Stephen Hawking Quotes

Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers. I think the human race has no future if it doesn't go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space.

I believe that the long-term future of the human race must be space and that it represents an important life insurance for our future survival, as it could prevent the disappearance of humanity by colonizing other planets.

There are people that tell you we gotta colonize Mars in the next 50 years if we're to survive as a human race. It's absolute stupidity. All it does is scare people - particularly young, impressionable minds who already think there isn't gonna be a planet in 30 years. Now they're thinking, since there isn't gonna be a planet, "If we don't get to Mars in 30 years, I'm gonna die."

Space travel leading to skylife is vital to human survival, because the question is not whether we will be hit by an asteroid, but when. A planetary culture that does not develop spacefaring is courting suicide. All our history, all our social progress and growing insight will be for nothing if we perish. No risk of this kind, however small it might be argued to be, is worth taking, and no cost to prevent it is too great. No level of risk is acceptable when it comes to all or nothing survival.

It would be great if we were on multiple planets, but I think that's unrealistic. Hawking says we have to be on multiple planets so an asteroid could come and you'd still have some humans left. It's a nice idea. It satisfies the multiple-eggs-in-multiple-baskets concept.

You don't go into space just for the science. Economically, it is not worth it. I think the reason we should be in space is for the exploration; it's the human endeavour.

I think we all want to really live good lives, and we all really want to have a healthy planet, although I don't know if we're supposed to be on it forever. Now, does that mean that we should be building rocket ships to shoot us into outer space? Well if we can, I think we should.

We need to take command of the solar system to gain that wealth, and to escape the sea of paper our government is becoming, and for some decent chance of stopping a Dinosaur Killer asteroid.

I think the human race doesn't have a future if we don't go into space. We need to expand our horizons beyond planet Earth if we are to have a long-term future.

In the long term, it is desirable that the human race, faced with the prospect of extinction on Earth, should prepare an escape route for itself to another inhabitable planet.

We need to spread out now in the universe. I think in 100 years we'll be living on other planets.

It's time for the human race to enter the solar system.

Some day we'll move into space and start ensuring the survival of our species beyond Earth, whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand.

We need a community of nations capable of space flight because we all have to be off this planet sometime in the future. Our sun is going to burn out eventually, and we are not in a sustainable situation.

I believe, I truly believe, that humans will be living off of this planet, at some point in the future. It's inevitable for us, and it seems like a reasonable and realistic progression for us as a human race. We won't last on this planet - not forever.

But the goal isn't just scientific exploration, ... it's also about extending the range of human habitat out from Earth into the solar system as we go forward in time... In the long run a single-planet species will not survive.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

I think that the future of the human race is to spread through the universe, and now is the time that we should be laying the foundations for that.

Here on Earth, we're exposed to asteroids hitting the Earth, eventual changes in the Sun, changes in the Earth's climate, things we're doing to the Earth's climate. If we want to survive, we need to become a multi-planet species. That's further down the road, but the first wave is going to be the explorers.

I think a colony in space will take much longer than sci fiction writers think. It costs $10,000 to put a pound of anything into near earth orbit. That is your weight in gold. It costs about $100,000 a pound to put you on the moon. And it costs $1,000,000 a pound to put you on Mars.

And then, the Earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun. The Earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the Universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds.

If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe as we spread into space. If we are the only intellegent beings in the galaxy we should make sure we survive and continue. . . . Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth but to spread out into space. We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space.

Even if we never reach the stars by our own efforts, in the millions of years that lie ahead it is almost certain that the stars will come to us. Isolationism is neither a practical policy on the national or cosmic scale. And when the first contact with the outer universe is made, one would like to think that Mankind played an active and not merely a passive role-that we were the discoverers, not the discovered.

Colonization means potential immortality for the human genus. Man's safety on Earth was never great, and it dwindles hourly. Disarmament, even world government, will not guarantee survival in an age when population presses natural resources to the limit and when the knowledge of how to work mischief on a planetary scale is ever more widely diffused among peoples who may grow ever more desperate.

We are not going to stop here on planet Earth. We're going to move out to other planetary bodies.