FROM STEPHEN KING TO STEPHEN HAWKING: a new kind of terror

Stephen Hawking: a new master of terror

Stephen King is a master of terror, right up there with Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. His works dwells on strange things and people, deals with pure terror. There are three kinds of terror, he says: Gross Terror, such as a head tumbling down a flight of stairs; Horror, such as the dead walking around and Pure Terror, the worst kind, which is when “you come home and notice everything you own has been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”

King has excelled in pure terror, the kind he describes in “The Shining”, when he writes about those huge halls of the hotel now deserted, except for voices and faces of the past which make the hair in the back of your neck stand up. 

Now Stephen King has a competitor in pure terror. His name is almost identical: Stephen Hawking, perhaps our most famous astrophysicist. The terror he inspires is probably bigger than anything King could have written. It is the ultimate terror, one that speaks about the total annihilation of the human race and of our planet. In his latest warnings this genius tells us that leaving Earth is our only hope for survival. According to Hawking the probability of a major disaster to our planet is almost certain within the next 1000 years. If Man has not been able to escape Earth in this period of time he is doomed. He also says that a full development of artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race… “once  humans fully develop artificial intelligence, it will take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate”, he predicts.

This is pure terror, in a scale that Stephen King could never match.

If we cannot find a way to travel to the stars within a reasonable period of time the disappearance of the human race due to a natural event, such as the one that killed all dinosaurs during the end of the Cretaceous period, would also represent the end of the belief that we are made in God’s image, that we have a soul and that we are destined to live forever in a heaven, if we behave well on this earth.

Stephen King only writes about pure terror but his work is fiction. Stephen Hawking talks about pure terror but his is real, he predicts. 

If this new master of pure terror is right we should be terrified. Even in the best of cases, if Man is able to escape Earth, he would have been an active agent of its destruction.

Will Man eternally wander among the stars, destructing every place he finds? King, Lovecraft, Poe could never match this terrifying thought.