Stephen Hawking has boldly claimed that humans will soon need to leave Earth in order to survive. In a recent statement, Hawking amended previous estimates of this timeline by saying that humans must leave Earth within 600 years.[1]
This is the kind of solution we can expect when someone, even a genius, speaks exclusively from within their chosen discipline (here Physics), believing that their chosen discipline and its knowledge/truths is the only one to consider in the face of our imminent destruction. He does not consider, for example, existential phenomenology (EP), which had sprung up as a response to the increasingly life-denying pursuits of science in the early 20th C. EP became interested in how we actually live as human beings, even what makes us human beings in the first place, prior to any reflections about the matter. EP discovered the life-world, that world we are all embedded in from birth. Life-worlds bestow meaning on our lives, prior to any thinking about meaning at all. This meaning is lived from within our ordinary practices, cultural forms, equipment (things we use to meaningfully carry out our daily lives), and is the way we conduct our lives on a daily basis, without thinking about any of it. There is also an intimate relationship between our daily use of language and our life-world.
Hawking would only have to take a cursory glance at the news to grasp, at least momentarily, what happens to people when they leave their meaning-bestowing life-world and enter another, or worse, if they are wrenched from their own habitat and forced to enter another, alien one. I am of course talking about immigrants (voluntary) and refugees (involuntary). The first thing many immigrants do is encapsulate themselves in a reproduced familiar life-world within the alien one (eg a “little Italy”)—to preserve their sanity! Without even this option, refugees are faring poorly. Their lives lose all meaning.
We could ask Hawking to carry out an experiment. Have someone transport him, and all the equipment that he uses meaningfully on a daily basis, to a foreign land and deposit him there. He can still “call home” and the electronic apparatus that keeps him alive is supported but he is now surrounded by and immersed in an alien life-world (e.g. no one there knows physics.) He could report to us how he fares, re: living meaningfully, or not!
The only way we can relocate on another planet, let alone another country, and keep our sanity, is to bring along a little bit of our life-world with us, like Australian immigrants to Asia, who set up pubs, cricket matches etc., within a cultural bubble. So, which life-world are we to export to another planet? Well that problem has already been tested years ago when we launched the International Space Station. We ignored the various and beautiful life-worlds into which each astronaut had been born and which defined and shaped his or her cultural being and instead forced astronauts to live together for months in an entirely new “life”-world—the technological “life”-world! It may well be that only the constant monitoring and communications with Earth kept the astronauts from veering into insanity. Prisoners in solitary confinement do indeed go insane when all traces of their life-world are removed for longer periods than the astronauts so far have done in space. Similarly, banishment in former times was the cruellest punishment.
This technological “life”-world does indeed, like all life-worlds, define the kind of human being it “wants”. But what kind of “life” and “human” being does the technological life-world “want”?
Hawking has something to say about this too, when he “speaks about the development of artificial intelligence (AI) as the true perpetrator of the eventual demise of human beings. In an interview with WIRED Hawking said, ‘ ‘The genie is out of the bottle. I fear that AI may replace humans altogether.’ ” [2] So he seems quite aware that our current definition of what it is to be human—the various definitions bestowed on us via our immersion in a plurality of available life-worlds—is under terminal threat by this all-encompassing “life”-world that we call our technological civilization. He does recognize that this new “life” form as defined by technology favours artificial “life” forms such as AI, and that it is a danger to us in our current definition.
But, inexplicably, Hawking thinks that, by relocating some of us to another planet, “safely” ensconced in a bubble that simulates some previous life-world, would preserve the present definition of humanity against the encroaching new definition of “human” as given us by this technological “life”-world.[3] It’s poor comfort for cosmonauts on another planet to surround themselves with classical music, tropical forests, etc., mere reminders of far-away life-worlds that existed on Earth. All this simulation of life-worlds has the logical status of Disneyland or a shopping mall, or indeed a Chinatown in the middle of New York. The real world defining the cosmonauts remains the technological one, as it already does here on earth. All other previous definitions of human being are being destroyed or swallowed up by the new definition given us by our technological civilization. Genocide was just the literal beginning. We are finding, for example, that our bodily existence is finding less and less support in this new world, as we are increasingly forced to conform (via the unconscious workings of Foucault’s “biopower”) to the demands of this new technological “life” world. Our minds too are increasingly condemned to think along certain channels only (algorithms, memes, calculation, abstractions, information, etc., all thought forms totally alien to bodily existence.) We are even developing algorithms for art and poetry! This process of redefinition will go on no matter where we relocate, no matter what simulated life-world we carry along with us.
Hawking and all those eagerly gibbering in their excitement of leaving a wasted hulk of an earth behind for new “lands”, thinking that there they can carry on as those humans that came before, appear to be quite ignorant about whom they are really serving, who their master really is. As one group of scientists said after their great discovery of a hidden chamber in one of the great pyramids, “This will advance the interests of science!”
They could well listen to the pithy conclusion and warning of existential phenomenology, as expressed by Hubert Dreyfus: The one thing that machines or AI cannot do is CARE![4]
[1] https://futurism.com/stephen-hawking-humans-must-leave-earth-within-600-years/
[2] https://futurism.com/stephen-hawking-believes-humankind-danger-self-destruction-ai/
[3] I have addressed this transformation in the definition of the “human” in several papers. See, for example, What is it to be Human at https://www.academia.edu/27610163/What_Is_It_To_Be_Human_Today. As well, my latest, Jung and the Post Human at: https://www.academia.edu/35056270/Jung_and_the_Posthuman.pdf
[4] “Caring, understood ontologically, is ‘making itself an issue,’ and we now know that making itself an issue can take many forms, from the most involved use of equipment to sheer disinterested staring.” Hubert Dreyfus explaining Heidegger’s ‘”care-structure”. In other words, within a particular life-world some things simply show up as mattering to us, whereas others don’t.
