It may have been hyperbole when famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking raised the specter of the apocalypse at the Tencent WE Summit on Sunday but it can’t be denied that his points were well made.
During his video appearance, Hawking warned that overcrowding and increased energy consumption will turn the Earth into a “ball of fire” by the year 2600. In the same vein as Star Trek, he declared that humans must “boldly go where no one has gone before” if we wish our species to continue for another million years.
Considering Hawking’s long record of concern with climate change it’s not surprising that he is using such an extreme threat to make a point about the need for a more sustainable approach to the use of our limited terrestrial resources. He appealed to investors to back his plan to travel to the closest star outside of our solar system, Alpha Centauri, in an effort dubbed Breakthrough Starshot.
This plan will send laser-propelled nanocraft to explore the nearest star system behind Alpha Centauri. Hawking says that such craft could travel past Mars in just an hour, reach Pluto in a few days and eventually make it to Alpha Centauri in about twenty years.
Alpha Centauri’s partner star, Proxima Centauri, is believed to be orbited by the potentially habitable planet Proxima b. The Breakthrough Starshot team are hoping to use the nanocraft to take the first close-up pictures of another star, including anything that may or may not live there.
Starshot Breakthrough’s director, the former head at NASA’s Ames Research Center, also made an appearance in Beijing. He said, “Maybe if all goes well, sometime a little after the middle of the century, we’ll have our first picture of another planet that may be life-bearing orbiting the nearest star.”
You can watch Hawking’s appearance here:
