Hawking His New Book

I ran across two items today about everyone's favorite syntho-voiced physicist, Stephen Hawking. Firstly, he's writing a children's book about physics, aimed at the Harry Potter crowd. So anybody who bought A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME, you may even be able to understand this one. Note the qualifier.

But also he's quoted as saying that mankind's only hope for survival is to colonize other planets. If we don't kill ourselves off in the next hundred years then we could set up a self-sustaining base on Mars or elsewhere. Bleak or realistic? I came across this item in the Huffington Post, where the commenters did their best to politicize it - some claimed global warming was all Bush's fault, while one guy said that we'll never make it off the planet because spaceships couldn't carry Michael Moore - the truth is there are more of us humans than the planet can probably sustain. We're said to be 2 billion over the limit. Of course, it's a flexible planet, and a closed, self-healing ecosystem. Any damage mankind does, the planet can repair.

Thing is, part of the repair would necessarily involve getting rid of us.

So I'm with Hawking - we need to get people offa this orb. I'm thinking half, and I'm thinking they should be right-wing. My first impulse is the far extremes of both parties, but those people would eat each other alive, then the bases would shut down, and I couldn't visit. So what about this - just the religious right. They all assume the rapture is coming anyway, so they'll be taken to heaven and us left behind. Think of the time it will save them! We'll be forced to live in a hellish vision of America with no Jerry Falwell and no Pat Robertson, where a much smaller majority will hate the gays and immigrants.

Too snarky? Sorry.

And the remote bases will be paradise. There will be no crime or sexual perversion. Well, at least there will be no disease or birth defects, because of the concentrated healing power of the blood of the lamb.

In any event, I'D be a lot happier. And surely that is what Hawking had in mind.