NASA has validated Stephen Hawking's chilling doomsday prediction, warning that Earth's destruction could arrive much sooner than the physicist's original timeline. The space agency confirmed the planet faces existential dangers from climate change, echoing Hawking's stark forecasts made just before his death in 2018.
Hawking's Original Warning
In his posthumous documentary The Search for a New Earth, Stephen Hawking warned that by 2600, Earth could become an enormous fireball unless humanity drastically alters its approach to global warming, climate change, and the greenhouse effect. He identified these as the three primary culprits threatening the planet's survival. Earlier, in a 2016 BBC interview, Hawking stated: "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 10,000 years."
NASA's Confirmation
A NASA spokesperson said: "For more than 50 years, NASA has studied our home planet, providing information to directly benefit humanity and producing observations that can only be gathered in space that address some of the areas that Hawking mentioned." While NASA has not offered a precise expiry date, it cautioned that our destruction could come far earlier than expected if resource usage is not controlled. According to The Express, sloths could face extinction by 2100, and New York may endure severe climate change damage by the century's end, suggesting the world's demise could occur much sooner than Hawking's 2600 prediction.
Prevention Programmes and Other Threats
NASA is actively involved in prevention programmes to avert catastrophic events, including investigating potential asteroid impacts and conducting continuous climate change research to mitigate its effects. The agency allocates resources for Earth observation to monitor environmental changes. Hawking also identified nuclear warfare, artificial intelligence, and pandemics as additional existential threats to humanity.
