TED | Talks | Stephen Hawking: Asking Big Questions About The Universe (video)

TED | Talks | Stephen Hawking: Asking big questions about the universe (video)



TED have released a series of shorter talks from the recent TED 2008 event, and in this instance we hear from Professor Stephen Hawking, presenting a 10 minute clip, in which he discusses the Universe, how it came into being, whether we are alone in it, and the uncertain future of humankind.

He tells us how our discovery that the Universe wasn't a static entity enabled us to realise that there must have been an original Big Bang event which explains its current expansive state. He believes this Universe could have spontaneously created itself out of nothing, and that it's possible for life to appear on other suitable planets.

Life appeared on Earth within half a billion years of this planet being able to sustain life, which would seem to imply that it could easily take hold elsewhere, but he suggests that there are no alien civilisations at our level of development within a few hundred light years, otherwise we would have detected them - he gives the example of radio waves and alien TV shows, though I assume he's discounting advanced civilisations, whose presence we might be unable to detect, precisely because of their technological advances, such as Dyson spheres.

He finally tells us that humankind faces great danger of extinction, particularly within the next hundred years, and that it is necessary for our ultimate survival to spread out across space, and begin living on various other worlds. Whether we will encounter other intelligent life on our travels, is a moot point - I don't think our very limited searches for alien life thus far have been going on for long enough, and the absence of radio signals is just that - an absence of alien radio signals, but as the radio has only been in use for a tiny fraction of the time humans have been alive on this planet, and that we are now relying more heavily on other means of communication, might imply that other civilisations across the galaxy would also only have produced radio transmissions for a very short period of their own existence - hence the reason we have so far failed to find any.

Professor Hawking further suggests that civilisations don't endure, and end up destroying themselves - that could well be true of civilisations such as ourselves, - technologically advanced, but culturally and politically wayward - it's worth bearing in mind that we at least have the intellectual capacity to realise the dangers to ourselves.

But even if we do overcome these present difficulties posed by war, poverty, disease and famine there is always the possibility of our eradication by catastrophic extinction events, caused by climate, inbound asteroids, or scientific accidents whereby an experiment goes slightly awry, and we are all instantly enveloped and consumed by a renegade black hole.