Impending End Of The World? Stephen Hawking Hints Apocalypse By 3016

If the world would end in a thousand years, what will happen and are humans ready for it? Prof. Stephen Hawking hints on how an impending apocalypse could end the world. In a new video, he predicted that an asteroid that might cause another mass extinction event on Earth by 3016.

In a speech he gave at the Oxford University Union, the renowned theoretical physicist said that humans have about 1,000 years left on Earth if they do not leave the planet by that time. Hawking added that in the next millennium, there could be various crises humanity would face and the only way to avoid extinction is to colonize other planets.

Despite the gloomy and chilling prediction, a thousand years is still a very long time to figure out how to colonize the space, other planets or stars. Besides, space agencies across the globe are on their way to discover a viable planet for humans to go to. Plans are already underway for humans to visit Mars with an ultimate goal of colonizing it.

"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," Hawking said in the speech, as reported by the Christian Science Monitor.

"By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race," he added.

Asteroid Apocalyptic Threat

In the video, Hawking emphasized on how asteroids could possibly collide with Earth at some point in the future.

"One of the major threats to intelligent life in our universe is the high probability of an asteroid colliding with inhabited planets," Hawking said as reported by The Inquisitr.

Despite the fact that space agencies like NASA are constantly tracking near-Earth asteroids, only a small percentage of them is known. According to the Daily Express, there are more than 600,000 known asteroids in the solar system and most of them are located in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter.

"We only know about 15 or 20 percent of the objects which are larger than a few hundred meters in size," Patrick Michel, an astronomer, said.

"If these bodies impact Earth, they can cause regional damage across a whole country or even a continent," he added.