The Speculist

...and necessary.

Over the past several years Stephen Hawking has been calling for space colonization. His believes that once it becomes possible for a few individuals to kill millions, humanity will be faced with an existential crisis.

His solution - scatter. Once we no longer have all our eggs in this one basket called Earth, we'll have a much better shot of surviving as a species. This is sound advice that we here at The Speculist would love to implement. The big hurdle: no warp drive.

In order to survive, humanity would have to venture off to other hospitable planets orbiting another star, but conventional chemical fuel rockets that took man to the moon on the Apollo mission would take 50,000 years to travel there, he said...

"Science fiction has developed the idea of warp drive, which takes you instantly to your destination," [Hawking] said.

"Unfortunately, this would violate the scientific law which says that nothing can travel faster than light."

However, by using "matter/antimatter annihilation", velocities just below the speed of light could be reached, making it possible to reach the next star in about six years.

"It wouldn't seem so long for those on board," he said.

And if the ship were Orion-sized with a crew numbering in the hundreds, spinning for artificial gravity, with greenery, a voyage taking years might not be so bad.

UPDATE: I had no idea how powerful a matter - antimatter explosion could be:

The reaction of 1 kg of antimatter with 1 kg of matter would produce 1.8×1017 J (180 petajoules) of energy (by the equation E=mc²). This is about 134 times as much energy as is obtained by nuclear fusion of the same mass of hydrogen (fusion of 1H to 4He produces about 7 MeV per nucleon, or 1.3×1015 J for 2 kg of hydrogen). This amount of energy would be released by burning 5.6 billion liters (1.5 billion US gallons) of gasoline.

Err...that could be dangerous. It's a bit ironic that the power to take us to the stars is also the reason we should go.