La domanda di Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking ha posto una domanda sulla versione americana di Yahoo! Answers che ha generato molto clamore anche nel nostro Paese. In poco più di un mese, 25000 utenti hanno mandato la loro proposta su come la razza umana possa sopravvivere per i prossimi cento anni.
Oltre ad aver scelto la risposta migliore, Hawking ha voluto mandarci un prezioso messaggio audio con le sue considerazioni sul tema.
Il grande astrofisico, per sua stessa ammissione, non può trovare una risposta alla sua domanda. Di fatto, il suo scopo è quello di avviare una discussione sul tema. Con la sua fine arguzia, sprona gli utenti di Answers a ragionare su questioni più urgenti che a improbabili collisioni con un asteroide! Davvero notevole il suo commento su Bruce Willis!
Hawking ci fa notare come i pericoli connessi alla corsa agli armamenti nucleari, alle variazioni climatiche, ai virus costruiti in laboratorio siano minacce più imminenti. Inoltre, si rende conto che la specie umana avrà molte più possibilità di sopravvivenza se il dibattito sulle possibili soluzioni stimolerà il desiderio di prendere l’iniziativa.
Ma perchè vi stiamo raccontando tutto? Ascoltate il messaggio (in inglese) o leggete la trascrizione integrale riportata più in basso e discutetene qui. Come possiamo contribuire a fermare il riscaldamento globale? Il disarmo nucleare è raggiungibile? In che modo possiamo realizzare delle trasformazioni a livello globale? La colonizzazione dello spazio è davvero la risposta?
Dateci il vostro parere!
Yahoo! Answers Team Italy
How can the human race survive the next hundred years. I don’t know the answer. That is why I asked the question, to get people to think about it, and to be aware of the dangers we now face. Before the 1940s, the main threat to our survival came from collisions with asteroids such collisions have caused mass extinctions in the past, but the last one was 70 million years ago, so the likelihood that we will need the services of Bruce Willis in the next hundred years, is very small. A much more immediate danger, is nuclear war. America and Russia, each have more than enough warheads to kill everyone on Earth, several times over, and the same may now be true of China. The world came perilously close to nuclear annihilation, on more than one occasion in the last 50 years. With the ending of the Cold War, the threat has become less acute, but it has not gone away. There are still enough nuclear weapons stock piled, to kill us all, and their use might be triggered by an accident that convinced a country that it was under attack.
There is now a new danger from small and potentially unstable countries, acquiring nuclear weapons. Such minor nuclear powers might cause millions of deaths, but they would not threaten the survival of the entire human race, unless they sparked a conflict between the major powers.
These dangers of asteroid collision and nuclear war, have now been joined by a host of other threats to our survival. Climate change is happening at an ever increasing rate. While we are hoping to stabilize it, and maybe even reverse it, by reducing our CO2 emissions, the danger is that the climate change may pass a tipping point at which the temperature rise becomes self sustaining. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice reduces the amount of solar energy that is reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of CO2, trapped at the bottom of the ocean, which will further increase the green house effect. Let’s hope we don’t end up like our sister planet, Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees Centigrade, and raining sulphuric acid.
There are other dangers, such as the accidental or intentional release of a genetically engineered virus. Each time we increase our technological powers, we add new possible ways in which things could go disastrously wrong. The human race faces an increasingly dangerous future. There’s a sick joke, that the reason we haven’t been visited by aliens, is that when a civilization reaches our stage of development, it becomes unstable, and destroys itself. In fact, I think there are other reasons why we haven’t seen any aliens, but the story shows how perilous the situation is. The long term survival of the human race, will be safe only if we spread out into space, and then to other stars. This won’t happen for at least a hundred years, so we have to be very careful. Perhaps, we must hope that genetic engineering will make us wise and less aggressive.
