HUMANS must learn to live on other planets to survive, Professor Stephen Hawking has claimed.
The Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University said humans must find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there is an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy Earth.
Humans could have a permanent base on the moon in 20 years and a colony on Mars in the next 40 years, he told a news conference in Hong Kong.
"We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system," added Prof Hawking, who arrived in Hong Kong "to a rock star's welcome".
Prof Hawking said that if humans could avoid killing themselves in the next 100 years, they should have space settlements that could continue without support from Earth.
"It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," he said. "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of."
Prof Hawking's comments were reminiscent of the work of American astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who was a believer in the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.
But his work focused on the search for habitable worlds and intelligent life beyond the solar system, as well as theories about life's origins, ideas popularised in his best-selling 1985 novel, Contact,
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