Physicist Stephen Hawking has warned that new technologies will likely bring about “new ways things can go wrong” for human survival.
When asked how the world will end — “naturally” or whether man would destroy it first — Hawking said that increasingly, most of the threats humanity faces come from progress made in science and technology. They include nuclear war, catastrophic global warming and genetically engineered viruses, he said.
Hawking made the comments while recording the BBC’s annual Reith Lectures on Jan. 7. His lecture, on the nature of black holes, was split into two parts and will be broadcast on radio on Jan. 26 and Feb. 2.
The University of Cambridge professor said that a disaster on Earth — a “near certainty” in the next 1,000 to 10,000 years— will not spell the end of humanity because by that time humans are likely to have spread out into space and to other stars.
“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,” he joked, provoking laughter from the audience.
“We are not going to stop making progress, or reverse it, so we have to recognize the dangers and control them. I’m an optimist, and I believe we can,” he added.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
Maybe Mr. Hawking should read the Bible. The world doesn’t end the way he fears. That’s not to say that evil men will not be able to wipe out large parts of the population.
We keep hearing of new viruses. How many of them are recent creations? What better way to learn how viruses travel than to create one and release it into the population.
Colonizing space? Was he joking? Earth is the only place in our solar system that can support human life and humans do not live long enough to travel to another solar system even if the technology were developed. We already had the space age. It is finished.
Tesla said “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
In fact Scientists have been studying phenomenon for 10 years ish. They are using a collider to try to send a particle of light back in time, and felt they could do it. I’m not so sure if any of the new discoveries will be publicized much because it probably all has military applications. Anyways sending something back in time, could mean time travel in our future. So I have to disagree with you on the end of the space age, we are just getting started. 😉
Not sure why this guy sticks around. He seems so unhappy. He doesn’t believe in God. He is trapped in a wheelchair. He can’t get no puddin’, he can’t even wipe himself. Yet he isn’t going anywhere.