4 ways that Stephen Hawking thinks the world could end

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Humanity's demise may be our own doing.

At the BBC's annual Reith Lectures, physicist Stephen Hawking said advances in science and technology could lead to the end of the world.

"Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years," he told the BBC. "By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race," Hawking says.

Here are his predictions for the nightmarish scenarios that could end the world (or at least humanity's participation in it).

Nuclear warfare.

Flickr/James Vaughan

Hawking calls for greater empathy. Otherwise, human aggression, combined with technological advances in nuclear weaponry, may lead to our demise.

"The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression," Hawking told The Independent last year. "It may have had survival advantage in caveman days, to get more food, territory, or partner with whom to reproduce, but now it threatens to destroy us all."

Global warming.

NASA

Climate change continues to escalate, with no end in sight.

"We don’t know where global warming will stop," Hawking told Storyline. "But the worst case scenario is that Earth will become like its sister planet Venus with a temperature of 250 [Celsius] and raining sulfuric acid. The human race could not survive in those conditions."

Man-made viruses.

Cybercobra

Hawking warns that genetically engineered viruses could wipe out entire populations. 

Genes operate in ways that are not fully understood. Modifying one part of DNA doesn't always have the intended result — instead, it can create other unintended consequences, like the development of uncontrollable viruses.

It could be only a matter of time before antibiotic-resistant viruses that we never imagined could exist actually develop, Hawking says. 

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