The end of the world is NEAR, and Stephen Hawking has predicted how it will be destroyed

THE end of the world will come within 600 years as overpopulation will cause Earth to become a blazing ball of fire, according to Stephen Hawking.

Professor Hawking sent a dire forecast for the future of humanity, telling the Tencent WE Summit Earth will be destroyed by 2600.

The 75-year old said overpopulation will lead to unsustainable amount of energy consumption which will ultimately finish in the end of the world.

The theoretical physicist said the world’s population has been growing exponentially for the last 40 years and it “cannot continue into the next millennium”.

He said: “By the year 2600, the world’s population would be standing shoulder to shoulder, and the electricity consumption would make the Earth glow red-hot.


Stephen Hawking has predicted how the world will end


Overpopulation will lead to the end of the world, says Hawking

“This is untenable.”

This bleak outlook for the future is the reason Prof Hawking joined the Breakthrough Starshot initiative, which is planning on sending tiny spaceships to Alpha Centauri – the next nearest star to our solar system – to scout for a potential new home in the future.

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Stephen Hawking: “This is untenable.”

The nano-spaceship could travel at a a quarter the speed of light and would be controlled by ground-based satellites situated in one location that would fire laser beams at it which would be picked up by the light-sail.

This would then allow the technology to essentially ride a light beam allowing it to travel at an astonishing 46,500 miles per second – dwarfing the previous record of 40,000 miles per hour achieved by the Voyager 1 space probe.

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Hawking is sending a probe to Alpha Centauri

Prof Hawking said: “The idea behind this innovation is to have the nano-craft on the light beam.

“Such a system could reach Mars in less than an hour, or reach Pluto in days, pass Voyager in under a week, and reach Alpha Centauri in just over 20 years.”

However, it would be much more difficult to get humans there as a ship big enough to carry humans would be much slower.

With today’s technology, a spaceship big enough to carry humans would take a whopping 30,000 years to traverse the 25 trillion miles (4.37 light years) journey to Alpha Centauri.