Stephen Hawking says aggression should be weeded out of the human race and replaced by empathy.

The renowned physicist has also claimed the future of the human race depends on space travel.

He made the comments while at the Science Museum in London with an American visitor, who won the tour as part of a "Guest of Honour" competition.

Professor Hawking said: "The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression. "It may have had survival advantage in caveman days, to get more food, territory or a partner with whom to reproduce, but now it threatens to destroy us all."

While he said empathy "brings us together in a peaceful loving state."

"I believe that the long term future of the human race must be space, and that it represents an important life insurance for our future survival - as it could prevent the disappearance of humanity by colonising other planets," he added.

Professor Hawking (right) with competition winner Adaeze | Image: Facebook/Stephen Hawking

Professor Hawking, born in Oxford in 1942, graduated in Physics from Oxford University in 1962. He continued his studies moving to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.

It was while he was a postgraduate that Hawking was diagnosed as having ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, which affects movement and speech.

His research has been concerned with the nature of space-time and its singularities, breakdowns in the space time-continuum where the laws of physics no longer apply.

Since 1970, he has worked on the properties of black holes and the behaviour of matter near them. In 1974 he found that black holes emitted thermal radiation.

His life is the subject of the film 'The Theory of Everything' in which he is played by Eddie Redmayne, about which Professor Hawking commented "Unfortunately Eddie did not inherit my good looks."