Science superstar Stephen Hawking says humanity is inching closer to demise, and we are to blame.
The physicist made the comments during the annual BBC Reith lecture, and said it’s inevitable that in the next “thousand or ten thousand years,” a disaster will strike the planet.
"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 said during the BBC lecture.
Hawking cautioned that disasters engineered by humans, including climate change, nuclear war and genetically engineered viruses, could be the downfall of life as we know it on Earth. With advancements in technology come "new ways things can go wrong," Hawking 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," Hawking said.