When ideas collide: fight or run?
Canscene) — Superscientist Stephen Hawking’s warning that eventually, humanity may be saved only by colonizing outer space reminded me of a popular sci-fi novel of the 30s, When Worlds Collide, the filmed version of which was released in 1951.
Written by Edwin Balmer and Phillip Wylie the book dealt with an asteroid-menaced earth from which a group of scientists planned escape to other planets for an elite group of humans.
The question then became “who goes?” which created the conflict necessary to create a good suspense story. Incidentally, a new film version of When Worlds Collide is said to be in the planning stage
It would seem to me that the Hawkings’ plan would cause a similar dilemma in an era in which human rights have greater impact than back in the 1930s. How many millions of space arks would it take to shift the entire population of the world? This being totally impossible, and an elitist approach taken, serious class warfare would be added to a globe already weighted down by religious, genocidal and territorial conflicts.
Far better, it seems, to exert a mighty earth-bound effort to convince governments that a massive and unbiased research effort — unhampered by commercial interests or those who say “it can’t happen here” — to determine practical ways in which all nations can join together in a massive effort to
Perhaps mass free screenings of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Tosh might end the lethargy and push the world’s peoples into demanding action.
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