Stephen Hawking calls for Moon and Mars colonies

Yes! In a speech at George Washington University, Stephen Hawking maked the case for HUMAN exploration of space!

"Robotic missions are much cheaper and may provide more scientific information, but they don't catch the public imagination in the same way, and they don't spread the human race into space, which I'm arguing should be our long-term strategy," Hawking said. "If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before."

"Even if we were to increase the international [space exploration] budget 20 times to make a serious effort to go into space, it would only be a small fraction of world GDP," he said. GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, is a measure of a country's economic activity.

Hawking argued that the world can afford 0.25% of its collective GDP to devote to space colonisation. "Isn't our future worth a quarter of a percent?" he asked.