Physicist Stephen Hawking is convinced that the Earth will remain habitable for just another 100 years and we must look for a new home in space. Astronaut Ulrich Walter thinks this is nonsense.
British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking (75) cannot determine the reason why the world will die. A few months ago, he still called artificial intelligence the greatest danger to humanity. In a highly publicized address, along with other prominent scientists, Hawking warned: “Artificial intelligence can be the greatest achievement of humanity. Unfortunately, it may also be the last one. If something goes wrong, artificial intelligence will eliminate the person."
And this week he told the BBC channel that people will be forced to move to other planets very soon. After 100 years, the world is threatened with destruction. This time, he named four possible causes of the inevitable catastrophe at once: global climate change, pandemics, the impact of a large asteroid and the rapid growth of the Earth's population. All this can lead to the fact that the Earth becomes uninhabitable.
Loud words, but scientifically unfounded. "Hawking's assertion that the population of the Earth will be forced to move to other planets within 100 years is based on assumptions that do not correspond to reality," says physicist and astronaut Professor Ulrich Walter, who teaches aerospace technology at the Technical University of Munich.
Climate change over the past 100 years has raised global temperatures by an average of about 1 degree Celsius. “If over the next 100 years the temperature rises by another 1.5 degrees Celsius, as predicted by the most pessimistic forecasts, then it will be warm in Germany, but this does not mean the death of mankind at all,” Walter emphasizes. To assess this rise in temperature, Walter makes the following comparisons:
"The temperature in the center of Munich is currently three degrees higher than in the countryside." Climate change will no doubt lead to more natural disasters such as floods or high winds. “But natural disasters are always local in nature and therefore cannot destroy humanity globally,” states Walter.
Stephen Hawking is wrong in timing
Promotional video:
Ulrich Walter, who just recently published Im schwarzen Loch ist der Teufel los (Fuss in a Black Hole), is above all an expert in everything that happens in space. Here he objects to Hawking in assessing the degree of the asteroid threat. “Large asteroids that could destroy humanity crash into the Earth at intervals of ten to one hundred million years,” Walter said. "So the likelihood of this happening in the next 100 years is extremely low." In any case, it is not higher than in the past 100 years.
The pandemic warning is trite. Yes, today it is more likely than before that new pathogens are spreading faster in a globalized world. A significant increase in world tourism and trade in the near future is hardly possible.
And with pandemics of past years, such as SARS, avian and swine flu, mankind coped pretty well. “We can handle this much better today than we were just a few decades ago, because there is a lot of progress in medicine and biotechnology,” says Walter. It is with the new possibilities of genetic engineering that new breakthroughs in the fight against infectious diseases become possible.
Particularly surprising is that Stephen Hawking seems to think it is possible for humans to migrate to other planets over the next 100 years. As a scientist, he should have known that with the technology that could possibly be created in the next 100 years, it is impossible to reach even the closest exoplanet to us. “Population of other planets is not out of the question,” says Ulrich Walter, “but in the next 100 years this is neither possible nor necessary. It's too early to start packing your bags."
Norbert Lossau