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Message: Designing The Future: Do We Have To Leave The Planet? The Telegraph ran a story last week about Dr. Steven Hawking’s view of our collective future on earth. The news is not good in the sense that Hawking thinks that to ensure our future we have to find other planets to sustain ourselves: Mankind will need to venture far beyond planet Earth to ensure the long-term survival of our species, according to the world’s best known scientist, Professor Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking says space is his next goal Returning to a theme he has voiced many times before, the Cambridge University cosmologist said today that space-rockets propelled by the kind of matter/antimatter annihilation technology popularised in Star Trek would be needed to help Homo sapiens colonise hospitable planets orbiting alien stars. And he disclosed his own ambition to go into space. “Maybe Richard Branson will help me,” he said, a reference to the space tourism plans of Virgin tycoon Sir Richard Branson, using the privately built SpaceShipOne to take people into space from 2008. From an environmental policy perspective, the hope that there is a future for Homo sapiens beyond our planet is worrying. After all, why solve our problems here when we can go somewhere else? That is the history of our species and now that we’ve run out of room to expand on earth, well, let’s go somewhere else and continue the destructive process there. Now, I doubt that is what Hawking intended, but the people who influence government spending use this idea to promote research in the theoretical physics behind interstellar travel. While I’m not against advancing our knowledge of the universe, it is critical that we focus financial and intellectual resources to solve the environmental challenges we face here, today. The future may indeed include our travel to other worlds that can sustain us; however, given the urgency of our local problems the much bigger challenge is not a theoretical one. It is practical. We need to ameliorate existing environmental problems and prevent them from worsening. And that is not theory. www.corporateknightsforum.com