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Who really said it

I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space

Spoken by Stephen Hawking 1942–2018 · theoretical physicist; Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, 1979–2009
Verified — a real interview, a named journalist, a dated front-page article. What usually goes missing is the source, not the words. In copyright

Hawking said it in an interview with science editor Roger Highfield published in The Daily Telegraph (London) on 16 October 2001, under the headline “Colonies in space may be only hope, says Hawking.” Quote Investigator ↗ traces the line to that article down to page 1, column 3, and Wikiquote ↗ carries the same citation with the fuller passage. The popular one-sentence version is genuine — it is simply the opening sentence of a four-sentence answer.

Last verified 17 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Verified quote & credit

“I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space” Stephen Hawking, interviewed by Roger Highfield in "Colonies in space may be only hope, says Hawking," The Daily Telegraph (London), October 16, 2001, p. 1. Verified — Quotle.info · Verbatim: “I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I'm an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.”

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The Estate of Stephen Hawking (the spoken words); Telegraph Media Group Limited (the 2001 article)). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

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Provenance

The source

Article
Colonies in space may be only hope, says Hawking
Publication
The Daily Telegraph (London), 16 October 2001 — quote page 1, column 3
Interviewer
Roger Highfield, science editor
Speaker
Stephen Hawking (1942–2018)

I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I’m an optimist. We will reach out to the stars. Full answer

Wikiquote ↗ gives the four-sentence passage from this interview; Quote Investigator ↗ quotes the first two sentences and supplies the page-and-column citation. The Telegraph’s own archive copy is not publicly readable, so the excerpt is reproduced from those two references rather than from a facsimile.

Quote Investigator: the 2001 Daily Telegraph citation

How we verified this

  • Quote Investigator ↗ devotes an article to this line and traces it to Roger Highfield’s interview in The Daily Telegraph of 16 October 2001, quote page 1, column 3, concluding that Hawking deserves credit for the remark.
  • Wikiquote ↗ lists it in its sourced Quotes section with the identical article, author and date, and preserves the two closing sentences that the popular version drops.
  • Hawking kept making the argument in new words: a Hong Kong news conference in June 2006 (Lawrence Journal-World ↗) and a November 2016 Oxford Union lecture (CBS News ↗) — later statements that are frequently mistaken for the source of this one.
In copyright

The sentence was first published in The Daily Telegraph on 16 October 2001, so it is firmly in copyright in the United States and elsewhere — a 2001 newspaper article is nowhere near the public domain in the US or the UK. Short quotation with attribution is ordinary fair use; reproducing the interview itself is not.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

It is real — the confusion is over when and where he said it

This is not a fabricated Hawking quote. The problem is the opposite: an authentic, front-page, on-the-record sentence tends to travel with no year, publication or interviewer attached. Hawking then made the same argument again in 2006 and in 2016, and those later statements are far better documented online than the 2001 interview — which makes them easy to mistake for the origin of this one.

The November 2016 Oxford Union lecture Different wording

At the Oxford Union in November 2016 Hawking said “I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet” (CBS News ↗). Same idea, different sentence, fifteen years later — and not the source of the line on this page.

The June 2006 Hong Kong news conference Different remark

Hawking’s widely covered 2006 Hong Kong appearance produced “It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species” and a hundred-year framing, not a thousand-year one (Lawrence Journal-World ↗). That event is far better documented online than the 2001 Telegraph interview, which makes it easy to mistake for the source of the older quotation.

The truncated one-sentence version Clipped

The quotation is normally cut after the first sentence, which reads as a prediction of doom. In the interview Hawking finished the thought optimistically — “But I’m an optimist. We will reach out to the stars” (Wikiquote ↗).

Hawking as a fake-quote magnet Context

Plenty of lines credited to Hawking are not his. The much-shared “greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge” is not his either — it is usually traced to Daniel J. Boorstin, quoted saying a version of it in The Washington Post in January 1984 (New Atlas ↗). Even that is not ownership: Boorstin called the idea an aphorism rather than his own coinage, and Quote Investigator ↗ traces precursors back to Henry Thomas Buckle in 1861 while finding no direct evidence Hawking ever used the line. That background is why an unsourced Hawking quotation deserves a check — this one simply passes it.

The words are Hawking’s, spoken to Roger Highfield and printed on page one of The Daily Telegraph on 16 October 2001 — documented in full by Quote Investigator ↗.

Context

A front-page answer, five weeks after 9/11

The interview ran on 16 October 2001, five weeks after the September 11 attacks, and Hawking used it to sort large threats from loud ones. In the same conversation he told Highfield that “Although September 11 was horrible, it didn’t threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do” (Wikiquote ↗). The thousand-year line is the other half of that thought: the species-level risks are the ones that reach every human at once, and the only structural answer is to stop keeping every human in one place.

The quotation as it circulates stops after the first sentence, which turns a conditional argument into a doom forecast. Hawking’s full answer ends the other way round — “But I’m an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.” The clipping is what makes the quote feel like a prophecy of extinction rather than a case for spaceflight.

There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet.

Why this one keeps getting re-dated

Hawking made the same argument repeatedly over the following fifteen years, and the later versions are better documented online than the 2001 original — which is why the quote is so often filed under the wrong year. At a Hong Kong news conference in June 2006 he said “It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species,” adding that Earth life faces ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by disaster (Lawrence Journal-World ↗).

In a November 2016 lecture at the Oxford Union he put it as “I don’t think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet” (CBS News ↗). That is a separate, later statement with its own wording — not the sentence on this page, and not its source.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Mortality Hope Change

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Origin: I Don't Think the Human Race Will Survive the Next Thousand Yearsquoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation. Traces the line to Roger Highfield's Daily Telegraph interview of 16 October 2001, quote page 1, column 3, and credits Hawking with the remark.
Stephen Hawking — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Sourced Quotes section carrying the full four-sentence passage with the same Telegraph citation, plus a second quotation from the same interview about September 11.
Stephen Hawking: Humanity won't survive 1,000 years on Earthcbsnews.com

The November 2016 Oxford Union lecture, where Hawking used the different wording "another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet" — the statement most often confused with this one.
Physicist pegs survival of human race to space settlementwww2.ljworld.com

Contemporary report of Hawking's June 2006 Hong Kong news conference, with his "important for the human race to spread out into space" remark and his moon-base and Mars timelines.
Stephen Hawking: His quotes in contextnewatlas.com

Useful on how freely quotes get pinned to Hawking: it says the "illusion of knowledge" line usually credited to him was probably never his, and is generally traced to Daniel J. Boorstin, quoted in The Washington Post in 1984.
Stephen Hawking — Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Biography: 8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge 1979–2009, author of A Brief History of Time (1988).

About the speaker

Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking

1942–2018 · British theoretical physicist & cosmologist

Stephen Hawking was a British theoretical physicist best known for his work on black holes and for A Brief History of Time (1988), the book that made him the most recognisable scientist alive. He held the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1979 to 2009, working for most of his career with motor neurone disease and, from the mid-1980s, a speech synthesiser. In his later decades he spent much of his public voice on risk — nuclear weapons, engineered viruses, runaway AI — and on the argument that a species confined to one planet is a species betting everything on a single throw.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Highfield, Roger. “Colonies in space may be only hope, says Hawking.” The Daily Telegraph (London), 16 October 2001, quote page 1, column 3. Citation documented by Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: I Don’t Think the Human Race Will Survive the Next Thousand Years, Unless We Spread Into Space,” 27 October 2023.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-dont-think-the-human-race-will-survive-the-next-thousand/

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