Ain’t Life Grand?

In a recent talk, Stephen Hawking estimated that humans have about a thousand years to find a new planet to inhabit. If we haven’t done it by then, the chance of human extinction is significant. (The thousand-year estimate assumes we figure out a way to deal with issues such as “artificial intelligence, the ravages of climate change and the threat of nuclear terrorism” in the nearer term.) “Although the chance of a 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 thousand or ten thousand years. By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.” (I will never move to space, in part because I don’t want to miss the look on my cat’s face when all the humans die.)

+ Before we begin the mass migration to another planet (or the much talked-about move to Canada), it pays to consider that while “most Americans believe that residential mobility is accelerating and that it is a source of social ills,” the truth is that America is going through a great settling down. (Geographically, not emotionally…)