Technology eventually will be humanity's undoing, noted physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking says.
The danger exists already, Hawking said in response to a question at the BBC Reith Lectures at London’s Royal Institution earlier this month,
the New York Post reports.
"Do you think the world will end naturally or will man destroy it first?" was the question asked of Hawking, research director at Cambridge University’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.
"We face a number of threats to our survival from nuclear war, catastrophic global warming, and genetically engineered viruses," Hawking replied. "The number is likely to increase in the future, with the development of new technologies, and new ways things can go wrong."
Though the chance of disaster during any given year may be low, he said, it adds up over time, "and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or 10,000 years."
But by then people should have colonized other planets, meaning an end to life on Earth won't mean an end of humanity as a whole, he said.
"However, 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," he warned.
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