Professor Stephen Hawking has warned that in the next 10,000 years humanity will face destruction by threats of its own making.

Professor Hawking was doing a Q&A when he was asked the probing question: “Do you think the world will end naturally or will man destroy it first?”.

In response, the Gonville and Cauis fellow noted that: “We face a number of threats to our survival from nuclear war, catastrophic global warming, and genetically engineered viruses.

“The number is likely to increase in the future, with the development of new technologies, and new ways things can go wrong.

“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.

“By that time, we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.

“However, we will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period”.

However, there was a note of optimism when Hawking, Research Director at Cambridge University’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, added that: “We are not going to stop making progress, or reverse it, so we have to recognise the dangers and control them.”

This is not the first time Prof. Hawking has opined on the ominous. Previously, he warned of the risk of humans being wiped out by their own artificially intelligent inventions, and the threat of more intelligent extra-terrestrials.

In 2006 Hawking posted this open question on the internet: “In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?”.

Hawking has been affiliated to Cambridge since he took up graduate study in Cosmology at Trinity Hall in October 1962. Until 2009 he was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.

The talk, delivered at London’s Royal Institution, delved into Hawking’s research into black holes, which he described as “stranger than anything dreamed up by science fiction writers”. The lecture series, which has in the past featured Jeffrey Sachs, Bertrand Russell, and Edward Said, will be broadcast on Radio 4, with Professor Hawking’s first lecture going out on 26th January at 9 a.m.