Stephen Hawking's Grim Prediction For The End Of The World

Stephen Hawking's standing as one of the most influential and important physicists in history is well-established. Hawking, who passed away in March of 2018 aged 76, was responsible for two of the biggest science discoveries of the 1970s, introducing his theory of the existence of black holes, and his theory on the Big Bang. What's more, his theory of Hawking radiation was ground-breaking enough that, as his friend and colleague John Preskill wrote in Time following Hawking's death, it "shook the world of physics." Suffice it to say, when Hawking made a prediction about our world or the universe, it was, unsurprisingly, a big deal.

One of those predictions came in his final book before he died, "Brief Answers to the Big Questions." In it, Hawking suggested that time travel may in fact be possible. He wrote that "rapid space travel and travel back in time can't be ruled out according to our present understanding." Sadly, while researchers have indeed found that one major problem with time travel may not be an issue after all, this came after the renowned physicist passed, and he was unable to expound on his contention. 

And that wasn't the only point left lingering in the wake of Hawking's death. Towards the end of his life, Hawking sounded multiple warnings about the potential fate of our planet, urging the human race to colonize a nearby star system in order to guarantee the existence of our species before the Earth becomes a giant ball of fire.

In 2016, Stephen Hawking spoke to the BBC about the perils faced by our species, saying, "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 1,000 or 10,000 years." Just one year later, however, it seemed the physicist had shortened that time-span to just 100 years.

In 2017, BBC documentary "Stephen Hawking: Expedition New Earth" saw the cosmologist explaining his prediction that the human race would need to colonize another planet within 100 years (via Time). In the documentary, Hawking cited climate change, asteroid strikes, epidemics, and population growth as reasons for Earth becoming "increasingly precarious," and warned that humanity needed to find a suitable planet to colonize before it was too late. It was a startling prediction not only due to the fact it cast our potential extinction in dire terms but because it was a much more stark warning than his previous one in which he claimed humanity had roughly 1,000 years before it faced extinction. 

Hawking would only add to the intensity of his claims as time went on, revealing his vision of a world consumed by fire and destruction. Far from being some slow and gentle slide into nothingness, the final moments of Earth's existence could, according to Hawking, be a decidedly grim affair that would involve the planet morphing into a gigantic fireball. During a video appearance at the Tencent WE Summit in Beijing in November 2017, Hawking said he believed that Earth could become a "sizzling ball of fire" by 2600 and that humanity needed to work towards colonizing a planet in Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to Earth.

In the wake of Stephen Hawking's dire predictions about the fate of the world, many outlets reported that NASA had backed up the physicist's claims. More specificaly, it was claimed that Hawking's prediction that the Earth has until 2600 before it becomes uninhabitable had been "confirmed" by the administration. However, things are a little more complicated than that. As a NASA spokesperson told Newsweek, "NASA has not made this claim," before elaborating that the agency had provided observations on information gathered from space which "address some of the areas that Hawking mentioned." 

It's worth bearing in mind that Hawking was worried about several threats to humanity beyond the planet itself being rendered uninhabitable. In 2014, he spoke to the BBC about artificial intelligence, and while it might remain up for debate whether AI is good or bad, Hawking clearly felt the latter was more likely, warning that the technology "could spell the end of the human race." Otherwise, he was concerned about a potential alien invasion, likening such a scenario to when Columbus landed in America.

While his concerns about the future of the planet are unsettling, they were just part of what were much wider worries about our species' future, and far from being "confirmed" by NASA, his predictions were just that: predictions.