"It's a genius' conundrum."

Recent article on the Arizona Republic:

But Hawking also said survival of the human species depends on finding somewhere else in the universe to colonize.

This is where the message became contradictory.

The need to leave the planet was based on his rather dispirited view that "life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."

Meteors from outer space could smack us out of existence.

Yeah. So?

Lightning could strike you dead on the street. You still go out, don't you?

It's nice to see what Stephen Hawking said going straight over this journalist's head. Let's try and step out of the narrow minded individualist attitude for a second, there's more to life than me me me.

Lightning isn't going to wipe out the entire species. The only thing to remotely guarentee our long term survival is to spread across the entire galaxy. Something perfectly achievable in a million years or so.

The media are over-hyping the whole shuttle safety thing again. Let's keep things in perspective.

The International Space Station is years behind schedule, modules that other countries have spent billions on are just sat waiting to be taken up. The Hubble Space Telescope is in dire need of maintenance, and that's just for starters.

The shuttle has to launch and has to get its list of jobs done NOW. Before the US regime makes more of a mess of the NASA budget - if you want to go to the Moon Mr Bush you need to come up with some hard cash and stop cutting other programs which leave international partners in the lurch, like Russia who have been forced into handling the ISS single handedly, which made a mess of their budget having to pay for all the extra launches.

Building from scratch was really a bad idea, they should of built on top of Mir. The ISS has really been destroyed by the US and yet when Russia was a year late (due to the economic crash in 1997) delivering the life support and other key modules (which were already on Mir and already in space), some in the US were screaming bloody murder. Now we see the project delayed years, Europe, Japan and other's modules are sat on the ground collecting dust, while NASA budgeting for the ISS has been slashed to make way for Bush's bright idea and - no I'm not opposed to more lunar landings, I'm just opposed to the idea that NASA is expected to do this with virtually no extra money - which means all the science programs have to get cut, hmmm Bush and science really don't mix.

The shuttle needs to get back to work and catch up on all the things its not been able to do. There are always risks with space flight, you're sat on top of a giant bomb. The media should stop taking things out of perspective.

I look forward to seeing Discovery launch on July 1st.