Speaking in Waterloo, Ontario, Hawking told the public that it was really nice we’d become so technically proficient at making our environment a pleasant place to be (or not), but iPhones, heated leather seats, and soy burgers are not going to do much to prevent alien colonization. (A caveat: nuclear weapons may not help the situation any either, if that’s what you were thinking.) Our solution? Spread out into the solar system. "Our only chance of long-term survival,” Hawking declared, “is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.” Selfishness and aggressiveness, he warned, will likely be our undoing.
In a very objective sense, it does seem a colossal waste the amount of time and resources we’ve poured into purely superficial pursuits. Our most creative minds tend to be absorbed with things like stock market trading algorithms and building a quieter luxury car than with some of those things central to our existence. How do we provide energy to a massively overpopulated world without destroying the environment that we depend on? How do we feed everyone without destroying ecosystems? How do we most efficiently use our quickly dwindling inhabitable spaces? How can we become smarter, happier, more efficient people without wasting what we’re given? If you’re Hawking, how do we begin to colonize the solar system, finding and creating healthy inhabitable environments?
Given the vastness of space, and the immense variety of possible variables involved in predicting a “first-contact” type of event, it doesn’t make any sense to “humanize” the nature of it. There’s no indication to think that we need to find another place to live in case this one is destroyed by an invading extra-terrestrial. There’s not point in assuming the celestial “Europeans” in this scenario would bare any resemblance to our human psychology, social structure, motives or tactics. Finally, it’s highly unlikely this will happen within the lifespan of our species anyway…we are talking about a relative nano-blink within the solar system’s billions of years of evolution. I know we like to think we’re going to be around for a very long time, but it’s an incredible stretch of egomania to think that something as simple as dropping our species off on another satellite around our little sun is going to stave off a mass extinction.
I still think we should colonize, but let’s not make it an imperative for human survival. More so, it’s an imperative for human curiosity and progress. That’s our mandate, and that’s our goal.