When I was a child, I, too, read Isaac Asimov's
Foundation series, and it forced you to confront
the question: Where will we be 50,000 years
from now?
Now, remember, science fiction, when I was
a kid, was just shoot 'em up cowboy movies
in outer space.
That's all it was.
However, Isaac Asimov forced you to come to
grips with the fact that we're going to be
exhausting the known laws of physics pretty
soon.
We have a very good grasp of the electromagnetic,
the strong, the weak forces, gravity, but
beyond that lies the unified field theory;
the theory that eluded Einstein for the last
30 years of his life, the theory that I work
on professionally -- that's my day job; I
work on something called string theory, which
we think is the theory of everything, and
this theory could dominate our destiny in
the coming millennia.
Now, this means, of course, starships.
Already, NASA has something called the 100
Year Starship program, very ambitious, however,
a lot of it's still theoretical.
We don't know for sure what it would take
to go to the stars.
Stephen Hawking, my colleague, the late Stephen
Hawking, talked about shooting computer chips,
tiny computer chips boosted by laser beams
to 20% the speed of light, capable of reaching
Alpha Centauri in 20 years time.
But then, of course, we want to go beyond
that.
One day, we're going to have fusion rockets,
anti-matter rockets, rockets that can take
us to the nearby stars, not just computer
chips, but people.
And then beyond that, who knows?
Maybe our destiny really does lie in outer
space.
Remember that on the earth, 99.9% of all species
eventually go extinct.
Extinction is the norm.
We think of Mother Nature as being warm and
cuddly, and for the most part, she is.
But sometimes, the savagery of Mother Nature
is revealed.
And if you don't believe me, dig underneath
your feet.
Right under your feet, right now, are the
bones, the bones of all the different organisms,
of fossils, the 99.9% that were doomed by
the laws of nature.
And the laws of physics also doom the entire
planet Earth.
And that's why I say, given the fact that
Mother Nature and the laws of physics have
a death warrant for humanity, that ultimately
our destiny will be in outer space.
