It sounds like something you’d expect to hear from a doomsday cult, or a Jehovah Witness. The world is ending, but is it really? So far, none of the prophecies that foretold the end of humanity have come to pass. Then again, the sources behind these claims have been less than reliable. Would you believe a theoretical physicist like Stephen Hawking? Surely, he wouldn’t make such an insane claim unless he had legitimate proof to back it up, right? So here’s what the man himself has to say about the end of the world, and just in case, start packing before it’s too late.Hawking is a smart man, and not just because he’s a physicist or because he guest-starred on “Star Trek The Next Generation” and “The Big Bang Theory.” He’s not some whack job mouthing off about the end of the world.
But it won’t survive Hawking’s version of the end of the world, at least, not according to him. Given that he’s 75 and the deteriorating effects of his ALS, Hawking is trying to leave a mark by warning humanity of the danger it’s facing.
Hawking predicted with near certainty that humanity would become extinct within the next 1,000 to 10,000 years, during a conference at the Oxford University Union last November.
Hawking has shaved off 900 years to his initial 1,000-year end of the world estimate, meaning we’ve all got about a hundred years to start looking for another planet or else we’re screwed.
He started out by blaming climate changes and continued his accusations on overcrowding and mineral water contamination.
But mark your calendars because by 2117, we could all be kissing existence as we know it goodbye for good.
But ultimately, human aggression combined with technology and nuclear weaponry will lead to our extermination.
He claims that we’ve managed to create technology that’s powerful enough to destroy the planet, but have yet to develop technology to escape our home world and look for a more habitable solution.
Hawking told Storyline that “We don’t know where global warming will stop, but the worst case scenario is that Earth will become like its sister planet Venus with a temperature of 250 degrees Celsius and bring sulfuric acid down on us.
Longer, hotter summers and shorter winters have led to polar ice caps melting, endangering a vast number of other species. So it’s only a matter of time before we begin to feel the full brunt of that.
The movie was a disaster, but if Hawking’s predictions are correct, that movie will turn into a real life nightmare, and it won’t be over in 2 hours or less.
It feels like we’ve taken advantage of the entire planet, and now the Earth wants to take every bit of progress that we’ve made away from us.
Clearly, there’s no way that we could survive on a planet that’s so much like Venus. Eventually, the planet and everything on it will be extra crispy.
It sounds all “Resident Evil,” but science fiction could turn into science fact. Modifying DNA has unpredictable results according to Hawking, which could lead to the development of an antibiotic-resistant virus that can’t be controlled and will end our world.
Powerful strains of the Ebola virus have recently ravaged across regions of the African continent, putting the inhabitants there in mortal danger. So at what point can a virus like Ebola or something worse be contained before it becomes uncontainable?
While we’re busy fighting among ourselves, an A.I. could go all Skynet on us and turn against humanity. In fact, Hawking signed an open letter warning that artificial intelligence weapons could create a global arms race in the near future.
Technology is advancing way too quickly, and if Hawking is right, we could be looking at something eerily similar to the Cylon wars from “Battlestar Galactica.”
No. According to Hawking, we need to go all “Star Trek” and seek out and explore bold new worlds in the hopes that we’ll find an earth-like planet that we can call home.
We’ve built airplanes, computers, the internet, and so much more. We’ve also created weapons that can potentially end us. But he’s hopeful that we can find a way to create vessels that will carry us to a new world.
“Expedition New Earth” aired on June 15th and suggested that humanity needs to be a multi-planetary species within the next one hundred years in order to survive.
There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of time, but Tesla and SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk believes we can land people on Mars by 2025 and set up a colony by 2033, which is within Hawking’s doomsday timeline.
Obviously the future is grim, but would any of us consider traveling back in time and living out our lives in the past? It sounds crazy, and unbelievable, but humanity is dying so we really have to consider all possibilities.
But it would still take a lifetime or two to reach one of these worlds and there’s no telling what we’d find when we got there. Plus, there’s the matter of propulsion, fuel, food, oxygen, all of which would have to be replenished somehow during the long journey to new Earth.
The idea of setting up a colony in one of the other planets in our solar system would certainly seem more feasible than wandering aimlessly across the stars.
Whether this nightmarish scenario predicted by Hawking comes to past remains to be seen. But Hawking isn’t ready to give up. “I’m an optimist and I believe we can,” he said, adding that “we are not going to stop making progress, or reverse it, so we have to recognize the dangers and control them.
