We’re All Doomed: Did Stephen Hawking Just Set An Expiration Date For Humanity?
Stephen Hawking , in a speech at Oxford University Union, stated that humanity has almost no chance of surviving the next thousand years, unless it finds a way to reach other inhabitable planets.
We must… continue to go into space for the future of humanity. I don’t think we will survive another 1000 [years] without escaping beyond our fragile planet.Stephen Hawking
According to the world-renowned physicist, the survival of humanity is currently challenged by threats including global nuclear war, climate change and genetically engineered viruses.
The number [of threats] is likely to increase in the future, with the development of new technologies, and new ways things can go wrong. Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time.
The only solution to impending doom is locating and migrating to new planets, Hawking said, as a way to avoid the destruction of humankind.
We will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period.
Ambitious space-exploration programmes currently under development in Russia and the US will take at least half a century to yield functional results with available technologies. A truly groundbreaking discovery in space travel technology is required, he suggested, to be able to reach habitable exoplanets.
And there are a plenty of choices as, since 2009, NASA has identified over 1,000 exoplanets believed to be similar to Earth by metrics including temperature and atmosphere. Another 3,000 exoplanets are called "planet candidates" and could be suitable for colonisation.
The article first appeared on Sputnik International.