by MATT BURGESS
PHOTO/Getty Images/Dave/Hogan
Stephen Hawking has claimed humans won’t be creating colonies on other planets for at least 100 years.
The 74-year old Cambridge professor, speaking before giving a lecture on black holes, said that with nowhere else to live humanity needed to treat Earth with great care. Hawking said potential downfalls for humans on Earth include nuclear war, global warming and genetically-engineered viruses, according to the BBC.
He said the chances of disaster happening on Earth were increasing and there was little anyone could do stop them. To help escape these problems Hawking said humans would eventually need to create space colonies — but this won’t happen in our lifetimes.
“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,” the physicist is reported to have said. “We are not going to stop making progress, or reverse it, so we must recognise the dangers and control them.”
Hawking’s comments come in advance of the The Reith Lectures (broadcast on Radio 4 at 9am on 26 January and 2 February), where he will explain how black holes work. He is also expected to claim it would be possible to fall into a black hole and appear in another universe, if the conditions were correct. The lecture was postposed in November when Hawking became unwell.
It’s not the first time Hawking has warned about humanity’s future on Earth. On multiple occasions he has spoken out about what will need to come next for the human race to survive.
Nuclear destruction
In 2012 he said the human race could become extinct but a disaster “such as a nuclear war” would “befall the Earth within a thousand years”. At the time, answering questions on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Hawking said that humans would eventually “spread beyond the Solar System”.
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