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Stephen Hawking, with his typing computer system

Famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has spent his life pondering big questions about the wider universe. In contempo years, he'southward turned his attention closer to home, talking nearly AI, climate change, alien invasion, and other threats to the hereafter of humanity. At present, he's put an expiration date on our species if nosotros don't get into infinite. He's giving u.s.a. but 1,000 years.

Hawking's latest warning came in a speech delivered at Britain'south Oxford University Union. He noted that Earth is fragile, as is any single planet. The odds of a catastrophic global outcome wiping out humanity in any given twelvemonth is slim, but over the course of years the risk becomes quite high. Homo activity is simply increasing those odds as well.

Hawking noted in the speech that some of the most pressing concerns for the hereafter of humanity could come up in the next century, as artificial intelligence is perfected and global climate change continues to bear on culture. When something happens on Earth, we don't want all of humanity to be hither, according to Hawking. The best way to continue the species going is to make sure we've got a backup — humans on other planets and perhaps even in other star systems.

But where could nosotros go? The easiest way to get humans off of Globe is to colonize Mars, and there are some ambitious plans to brand that a reality inside our lifetimes. The SpaceX Interplanetary Transport Organization is designed to shuttle as many equally 200 people to Mars in each 3 month trip. Launches would merely happen when the orbit of Mars put information technology close enough to Earth for such a quick journey. It's certainly feasible to move people to Mars, merely creating a functional society is still an unknown. Mars has no magnetic field to protect people from radiations and its thin atmosphere isn't breathable.

ITS Mars

Mars is a good start, but being in a completely different solar arrangement would be the ultimate fill-in for humanity. Astronomers are constantly finding potentially habitable exoplanets, only nosotros can't go to any of them with current engineering science. The most likely target for further examination is Proxima Centauri, which harbors an exoplanet that may be World-similar. First, we need to get a closer await at information technology, which the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope can manage. A few centuries agone, wooden sailing ships were the fastest fashion to travel, and then who know what we'll accept in another couple generations? Proxima Centauri might not seem that afar.

A whole millennium might sound like a lot of fourth dimension, but humanity has existed in more than or less its current course for nearly 100,000 years. Information technology'd exist an awful shame if all this progress we've fabricated was for zilch in just 1% of that fourth dimension. We should probably get on this.