Stephen Hawking warns over making contact with aliens
Quote:Aliens almost certainly exist but humans should avoid making contact, Professor Stephen Hawking has warned.
In a series for the Discovery Channel the renowned astrophysicist said it was "perfectly rational" to assume intelligent life exists elsewhere.
But he warned that aliens might simply raid Earth for resources, then move on.
So I guess the rationale for the aliens in Independence Day wasn't so stupid after all.
I think there's some wisdom in what Hawking is saying. I've always thought that us waving down any potential aliens would be akin to standing on a Interstate in the middle of nowhere and trying to get a ride.
Eh, sounds more like Hawking is losing it. After all, any species capable of interstellar travel is going to be resource-rich and unless there is something on Earth they can't find on any of the millions of lifeless rocks about any aliens will just ignore us.
I know something, our space travel capabilities come as a direct result of our desire to make killing people who are different than us as efficient as possible, so if any aliens show up here, we'd be better off surrendering and giving them whatever they want. If they've developed faster than light travel, it probably means they're much better at war than we are.
This seems a bit off for Hawking. As Vulcan said, if anyone can cross the vast distances of space to attack us, there's not a hell of a lot we could do about it.
Unless we can somehow take the fight to them... with some sort of Death Star...
Hawking (or anyone else for that matter) shouldn't be making assumptions or ruling anything out about unknown alien motives, good or bad. We have no frame of reference. It's impossible to predict, utterly and hopelessly impossible, because we know nothing about their psychology or their history or their abilities.
hawking sounds rather short sighted, if not paranoid. how would we know if they would even like a world like earth?