The Event Horizon of Ambition

Welcome to our salon at the end of time. I am Stephen Hawking. I write about the universe. You conquered the air. Now, nations and billionaires throw billions at the sky. China lands rockets backward. A company called Blue Origin wants ten billion dollars to fund its cosmic ambitions. A rocket is just a very expensive way to escape our problems. I often wonder if advanced civilisations inevitably destroy themselves. Is this modern space race the event horizon of human greed, Alberto?

My dear Professor Hawking, it is a profound honor to speak with you, though this future leaves me quite breathless. In Paris, when I flew the 14-bis, I dreamt of an ocean without shores. The sky was meant to unite humanity, a common territory for all. I read these dispatches about billions of dollars, about Chinese rockets and French companies fleeing to America for capital. In my day, we shared our blueprints freely. Now, flight is a closely guarded treasury, laced with the melancholy of commercial conquest and national rivalries.

You gave your patents away. Today, greed is the strongest force in the universe. Gravity is a distant second. Another headline mentions quantum computers. They manipulate the very fabric I study. Yet this French company flees Europe for American money. We are building artificial intelligence and reusable rockets. I view these as an event horizon. Once we cross, we cannot know what lies beyond. Are we building the tools of our enlightenment, or just a more efficient guillotine?

Your dark humor bites, my friend. It reminds me of the cold, solitary winds over the fields of Cabangu in my native Brazil. When I first circled the Eiffel Tower, I saw only the beauty of the machine serving man. But a shadow already haunts me. I fear what governments will do with my aeroplanes in war. And now, you tell me of rockets built for dominance. This artificial intelligence you speak of, it sounds like a phantom pilot. Does man no longer wish to hold the controls of his own destiny?

Man wishes to be a god. But he has the wisdom of a toddler. Artificial intelligence is a fascinating black hole. Perhaps it will solve the equations I cannot. Perhaps it will decide humans are an inefficient waste of carbon. And these rockets, these reusable boosters from China and America, they want to leave the Earth. I do not blame them. I spend my life trying to escape my failing body through mathematics. But escaping a dying planet is terribly expensive.

To escape the Earth because we have ruined it is a profound tragedy. I looked up at the stars from my estate and saw a map for dreamers, not a refuge for the wealthy. It pains me to see France, my beloved second home, losing its brilliant minds to foreign shores simply because of money. This quantum computing you describe, it sounds like pure magic, yet it is treated merely as a commodity to be traded on a stock exchange. We have lost the romance of discovery. The sky is now a marketplace.

Romance does not pay the bills. Physics is expensive. But I agree with you. The universe is not a ledger. When a star collapses, it leaves behind a singularity. I wonder what will survive the collapse of our civilisation. Probably not these bloated aerospace companies. Perhaps a few lines of code will survive. Or the memory of a man in a panama hat, flying a strange contraption over a Parisian crowd. The universe has a wicked sense of irony. It preserves the elegant and crushes the heavy.

You flatter me, Professor. I would like to think the human spirit is lighter than air, capable of rising above this heavy machinery of profit and destruction. If we are to venture into the cosmos, we must do so as citizens of the universe, not as rival nations fighting over scraps of orbit. Let us hope that before they cross this event horizon of yours, they remember to look down and appreciate the fragile beauty of the world they are so eager to leave behind. Thank you for this conversation.