The famous British popularizer of science Stephen Hawking believes that humanity has less than a hundred years left to build spaceships and leave the Earth - it, according to the scientist, is threatened by a global catastrophe that will make the planet uninhabitable. Physicist and astronaut Ulrich Walter, who commented on Hawking's forecast, called it unfounded and simply ridiculous.
“Hawking’s assumptions lack even a hint of common sense. What this "scientist" is talking about is not just unscientific, but also dangerous for public sentiment. Yes, people should certainly continue to work on the creation of spacecraft for long-distance travel, but there is no need to force such projects because of some disaster of a planetary scale invented by Hawking,”Walter said.
According to him, in the next hundred years, the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere will rise by only one and a half degrees Celsius - this is a tangible indicator, but it is very far from catastrophic.
Any natural disasters, even such grandiose ones as the eruption of a supervolcano or the fall of an asteroid, will nevertheless be local in nature, so that the planet as a whole will remain habitable, Walter concludes.
Kolesnikov Andrey