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Stephen Hawking has convinced the Times Online to beware of drawing attention from Out There…
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.
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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.
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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.
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… Hawking [posits] 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.
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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.”
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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.”..
One suspects that Hawking speaks, as the great writer R.A. Lafferty phrased it, “with tongue so firmly in cheek as to protrude from the vulgar bodily orifice.”
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Although from some of the comments after the article, it could be argued as to whether intelligent life has evolved on this planet.
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fucen tarmal
i think the truly scariest possibility is they are exactly like us. to the point of being nearly, if not completely inter-matable.
except of course for an entirely different culture, history, and development along those lines, leading to radically different, superstitions, logic, and understanding..
who wants to meet those long lost cousins for a latte?
EDantes
President Obama visits, prays with ailing Rev. Billy Graham
URG. I really really hope a shower like that one in Silkwood followed this meeting.
PurpleGirl
Unfortunately we’ve been advertising our existence ever since we began using radio and tv only added more information.
freelancer (itouch)
So, in other words, Hawking belongs to the Coen Bros’ school of thought vis a vis life in the universe (including humanity).
Good to know.
I’m gonna fall asleep watching Blood Simple tonight.
Sweet ambivalent nightmares everyone.
Mark S.
I’ve seen this argument before but I don’t find it very convincing. If a civilization mastered interstellar travel, I doubt that they would need the resources of our puny planet.
But if Battlefield Earth was correct, these aliens might be after gold, though they might be too stupid to find Fort Knox.
ReggieH
@Mark S.: Testing.
Greasings I cum in peas
I thought they were supposed to wait for a warp signature before they would contact us.
The most certain indicator that there is other intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has contacted us yet.
Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy – Entry for earth – Mostly Harmless
Zone 804 by Peter Schilling
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Vj4hajtWgc
Miss Nude Jersey
New definition for “Nine Most Feared Words in English Language”
I’m Sue Lowden and I’m here to help you
Keep f’in that chicken $arah – Ernie Ana$to$
Joey Maloney
i think the truly scariest possibility is they are exactly like us. to the point of being nearly, if not completely inter-matable.
The Star-Trek-funny-looking-foreheads theory of interstellar life?
Realistically unless there turns out to be something to pan-spermia theories the odds are overwhelmingly against interfertility. FTM, even if humans and some alien race both started from common roots, after a billion years of separate evolution interfertility is still unlikely. There’s only 6 million years of separation between us and chimpanzees.
Bill E Pilgrim
“To serve man”…. it’s a subpoena!
As Carl Sagan and others have pointed out, if you think of how much our technology has changed in just a few hundred years, not to mention a few thousand years, the chances of two civilizations meeting and being even remotely alike in stages of evolution are negligible.
Whether this means domination and plunder is another question, but I do think that people don’t grasp just what vast differences there will certainly be, unimaginable ones.
bago
@PurpleGirl: If you take a gander at this, you’ll know we’re not in much danger.
IndyLib
I also find it hard to believe that if a species has the technilogical ability to travel in space they’d need resources from our planet, especially since it seems likely they could get those same resources from planets that are unihabited.
Saying that, what possible reason would an intelligent species have to want contact with us in our current incarnation, if they spent more than a week observering us?
We are contentious, given to panic, and suspicious as a whole. To quote MIB, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it”.
Catfish N. Cod
I see what Professor Hawking was trying to say, but he pushed a hot-topic button that’s overwhelmed his point. Everyone’s taking the part about analogies to European colonization a little too literally.
Anytime a culture with a quantum leap of technology meets a less advanced culture, the more advanced people tend to walk all over them almost without noticing. In terms of population and ability, there’s almost no there there. _Germs, Guns, and Steel_ uses the example of the Maori taking over some neighboring islands filled with hunter-gatherers. While they did have a couple of guns, the result would have been the same with just spears. The Maori were more numerous, more skilled, more experienced, and more capable; it wasn’t a contest.
Anyone who can fly to Earth from another system is freaky advanced. Either they have an FTL capability — which demands control of gravity or dimensionality far beyond our own — or they have slowboats — which demands not only vast amounts of energy but also a patience far beyond our own. (How many humans would work on a space probe that won’t report back for a thousand years? Of those that did, how hard would they work?)
Either way, in terms of gross physical capabilities, they could make the Earth uninhabitable without even trying. (Several scifi authors have pointed out that any slower-than-light starship is also automatically the fastest and most powerful artillery shell ever built — you don’t need a warhead when your kinetic energy exceeds the largest atomic bombs’ output.)
From the excremental Battlefield Earth to the excellent Footfall, tales of present-day-capability humans triumphing over invading aliens depend fundamentally on the aliens having blind spots you could drive an aircraft carrier through. You can’t count on that.
But they most likely won’t be throwing bombs around anyway: planets with life as rich as Earth’s are likely to be rare. We’re much more likely to be sampled for our DNA — ask the Grand Canyon Native Americans what that is like. Or more; they may wish to, as the saying goes, “add our biological and technological distinctiveness to our own”. In David Brin’s Uplift series, Earth’s biggest long-term threat isn’t the aliens who hate and kill humans (and other Earthborn sentient species)… it’s that the vast richness of Galactic “soft power” will swamp out and destroy Earth’s unique and precious pre-First Contact history and culture. It has happened times beyond count on Earth, and is STILL happening: 75%+ of the native languages in the world are endangered, as the planet standardizes on a few dozen common tongues. Linguists are panicking that soon they will have nothing left to study…
Xenos
@IndyLib: Uninhabited? As far as a civilization which is technologically advanced enough for interstellar travel is concerned, earth is uninhabited. What’s more, it has a bad primate infestation which risks spreading through the neighborhood. Best to to tent that baby and fumigate it thoroughly while the infestation is still contained to the planetary surface.
balconesfault
Huh – who’d have expected that the aliens would have been glibertarians?
I’m sure that they’ll move along and leave us alone after they’ve finished mining the earth’s crust for the 0.029% Flourine it contains (critical for them, but they used all theirs up making alien sex toys long ago … their free market having reflected the best use, of course!).
Andre
Robert Farley over at LGM has found the most brilliant winger reaction to this, titled :
Andre
FYWP x 2!
Go read LGM for a link to the real lulz.
MikeJ
@Andre: I wonder if that guy is trying to keep people from laughing at him by making it painful to read his all caps screed.
Oddly, the guy who turned up in the comments claiming to be the blogger in question didn’t use all caps.
The Grand Panjandrum
Kthugh and Cole agree: It’s the rating agencies, stupid.
He goes on to point out that current proposed legislation will not fix this problem.
Andre
@MikeJ:
No, I think he believes he’s just being “forceful”. He did “scoop Hot Air” after all…
dr. bloor
What’s the threat? Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum will kick some alien ass and take names if they ever try to colonize Earth.
folkbum
Everybody needs to get their hands on Peter Mulvey’s record from last year, Letters from a Flying Machine. On it, he’s got a track called “Vald the Astrophysicist,” where he recounts a conversation with said Vlad who explains why humans will never, ever encounter an alien species. Not to dis Hawking, of course, but Vlad’s theory makes a lot more sense than, say, roaming nomads looking to strip our planet of resources.
fucen tarmal
@Joey Maloney:
never said it was the most likely, just the scariest.
thinking along the lines of the columbus analogy, also put forth in the porno for pyros opus “pets”, that what if apart from being a force of enslavement or exploitation, or the other more hopeful notion, of a benevolent super-evolved being that helps us primitive saps, spielbergian style…
what if they show us merely an alternate view of how we might have been up until this point. different afterlife/creator stories, perhaps non-language based brain coding, perhaps numbers are emotions, who knows….
bob h
Imagine that they have evolved the mores of Goldman Sachs.
V.O.R.
There are a lot of interesting answers to the Fermi Paradox.
Though admittedly it doesn’t take much to be more interesting than “We’re alone.”
Examples:
Everyone else is hiding. And for good reason.
Nobody survives long enough. Too many natural disasters.
Races invariably turn inward. WoW is the first big step.
We’re the first! The universe is still young, after all.
And a few reasons why aliens might want to eat our lunch:
Entertainment. Maybe we’re so stupid it’s funny. WWII as slapstick?
They like Earth, but not the current tenants.
Slaves. Maybe this should be filed under “entertainment.” There’s nothing that gives a space fortress that *finished* look like some humanoid servants.
Dolphin abuse.
The Endless Sheriff
There’s a remarkable lack of pride–not the right word–in our own species here on this forum. We humans are a pretty nasty, vicious, highly aggressive and unpredictable animal. Chances are we’d steal their advanced technology and turn it on ’em. (Individually we’re not so bad.)
BR
@V.O.R.:
I’d argue the most likely one is that we’re going to run out of cheap fossil fuels very soon, making it very difficult for us to become a space-faring civilization in any meaningful way. (That is, beyond putting up a few more satellites / shuttle trips.)
drew42
My astronomy is rusty, but aren’t both those figures a tad low?
PurpleGirl
@bago: Thanks for the link. Those videos look really neat.
ETA: I’ll be going back to view a bunch of them, especially the ones about the Silk Road.
SGEW
Has anyone here heard of Pellegrino’s Three Laws of Alien Behavior?
1) Their survival will be more important than our survival.
2) Wimps don’t become top dogs.
3) They will assume that the first two laws apply to us.
It’s a convincing logical argument that we should keep our heads down and not send attract any interstellar attention.
toujoursdan
They could exploit almost everything found on earth at a cheaper energy cost elsewhere. For example you’ll find as much water on Jupiter’s moons as on the oceans on earth but one would have the advantage of much lighter gravity and no atmosphere getting in the way of extracting it. Same with nitrogen on Titan and iron on the asteroids. There is really nothing all that unique about Earth from an industrial perspective. Maybe oil/coal would be unique but that has been as much of a curse as a blessing.
But it’s a great tongue in cheek analogy. It seems to me that smart aliens would stay far away from this planet.
Walker
While they might be able to find mineral resources elsewhere, they may want to plunder the organic resources. Such as for food. Or to distill our species into giant squid-like spaceships.
gnomedad
@SGEW:
Pelligrino co-authored a novel, The Killing Star, which explores these ideas. Basically, an alien civilization realizes that relativistic missiles make possible undetectable sneak attacks, and therefore go about exterminating civilizations that might acquire this capability. Nothing personal, you understand.
ericblair
@drew42:
Several orders of magnitude: I think: there are trillions of stars in our galaxy and trillions of galaxies in the universe. To think we’re the only intelligent life that evolved in all those stars is pretty much insane.
I think the easiest answer to the Fermi paradox is “why would they bother”. I have no idea what kind of raw resources the Earth would have that couldn’t be gotten by snagging a comet somewhere. Any visit just for the hell of it, assuming it’s practical, requires a sort of curiosity that humans experience but it’s a bit assumption that any nearby alien intelligence would think even remotely like this.
I suppose the most depressing reason would be that advanced intelligences, for a multitude of reasons, have decided that interstellar travel is not practical or possibly not even interesting, and stay on their own planets or disappear up their own navels in a Singularity (think of the Rapture for geeks).
Who knows, though, we might find some semi-intelligent life in our own backyard under the ice of Europa. Or they could be hidden among us, disguised as hot chicks with skimpy futuristic clothing and casual interests in our planetary defensive capabilities. You never know.
Fern
People often make interesting assumptions about life on other planets.
– that it it will have evolved into some sort of humanoid form
– that the development of life on another planet will parallel the development of life on ours, in spite of the vast stretches of time involved
– that the life forms on another planet will be psychologically similar to us (interested in domination/invasion of other worlds etc)
– that life forms on another planet will be technologically oriented
We’re awfully good at anthropomorphizing.
daveNYC
Maybe they’ll just want the planet. Natural resources like the various elements are easily available, but from what we’ve managed to see of other solar systems, planets like Earth aren’t.
Linda Featheringill
@Andre: . . . hope [the aliens] are not leftists . . .
I laughed out loud at that. Whether or not this guy is serious, that is an excellent example of egocentrism. As if someone from Out There would care about our left vs right struggles!
Cute. I am still chuckling.
SGEW
@gnomedad: I was quoting from Killing Star, actually. Good book, if a bit grim.
ericblair
@daveNYC:
Maybe, but that’s assuming they can live in our environment, with our atmosphere, our temperature ranges, and so on. That’s a pretty big assumption. Otherwise, it might for them like Mars or Venus is to us.
And then, why would they want the planet? If it’s overpopulation, that would sort of mean transporting a huge mass of life over interstellar distances. If it’s pollution, it would probably be easier to clean their mess up. And so on.
Of course, they could come to wipe us out just because they picked up a transmission of the Eurovision Song Contest and decided we can’t be allowed to exist in this galaxy. Who knows, these are aliens we’re talking about.
Linda Featheringill
The question of life in Other Places:
IF we assume that the conditions on Earth [or something close] are necessary for life to arise and evolve, we must look for Earth-like conditions on other planets.
I think that our large moon is VERY necessary for our stable rotation and wobble and therefore necessary for stable climate. It was ABSOLUTELY essential for the rise of life on this planet.
A planet cannot capture a stray body of this size, relative to the mass of the host planet. Our moon resulted from a terrible catastrophe. How often do these happen?
What are the chances of finding another planet with a nice, large moon like ours?
Not good, I think.
A. Lurker
“Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”
Bonus points if you can say where this quote came from.
Et Tu Brutus?
Sounds like Hawkin’s been reading Greg Bear’s “The Forge of God”, wherein nasty aliens take us out on general principle ( ruthlessly eliminate potential competition before they leave the cradle), which certainly reflects natures’ course, at least locally, and makes more sense than raiding us for resources more abundant and obtainable in places like the asteroid belt or gas giant rings.
chopper
it fits our general views of the future and space travel. just watch some sci-fi on TV or in movies – when we envision spacefaring civilizations, if they’re us humans then they’re good guys out peacefully exploring the universe or trying to find our way home or whatever. if they’re an alien race then they come here to try to rape our land and kill us all or judge us for being assholes.
chopper
@toujoursdan:
but what about the ‘unobtanium’?
yeah, i realized that after my last post. with one big exception, we envision ourselves as the good guys.
Viva BrisVegas
It is simply too expensive in terms of energy to send anything from one star to another in time not measured in aeons.
If some alien civilisation wanted to do us harm they would have to send by radio some kind of insane but irrestible meme which would act analogously to a computer virus and destroy our civilisation from the inside.
I propose we call such a meme “libertarianism”.
DanF
When a physicist of his stature cribs “Independence Day” for a thought piece, odds are good he’s yanking your chain.
Little Dreamer
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Yeah, because once they figure out how awful we treat anyone that isn’t exactly like ourselves (what if they’re PURPLE? OH NOES!) they will wish they hadn’t met us. Our annihilation will be due to our own lack of hospitality.
Hawking is doing us a favor by giving us this information. If aliens come here, you can be sure they’ve got MUCH better technology than we do.
gnomedad
@ericblair:
I can well imagine why they wouldn’t make the trip. What I find puzzling is lack of any evidence of intelligence-guided activity that we can detect. If I were an ultra-powerful alien, I would make a star flash a series of prime numbers just to mess with alien minds. But as far as we can tell, the universe outside the solar system is entirely in a “wild” state.
ericblair
@gnomedad:
I don’t, really. Anything we could detect from lightyears away with our equipment would be a massive source of energy emitting in a random direction. In other words, inefficient as hell. Look at our communications: we start off with the basic stuff emitting a ton of power, then move to cellular and local area communications with just enough power to do the job that would be undetectable outside our atmosphere. Satellite communications are carefully aimed to avoid wasting energy. And we haven’t started playing with quantum communications dealing with single photons.
And Hawking? That guy who seems to know a suspicious amount about black holes and has difficulty with Earth speech and locomotion? He’s one of THEM, people, and he’s trying to tip us off but we’re too stupid to see it! I’m going down to my bunker now and getting ready for the alien zombie apocalypse.
Resident Firebagger
You mean we’re not already being plundered by Goldman, et al?…
Robin G
Is anyone else reminded of Michael Crichton’s Sphere? (Crichton was a douche, but I love that book.)
Catfish N. Cod
More often than you might think, Linda. The lastest theory suggests that Theia (the protoplanet that smashed Earth to make the Moon) formed in the same orbit, then got destabilized (probably by proto-Jupiter) and moseyed over to that slightly bigger lava ball. The sort of glancing blow that made the Moon is made much more probable by this theory — it’s very hard to get Theia to be moving slowly relative to Earth any other way.
And co-orbital planets are not at all an odd thing; there are many co-orbital moons of Saturn, for instance (and I don’t mean the rings).
Keith
Please don’t let Newt Gringrich read this.Please don’t let Newt Gringrich read this.Please don’t let Newt Gringrich read this.Please don’t let Newt Gringrich read this.
schrodinger's cat
We already have a superior alien species here on earth. Many of their representatives live in our homes, watch our every move and transmit it back to their home planet. They have exceptionally sensitives receivers and transmitters. In fact our blog host has one such specimen. He can barely contain his superiority and disdain for the lesser species. Its only a matter of time before they take over. They look cute and adorable but beware this is a trap to lull you into a false sense of security.
Et Tu Brutus?
just for sh!ts&giggles, ya’ll might consider that anything we can observe about interstellar space happened quite a long time ago…not to mention that in cosmological terms, despite what the good book would have us believe, humans are roughly as significant as the bacteria growing on a damp dishrag.
Jon H
Stephen’s been watching Avatar and decided we are the Na’vi.
Shade Tail
Back in the 1970’s, the US House Science Sub-Committee held a series of hearings on the possibility of extra-terrestrial contact. The general consensus among the scientists who testified was that, most likely, first contact would be an unmanned probe sent into our solar system requesting a response.
Because of the possibility that such contact would be a berserker-probe sent to wipe out potentially threatening life forms, it was decided that, should a probe or any other alien ship arrive, no response should be sent.
That is our country’s official policy on the subject.
Bob L
Looks guys, if Anime has taught mankind anything there are two things you do not want together; Space Aliens and Japense School girls. Let’s just say it features a lot of tentacles and you don’t want to see what comes next. So unless you want our insect overlords issuing our daughters sailor suits at laser point I suggest we avoid contacting aliens.
celticdragonchick
@Et Tu Brutus?:
I read that. Whack a mole on a cosmic scale.
wrb
I think their most likely purpose would be a realty tv contest. You send a few players to a planet where the dominant species has become sufficiently advanced and the players compete to end or preserve life. The audience gambles of who with prevail and which of the standard ends it will be. One player becomes a prophet of non-violence, one founds a jihadiast cult, one attempts to exercise mind control through talk radio show and one founds a media empire devoted to making shit up that will hasten the end.
Any advanced culture would pour huge resources into a making show that great.
Players at home could attempt to affect the outcome buy entering the planet’s internet and blogging.
wrb
edit thingy claiming I don’t have permission to edit my own comment
“on who will”
wrb
On further thought:
The game should have a couple of layers on on-planet players. In one the contest would be between end and no end. Or, to have a realistic chance of getting bets, over when it will end. Here you have your talk radio mind controllers and evil media mogul on one side and the rare good guy on the other (Gandi? Obama even?)
The other contest would be over the type of end. Here the players would be climate change deniers, promoters of national destinies etc.
LanceThruster
There is supposedly only one example in history where an “advanced” culture met a “primitive” culture and did not decimate them. This was, as I recall, a whaling ship that traded with Eskimos for much needed supplies. And you might say that it in the end, only applied in individual circumstances rather than across the board.
I doubt that any interstellar spacefaring race would be inclined to operate on a “prime directive” policy any more than we have in our quest for empire here on spaceship Earth.
JSpencer
“it could be argued as to whether intelligent life has evolved on this planet”
Nailed it!
PaminBB
I think there is evidence that aliens are here. It would explain the unreadable rantings that appear daily at NRO, Red State, etc.
It’s all really Vogon poetry.
TenguPhule
Calvin and Hobbes.
TenguPhule
Wrong!
Anime teaches us that space is full of hot princesses who find ordinary earth boys attractive and attract other hot space girls to the area like bees to honey.