Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking

A story in the news today that caught my eye...

THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.

The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

The answer, he suggests, is that most of it will be the equivalent of microbes or simple animals — the sort of life that has dominated Earth for most of its history.

One scene in his documentary for the Discovery Channel shows herds of two-legged herbivores browsing on an alien cliff-face where they are picked off by flying, yellow lizard-like predators. Another shows glowing fluorescent aquatic animals forming vast shoals in the oceans thought to underlie the thick ice coating Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter.

Such scenes are speculative, but Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious point: that a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

The completion of the documentary marks a triumph for Hawking, now 68, who is paralysed by motor neurone disease and has very limited powers of communication. The project took him and his producers three years, during which he insisted on rewriting large chunks of the script and checking the filming.

John Smithson, executive producer for Discovery, said: “He wanted to make a programme that was entertaining for a general audience as well as scientific and that’s a tough job, given the complexity of the ideas involved.”

Hawking has suggested the possibility of alien life before but his views have been clarified by a series of scientific breakthroughs, such as the discovery, since 1995, of more than 450 planets orbiting distant stars, showing that planets are a common phenomenon.

So far, all the new planets found have been far larger than Earth, but only because the telescopes used to detect them are not sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized bodies at such distances.

Another breakthrough is the discovery that life on Earth has proven able to colonise its most extreme environments. If life can survive and evolve there, scientists reason, then perhaps nowhere is out of bounds.

Hawking’s belief in aliens places him in good scientific company. In his recent Wonders of the Solar System BBC series, Professor Brian Cox backed the idea, too, suggesting Mars, Europa and Titan, a moon of Saturn, as likely places to look.

Similarly, Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, warned in a lecture earlier this year that aliens might prove to be beyond human understanding.

“I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive,” he said. “Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.”

I'm not agree, we can't compare

Christopher Columbus first landed in America

Hawking's must have sensed similar danger in To Serve Man, my favorite Twilight Zone episode!

It makes for an interesting debate Antonio,

My view would be to wait until we have detected at least 10 other intelligent species and we know for sure that the "Universal way" is to not kill or eat all the other species.

Think about it. Us humans eat the vast majority of other species on our own planet Earth. We kill and control all the other species, we think we have the right to dominate all the other animals. We have also been killing each other for thousands or millions of years. If Darwin style "natural selection" proves to be common in other species in the universe, then we best keep radio silence until we are sure.

John.

The battle would be identical to the wars we watch on our TV news channels every evening. I bet we would call them "terrorists" and "insurgents" and "illegal alien's", then bomb them into submission.

In the previous message I said only if it is right to eat animals,
but really I was referring to all: kill to eat, to sport, etc.

For me it isn't wrong because they aren't intelligent beings so we can make them what we want,
to you (and others) it may also be wrong,
it depends on your religion and your ideas.

For anyone to kill intelligent creatures must be wrong, because we have the same importance,
who doesn't think this he is racist or delayed.

In fact for aliens, to kill unintelligent beings or it is right or it is wrong,
for them to kill intelligent beings (hunams) must be wrong,
otherwise they would be racist or delayed and they would not have evolved.
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If aliens arrive on Earth, they will not fight against us for

interrested in our resources and our-selves.

To be able to travel the universe through galaxies (to have evolved), they must live in harmony with each other.
It is not possible that they are ancient civilizations that are still struggling among themselves or with other to get anything

Seth Shostak (Sr. Astronomer, SETI Institute) participates in Larry King´s show---->Larry King Live: Are Aliens a threat? pt 1/3 (30/4/2010)

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Guests in the show are: Dr. Michio Kaku (Physicist), Dan Aykroyd (Actor), David Brin (Astronomer and Sci-Fi author)
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7107207.ece

Its a good article, i tend to agree with Prof. Hawking. Intelligent life, if its anything like us, will want to propagate its own species and we would just be a "curiosity" to them.

The article says:
Stephen Hawking's Universe begins on the Discovery Channel on Sunday May 9 at 9pm

I will be watching that on TV, looking forward to it with great interest. Thanks Callum,

John.