Politics

Nobel Prize winners predict the end of the world

A group of 50 Nobel Prize winners has spoken out to reveal the 10 greatest threats to mankind.

In a survey, the brainiacs revealed fears that nuclear war, environmental disaster and even Facebook pose a risk to the future of our species.

Times Higher Education asked the eggheads about the “biggest threat to mankind.”

The experts who responded are known as laureates and represent one-quarter of the living Nobel Prize winners in chemistry, physics, physiology, medicine and economics — making them arguably some of the smartest people in the world.

Just over a third (34 percent) said population rise or environmental degradation represented the gravest apocalyptic risk.

In second place was nuclear war, followed by infectious disease and drug-resistant bugs.

Artificial intelligence was also highlighted as a risk, as well as selfishness, inequality, terrorism and even Donald Trump.

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Facebook and drugs were also named as threats, coming in at joint 10th place after both being identified by one respondent.

“Humans are very busy with the greatest climate change experiment since the ice ages,” John Mather, a senior scientist in cosmology at NASA, told Times Higher Education, which carried out the survey.

Another responder who was not named said there were “several low probability but quite existential threats to humanity, including pandemics, nuclear war, and artificial intelligence.”

With tensions between nuclear-armed North Korea and the United States reaching a boiling point, it’s little wonder that 23 percent said nuclear war could bring about doomsday.

One Israeli laureate was particularly concerned about “warmonger dictators,” while a German participant was nervous about “populist regimes in possession of nuclear weapons.”

Two people specifically mentioned Trump as a threat to humanity.

“I don’t think science can do much about him,” one said.

However, some of the scientists feel we could survive and even thrive after the apocalypse.

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One of the laureates said: “The human species is so successful in making the world a better place.”

Even if we do destroy the world or cause a mass extinction that makes it uninhabitable, humans could survive by jetting off into space.

“The ultimate insurance policy is to make humanity a multiplanet species,” one laureate said.

“And science obviously has a big role to play in that.”

Elon Musk is one of many people who are already thinking about this idea.

Musk has previously claimed Mars is “a fixer-upper of a planet” and even suggested dropping nuclear bombs on its surface to heat up the atmosphere and make it suitable for human colonization.