Stephen Hawking says the Earth is doomed

TECHNOLOGY - Famed astro physicist Stephen Hawking says the Earth is doomed and that mankind should flee to space. (We disagree with the doomed bit.)

But really, if you're at all familiar with some of his previous public statements, you'd probably also know he's lost touch with reality and is "off his freaking rocker" so-to-speak. Some of his comments are logical, but other times you'd swear he's been smoking something.

According to Stephen Hawking the human race is angry, gluttonous and growing too fast, destroying the planet and risking extinction via nuclear war. To avoid extinction, Hawking insists that people must colonize space within the next two centuries.

“It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster on planet Earth in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand, or million. The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet,” says Hawking.

Likely candidates for colonization are Mars, various moons surrounding Jupiter, asteroids floating in space and after that it becomes more difficult because we will have to terraform planets to become warm enough to support life.

The next nearest solar systems are 4 lightyears away and with our current technology its unreachable in a single lifetime.

NASA however believes it would be easier to build space stations and harvest minerals/water from asteroids and planets that are uninhabitable. Space stations orbiting the sun would be able to support life, gain solar energy... the only real trick would be food production, which means life in space would have to be mostly vegan because milk and meat would be unheard of.

Meanwhile more quotes from 68-year-old Stephen Hawking give you a glimpse of a man who has become obsessed with humans exploring space.

"I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image." - Stephen Hawking.

"Although September 11 was horrible, it didn't threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do." - Stephen Hawking.

"The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?" - Stephen Hawking.

"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." - Stephen Hawking.

"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special." - Stephen Hawking.