Humans Doomed Without Space Colonies?
出路在别处

The human race is likely to be wiped out by a doomsday virus before this millennium is out unless it starts to colonize space, top British scientist Stephen Hawking warned. “I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet,” Hawking told Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper. Hawking, Lucasian professor1 of mathematics at Cambridge University in England, said Armageddon2 threatened not in the form of a nuclear holocaust but could arrive in a more insidious and invisible form, “In the long term, I am more worried about biology. Nuclear weapons need large facilities, but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab. You can't regulate every lab in the world.” Hawking, a leading theoretical physicists who hit the best-seller lists with his book A Brief History of Time, said the chances of humanity pulling through looked good. “I am an optimist. We will reach out to the stars,” he said.

　　英国的顶尖科学家斯蒂芬·霍金警告我们：除非开始向宇宙空间殖民，否则不出这个千年人类就会被某种“世界末日”病毒灭种。他接受英国的《每日电讯报》的采访时说：“我认为人类如果不向宇宙空间发展，就生存不到下一个千年。对单一行星上的生命来说，可能降临的不测实在太多了。”身为英格兰剑桥大学卢卡逊数学教授的霍金说，末日可能不会以核毁灭的方式来临，它可能会以某种更阴险、更难察觉的方式到来。“长远看来，我更担心生物（方面的危险）。核武器需要大型的设施，而基因工程在一个小实验室里就能完成，而监控世界上所有的实验室是不可能的。”霍金是杰出的理论物理学家，以其著作《时间简史》跻身畅销书作者行列。他认为人类延续下去的可能性看起来仍然很大。“我是个乐天派，我们能够到星际空间发展，”他说。