Elon Musk on Monday tweeted about mass extinction. The SpaceX and Tesla CEO warned that the end of the world is ‘just a matter of time’. 

The 51-year-old billionaire was citing a BBC article about the Chicxulub asteroid, which wiped the dinosaurs. 

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“This will happen again – just a matter of time,” Musk tweeted. 

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Walter Alvarez and his geologist son Walter in 1970 theorized that the Chicxulub asteroid collided with the Earth about 66 million years ago and its impact led to the extinction of dinosaurs. 

Musk is currently testing his Starship, which is expected to carry humans to Mars. The SpaceX boss has said that he aims to carry humans to the red planet within the next decade. 

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  “Mars may be a fixer-upper of a planet, but it has great potential,” he said.   

However, his tweet has sparked one question: How far is Earth from another mass extinction?

Planet earth is belived to have formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Since then, the planet has witnessed five mass extinctions. Some ecologists argue that humanity is already in its sixth mass extinction event, particularly as man-made climate change threatens billions of species.

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Environment Agency (EA)’s report showed that 41% of England’s native flora and fauna species have considerably decreased and about 15% is facing a serious risk of extinction.

The body’s head said that the the irreversible damage to the Earth’s biodiversity could result in the extinction of mankind.

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There were several theories about the world ending in 2012. People predicted that another planet, called Niburu, will collide with Earth. 

Now, the Holocene extinction, or the sixth mass extiction, says that large land animals known as megafauna will start disappearing. However, there is no  general agreement on where the Holocene begins.