(As regular followers of either the "GLXP" or the "PomerantzReport" twitter streams already know, I had a chance to attend a cool lecture early this week, and to give one at a cool meeting yesterday. This post is the first of those promised recaps!)

A few months ago, Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a lecture here in DC as part of NASA's 50th anniversary series. On Monday, the next lecture and that series finally took place, and it was a great one. The speakers: Professor Stephen Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, and his daughter and co-author, Lucy Hawking.

Stephen Hawking and Lucy Hawking, presenting as part of NASA's 50th Anniversary Lecture Series.
Photo Credit: P. Vaujour, X PRIZE Foundation.

I was lucky enough to grab some seats to attend this event, held at the George Washington University, not too far from my own office in downtown Washington, DC. The event was mostly full--some obstructed view seats towards the edges remained empty--but the talk was also broadcast on both NASA-TV (warning: link doesn't play well with Firefox, at least not version v3β5) and C-SPAN.

Hawking had written this particular talk specially for the occasion--what he called a "50th Birthday Present for NASA." The title of the talk--"Why We should Go Into Space"--was apt, describing exactly what the talk was about. For about 45 minutes, the two Hawkings both gave a passionate, persuasive argument for why we should explore space.

Many of the arguments Hawking presented were quite familiar to those of us already passionate about space, but Hawking was an eloquent and effective messenger to carry those arguments out to new ears--including, hopefully, the ears on Capitol Hill responsible for controlling NASA's budget. As the lecture is archived online, I won't quote big tracts of it, but I did want to cite one section I found particularly effective.

Spreading out into space will have an even greater effect [than Columbus's voyage to the New World]. It will completely change the future of the human race -- and maybe determine whether we have any future at all. It won't solve any of our immediate problems on Planet Earth, but it will give us a new perspective on them, and cause us to look outwards rather than inwards. Hopefully, it will unite us to face a common challenge. ... Even if we were to increase the international budget 20 times, to make a serious effort to go into space, it would only be a small fraction of world GDP ... There will be those who argue that it would be better to spend our money solving the problems of this planet, like climate change and pollution, rather than wasting it on the possible fruitless search for a new planet ... I am not denying the importance of fighting climate change and global warming, but we can do that and still spare a quarter of a percent of world GDP for space. Isn't our future worth one quarter of a percent?

Professor Hawking eloquently sums up a point many of us space geeks have long known: the "choice" between space exploration and solving other problems is a false one--this is not a zero sum game. Not only does investment in space exploration result in the immediate employment of large numbers of productive members of society and the near-term creation of countless valuable spin-offs that improve the quality of life around the world--it is also along term investment in the success or perhaps even the survival of our species. It's a good argument, and I hope that it fell on the right ears.