The Island of Doubt

I wasn't going to wade into the Stephen-Hawking-has-lost-it debate, but then I came across an otherwise unrelated story this morning pitting Cosmologist Numero Uno against the late Pope John Paul II.

For those unfamiliar with the fuss, Hawking had the nerve last week to publicly support the idea of colonizing the Moon and Mars because, he said, things are looking pretty dicy down here on Earth.

As Stein so eloquently put it at Dynamics of Cats, "Hawking is not being ridicilous. At worst he is being pessimistic about the time scale for major potential catastrophes, and optimistic on feasible time scales."

Yes, maybe Hawking is being unnecessarily alarmist. His suggestion that climate change could make the world uninhabitable for humans in the near future, for one thing, does not seem to have much scientific foundation. It is possible that we are on the verge of a positive-feedback cascade that triggers a new equilibrium quite a bit warmer than today's 15 C -- a paper in today's Science (here if you have access) lays out a frightening scenario involving the release of a trillion tonnes of carbon in the form of methane from melting permafrost. But the truth is we really don't have a good idea of how far away that threshold is.

Even if things are about to get really bad, my main objection to using the climate change justification to settle the solar system is that figuring out how to survive a much warmer Earth will probably be a lot easier and cheaper than doing the same in Moonbase Alpha or onMars.

But I am still willing to cut Hawking some slack. First, he's right about other, external threats. Just because Hollywood can't make a decent film about extinction-level asteroid impacts doesn't mean it's not something we should be thinking about.

More importantly, though, I don't think it's such a bad thing to let very smart people muse publicly about subjects that aren't safely within their field of expertise. Sometimes a keen mind is capable of spotting trends and identifying trouble spots before others who have devoted their lives to those very same problems. Which brings me to the news story that prompted this post.

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking said Thursday that Pope John Paul II tried to discourage him and other scientists attending a cosmology conference at the Vatican from trying to figure out how the universe began. (AP, June 15)

So go easy on the guy. I say he's earned the right to push the envelope. And I have to say much of the negative reaction I've read at Scienceblogs is further over the top than what Hawking said in the first place.