Well, someone needs to respond to this! We should have a poll for it (that's a less controversial way to do it) and the question would be: "Will humanity exterminate itself within the next 50 years, or not?"
My vote: it's an absolute certainty.
I was not that excited about Hawkings "A brief history of time" - I'm a fan of popular physics, but more on the order of Heinz R. Pagel's "symmetry" and Joao Magueijo's "Faster than light" - but I tended to agree with much of the article.
He's really just reiterating the concern of Enrico Fermi in the thought vein of Enrico's "The Great Filter" - which is that at some point, technology becomes both too powerful to be used responsibly, and too easy to obtain and to replicate, and thus it destroys the civilization that created it (with the help of members of the unlucky life form (which in our case, woud be humans)). The answer to the Fermi Paradox explains why we've never been contacted by alien life forms, in spite of (Fermi's) calculations that would otherwise make such a contact reasonably certain.
Synopsis: Lifeforms always extinguish themselves when a certain threshold is reached wherein the technology starts to increase at a very steep (exponential) rate. It is around this time that far-travel by that civilization would be possible, or at least communications would be, but the window of time, within which the civilization exists, is too short, and such a civilization vanishes before its window is coincident with another's.
So, Fermi, here's a +1 for ya!
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