Space ambition

London, Nov. 30: Mankind will need to venture far beyond planet Earth to ensure the long-term survival of our species, according to the world’s best known scientist, Prof. Stephen Hawking.

Returning to a theme he has voiced many times before, the Cambridge University cosmologist said today that space-rockets propelled by the kind of matter/antimatter annihilation technology popularised in Star Trek would be needed to help Homo sapiens colonise hospitable planets orbiting alien stars.

And he disclosed his own ambition to go into space. “Maybe Richard Branson will help me,” he said, a reference to the space tourism plans of Virgin tycoon Sir Richard Branson, using the privately built SpaceShipOne to take people into space from 2008.

Hawking, who is confined to a wheelchair by motor neuron disease was commenting using a muscle below his right eye to operate — via a switch on his glasses — his voice synthesiser.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that scientists still have “some way to go” to reach his prediction in his bestselling A Brief History of Time that mankind would one day “know the mind of God” by understanding the complete set of laws which govern the universe.

This set of laws, which will probably rely on theory that requires more than three dimensions of space and one of time, could be uncovered within 20 years, not least because next year the giant Large Hadron Collider will go into operation in the CERN nuclear physics laboratory in Geneva to provide new information for that quest by simulating conditions not seen since the birth of the universe.

Hawking said that this knowledge may be vital to the human race’s continued existence. “The long-term survival of the human race is at risk as long as it is confined to a single planet,” he said. “Sooner or later, disasters such as an asteroid collision or nuclear war could wipe us all out. But once we spread out into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe.”

“There isn’t anywhere like the Earth in the solar system, so we would have to go to another star.”