however given that he believes we only have perhaps one thousand years left on earth anyway it is as well to explore every possible scenario before the robots and algorithms secure minds of their own and as their first step eliminate us all stephen hawking seems to have turned into the man with the sandwich board that says the end is nigh not only has he warned us that aliens might destroy us but he is also been worrying that artificial intelligence might do the same now he is perceiving a threat that might not merely put an end to earth but to the whole universe as the sunday times reports hawking is worried about the god particle this discovered by physicists during experiments within cerns large hadron collider is a vital ingredient to explaining why things in our world have mass however in a preface to a new book called starmus a collection of lectures given by famous scientists and astronomers hawking worried that the higgs boson might become unstable he wrote that the higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become metastable at energies above hundred billion gigaelectronvolts hawkins explained that this could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light this could happen at any time and we wouldnt see it coming before you prepare your loved ones for an evacuation to some distant star hawking did offer some hope with it seems a wry smile that a particle accelerator that reaches hundred bilion gev would be larger than earth and is unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate in essence then his fears might be theoretically valid but their likelihood of actually coming to pass is somewhat smaller than that of the new york jets winning the next super bowl still you have to wonder about hawkings relationship with the higgs boson discovery first there is the fact that he lost a hundred dollar bet over its unearthing then he mused last year that now the higgs boson had been identified physics has become less interesting