Stephen Hawking Says We Only Have 1,000 Years Left on Earth

This is definitely not the first time that famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has issued warnings to humanity, but his latest one does seem a little bleak. Apparently, he thinks that humanity won’t survive more than another 1,000 years on this “fragile planet,” and the only obvious solution would be to move to another one. The speech was given at the Oxford Union earlier this week, and it looks like the professor is trying to raise awareness to this issue as much as he can whenever he gets the chance.

Stephen Hawking: We must continue exploring space in order to improve our knowledge of humanity. We must go beyond our humble planet.

— Oxford Union (@OxfordUnion) November 14, 2016

Back in 2010, Hawking issued a similar warning, although with a slightly wider window for disaster:

“It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet. Let’s hope we can avoid dropping the basket until we have spread the load.”

Fortunately, the physicist is currently involved in a few projects that aim to help humanity relocate should the need arise, but progress is pretty much slow, as you can imagine. It’s true that Elon Musk and his effort to put human beings on Mars has been getting a lot of attention lately, but all we can do now is wait and see how or if this effort will actually materialize in our lifetimes.