Celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking has moved up the deadline for humans to colonize another planet as he believes that if we don’t act fast, we will face extinction.
Hawking will be elucidating on his theory of why humans only have a century left with them in in a new BBC documentary called Stephen Hawking: Expedition New Earth. The timeframe of just 100 years is a very small window compared to Hawking’s earlier window of anywhere between 1,000 to 10,000 years.
Hawking had said last year that we humans only have anywhere between 1,000 and 10,000 years within which we need to figure out how to colonize another planet and move there permanently to save our race from mass extinction.
In the new warning, Hawking said that humans are at risk of being wiped out because of a number of reasons including artificial intelligence going wild, celestial dangers including an asteroid strike; the effects of climate change and population growth and medical epidemics.
At the start of 2016, Hawking warned about the dangers from nuclear war, global warming, genetically-engineered viruses and artificial intelligence (AI).
At the time Hawking had said that in 1,000 to 10,000 years humans can spread out across the space and thereby avoid mass extinction. But the latest warning offers us just 100 years – a time frame many believe is just not plausible.
We haven’t even managed to re-send humans to the moon; never mind sending humans to far off planets. Scientists have worked out several technological hurdles that we need to cross before we can send humans to deep space missions. While we still don’t have answers to all the known issues, a number of unknown issues may come up as well during actual flights that need to be addressed on the go – technology for which we haven’t even thought off.