It would be fair to say that the life of Stephen Hawking was a constant,
monumental and all-consuming challenge. And with that challenge came an
enormous sense of urgency. It would be hard to find a more curious and
scientifically probing mind than that of Hawking, and his desire to meet and
surpass the challenges he set out for himself was overshadowed by a sword of
Damocles that hung by a hair above his head throughout his entire life. At age
twenty-one, doctors “gave” him three years to live. From then on, and for the
next half-century, he took the years
he desired, in spite of that death sentence, and made every one count in terms
of his discoveries and of his gifts of knowledge to the world at large.
By the time Hawking died this past week at the age of seventy-six, he
was, literally, about as close as any human could get to being an immensely
active brain housed in what had become an almost entirely inert package. But
despite his nearly complete physical disability, his mind and his image had
made him one of the world’s best known and most popular figures—one of a
handful of brilliant scientists who have made it their life’s mission to render
uncommon, complex and complicated scientific principles and theories accessible
to the common people.
Stephen Hawking was anything but negative or ominous, despite the dire
circumstances under which his life unfolded. “Keeping an active mind has been
vital to my survival,” he once said, “as has maintaining a sense of humor.” Indeed,
he had a playful side that allowed him to appreciate and participate in public
manifestations of humor. He made many cameo appearances on TV shows in person,
but also as a cartoon character. He once said that the Matt Groening cartoon
series, The Simpsons, was the best
show on television and his cartoon persona appeared in several episodes of the
show, in which Homer, the (yellow) head of the Simpson clan, referred to him as
“Lisa’s robot friend.”
But such identification with and participation in popular culture aided
Hawking, without a doubt, in advancing his own mission, which was to help
people understand the science of the world they lived in, and thus, to be aware
of the challenges facing them and the future generations that they were
spawning.
Intrinsically and actively, Stephen Hawking was clearly a man of peace. He
once said: “Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its
greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this.” His
overarching message was that what we do matters. “The universe,” he said, “is
not indifferent to our existence: It depends on it.”
Hawking believed that the only thing that could save planet Earth from ecological
catastrophe was world peace and cooperation. As such, he was troubled in his
latter years by the growing resurgence of blind nationalist jingoism and
isolationist policies. He correctly saw this trend as the result of people’s
frustration with ever-increasing economic and social inequality but indicated
that isolationism was just the opposite of a much-needed solution.
Hawking specifically mentioned the election of Donald Trump in the US and
the popularly-backed decision of Great Britain to pull out of the European
Union as worrisome manifestations of this trend. He indicated that this was no
time for such political tendencies since the planet was living through a
dangerous era in which the decisions we, the human race, made could spell the
difference between our survival as a species and a sixth great extinction that
would destine us—and most other species—to the fate of the dinosaurs.
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Hawking joined 373 other top scientists in slamming Trump's
decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Change Accord.
The planet, Hawking believed, was in dire straits.
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“Nothing,” Hawking once said, “lasts forever.” But the human race could
last a great deal longer if, instead of squandering vast sums of money on the
weapons and machinery of war, we were to invest heavily in space travel and
interplanetary exploration and settlement. For this too, he made it clear, we
needed to cooperate to an ever greater extent. He warned that the chances of a
catastrophic event on Earth were more of a question of when than of whether it
would take place. “Although the chance
of disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over
time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years.”
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One of Hawking's dreams was space travel. Sir Richard Branson
helped him achieve that dream by giving him a ride on a
suborbital Virgin Galactic spaceship. For a while, Stephen
escaped the confines of his wheelchair and floated happily in the
weightless state of zero gravity.
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Hawking once indicated that if the human race hoped to survive such an
event—a meteor impact, nuclear holocaust, a climate change calamity—it would
probably have to be colonizing other planets within the next one hundred years.
“The moon,” he said, “could be a base
for travel to the rest of the solar system,” and Mars, he felt, would be
“the obvious next target.”
The renowned scientist’s predictions seem to take on new meaning within
the current political context over which he expressed concern. The nuclear war
posturing and threats exchanged between US President Donald Trump and North
Korean leader Kim Jong Un over the course of the past year have clearly
heightened fears of a possible nuclear holocaust, until now downplayed since
the end of the Cold War that came with the fall of the Soviet Union in the
1990s. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has maintained a Doomsday Clock
since 1953. This “clock” measures the global political context within the
framework of chances for a nuclear holocaust. The Doomsday Clock is
currently positioned at two-and-a-half minutes to midnight—the final
hour.
Though he wished and hoped for world peace and cooperation, Stephen
Hawking had no naïve illusions about Humankind’s behavior up to the present. He
once advocated considering computer viruses a man-made life form. “I think it
says something about human nature,” he said, “that the only form of life we
have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.”
He also had a warning for humans about actively seeking contact with
alien life forms. “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent
life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet,” Hawking suggested.
“I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources
from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads,
looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach. If aliens ever
visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed
in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans.”
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Former US President Barack Obama presents Stephen Hawking
with the country's highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom.
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His other warning to Humankind was of the rapid advance of artificial
intelligence. We needed to incorporate it, he indicated, in order to keep from
being enslaved to it. “With genetic engineering,” said Hawking, “we will be
able to increase the complexity of our DNA, and improve the human race. But it
will be a slow process, because one will have to wait about 18 years to see the
effect of changes to the genetic code. By contrast, computers double their
speed and memories every 18 months. There is a real danger that computers will
develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct
connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather
than be in opposition.”
From the complexities of quantum physics to Einstein’s fascinating
Relativity Theory, Hawking himself was an indefatigable researcher and discoverer,
but his gift to the world was that he sought to make all of the science that he
could grasp eminently accessible to the public at large. His first major book, A Brief History of Time, provided his
first revelation of complex science to readers and sold over ten million
copies. But as he probed on, he sought to make knowledge ever simpler for his
readership to acquire, and followed that first book with ever more didactic
sequels—The Universe in a Nutshell, A
Briefer History of Time, and The Illustrated
Brief History of Time. Of his last work, he proudly wrote in the
introduction, “Even if you only look at the pictures and their captions, you
should get some idea of what is going on.”
Perhaps it was the near absence of Stephen Hawking’s physical persona
that made his message so compelling to the world. And it is what continues to
make it immortal and compelling today. Hawking seems to always have been
speaking to us from some other-worldly place, hardly less so than the place
from which he speaks to us today. And we could pay no better tribute to him and
to the gift of knowledge that he has bequeathed us than to heed his words and
learn to live and thrive within a framework of global peace, harmony and
cooperation, with the aim of forging a future in which our species might indeed
survive and evolve, rather than perish forever.
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