Stephen Hawking’s prediction for when the world will end is much sooner than you’d expect

'It becomes a near certainty'

Hawking predicted that if we continue on our current trajectory our future did not look promising.

The famous physicist and author of The Theory of Everything foresaw a grim scenario set to take place in just under 600 years.

Before he passed away in 2018, he explained that factors such as a growth in population and energy consumption could transform the Earth into a 'giant ball of fire', unless we changed something.

Hawking showcased his prediction at the Tencent WE Summit in November, 2017, as he revealed that the world's population up to that point was doubling every 40 years.

He said: "This exponential growth cannot continue into the next millennium.

"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. This is untenable."

In 2016 he told the BBC: "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 10,000 years."

He attributed his prediction to global warming, climate change and the greenhouse effect.

Recently, it was claimed that NASA have backed up his claims about our planets impending doom however, they have since denied this.

However, they did say: "For more than 50 years, NASA has studied our home planet, providing information to directly benefit humanity and producing observations that can only be gathered in space that address some of the areas that Hawking mentioned."

Hawking also pointed to nuclear war, artificial intelligence and pandemics as other possible cause of Earth's demise.