Recently Dr. Stephen Hawking posted on Yahoo Answers a question: How can the human race survive the next hundred years? Here is my quick answer. Obviously this short answer can’t address all topics and polemics but it’s a start:

To survive we must use the faculty which is the key to the human race — reason. And in turn we must also embrace its corollaries: science and technology. I admit that it does feel like we are in a chaotic time but from a longer term perspective the overall (or average) life of a human is much improved over the last centuries (you, Dr. Hawking are a perfect specific example). I have confidence that if we apply ourselves to our problems that we can arrive at solutions.

Imagine that 80 years ago we didn’t know about penicillin and 65 years ago we didn’t have any commercial penicillin. Infections we don’t think twice about now could have killed you. A bird flu pandemic is obviously on many peoples minds and this would obviously be very bad. Some people might even blame science for these diseases and “superbugs” but the alternative is to just sit back and accept whatever nature happens to throw at us. And history has shown us over and over again nature can be extremely cruel towards life. e.g. Volcanoes, diseases, floods, tsunamis etc. Perhaps some diseases would not exist today without our use of antibiotics but the alternative is literally just to sit back and whither. That is the true path to destruction.

We must to continue to apply our rational thought to our problems if we are to arrive at solutions, survive and even thrive in the next hundred years.