Stephen Hawking Talked about Technologies and Science

I would like to say a few words about public awareness and attitudes, to science and technology. Whether we like it or not, the world we live in, has changed a great deal in the last hundred years. And it is likely to change even more in the next hundred years. Some people would like to stop these changes, and go back to what they see as a purer and simpler age. But as history shows, the past was not that wonderful. It was not so bad for a small privileged minority. Though even they had to do without modern medicine, and childbirth was a high risk for women. But for the vast majority of the population, life was nasty, bruttih, and short.

Anyway, even if one wanted to, one can’t put the clock back to an earlier age. Knowledge and techniques can’t just be forgotten. Nor can one prevent further advances in the future. Even if all government money for research were cut off, the force of competition between companies, would still bring about advances in technology. And one can not stop enquiring minds thinking about basic sciences, even if they are not paid for it. The only way to prevent further developments, would be a global totalitarian state, that suppressed anything new. But human initiative and ingenuity is such, that it wouldn’t succeed. All that it would do, is slow down the rate of change.

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If we manage to avoid a nuclear war, there are still other dangers that could destroy us all. There’s a sick joke that the reason we have not been contacted by an alien civilisation is that civilisations tend to destroy themselves, when they reach our stage. But I have sufficient faith in the sense of the public, to believe that we might prove this wrong.