The Cart Blog

Hawking talks at TED

Here’s the video.  He thinks we’re probably alone in the Milky Way, either because  we haven’t heard any radio waves from another planet - unless (yikes!) “civilizations don’t last that long because they destroy themselves.”

This statement was made in response to a question following the talk.  Only one question was allowed, because the three sentence answer Hawking composed took eight minutes.  He has an optical interface to a screen with blocks of words, and has to select the words one by one with the human-computer interface that has been designed to allow people in his condition to communicate.