Hawking was and still is a great personal inspiration to me. Whenever I saw him in a documentary or on TV, or just heard his enigmatic voice, I would feel that the dream is not dead. Rest in peace.
Hawking was a brilliant scientist, and he also gave us a warning. It is crucial to our survival as a species that we don’t remain on this one planet alone. If history, art, philosophy, music, beer and cheese burgers are to survive in the cold nothingness of space, we must back up our spiritual heritage onto several galactic locations. Otherwise, everything could be accidentally deleted in an instance, by our own doing, by a global catastrophe or a rouge piece of rock and ice.