Stephen Hawking, who passed away, believed that the end of the planet was imminent.
Even though it’s a somber topic to think about on a Tuesday morning, here we are.
One of the most well-known scientists in history once said something terrible about what will happen to us if we keep going in the same direction.
Although Hawking was no stranger to making forecasts about the future, this one stands out as one of his most well-known since it offered us a year to watch.
In less than 600 years, the renowned scientist and creator of The Theory of Everything predicted a dire future for humanity.
Before he passed away in 2018, he said that unless we made a change, factors like population expansion and energy use may turn the Earth into a “giant ball of fire.”
At the Tencent WE Summit in November 2017, the former mathematician from the University of Cambridge stated his prognosis of our imminent demise, stating that the world’s population was doubling every 40 years up until that time.
He explained: “This exponential growth cannot continue into the next millennium.”
“By the year 2600, the world’s population would be standing shoulder to shoulder, and the electricity consumption would make the Earth glow red-hot.”
“This is untenable,” Hawking said in his computer-generated voice.
It has recently been reported Hawking’s chilling claims have been backed up by NASA, though they have since denied this, as a spokesperson highlighted to Newsweek: “NASA has not made this claim.”
The space agency are worried about global threats to humanity though, adding: “For more than 50 years, NASA has studied our home planet, providing information to directly benefit humanity and producing observations that can only be gathered in space that address some of the areas that Hawking mentioned.”
Is it too late to change now?
Hawking had previously explained to the BBC in 2016: “Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or 10,000 years.”
He ascribed this prognosis to the greenhouse effect, climate change, and global warming as the primary factors contributing to Earth’s destruction.
Humanity doesn’t seem to have changed all that much in these areas in the years that have passed.
Given that Hawking identified pandemics, artificial intelligence, and nuclear war as existential risks, the end of the planet might actually be closer than previously thought.
One more to go, two down.
