About Stephen Hawking "pessimism"
The other day Stephen Hawking was saying the only way for humanity to avoid total destruction is to learn how to expand outside Earth.
It’s funny how the entire online press took this as a morbid pessimism; it’s like a kid who’s parents warn him not to break the window or he gets punished. What would you say: is this warning pessimistic for our kid, or not?
Well, the parents’ warning is pessimistic only if the kid had already broken the window, even before the warning came. Otherwise, the warning cannot bare the quality of “pessimistic” or “optimistic”. The warning is just a condition.
I cannot accept how stupid that many bloggers and writers can get today!
I’ve read the news in some 6-7 blogs / sites / online newspapers. None of them (with some exception from Big Think) even dared to analyse Hawking’s warning, none of them dared to dream a bit in readers instead, none of them questioned anything but Hawking sanity saying such a morbid thing: Humanity destruction is imminent. Just a soap opera reaction.
The slippery detail is the professor has at least one chance of being right…
40 years ago, the same title would have started a “Conquer the Moon” campaign, where the press would have been the main defender of the idea and Kenedy the second one.
Now the press is the greatest enemy, diminishing the importance and the relevance of the “warning”: “Nuhh, this guy went cuckoo and became pessimistic”.
I’m afraid it’s not the “selfish and aggressive instincts” that will carry us to destruction, but pure mind entropy.