Hawking in zero gravity

Has anyone been paying attention to Stephen Hawking recently? His latest theories on the nature of Space and Time sound more akin to the subjects discussed here on Foa12P than in Popular Science. From the mind whose legend is amongst Einstein and Newton, who has shaped the way the rest of the world understands the framework of the Universe, these are some radical ideas.

A week or so ago, he affirmed without equivocation in the existence of extra-terrestrials. For as vast as outer space is and as many billion galaxies there are, the probability alone would favor his belief. He’s certain of it.

To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational…The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

Sure. Ok. Nothing that chimerical, you may think to yourself. But Hawking then went on to warn humanity against the potential threat he believes aliens may pose to Earth. He speculates that if they did make contact with us, there is a high chance that it would be in the interest of plundering our natural resources for their own depleted and starved planet.

“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. 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.”

Sounds to me like something Zecharia Sitchin would suggest, but this is Stephen Hawking here…the ground breaker of theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity!

An illustration of how wormholes work

At the beginning of this week, Hawking followed up his Alien Pirate theory with another exotic concept…the possibility of time travel. Not only did he emphatically subscribe to the concept, he told us how to realistically build a time machine! But unfortunately this is a one way drive into hyperspace. Illustrating the impossibility of travel into the past, Hawking cites a paradoxical effect which would destroy the portal or wormhole which you would first need to enlarge from their sub microscopic sizes amidst the “quantum foam”.

Imagine, somehow, he’s built a wormhole, a time tunnel that stretches just one minute into the past. Through the wormhole, the scientist can see himself as he was one minute ago. But what if our scientist uses the wormhole to shoot his earlier self? He’s now dead. So who fired the shot? It’s a paradox. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s the sort of situation that gives cosmologists nightmares.

This kind of time machine would violate a fundamental rule that governs the entire universe – that causes happen before effects, and never the other way around. I believe things can’t make themselves impossible. If they could then there’d be nothing to stop the whole universe from descending into chaos. So I think something will always happen that prevents the paradox. Somehow there must be a reason why our scientist will never find himself in a situation where he could shoot himself. And in this case, I’m sorry to say, the wormhole itself is the problem.

The Large Hadron Collider

Hold on though…Hawking doesn’t leave us hanging in the beguiling dark matter of the cosmos! You want to know the secret to travel into the future? Get a Hadron Collider, an enormous spaceship and GO REALLY REALLY FAST!

It really is that simple. If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we’re ever likely to do that is by going into space. The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000mph. But to travel in time we’ll have to go more than 2,000 times faster. And to do that we’d need a much bigger ship, a truly enormous machine. The ship would have to be big enough to carry a huge amount of fuel, enough to accelerate it to nearly the speed of light. Getting to just beneath the cosmic speed limit would require six whole years at full power. The initial acceleration would be gentle because the ship would be so big and heavy. But gradually it would pick up speed and soon would be covering massive distances. In one week it would have reached the outer planets. After two years it would reach half-light speed and be far outside our solar system. Two years later it would be travelling at 90 per cent of the speed of light. Around 30 trillion miles away from Earth, and four years after launch, the ship would begin to travel in time. For every hour of time on the ship, two would pass on Earth. A similar situation to the spaceship that orbited the massive black hole.
After another two years of full thrust the ship would reach its top speed, 99 per cent of the speed of light. At this speed, a single day on board is a whole year of Earth time. Our ship would be truly flying into the future.

Theories of time travel are nothing new, but these aren’t the ruminations of Richard Hoaglund or Terence McKenna! This is Stephen Hawking telling us what’s what! What’s interesting is how close scholars such as McKenna are to Hawking’s thoughts. What’s even more interesting was Hawking’s hesitation in going mainstream with his theories for this long….

Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank. But these days I’m not so cautious. In fact, I’m more like the people who built Stonehenge. I’m obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I’d visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I’d even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.

I suppose Stephen Hawking is no longer concerned with getting published or garnering accolades in the mainstream science community…a point of argument by many conspiracy theorists and investigative scientists when broadcasting their lack of acceptance by the mainstream. Consider this though, Stephen Hawking IS science. If he’s saying it, it’s real. Now, if he’s waited this long to go public with these thoughts on aliens and time travel (both idly accepted concepts in the mainstream today) what about the ideas of Hawking which he isn’t ready to share with the rest of us yet?

There’s nothing better you can be doing with your time than checking out Stephen Hawking’s new documentary series on Discovery Channel beginning May 9th which premiered last week.