{"id":20927,"date":"2016-01-19T14:16:38","date_gmt":"2016-01-19T22:16:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/01\/a-brief-history-of-stephen-hawking-being-a-bummer"},"modified":"2017-04-26T13:20:01","modified_gmt":"2017-04-26T20:20:01","slug":"a-brief-history-of-stephen-hawking-being-a-bummer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/01\/a-brief-history-of-stephen-hawking-being-a-bummer","title":{"rendered":"A Brief History of Stephen Hawking Being a Bummer"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Yeah, he\u2019s turned into quite the man-of-panic as of late.<\/p>\n

\n

Stephen Hawking is at it again, saying it\u2019s a \u201cnear certainty\u201d that a self-inflicted disaster will befall humanity within the next thousand years or so. It\u2019s not the first time the world\u2019s most famous physicist has raised the alarm on the apocalypse, and he\u2019s starting to become a real downer. Here are some of the other times Hawking has said the end is nigh\u2014and why he needs to start changing his message.<\/p>\n

Speaking to the Radio Times<\/a> recently ahead of his BBC Reith Lecture<\/a>, Hawking said that ongoing developments in science and technology are poised to create \u201cnew ways things can go wrong.\u201d The scientist pointed to nuclear war, global warming, and genetically-engineering viruses as some of the most serious culprits.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough the chance of a disaster on planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, becoming a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years,\u201d he was quoted<\/a> as saying. \u201cBy that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so it would not mean the end of the human race. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yeah, he\u2019s turned into quite the man-of-panic as of late. Stephen Hawking is at it again, saying it\u2019s a \u201cnear certainty\u201d that a self-inflicted disaster will befall humanity within the next thousand years or so. It\u2019s not the first time the world\u2019s most famous physicist has raised the alarm on the apocalypse, and he\u2019s starting [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":362,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,12,412,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-engineering","category-existential-risks","category-genetics","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/362"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20927"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56549,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20927\/revisions\/56549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}