Hawking Hints End Of Earth - New Focus on Results Of Technology

Stephen Hawking hasn’t allowed an Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) to diminish his robust ideas. The celebrity physicist and cosmologist has yet again come up with a big assertion, this time about the future of humanity, and its correlation with the existence of the earth.

Global-Catastrophe

Giving one of the BBC Keith Lectures of this year, Hawking narrowed down on the biggest risks that threaten human existence – nuclear war, global warming and genetically-engineered viruses; but we cannot help exploring the different avenues in which technology poses a threat to us, its users.

Marc Goodman’s Marc Goodman: A vision of crimes in the future - YouTubetalk provides insight on how terrorism and crime have been showered with increasing technological advances. He recalls that as technology evolved, even the basic phones fell in the hands of drug dealers and criminals long before they came to police officers or the masses, and today, 20 years later, criminals have their personal mobile networks, like in Mexico, where the narco-dealers have installed such arrangements in all 31 states.

The 26/11 Mumbai attacks were facilitated by modern information and communication technologies – terrorists used mobile and satellite phones, satellite imagery, night-vision goggles, and even built operations centre across the border in Pakistan to monitor their success in slaughtering innocent civilians.

Talking about crime, the Sony PlayStation hack left 100 million robbed through a simple code modification, raising concerns about how you “control the world” if you “control the code”.

Bio-crime can lead to horrendous results. The human body is increasingly becoming an IT machine, courtesy the stupendous number of cochlear implants, diabetic pumps and pacemakers; this makes the human body more vulnerable to related attacks. The US, where more than 60000 patients have pacemakers connected to the internet, is a clear example. Misuse of synthetic biology and DNA sequencing have frightening propositions, the H5N1 avian influenza was made more potent by researchers recently, and this can be easily extended to create new pandemics.

Hawking is concerned about the bigger picture. He mentions how we will need to colonize space to fancy a chance of survival. In the next 100 years, this is not a possibility, which makes this coming century the most dangerous span of time for us to live in. We need to spread out to planets and stars if we are to escape the catastrophes of the earth, he feels. It is a stark irony that Hawking, a student, teacher, and preacher of science is warning the world of its manifestations. Owing to the risks of growing scientific progress, he has regarded a global disaster as a “near certainty”.

Stephen-Hawking-Assertions

At the same time, he also mentions that judicious use of science and technology is the only possible way out of the problems that humanity to yet to face.

Source: Hawking: Humans at risk of lethal 'own goal' - BBC News

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