BEIJING, China (Reuters) — World-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking and other scientists offered a surreal glimpse into the future as they shared their latest research findings at the 2017 Tencent WE Summit in Beijing on Sunday.
Hawking made a video appearance at the annual exploration and innovation summit, saying that the human race has to “boldly go where no one has gone before” if it wants to continue on for another million years.
According to him, the world will become rather crowded by 2600, when power consumption will turn the planet into a sizzling fire ball.
He said that the best way out is through space migration, which could be made possible through initiatives like Breakthrough Starshot, a Hawking-backed attempt to reach Alpha Centauri.
“The The idea behind this innovation is to have the nanocraft ride 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,”said Hawking.
If the program succeeds, a nanocraft probe will be able to reach the nearest star to the Solar System within a single generation.
“Maybe if all goes well, sometime a little after the middle of the century, we’ll have our first picture of another planet that may be life-bearing orbiting the nearest star,” said Pete Worden, the project’s executive director and former director of NASA’s Ames Research Center.
Elsewhere, Tony Wyss-Coray, a professor of neurology at Stanford University, shed light on the possibility of brain rejuvenation. Wyss-Coray found that infusions of blood from young mice made old ones smarter; his research may pave the way for breakthroughs in reversing the degeneration of the central nervous system caused during the aging process.
“So what we want to do is the brain rejuvenation project, an initiative where first of all, we want to understand all the signals that cells use to talk to each other,” he explained.
David Wallerstein, chief exploration officer at the Chinese internet giant Tencent, said, other new technologies like flying cars are also poised to change our way of life.
“We once hoped that one day, there would be flying cars. But now we have found that the technology could be available within this year and hopefully be brought to China, where it can change the relationship between people and cities,” he said, on the sidelines of the one-day event.
