Humans must colonize a neighboring planet in the next 100 years, or they will face a possible extinction, warns famous physicist Stephen Hawking.
In his new BBC documentary entitled “Stephen Hawking: Expedition New Earth” due to air in this upcoming year, the physics professor will “present his predictions that the human race only has 100 years before we need to colonize another planet,” reported a recent press release.
“With climate change, overdue asteroid strikes, epidemics and population growth, our own planet is increasingly precarious.”
In the past, Hawking came up with a theory that humankind most likely has about 1,000 years remaining before it may become extinct. That timeline seems to have reduced significantly. The high-profile physicist previously issued multiple warnings regarding the future in recent years.
In early 2016, Hawking laid out warnings about dangers that may result from global warming, nuclear war, artificial intelligence (AI), and genetically-engineered viruses.
“Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years,” Hawking said to the BBC.
“By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race,” he stated. “However, 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.”
Hawking is one of many tech and science figures that have warned about threats to humanity’s existence, including Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla, who stated that humans will need to merge their brains with machines or face the risk of irrelevance in the era of AI.
He founded another company, Neuralink, hat aims to do exactly that.