Hawking & Outerspace

Stephen Hawking, world famous scientist and author of the best selling book "The Brief History of Time", recently said that humans should go into outer space because that's where the human race will find its future survival and continuance. He thinks that in time our planet earth will become uninhabitable because of global warming or nuclear annihilation.

I think we should go into outer pace for the same reason Columbus came to America, to preserve and continue civilization. Columbus’ adventure saved Europe. However, Columbus wasn't aware that he was discovering a new world for that reason, to save Europe. (He was looking for a new trade route to the Orient.) But essentially that is what he did. Similarly, we may not be aware that humans have been venturing into space with the purpose of saving the human race. There is a saying, expand or perish.

At the time of Columbus Europe was in need of a savior. It needed to be saved from itself, from its social and political problems. Europeans were crowding each other, getting on each other’s nerves, constantly feuding over domain and ideas. The New World offered expansion and an outlet where, for one, people could live and practice their religions without being harassed. The Jews of Spain helped finance Columbus' voyages in the hope he might find them a homeland. As well, Europe was running out of resources that needed replenishing. Areas of Europe were being depleted of trees for building ships. In the New World there was an abundance of trees. The gold Spain found in the Americas helped lift it out of bankruptcy. For better or for worse, the New World helped rejuvenate the Old World. And later, not only did The New World come to the aid of The Old World in two world wars in the 20th century but also helped rebuild it economically and politically.

Hawking is right. Our survival depends on us going into outer space, but not only for scientific reasons but also for philosophical ones. Going into outer space will alleviate some of the problems the world faces as well as stimulate and ignite new technologies that will help save it. We need two types of technologies, scientific and philosophic.

Science and philosophy have accompanied each other as though they were both essential to sustain humankind. They work like a tag team. Science discovers things and philosophy reflects on them, putting them into context, debating their meaning and ethics. Science is essentially neutral, philosophy isn't. Philosophy challenges science to be relevant and moral, and makes it operational. Science gives use our material world. Philosophy gives as the ideas and techniques to govern and organize our world.

Science keeps on expanding in order to sustain us materially. New technologies have to be developed because old ones ware out, become inadequate or need replacing. Philosophy, as facilitator and provider of ideas, has the same problem. It has to keep on expanding to sustain us cognitively because with time some of our ideas about organization and governance grow stale and inadequate. Both science and philosophy are susceptible to atrophy and changing circumstances. They have to innovate and reinvent themselves to keep up with the times. Like Columbus' coming to America did, going into outer space will stimulate the rejuvenation and expansion of both.

Science, back in the late sixties, afforded us a marvelous, spiritually moving picture of the earth from outer space. As a globe in the dark sea of outer space the earth looked serene and majestic. This was the first time humans had ever seen the earth this way, as the capsule of the human race. It moved some of us to think like we had never thought before, that humanity was one. We also sensed a vulnerability about it because as we looked at this globe of ours in the darkness of space we knew we were not exactly taking good care of it, with our polluting and fighting over it. To some of us the earth looked fragile. Science let us see the earth this way and this view heightened our senses and consciousness, which we expressed philosophically, about what this sensation meant to us.

Science didn't force us to think what we did when we saw the earth the way we did in outer space, as a fragile capsule that needed better taking care of. Yet it moved us in that direction. A new philosophy grew out of that vision. We became a little more conscious about our destructive nature, which in turn changed our philosophical outlook. Some of us became far more environmentally conscious. That isolated image of the globe and what it mentally conjured is one thing that motivated the environmental movement. Perhaps the last time the world changed that dramatically in its philosophical outlook was when humanity saw for the first time the destructive nature of another scientific invention, the atomic bomb. In both cases we developed a new language and attitude which focuses more on our self-preservation. The image of the annihilative force of the first atomic bomb altered political and philosophical thought enough to dissuade us from using such a destructive force again. Our seeing the world as we did in outer space made us a little more conscious about other things we should be doing to prevent is destruction.