PROBABLY the most admired figure in British science, the severely-handicapped Professor Stephen Hawking, looks forward to mankind conquering space.

The Cambridge University cosmologist, who speaks through an artificial voicebox, has just received the Royal Society's Copley Medal, Britain's top scientific award. He used the occasion to warn that the human race will probably need to colonise another planet to survive.

"Disasters such as an asteroid collison could wipe us all out. Once we spread into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe. There isn't anywhere like the Earth in the solar system so we would have to go to another star," he says.

Well, on the cosmological timescale - far longer than even our earthbound geological timescale - the likelihood of extinction by asteroid is probably little greater now than when humans first appeared some 200,000 years ago. Certainly, the havoc we ourselves have wreaked on our planet, and continue to do so despite evidence of impending Armageddon, seems a far stronger driving force for seeking pastures new.

Prof Hawking believes that by mastering a process negatively termed "matter/antimatter annihilation" we might be able to travel at the speed of light. This would reduce the journey-time to the nearest stars from the 50,000 years demanded by present space-travel technology to just six.

But Professor Hawking avoids the key question: by what right would we impose ourselves on another planet?

Throughout human history, we have ravaged and ruthlessly exploited our planet. We have even devoted ever-more of our diminishing resources to butchering ourselves. If there is life beyond our solar system, advanced enough to have been keeping tabs on us, you could hardly blame it if it took Prof Hawking's hint of our eventual real-life star trek as a signal to prepare to repel the barbarians. Or zap us into oblivion now, just to be on the safe side.

'PERVERT might never be freed.'' But behind the relief that greeted the judge's words to this effect, when sentencing Peter Voisey, the child-molester who snatched a Tyneside girl from her bath, is the less reassuring truth that the judge set a minimum tariff of just ten years, after which Voisey could be released. Not even half long enough, don't you agree?

The case exposed a bigger worry. Though Voisey has been imprisoned for a sexual assault on a 12-year-old girl at a leisure centre, he was not subject to any restriction on his movement or employment. He could have obtained a job at a swimming baths. How this was allowed should be investigated.

SOMETHING lighter. It's a while since I provided a reminder that newspapers print April Fool stories all the time. One of the recent best outlined the discovery of a fossil of a giant armour-plated fish, Dunkleosteus terreli. Its special feature was a "uniquely-hinged jaw" which, said a scientist, "snapped shut with an incredible 80,000lbs of biting power per square inch". You couldn't make it up, and no one did.

MICHAEL Parkinson, doyen of professional Yorkshiremen, offers his take on the Scots' clamour for independence. "They can have it. I think that Yorkshire should be independent too. It's bigger than Scotland." Wishful thinking, perhaps in the hope of bringing Parky's home in far-off Berkshire within the Broad Acres.