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The computer - generated voice of the tardy physicist Stephen Hawking will cover audiences once again from their television CRT screen on March 25 , during his appearance in one of the last TV project of his life .
In the Smithsonian Channel documentary " lead Earth : Or How to Colonize a Planet , " Hawking shareshis long - held vision of humanityconfronting an unsettled future on Earth by looking to the star , and set a course that will pass us to one solar day inhabit distant worlds beyond our ownsolar system .
In one of his last television appearances, Stephen Hawking poses the question of how people might one day live on planets other than Earth.
Where we would go , how we would get there and what it would take to make an alien major planet inhabitable are just a few of the questions that Hawking and other scientist address as they confront the challenges that citizenry would face in orderliness to colonise Earth 2.0 . [ Stephen Hawking : A Physics Icon Remembered in Photos ]
huckster often talked about the thought of humanity stop up its future by colonise other worlds . In November 2016 , he deliver a actor’s line at the Oxford University Student Union suggesting that mood modification , the terror of nuclear weapons , befoulment and other environmental risks were swiftly rendering Earthuninhabitable , and that our coinage had only about 100 years left . Our only hope , he told the hearing , was finding another planet to call our home .
A provocative idea
In fact , " leave Earth " was inspired by Hawking ’s give-and-take about colonize other satellite , Lucy Haken , the show ’s producer and director at Brook Lapping Productions , told Live Science .
" He ’d spoken about it many times , " Haken said . " The team at Brook Lapping worked up that thought into something that could be a film , and then approached Stephen Hawking and asked if he ’d take part . "
The production team developed the handwriting with Hawking , and his segments were film over two days near his spot in the math department at the University of Cambridge , Haken said . What emerged was both challenging and frustrative , Haken recalled — while Hawking posed riveting and tough questions about how multitude could go about depart Earth and migrating to unexampled worlds , he did n’t offer them any solutions for how that might pass , she tell Live Science .
" Our hosts came up with possible ideas as to how we might go about approaching this problem , but Professor Hawking had n’t really suggested a program for how we ’d do this , " she said . " He was put it out there to the public as an almost provocative question that he thought we ought to be investigate , but I remember he was also quite playful in the manner that he wanted other citizenry to take it and run with it . "
Billions upon billions of people
Life first emerged on Earth more than 3 billion eld ago , and mod humans — Homo sapiens — did n’t get in on the scene until about 300,000 age ago , harmonize tothe fossil disc . Since then , our numbers have swell up tomore than 7 billion , and the world-wide human population is bear to reach9 billion by 2050 , according to the United Nations Population Division .
A dozen citizenry have take the air on the moon , but we have yet to establish an off - planet settlement within our own solar organisation . However , the account of humanity is one that embraces front and migration , as peopleemerged from Africahundreds of thousands of years ago and crossed continents and then oceans , establishing bridgehead in diverse environments nearly everywhere on Earth .
Perhaps viewed in that context , Hawking ’s pipe dream of humanspopulating other planetswithin the foreseeable time to come is n’t so far - fetched after all , and may just be the born lengthiness of a operation that humanity has followed since its earliest days , Haken said .
" The colonizing of continent start with groundbreaker , and then others would come . It ’s all about moving in steps and wafture , " she say . " At the moment , going to live outside our planet seems unthinkable . But actually , if you take those step one at a metre , maybe it is doable after all . "
" leave Earth : Or How to colonise a Planet " airs March 25 at 8 p.m. local prison term on the Smithsonian Channel .
Original article onLive Science .
