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Stephen Hawkin: Don’t contact the aliens

Unlike Carl Sagan, who actually sent a message to any (space) aliens out there, Stephen Hawkin would rather we don’t:
Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking

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.
…
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.”

I’ve had the same feeling since I saw the To Serve Man episode of the Twilight Zone:

UPDATE
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UPDATE, Monday 26 April,
Simone sent the patch:


“Tastes like chicken”

Mixing our cinematic metaphors, “Badges? We don’t no steekeen’ badges!”

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Comments

  1. Well, well, well. I was wrong. Here I thought ‘To Serve Man’ was morality tale telling people it’s good to be skeptical, not to mention a contemporary metaphor for Obama and ObamaCare. Man, I’ve got to start taking this Sci-Fi stuff more seriously.

  4. Meh, the literary parallel I’d be more worried about would be Beserkers, not interstellar gourmets.

    Although it’s even more likely that the Beserkers would be more interested in the materials in our system which *aren’t* at the bottom of a gravity well and sheathed in a corrosive atmosphere. I suppose it all depends on whether you think the resources in the subplanetary objects of the solar system – rings, asteroids, minor moons, cometary bodies – are ours by birthright, or rightfully there for whomever gets to them first with the right levers.

  6. Spelling, Troopers, spelling: Hawking. Berserkers.

    You never know when we may have to defend our island with the Orthography Ray. Plus, you don’t want to piss these beings off. Would you want Hawking mad at you, Earthling?

  7. We came in peace Earthlings, thinking that because you had obtained space travel, learned how to conquer many if not most diseases and averted a catastrophic nuclear war. Then we see that your greatest country, America spends more than it takes in, allows an oligarchy to take power because it was fooled by the fellow with the teleprompters. We realize that there is little worth saving Earthlings but have held off using a planet buster to see if this fledgling “Tea Party” can correct this problem. If so, we may welcome you to the Universal Council of Sentient Beings. If not, well… we still have that planet buster on standby. You have slightly more than 6 of the time units you call months Earthlings. Make the most of it, or learn to breath space.

  8. Not once in the article does either the writer or Hawking address the main problem. That in spite of mathematical probabilities of alien life no example of aliens or alien civilizations have been found. In a nutshell the Fermi-Hart Paradox argues that if they are there where are they? Plus minor little problem in that SETI has been out in the desert serving as backdrop for any number of X-Files episodes and a sponge for funding hasn’t documented one single piece of evidence suggesting the existence of aliens.

  9. Pat, the SETI people are assuming that the aliens a) have a language b) that we can recognize as a signal. They don’t even know the size or composition of the needle or the haystack.

  10. I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for aliens to show up. While life may be common in the universe, intelligent life is probably quite rare. For more than 3 billion years the only life on Earth was microbial. Given the very long time it took intelligent life to emerge here, as well as the immense gulfs of time and space separating us from even the nearest stars, it is most unlikely that any intelligent life is nearby.

  11. Just because we haven’t seen them, doesn’t mean no aliens exist. We’re still finding previously-unknown species right here on earth, and the universe is a lot bigger than one tiny planet. If the nearest alien civilization is 100 light years away (farther than our radio/tv broadcasts could have reached), they’d have no clue that WE exist either, but we indisputably do.

    Exceptional claims require exceptional proof, and there’s no proof (yet) that life exists elsewhere, much less intelligent life. That’s true. But the fact that we haven’t seen any yet isn’t proof that it doesn’t exist either.

  12. Bah. Yet another bit of evidence against the thesis that Hawking is a super-brain.

    If we’re ever visited by aliens with any sort of agenda, they’ll be a pitiful few survivors of a centuries-long trip in a generation ship. They’ll be weak, starved, and incapable of doing any serious harm to a vital, planet-based civilization. The laws of physics — remember them, Dr. Hawking? — forbid any other possibility. But the notion of interstellar travel on any basis other than multi-generation travel in an artificial worldlet isn’t science; it’s science fiction, and strictly for entertainment.

  13. Intelligent machines would have no trouble surviving trips between the stars. They could show up in our solar system, drop a few smallish asteroids on our head to get our attention, then ask us to build them spare parts. If we refuse, well, I guess you know what follows. I think Stephen Hawking is right on the money. Previous SETI research has assumed friendliness on the part of alien intelligence, but here on earth life always exploits life, and human civilizations always attempt to exploit each other. That we search the skies and do not find evidence of alien civilizations does not necessarily mean that they are not there — sad experience may have taught them to hide from each other …

  14. Scientist long ago made a machine that accelerates particles to which if they are fast enough can make worm holes. These worm holes then with work from feeding it to help it grow they can send a human back in time when sending this human another worm hole will form in some other part in the future past or if something goes wrong another planet. if said person were to go back in 1997 he would show up somewhere in the united states in our time because for him it has been 13 years for us it had been 10 minutes and if he would go to the future you would here about on a plaque in a museum somewhere in just ten minutes because he’s been there for 20-or more years and has died.

  16. I used to be a big Star Trek fan. But the idea of interstellar warp drives carrying people to new worlds in days or weeks is a fantasy. It encourages a careless attitude toward the Earth, which will likely be our one and only home for a very long time to come. Unless of course you find the idea of living underground on the moon or Mars appealing. I don’t.

  20. Spider Robinson has solved Fermi’s Paradox:
    It was the Poison-toothed Sloth, in the Observatory,
    with a Sun-destroying Long-range Mass/Energy Converter.

    Semi-seriously, the simplest explanations are:
    1) Sapience self-destructs
    2) Genocidal Xenophobia rules the universe.

  22. M. Report: You do not have to have genocidal xenophobia ruling the universe to solve Fermi’s paradox — a balanced ecology of “predator” and “prey” civilizations will do the trick. You should also note that a predator-prey ecology would explain our inability to find alien civilizations. The predator civilizations are hiding out so that they have a better chance of getting a jump on their prey, and the prey civilizations are hiding out to avoid the predators. If a casual explorer enters a jungle on earth the chances of seeing any big animals are very slim for similar reasons. That doesn’t mean the big animals aren’t there, of course.

  23. Maybe Hawking’s argument is that mankind should become the predator species instead of the prey??

    (*Ducks*)

    😉

  24. I rather take my chances with ETs….we are a nation that rapes and kills 6 month old babies, waterbords people just for the fun of it….billions upon billions go missing every second on our planet, we have serial killers, kidnappers, people who pay to torture others, mothers who after giving birth don’t want they’re babies and so they put them in the microwave or oven, cults that brainwash people to be servants, people who skin animals alive or burn them alive….what can ETs do to us that we have not done to ourselves? Mind you we are also destroying our planet I mean get real why would they want our planet which is on the break of destruction? oil spill, global warming, our resources are lacking lol were probably a sad sight to be hold to ETs.