Stephen Hawking’s disturbing prediction about our future

In 1818, when an expedition led by John Ross came across them around Inglefield Firth, the Inughuit had not seen another human being for centuries. Descendants of the thule villagesarrived in Greenland in the 13th century and lived a small golden age until, around the 17th century, climate change isolated them from the rest of civilization.

They were a community of just over 200 people convinced that they were the last human beings on the face of the Earth. AND They were for hundreds of years.

The ends of the world

This case is very interesting because, although the “end of the world” has been a literary trope for thousands of years, there are not many communities that thought they were the last ones left. The ‘Apocalypse’ historically was more of a ‘reset’ than a ‘game over’. As I pointed out Thomas Moynihan in his ‘X-Risk: How humanity discovered its own extinction‘, the idea of ​​the world ending completely was “virtually unthinkable.”

But 200 years ago something changed. It was when we began to understand that there is no “anthropic principle“, that we are not necessary, nor the natural result of the evolution of the universe. That is, we began to understand that we could disappear.

The problem is that in these two centuries things have only gotten worse. It defended Nick Bostrom more than twenty years ago“due to the acceleration of technological progress, humanity may be rapidly approaching a critical phase of its career.”

The ‘existential risk’

That is, “a threat that could annihilate humanity or permanently destroy much of its potential.” We are talking about a risk that could eliminate not only the current human population, but also all potential future generations.

A risk that, moreover, has not stopped growing since the beginning of the century because, given the threats we already had (the climatenuclear weapons, etc…) now the derivative of artificial intelligence is added.

In 2016, in front of the Oxford Union (probably the most prestigious debating society in the world), Stephen Hawking Yogave a conference about cosmology that ended with a profound and terrible reflection on existential risk and the future of humanity.

With that phrase (“I don’t think we will survive another thousand years”), the Hawking of 2016 was not inventing anything, he was putting into words something that experts had been ruminating on for many years.

He was also giving us a solution.

Because, although the quote is at the end of the conference, the British physicist still had time to add something key: that he did not believe that we would survive another thousand years, otherwise we would not “escape beyond our fragile planet.”

It was a way of putting eggs in several baskets; but on an interplanetary scale. As the risks on the planet growthe space appears as “plan B.” Hawking is quite explicit about this: “it is not just an intellectual question,” he tells us. “It’s not even an economic issue, it’s an existential issue.”

Obviously, it’s a tricky thing. The moral hazard is there. The risk that we use that scarecrow as an excuse not to reduce risks on Earth. However, if we read Hawking’s words in context, it is clear that that is not what he is telling us.

“We need other worlds, but they are in this one.”

Taking Hawking’s argument to the limit, we don’t even need to go to space, we need to want to go. We need the special dream because we need stories that tell us how far we can go; stories that motivate us to create new technologies and develop new ways of looking at the world.

The case of the Inughuit is also very frustrating, because contact with the outside world changed them very quickly and did not give us time to study their way of life or their belief system. However, we can always make tales and that is what Hawking does. in the 2016 speech: realize something that, without a doubt, the Inughuit lost in the white hell realized, that “the important thing is not to give up.”

Image | Tanya Hart | Alexander Andrews

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