Stephen Hawking, renowned British physicist and Nobel Prize winner, has made a dark prediction about the fate of the world.
He toured the facility that studies the disease he suffers from, amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and gave a lecture for doctors, nurses and other employees at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on Tuesday, where he urged further space exploration to guarantee the future of humankind, according to the Belfast Telegraph.
"We must continue to go into space for humanity," Hawking said. "We won't survive another 1,000 years without escaping our fragile planet."
Space exploration programs have suffered from government budget cuts. NASA's planetary science budget was recently cut by $300 million. That funding would be crucial in the exploration to find a habitable planet that could serve as an alternative to Earth. Among the projects that suffered from the budget cut is a mission to lasso an asteroid and park it next to the moon to study.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center specializes in ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, the debilitating disease Hawking has suffered from since the age of 21. He is 71 now, and has survived much longer than most sufferers of that disease.
Dr. Robert Baloh, the director of Cedars-Sinai's ALS program, is amazed at Hawking's longevity. Most people who suffer from ALS do not live more than 10 years after being diagnosed.
"Fifty years is unusual, to say the least," he told CBS. "However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.
"If you understand how the universe operates, you control it in a way," he said.
Last year, Hawking held a party for time-travelers, but none showed up. However, Hawking waited until the party was over to send out the invitations, though theoretically that would not be a problem for time travelers.
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