Population of Earth
Physicist Stephen Hawking, at a White House lecture in 1999, remarked that if there is no space colonization, population expansion continued unabated and the people of the Earth continued to use power at the rate they did then, then by the year 2600 people would be standing shoulder to shoulder and the Earth would glow red hot.
Read more about this topic: 26th Century
Famous quotes containing the words population and/or earth:
“America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that’s 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs. We’re in that kind of situation. We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide, and still run and look fairly good.”
—Thomas McGuane (b. 1939)
“It sometimes strikes me that the whole of science is a piece of impudence; that nature can afford to ignore our impertinent interference. If our monkey mischief should ever reach the point of blowing up the earth by decomposing an atom, and even annihilated the sun himself, I cannot really suppose that the universe would turn a hair.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)