Stephen Hawking and the Future

This is not another Stephen Hawking obituary

For those other avid fans out there, who have been inspired by the genius that was Stephen Hawking and equally inspired by this blog, it will come as no surprise that this article has come into being.

To quote The Big Bang Theory “the wheelchair dude who invented time” inspired many curious minds with work about black holes and time travel and it is indeed these key themes that are the driver for this post.

On Black Holes

To keen minds like ours, it comes as no great surprise that at the centre of our, and indeed everyone’s galaxy there is a super massive black hole. This is clearly why the galaxy is a swirling mass of stuff seeming held in place by the gravitational pull of a big lump of super concentrated something.  Look closely next time you have a bath and pull the plug out, see how the plug hole draws everything to it, being a gravity well. See how the bubbles are mini solar systems, circling around the plug hole until they ultimately get consumed by it.

Obvious right? – It is now but it took a genius to describe it to us.

On Time Travel

The “Arrow of Time” Stephen discusses in “The Brief History of Time” can only ever point forwards. This makes time travel to the past impossible unless you mess about with a black hole which is apparently dangerous.

We are of course all travelling in time, forward as this is the only way we can go. This didn’t stop Hawking from predicting the future. Some of his well-publicised thoughts on this include why we should stop trying to find aliens and why the end of the world isn’t necessarily something to worry about.

On his thoughts about aliens his proposition that when advanced cultures meet others that are less so advanced. The former seem to obliterate the latter. What then would happen if aliens find our noisy planet and decide to visit…

On his thoughts about the end of the world, the fact that it may take a million million million (lots of millions) of years before the earth gets consumed by the sun comes as little comfort when the end of the world is a lifetime away for all of us… your lifetime, my lifetime .. and of course the way we are carrying on possibly before then should climate change reach its tipping point.

 

 

Stephen was a genius yes but also a visionary and a well humoured guy.

I only hope those in the afterlife are ready!