The human race is likely to be wiped out by a doomsday virus before this millennium is out unless it starts to colonize space, top British scientist Stephen Hawking warned.“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,”Hawking told Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper. Hawking, Lucasian professor<注1> of mathematics at Cambridge University in England, said Armageddon<注2> threatened not in the form of a nuclear holocaust but could arrive in a more insidious and invisible form,“In the long term, I am more worried about biology. Nuclear weapons need large facilities, but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab. You can't regulate every lab in the world.”Hawking, a leading theoretical physicists who hit the best-seller lists with his book A Brief History of Time, said the chances of humanity pulling through looked good.“I am an optimist. We will reach out to the stars,”he said.