Yikes!
Yikes!
Brief Answers to the Big Questions | Stephen Hawking
‘‘I think what he meant was that although we humans are very limited physically, particularly in my own case, our minds are free to explore the whole universe and to boldly go where even Star Trek fears to tread.’’
I have always been particularly fascinated by space. I mean, who isn’t? It’s wild, the fact that we are inhabitants on planet earth; teeny-tiny beings on a massive planet that orbits around a much bigger star in an even bigger solar system. Then we have our galaxy and galaxies beyond - quite literally to infinity and beyond! I love it, and recently I have read some incredibly exciting books about space, by the one and only Stephen Hawking.
The book Brief Answers to the Big Questions was a much easier digest for the classic astronomy novice like myself. Hawking’s answers to the big questions were simple to grasp yet simultaneously jaw-dropping. Yikes! Is right!
Allow me to share a few of my favourite facts from this book; these seem to have struck a chord with me, and maybe the same for you;
“There is a black hole with the mass of about four million times that of the Sun at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy.”
“It would take an infinite amount of power to accelerate past the speed of light.”
“It also indicated that space travel to other stars was going to be a very slow and tedious business. If one couldn’t go faster than light, the round trip from us to the nearest star would take at least eight years and to the centre of the galaxy about 50,000 years.”
There are several mentions throughout the book discussing the likelihood of humankind colonizing another planet that in order for our species to survive, we should consider leaving Earth.
“I am convinced that humans need to leave earth, if we stay we risk being annihilated.”
YIKES, imagine that? If you had the opportunity to leave planet Earth to live on a different planet which could support human life, would you go for it? According to Hawking’s predictions, there could be ‘Earth-like planets” in a region of space called the “Goldilocks Zone”
“where the distance from the star is in the right range for liquid water to exist on their surface. There are around 1 thousand stars within 30 light-years of Earth. If 1 per cent of these have earth-like planets in the Goldilocks Zone, we have 10 candidate New Worlds”
First, we would need to survive on Earth for the next 200 - 500 years for the technology to advance so significantly, as this round-trip could take three million years.
A bit of food for thought, huh! I rated this book 5/5 stars, and I highly recommend it. It has been one of the most thought-provoking books I have read. You don’t have to be a die-hard space nut to enjoy it either; the mind-boggling facts will blow you away regardless!