Stephen Hawking: The Passing of an Immortal Man of Science and Peace

It would be fair to say that the life of Stephen Hawking was a constant, monumental and all-consuming challenge. And with that challenge came an enormous sense of urgency. It would be hard to find a more curious and scientifically probing mind than that of Hawking, and his desire to meet and surpass the challenges he set out for himself was overshadowed by a sword of Damocles that hung by a hair above his head throughout his entire life. At age twenty-one, doctors “gave” him three years to live. From then on, and for the next half-century, he took the years he desired, in spite of that death sentence, and made every one count in terms of his discoveries and of his gifts of knowledge to the world at large.

By the time Hawking died this past week at the age of seventy-six, he was, literally, about as close as any human could get to being an immensely active brain housed in what had become an almost entirely inert package. But despite his nearly complete physical disability, his mind and his image had made him one of the world’s best known and most popular figures—one of a handful of brilliant scientists who have made it their life’s mission to render uncommon, complex and complicated scientific principles and theories accessible to the common people.
Stephen Hawking was anything but negative or ominous, despite the dire circumstances under which his life unfolded. “Keeping an active mind has been vital to my survival,” he once said, “as has maintaining a sense of humor.” Indeed, he had a playful side that allowed him to appreciate and participate in public manifestations of humor. He made many cameo appearances on TV shows in person, but also as a cartoon character. He once said that the Matt Groening cartoon series, The Simpsons, was the best show on television and his cartoon persona appeared in several episodes of the show, in which Homer, the (yellow) head of the Simpson clan, referred to him as “Lisa’s robot friend.”

But such identification with and participation in popular culture aided Hawking, without a doubt, in advancing his own mission, which was to help people understand the science of the world they lived in, and thus, to be aware of the challenges facing them and the future generations that they were spawning.
Intrinsically and actively, Stephen Hawking was clearly a man of peace. He once said: “Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this.” His overarching message was that what we do matters. “The universe,” he said, “is not indifferent to our existence: It depends on it.”
Hawking believed that the only thing that could save planet Earth from ecological catastrophe was world peace and cooperation. As such, he was troubled in his latter years by the growing resurgence of blind nationalist jingoism and isolationist policies. He correctly saw this trend as the result of people’s frustration with ever-increasing economic and social inequality but indicated that isolationism was just the opposite of a much-needed solution.
Hawking specifically mentioned the election of Donald Trump in the US and the popularly-backed decision of Great Britain to pull out of the European Union as worrisome manifestations of this trend. He indicated that this was no time for such political tendencies since the planet was living through a dangerous era in which the decisions we, the human race, made could spell the difference between our survival as a species and a sixth great extinction that would destine us—and most other species—to the fate of the dinosaurs.

“Nothing,” Hawking once said, “lasts forever.” But the human race could last a great deal longer if, instead of squandering vast sums of money on the weapons and machinery of war, we were to invest heavily in space travel and interplanetary exploration and settlement. For this too, he made it clear, we needed to cooperate to an ever greater extent. He warned that the chances of a catastrophic event on Earth were more of a question of when than of whether it would take place. “Although the chance of disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years.”

Hawking once indicated that if the human race hoped to survive such an event—a meteor impact, nuclear holocaust, a climate change calamity—it would probably have to be colonizing other planets within the next one hundred years. “The moon,” he said, “could be a base for travel to the rest of the solar system,” and Mars, he felt, would be “the obvious next target.”
The renowned scientist’s predictions seem to take on new meaning within the current political context over which he expressed concern. The nuclear war posturing and threats exchanged between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un over the course of the past year have clearly heightened fears of a possible nuclear holocaust, until now downplayed since the end of the Cold War that came with the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has maintained a Doomsday Clock since 1953. This “clock” measures the global political context within the framework of chances for a nuclear holocaust. The Doomsday Clock is currently positioned at two-and-a-half minutes to midnight—the final hour.
Though he wished and hoped for world peace and cooperation, Stephen Hawking had no naïve illusions about Humankind’s behavior up to the present. He once advocated considering computer viruses a man-made life form. “I think it says something about human nature,” he said, “that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.”
He also had a warning for humans about actively seeking contact with alien life forms. “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet,” Hawking suggested. “I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach. If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

His other warning to Humankind was of the rapid advance of artificial intelligence. We needed to incorporate it, he indicated, in order to keep from being enslaved to it. “With genetic engineering,” said Hawking, “we will be able to increase the complexity of our DNA, and improve the human race. But it will be a slow process, because one will have to wait about 18 years to see the effect of changes to the genetic code. By contrast, computers double their speed and memories every 18 months. There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.”

From the complexities of quantum physics to Einstein’s fascinating Relativity Theory, Hawking himself was an indefatigable researcher and discoverer, but his gift to the world was that he sought to make all of the science that he could grasp eminently accessible to the public at large. His first major book, A Brief History of Time, provided his first revelation of complex science to readers and sold over ten million copies. But as he probed on, he sought to make knowledge ever simpler for his readership to acquire, and followed that first book with ever more didactic sequels—The Universe in a Nutshell, A Briefer History of Time, and The Illustrated Brief History of Time. Of his last work, he proudly wrote in the introduction, “Even if you only look at the pictures and their captions, you should get some idea of what is going on.”
Perhaps it was the near absence of Stephen Hawking’s physical persona that made his message so compelling to the world. And it is what continues to make it immortal and compelling today. Hawking seems to always have been speaking to us from some other-worldly place, hardly less so than the place from which he speaks to us today. And we could pay no better tribute to him and to the gift of knowledge that he has bequeathed us than to heed his words and learn to live and thrive within a framework of global peace, harmony and cooperation, with the aim of forging a future in which our species might indeed survive and evolve, rather than perish forever.