David Gross, a Nobel laureate in physics for 2004 for the discovery of asymptotic freedom, gave a grim assessment of the future of civilization in a recent interview. According to him, the probability of humanity existing for another 50 years is "very small", and the risk of nuclear war outlines a horizon of about 35 years.
"Lately, I've been spending some of my time explaining to people… that the probability of us surviving another 50 years is very small," Gross says in an interview with "Live Science". "Because of the threat of nuclear war, you have about 35 years."
The 85-year-old theoretical physicist, who works at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, made this statement shortly after being announced as the winner of the Breakthrough Special Prize for Fundamental Physics for 2026 - a prize of $3 million for "outstanding contributions to theoretical physics throughout his life: from the strong interaction to string theory".
Growing Nuclear Threat
Gross formulates his warning in probabilistic categories, calling 35 years the "half-life period of humanity" - i.e. the chance of the human species disappearing in this interval is about 50 percent. His calculation is based on an estimate that the annual probability of a nuclear conflict has approximately doubled - from about 1% to approximately 2% per year.
This type of warning is not new to Gross. In October 2025, he, along with other Nobel laureates, signed a declaration calling for the prevention of nuclear war, stating that the risk of using nuclear weapons has reached its highest level ever. The document appeals to Russia and the United States to negotiate a new agreement to replace the Treaty on the Reduction of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START), which expired in February 2026.
Race between physics and survival
In an unexpected parallel between the work of his life and his existential anxieties, Gross concludes that the biggest obstacle to the creation of a unified theory of quantum gravity may not be scientific complexity, but the question of whether humanity will have time to reach it. For decades, he has been working on string theory as a leading candidate for unifying gravity with the other three fundamental interactions described by the Standard Model – the theoretical framework he helped complete in 1973, when he and Frank Wilczek discovered asymptotic freedom – a principle underlying quantum chromodynamics.
A career driven by curiosity
In accepting the Breakthrough Prize, Gross emphasizes that curiosity remains the engine of scientific progress and recounts that he continues to explore fundamental questions about the origins of the Universe and the nature of space and time. His path to physics began in his teenage years with a popular science book by Albert Einstein with a personal autograph, which he received as a gift.
Today, after six decades dedicated to studying the deepest structure of matter, Gross is faced with a much more pressing question – not how the Universe is arranged, but whether there will be anyone left to understand the answer.