When Really Smart People Speak...

... why don't we listen? Now Stephen Hawking is joining in with Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, and hundreds of other Really Smart People (tm) telling us that humanity needs a frontier. Instead we have NASA launching one crew every five years into LEO. At least the Chinese seem to be listening. As Jerry Pournelle has repeatedly pointed out, there is no Law of the Universe that says English will be spoken at the first moon base.