Every generation has a few truly exceptional minds, and Stephen Hawking was one of the most brilliant we had to offer. When he passed away in 2018, the world lost one of the few people who probably could have thought of a way out of the mess that we've made of the world. But he may have left us one last gift, and that's a warning that the end is nigh. This is what he thought was going to happen...
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00:00Every generation has a few truly exceptional minds, and Stephen Hawking was one of the
00:04most brilliant we had to offer.
00:07When he passed away in 2018, the world lost one of the few people who probably could have
00:11thought of a way out of the mess that we've made of the world.
00:14But he may have left us one last gift, and that's a warning that the end is nigh.
00:18This is what he thought was going to happen.
00:20Just a few weeks before he died, he released a paper called A Smooth Exit from Eternal
00:24Inflation, and it's a strangely beautiful look at how he believed the universe began,
00:29grew, and will finally end.
00:31It's abstract and complicated stuff that even most scientists don't understand, and dissecting
00:35what it's all about isn't easy.
00:37At the heart of the matter is this.
00:39Stephen Hawking and paper co-author Thomas Hertog essentially speculate the end of the
00:42universe will be something of a relatively smooth transition into the after, and cosmologist
00:47Andre Linde translated a bit of the heaviest stuff like this.
00:50They argue that the end of eternal inflation, the expansion of the universe, may occur in
00:55a smooth way and the variety of the possible outcomes is limited.
00:59That's vague and a sort of anticlimactic end to the universe, but there's a good chance
01:03no one on Earth will be around to see it.
01:05When it comes to the end of our own world, however, Hawking made some incredibly dire
01:08predictions about it.
01:10Wired asked him about the relentless march toward developing artificial intelligence,
01:14and he warned it might mean the end of mankind in a way that we've long thought of as being
01:19science fiction.
01:20The genie is out of the bottle.
01:21We need to be mindful of its very real dangers.
01:24I fear that AI may replace humans altogether.
01:27Someone will design AI that replicates itself.
01:30This will be a new form of life that will outperform humans."
01:33Speaking at a summit in Portugal in 2017, he warned that the rise of AI had the potential
01:38to be incredibly dangerous.
01:40He's spoken about it for years, and in 2014 told John Oliver,
01:44"...artificial intelligence could be a real danger in the not-too-distant future.
01:49It could design improvements to itself, an outsmart us all."
01:53He foresaw not just autonomous robots, but autonomous weapons, too.
01:57And when one of the most brilliant minds in the world warns that science fiction might
02:01become science fact, the rest of the species should probably listen.
02:05Why should I not be excited about fighting a robot?
02:08You would lose.
02:10Right.
02:11He's also suggested we're in danger of destroying ourselves before we even get that far, and
02:15in 2017, he talked to the BBC about how we're doing it.
02:20A huge part of our mistakes involve climate change, and he cited U.S. President Donald
02:24Trump's decision to withdraw America from the Paris Agreement as particularly worrying.
02:29He said,
02:30"...we are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible.
02:33Trump's action could push Earth over the brink.
02:35And by pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, Donald Trump will cause unavoidable environmental
02:39damage to our beautiful planet, endangering the natural world for us and our children."
02:44Hawking was absolutely not kidding around, and when he spoke at the Starmus 4 festival
02:48in 2017, he stressed how important it was that we find a way to colonize other planets
02:54if we want the human race to survive.
02:56Only the previous year, Hawking predicted that mankind had only about a thousand years
03:00before the planet became incapable of supporting human life, and we needed to find a new place
03:05to live pretty pronto.
03:06At the time, he was optimistic that mankind would get its act together, but by 2017 he
03:11revised his time frame to a mere 100 years.
03:15Some might be able to agree it was a rough year, but that rough?
03:18Hawking also made some other comments in 2017 that got almost just as much attention.
03:23At the Tencent We Summit, he predicted overpopulation and the subsequent energy consumption were
03:28going to get to an unsustainable point in just 600 years, give or take.
03:33Put it all together, and he paints a pretty dire picture of our world's future if things
03:36continue in the direction they're going.
03:38Overpopulation, climate change, energy consumption, artificial intelligence leading to a major
03:43war against machines, those are all things humans are doing to ruin the planet.
03:47But Hawking has also said there's the chance the end of the world is going to come from
03:50something well beyond the control of any human.
03:53During his talk at the BBC's 2016 Reith Lectures, he warned,
03:57"...although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it
04:01adds up over time and becomes a near-certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years."
04:06"...and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, cause there's bugger
04:11all down here on Earth."