One of the world's leading theoretical physicists, Dr. Stephen William Hawking, is urging all of us to pack up and leave our beloved planet and move into artificial habitats in space or in a deconstructed Moon. In his recent talk in Hong Kong, the famous physicist said, "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."

He mentions the wrong shape of the earth as one of the leading factors on why we must flee. Mathematics will support this idea of Hawking's to an outstanding degree. Think about it. The earth is a sphere, and a sphere has less surface area than any other form of the same volume. This means that, in the near future we could have already occupied most of the existing land on the planet.

But, he also poses possible solutions to our dilemma. We could either occupy Mars now, and by the mid-century we'd already have it filled. And even that won't be the best solution, because we are still moving into a sphere, which the main reason why we are moving out. So, he then suggests along with physicists like Freeman Dyson, that asteroids and perhaps the diminutive worlds of the Kuiper Belt, could be the next best thing. Unfortunately, Dyson reckons that our descendants will migrate to where land is abundant.

Building artificial habitats in space could probably be the perfect solution to our realty needs. This is not an entirely new concept though. Building gigantic, rotation aluminum cylinders in orbit, has dated back to 1970s, when Gerald O'Neill and Tom Heppenheimer wrote speculative books on how it might be done. Or if that doesn't sound appealing to you, we can always take the moon apart and redevelop it as a dream suburbia.