the social problems that plague us on Earth. A new initiative to put colonies on the moon and Mars would revitalize the public’s interest in science of all types.
Colonists could survive on the moon and elsewhere by digging underground, which would insulate them from temperature extremes and protect them from meteors, cosmic rays, and other space dangers. Mining would provide resources. From the moon, travel to other planets would be simplified. Mars would be next: As on the moon, water and oxygen could be obtained from the Martian ice caps, and minerals from vulcanism would be available through mining.
Some moons around Jupiter and Saturn may have life within oceans beneath the moon’s surfaces. In addition, many nearby stars have planets that might be in the “Goldilocks zone”—a zone with temperatures that can support life. Getting there within a human lifetime, though, using current technology, would require fuel that weighs as much as the entire galaxy. Technical improvements will increase our ability to travel through space.
Breakthrough Starshot is a plan to launch 1,000 tiny spacecraft propelled by small sails pushed by laser beams toward the star Alpha Centauri at one-fifth the speed of light. The 20-year flight would arrive near Alpha Centauri’s Earth-like planet; observations would be beamed back toward Earth via laser, arriving four years later. Starshot vehicles might also explore our solar system and chart near-Earth asteroids. Many technical problems remain, but Hawking is optimistic that engineers will work them out.
Chapter 8 Analysis
Hawking addresses concerns from some quarters that the expense of space travel is too great and that its value is overrated. His answer is that humanity needs populations separate from Earth in case disaster strikes on our planet; additionally, he points out that the cost is a fraction of 1% of worldwide annual earnings and that the technology developed for space travel will also benefit the people who remain behind.
The author cites Columbus’s visits to the Americas as an example of exploration that benefited Europeans, though not all at once. Likewise, Hawking believes the payoffs of colonizing space won’t all become apparent right away: “This would be a long-term strategy, and by long term I mean hundreds or even thousands of years” (166). Hawking thus echoes the beliefs of longtermism, the ethical view that the welfare of future humans is as important as that of people now living.
In Chapter 3, Hawking commented that visits by outsiders tend to go badly for Indigenous peoples. Referring to the native peoples of the Americas after Columbus’s arrival, he writes, “I don’t think they thought they were better off for it” (85). As humans begin to colonize nearby planets, we’re unlikely to cause too much trouble if we don’t encounter aliens. He warns, though, that we might contaminate Mars with Earth’s microbes; conversely, if we carried Martian microbes back to Earth, they could wreak havoc here.
Hawking’s vision of our destiny puts Earth at the beginning of a long future-history: It’s the crèche or cradle out of which humanity climbs as it stretches itself outward toward a galactic destiny. That he foresees such a future—which foregrounds the book’s theme of A Limitless Future—reveals an optimism absent elsewhere in the book, where the idea of disaster looms large, as in Chapter 7, where he urges people to escape Earth before we destroy it. Those who do venture beyond Earth, of course, will retain much know-how on travel between planets. His pessimism about Earth’s future hints at a belief that the space colonists will be the ones who continue onward to the stars.
Related Titles
By Stephen Hawking
