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Of course there’s no reason for someone who’s an expert in one field to be regarded as an expert in all of them. That is, just because Stephen Hawking knows so much about cosmology and physics, that doesn’t mean we should expect his social science prognostications to be equally valuable. Yet, when watching the concluding episode of Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, I found one of his ideas to be downright silly, and it bugged me.
In 500 years, says Hawking, we may have colonies on Mars, with their own language. Why? I mean, even supposing that we set up these colonies within the next 100 years, why would a new language evolve there? Would they be more cut off from communication with Earth than the first European New World colonists were cut off from England, Spain, Portugal, and France, and would they also lose the degree of literacy that has kept those languages stable enough over the past centuries that we don’t consider, say, Elizabethan English a different language from our own?
Even if the Mars colonies are multicultural, and its people learn each other’s languages and borrow words all over the place and create Martian slang, I would still expect them to continue to be able to communicate with Earth in English, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Hindi, or whatever.
In 500 years, says Hawking, we may have colonies on Mars, with their own language. Why? I mean, even supposing that we set up these colonies within the next 100 years, why would a new language evolve there? Would they be more cut off from communication with Earth than the first European New World colonists were cut off from England, Spain, Portugal, and France, and would they also lose the degree of literacy that has kept those languages stable enough over the past centuries that we don’t consider, say, Elizabethan English a different language from our own?
Even if the Mars colonies are multicultural, and its people learn each other’s languages and borrow words all over the place and create Martian slang, I would still expect them to continue to be able to communicate with Earth in English, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Hindi, or whatever.