Physicist Hawking Delivers White House Millenium Lecture

Cosmologist Stephen Hawking says technology won’t be the only thing more advanced in the next millennium: People will be better too.

“I don’t believe science fiction like ‘Star Trek,’ where people are essentially the same 400 years in the future,” the Cambridge University physicist said Friday night during a lecture in the East Room of the White House.

Hawking said the combination of advanced science and technology will inevitably bring together incredible changes--including genetically engineered human beings.

“Unless we have a totalitarian world order, someone will design an improved human somewhere,” he said, clarifying that he wasn’t passing judgment on such changes.

“I am just saying that it is likely to happen in the next millennium whether we want it or not,” he said.

President Clinton invited Hawking, author of the bestseller “A Brief History of Time,” to speak as part of the presidential “Millennium Evenings” series. His speech to several dozen people, including many fellow physicists and other scientists, touched topics ranging from “closed-loop histories of particles” to Moore’s Law, in which the speed and complexity of computers doubles every 18 months.

Even the program’s moderator joked about needing an interpreter to understand some of the concepts in Hawking’s speech.

The evening was telecast live through satellite connections and cybercast over the Internet. Mir astronaut Andrew Thomas appeared briefly via satellite to welcome Hawking.

Hawking, 56, has Lou Gehrig’s disease, which affects his motor skills. He speaks by touching a computer screen that translates his words through an electronic synthesizer. He is the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, a post once held by Sir Isaac Newton.