brian livesey wrote:In a recent TV interview, Stephen Hawking said that colonising space was the only hope for humanity's survival - faced with wars, population growth and ecological problems, etc.
This is ludicrous, if not supercilious, advice from someone of Hawking's scientific stature. To abandon Earth's problems for a life in space would be like leaving the tap on in an overflowing bath, while collecting the overflow in buckets instead of turning off the tap.
It stands to reason that, if humanity is incapable (which it isn't) of solving its earthbound problems, it will only be taking its problems into space to create new crises elsewhere.
The answer lies in creating a single world community based on conscious social-planning, but that's political - something Hawking has yet to catch up with.

I have heard Hawking say this but I did not take the same meaning from his comments.
I thought he was simply saying that moving into space was the only sure way of guaranteeing the survival of humans. In other words making certain our eggs were not all in one basket (the Earth).
Of course a long time will pass before we are able to send huge ships, out of the Solar System, to explore interstellar space, but I believe that will happen and we have to start with our own System.
As "nealeh" said it is impossible to predict the technology of the future, but I suspect that the ships, going to the stars, will be self-sufficient, for very long time periods, and could be thought of as mini-earths.
Without starting a civil war I think your second paragraph is absurd. You appear to believe that because Hawking is advocating space travel he is actually suggesting abandoning the Earth.
If the first group of Homo Sapiens, who left Africa and eventually moved over almost the whole planet, had felt it necessary to solve every problem, facing them, they would never have left their relatively small corner of that continent.
I much prefer the views of Hawking to someone who advocates "successfully" adopting some kind of Utopian solution, to our problems, before we begin a proper exploration of the universe.