The synthesized voice of Professor Stephen Hawking has tinnily decreed that the sort of bio-engineering he enthusiastically advocated last month is actually going to doom humanity unless we colonize other worlds, the Telegraph reports.

As you may recall, the Davros understudy had recently predicted that humanity's only hope for long-term survival was mucking about with our DNA to keep up with malevolent chips and diodes certain to overtake us in intelligence, looks, and breast and penis size.

He's now decided that this very mucking about is going to sign our species' death warrant.

"In the long term, I am more worried about biology....genetic engineering can be done in a small lab. You can't regulate every lab in the world. The danger is that either by accident or design, we create a virus that destroys us," the Cambridge Lucasian Professor of Maths (yes, following Newton) is quoted as saying.

But according to the Telegraph, Hawking maintains his preposterous belief that genetic engineering should be used 'to improve human beings to meet the challenges of long duration space travel.'

So what he's saying is, we need to develop a thing that's going to destroy us so we'll have it handy to help us escape the consequences of developing it.

Okay....

Anyone else see Sir Isaac spinning in his grave? ®

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