You know, a lot of people don’t realize that everything they find important — from family to politics to sports to drinking, you name it — doesn’t really count for a damn thing if we’re facing a global catastrophe, as would be the case with a nearby supernova, or an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. (Both of which are fairly common events in the universe.)

So long-term vision is crucial; and I don’t mean “long-term” as in “maybe next year,” I mean long-term as in “within the next several hundred years.” Remember — virtually all of the technology and scientific knowledge we possess was discovered within the past 100 years, give or take a few scientists (namely Newton).

With all of that in mind, here’s a recent article from New Scientist about Stephen Hawking, arguably the world’s greatest living physicist:

Stephen Hawking called for a massive investment in establishing colonies on the Moon and Mars in a lecture in honour of NASA’s 50th anniversary. He argued that the world should devote about 10 times as much as NASA’s current budget - or 0.25% of the world’s financial resources - to space.

The renowned University of Cambridge physicist has previously spoken in favour of colonising space as an insurance policy against the possibility of humanity being wiped out by catastrophes like nuclear war and climate change. He argues that humanity should eventually expand to other solar systems.

But in a speech in Washington, DC, US, delivered in honour of NASA’s 50th anniversary in 2008, Hawking focused on near-term possibilities, backing the space agency’s goals of returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020 and sending humans to Mars soon after that.

The Moon is a good place to start because it is “close by and relatively easy to reach”, Hawking said. “The Moon could be a base for travel to the rest of the solar system,” he added. Mars would be “the obvious next target”, with its abundant supplies of frozen water, and the tantalising possibility that life may have been present there in the past.

Some space experts have recently called for NASA to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid instead of the Moon as a next step.

Hawking did not mention the idea, but said that any long-term site for a human base should have a significant gravity field. That’s because long missions in microgravity lead to health issues such as bone loss.

He also called for an acceleration of NASA’s plans for human landings on Mars, which one NASA study suggested could be done in the early 2030s. “A goal of a base on the Moon by 2020 and of a manned landing on Mars by 2025 would reignite the space programme and give it a sense of purpose in the same way that President Kennedy’s Moon target did in the 1960s,” he said. . . .

Eventually, Hawking said, humanity should try to expand to Earth-like planets around other stars.

No such planets are known so far. But even if only 1% of the 1000 or so stars within 30 light years of Earth has an Earth-size planet at the right distance from its star for liquid water to exist, that would make for 10 such planets in our solar system’s neighbourhood, he said.

“We cannot envision visiting them with current technology, but we should make interstellar travel a long-term aim,” he said. “By long term, I mean over the next 200 to 500 years.”

The first priority in everyone’s mind — no exceptions — should be: to survive. Mankind has been around for what, 200,000 years? That’s only .00001% of the total lifetime of the universe, around 13.5 billion years.

So surviving is what’s really important, and any ideology or philosophy you adopt should be friendly to the development of plans for mankind to expand outside of our solar system, and, as a corollary, to work the long hours required to obtain such technology. (In other words, Eastern philosophies like Buddhism are not only wrong, but dangerous.)

Let me just make one quick political point: what economic system has been historically the best (by a huge margin) at producing technology and advancing mankind? That’s right — capitalism.

Capitalism — it’s fantastic.