Apocalypse!

I, like many other people, have read the physicist Stephen Hawking's announcement that human beings must look for stars to settle on in order to survive the demise of the earth. He also mentioned that the earth might be wiped out by disaster in the next 20 to 40 years, though for the life of me I cannot see what would lead him to such a conclusion. Hawking also believes that space travel can be achieved in this time frame. Now, I hate to say it, but let's take a close look at our planet. For one, many countries are currently at war, including our own. There are just as many countries where people are starving to death and dying young. There are diseases, genocide, and intolerance. There are troubles abroad and troubles at home. Just look at some of our problems in Marengo, such as the police issues! How easy are those to solve? Now let us suppose that we put all our energy into exploring outer space, all our money into building rockets, space stations, deep space probes, as well as training people for these procedures, Where is all this money, time, and energy going to come from? Why, it's going to be at the expense of taking care of the problems here on earth, of course!! How can we hope for a future somewhere in the stars when we have not even begun to take care of the issues right here on our planet?
It is also interesting to not that Stephen Hawking believes all the mysteries of the universe have a solution. That one day we will know everything there is to know about our universe. To say that seems unlikely is stretching it. For one, have we even answered a basic question: where did all life come from? How about this one: Is there a God, how could a universe begin all on its own, why would it begin, are there other universes? The list goes on and on. Not only might it not be possible to answer some of these questions, I am not sure that I would like to know ALL the mysteries of the whole, entire universe. Would it not be better if there were some things which we could still hope to learn about, some things which we just don't know everything about? How interesting would life be if all the basic mysteries were solved?