Stephen Hawking Says We Only Have 1000 Years Before End of Earth, Urges Humans to Go Into Space

Humans only have a thousand years to find a new home, said Stephen Hawking during a speech at the Oxford University Union. According to the famous physicist, it will be very unlikely for humans to survive in the next millennium, and in order to survive, humans have to find another home.

According to The Washington Post, the risk of mass extinction heightens as humans stay on Earth longer. Hawking, during his hour-long speech, urged humans to go into space for survival as humankind itself will be the reason to the Earth's demise through its continual and rapid use of the planet's resources.

“We must ... continue to go into space for the future of humanity,” said Hawking as quoted by Daily Express. “I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet.

“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 ten thousand years. By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race," he added.

NASA has been on the hunt for potential habitable exoplanets, which, as the space agency defines them, are " small Earth-size worlds, belonged within the realm of science fiction just 21 years ago. Today, and thousands of discoveries later, astronomers are on the cusp of finding something people have dreamt about for thousands of years.”

However, before moving to another planet, Hawking said that there's another challenge: the battle against technology. He explained that despite the potential of technology giving way for possible ways of human survival, artificial intelligence can also wipe out humans.

“Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it will take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded.” Hawking said back in May.

In his recent speech, the Cambridge professor also taked about Einstein's famous theory of relativity as well as the origins of the universe. He also discussed the M-theory and said that it is a “glorious time to be alive and doing research into theoretical physics.”