Stephen Hawking fears Earth will turn into giant ball of fire by 2600
British scientist Stephen Hawking arrives to attend the launch of The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, eastern England, on Oct. 19, 2016. The CFI is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Imperial College London and the University of California, Berkeley. AFP
Several potential doomsday theories have been scaring humanity off in recent years, and renowned physicist Stephen Hawking may have just added to the growing list.
In a video appearance at Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal, the 75-year-old genius warned that human’s overpopulation and soaring energy consumption could turn Earth into a fire ball by the year 2600.
To avoid the total extinction of the human race, Hawking said that we “must boldly go where no one has gone before.”
But if all efforts go for naught, the English author and cosmologist stressed that humans could relocate to a habitable planet elsewhere, according to The Sun.
Hawking also gave light to a project that he is backing—the Breakthrough Starshot initiative—which aims to develop ultra-fast light-powered spacecraft that can accommodate humans to habitable worlds circling around the nearby star, Alpha Centauri.
“Such a system could reach Mars in less than an hour, or reach Pluto in days, pass Voyager in under a week and reach Alpha Centauri in just over 20 years,” he said.
Although the ambitious venture seems to be purely speculative at this point, Hawking remains optimistic that it can turn into a reality in the near future.
“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,” he shared.
“The idea behind this innovation is to have the nanocraft on the light beam.” Khristian Ibarrola /ra
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