Stephen Hawking says that in less than 600 years this planet will be virtually uninhabitable.

Get out while you still can.

Courtesy of Yahoo: 

British physicist Stephen Hawking has warned repeatedly that Earth could well be doomed, but his latest warning gives us no more than 583 years before we get burned on Earth. 

During a video clip aired at the Tencent WE Summit on Sunday, the 75-year-old scientist said that humanity would have to deal with exponential growth in the centuries ahead. He noted that the world’s population has been doubling every 40 years. 

“This exponential growth cannot continue into the next millennium,” Hawking, who has been coping with neurodegenerative disease for decades, said in his computer-synthesized voice. “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,” Hawking said as a planet-sized ball of fire blazed on the screen.

Hawking suggested that humanity's best chance for survival lay in the stars, and that finding other inhabitable planets may be our only hope.

Personally I am all for space exploration and have believed for decades that it is our destiny to someday leave this planet and explore the cosmos.

However 583 years is actually cutting it a little close.

If you consider the fact that we have yet to understand how to travel any great distance from this planet and survive, while adding to that the fact we have yet to identify a planet that we know for certain can sustain life, then just for fun let's remember that also need to be able to move not a handful, but potentially millions of people, and it's starting to feel a little doomy around here.

Of course we could all just stop having so many damn babies, quickly move to renewable energy resources, and start working together to repair this planet that we have all treated like our own personal landfill for thousands of years.

Nope, our best hope is to get the hell out of Dodge before the planet burns to a crisp.

A little perspective.

Personally I find this somewhat humbling.

However I consider myself lucky to have ever spent time in the top portion of the hourglass, making it harder to regret my eventual tumble into the bottom.

Study claims that Muslims will outnumber Christians by 2070. Let the panic begin.

Courtesy of CBS DC:  

Shifts in the world’s major religions will see Islam growing faster than any other faith, with the number of Muslims nearly equaling that of Christians by 2050. 

A new Pew Research Center study finds that with the exception of Buddhists, the world’s major religions will all see an increase in numbers by 2050, although some will make up a smaller percentage from today. Muslims are the only major religious group projected to increase faster than the world’s population as a whole. 

Over the coming four decades, Christianity will remain the world’s largest religious affiliation, but Islam will see a major increase that will make the two religions nearly equal in numbers by 2050. In 2010, Christianity was by far the world’s largest religion, with 2.2 billion followers of the faith and composing nearly one-third (31 percent) of the Earth’s 6.9 billion people. Islam was second, with 1.6 billion adherents, or 23 percent of the world’s population. 

If current fertility rates and youth populations continue to grow at their current rate, Muslims will make up 10 percent of Europe’s overall population by 2050. Islam is expected to nearly match Christianity in the coming four decades as a result of a “comparatively youthful” population with high fertility rates.

The article goes on to predict that Muslims will see a 73 percent increase by 2050 while the Christian population will only increase by about 35 percent. 

However as frightening as those numbers may be to fundamentalists and conservative politicians, this one is going to bother them even more:

The religiously unaffiliated are expected to rise from 16 percent to more than one-quarter of the population, 26 percent.

Personally I think this study might be missing the fact that the number of "religiously unaffiliated" is rising exponentially, and unlike most religions not through breeding.

And while it is quite likely there will be far more Atheists in the west for decades to come the movement is spreading like wildfire and, though they for a time stay hidden, I would imagine that the number of anti-deists will also rise quickly among Muslim nations as well.

In short I think that by 2070 the largest group will NOT be either Christians or Muslims, but rather those who have rejected both, or better yet all, religions and embraced enlightenment instead.