The renowned physicist tells a Beijing gathering that overcrowding and increased energy consumption could doom Earth.
In the last few years Stephen Hawking has become quite the pessimist. His predictions on Artificial Intelligence and Climate Change have been widely reported but his latest warning is probably his most apocalyptic-sounding yet.
If humanity doesn't become a truly space-faring species in the next five centuries or so, we may well go extinct, Stephen Hawking said, according to media reports.
During a video presentation Sunday (Nov. 5) at the Tencent Web Summit in Beijing, the famed cosmologist warned that the ever-rising human population, and its mounting energy needs, could render Earth uninhabitable by the year 2600.
One of the possible solutions to this problem – apart from actually tempering our addiction to fossil fuels and preventing harm to the world’s ecosystems, of course – is to leave the planet. Easier said than done, but during his video appearance at the 2017 Tencent WE Summit, Hawking said that we need to “boldly go where no one has gone before.”
During his talk, Hawking also highlighted the exploration potential of Breakthrough Starshot, a $100 million project that aims to develop tiny, uncrewed, sail-equipped probes that will be accelerated to 20 percent the speed of light by powerful lasers.
Such nanocraft could get to Mars in less than an hour and theoretically fly by the closest exoplanet to Earth — the possibly habitable Proxima b, which lies about 4.2 light-years from us — after a space journey of just 20 years, Hawking and other Starshot team members have said.
"Maybe if all goes well, sometime a little after the middle of the century, we'll have our first picture of another planet that may be life-bearing orbiting the nearest star," Breakthrough Starshot Executive Director Pete Worden, the former head of NASA's Ames Research Center, said at the summit in Beijing.