Escape from the USA part 4: Ground Control to Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking is generally acknowledged to be a pretty smart guy. Stephen Hawking really wants off this planet.

Professor Hawking fears for the survival of the human species. I have to disagree with the good Professor: Humanity will survive, but the how and the who remain in question. I've been looking for another country to live in, or barring that, my own island, but Stephen Hawking has me wondering if I'm thinking big enough.

I need a frontier. There aren't any more frontiers. We're all over this damn planet. A couple of hundred years ago, all one had to do was move west a little, kill all the indians that were already there, and it was free land for the taming. Now all the land is either full or uninhabitable. Antarctica will have some available landmass before too long, but the U.N. will probably claim dominion over it and restrict settlement.

Space... That's a tough one. It's pretty hard to get into space, and pretty hard to stay alive once there. NASA and the other space agencies have all the rockets, and even then, they're limited to the neighborhood of earth orbit. I've heard reports that a permanent manned colony is scheduled to be put on Mars by 2020, but it's going to be a corporate mining colony. I would hate to go all that way to be a corporate slave. I can do that here.

Mars might be too much of a project-planet, anyway. If I went to Mars today and started terraforming, it wouldn't have a breathable atmosphere in my lifetime, and I don't want to live in a can, breathing recycled air. An Earth-like planet has been discovered, a mere twenty light-years away, that might be promising. It reportedly has a similar climate, though I couldn't say as to the atmospheric composition. Twenty light-years is quite a jaunt, too. Conventional rocket technology isn't going to get me there, even if I could hitch a ride.

Einstein said faster-than-light travel is impossible. Who am I to argue with Einstein? Looking at this stuff gives me a headache. Quantum, as far as I'm concerned, means more math than I can contend with. I'm not real thrilled with math as the ultimate expression of reality, anyway. Theoretical physicists are great if one wants to know the circumference of the universe at .1259-to-the-negative-zillionth seconds into the big bang, but they tend to be discouraging when it comes to practical applications. Time travel, for instance, is supposed to be theoretically possible but would require infinite energy. Let me just open up this can of infinite energy, then. I would rather hear what some engineers have to say about it. Maybe I'll ask after this headache clears up.

Damn theoretical physicists. You just can't argue with them! They start talking about paradoxes (paradoci?) and throw up some equations... I can't check their math. They could just be making stuff up, for all I know.

Maybe aliens could give me a lift. I believe in aliens. I believe in UFOs. I do not believe that aliens or UFOs have any direct bearing on my life. I wouldn't trust them, though, if I met them. Would you travel light-years to shake hands with someone? During the golden years of British Colonialism, did the Brits cross the Atlantic to shake hands and make friends with people? No, they went for profit, and had no more regard for indigenous populations than they did for the dodos on Galapagos. H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds after witnessing the treatment of indigenous peoples by British Colonial forces. Wells' Martians wouldn't be likely to offer a ride.

Even Stephen Hawking, perhaps one of the smartest people ever, can't get a ride off this rock. I may have to settle for Antarctica, after all. If I see a UFO with the keys in it, though...