Invasion of the Saucer Men!

Have you ever wondered how cool it would be if we ever contacted an alien civilization? Dr. Stephen Hawking has wondered that, and as one of the smartest people on the planet, he’d just as soon we stopped wondering about that.

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.

(snip)

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.”

Hawking also says he thinks there must be intelligent life out there somewhere because, out of the entire vast universe, with hundreds of billions of possible planets out there, it’s mathematically unlikely that Earth would be the only planet on which advanced life would appear. I’m not so sure of that — I’m a skeptic about such things in general, and if we’ve never managed to find proof it exists, I’d reckon on it not actually existing out there.

But if we expect that sapient life would evolve the way it has on Earth — if we expect that an intelligent alien species would share some of our characteristics? Yeah, time to shut down SETI, hunker down, and hope the space monsters don’t notice us. We can just suck all those old TV and radio signals back, right?