I've been thinking about sex in space. Not from any interest in a potential new porn genre, or because I've got a chance of joining the 62-mile-high club any time soon. No, my concerns are loftier even than that: I'm worried about the future of humanity.
As British physicist Stephen Hawking said in a talk to NASA last year: "Spreading out into space will completely change the future of the human race and maybe determine whether we have any future at all."
Hawking recommended that we get off-planet within the next 200-500 years to have any hope that the human species will survive long-term. That's not to say we shouldn't bother trying to protect Earth from the terrible devastation we are wreaking upon it — we should, and fast — but in the long term, most species go extinct. That's just the way it goes. To guarantee the survival of humanity, we need to colonize other planets.
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