Why We Must Flee the Planet: The Geometry of Earth is All Wrong

Stephen Hawking is best known for thinking about time, space, and those teratoid trash mashers known as black holes. But in a recent talk in Hong Kong, the famous physicist digressed from his usual subject matter to tell the audience that they’d better get off the island, and he didn’t mean Kowloon. Instead, the Cambridge don was urging the crowd to get off the whole, gosh-darn planet. Hawking was hawking space colonization.

“Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers,” Hawking disclosed.

Well, if you’re a space buff, your reaction to this pronouncement is probably half-closed eyelids and a big “duh.” Moving out into the solar system to save our precious, hominid skins is hardly a new idea. What makes these statements print-worthy is that they come from a luminous source.

But news or not, Hawking’s observation is correct, primarily and fundamentally because our planetary home is the wrong shape. A sphere has less surface area than any other form of the same volume. Less than a cube, an ellipsoid, or any polyhedron you can still recall from seventh grade geometry. What this means is that there’s precious little surface acreage to live on, despite Earth’s goodly heft.

Space.com