Brief Answers to the Big Questions

This book was a compilation from the best of over 500,000 words of Hawking’s notes, a selection he was working on up until his passing in 2018. The first half of the book was similar to that of past Hawking works I’ve had the pleasure of reading — whimsical and eloquent summaries of time travel, black holes, and much more.

The second half — Hawking’s analysis of humanity’s greatest threats and opportunities, was so exceptionally good I read through much of it twice. Often writers that handle this topic do so from an alternative aperture to that of Hawking’s, or at least from a far smaller temporal scale. Hawking, of course, often thinks on timescales of millions (or more) years. When existential risk and “long-tail” problems like the use of large-scale nuclear weapons, an asteroid collision, or the mismanagement of general artificial intelligence and genetic engineering are looked through the filter of likelihood over anything even fractional to Hawking’s timescale, their relative chance of occurrence, and what it says about the fundamentals of our current state of society, suddenly becomes quite unfavorable.