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I have a burning need to know stuff and I love asking awkward questions.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Stephen Hawking Warns Over Making Contact with Aliens

by Jonathan Leake for The Sunday Times

Sunday, April 25, 2010

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 center 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 colonize 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 paralyzed 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 program 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 colonize 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 think that the odds against the non-existence of alien life anywhere else in this Galaxy – never mind the entire Universe – is mind-staggeringly huge. With so much time and so many potential places to evolve it’s pretty certain that we are not alone in the Universe. Whether or not intelligence is rare is a whole other question. Although intelligence seems to be a winning evolutionary strategy it’s also a very dangerous bargain – as we clearly see with the only intelligent species we are aware of – us. However, maybe not all intelligence is the same. It’s difficult, to say the least, to extrapolate from a single example but I think that the odds in favour of intelligent life ‘out there’ are good. Not every species will end up killing itself off (even if we do). Some at least will grow, prosper and leave their home worlds making them much more difficult to kill off. Numbers wise its impossible to guess how many intelligent species we share this Galaxy with. The odds of actually meeting one – given the light-speed restrictions are pretty slim though. The possibility of them arriving in orbit in order to asset strip the planet is a little far fetched I think. But if they did at least we’d have our proof that we’re not alone!]

4 comments:

Stephen said...

If there are other beings out there, I almost want to take the optimisitc view, that any race advanced enough to create starships is old enough to have gained maturity about the use of great weapons and imperialism: I think I first heard that from Asimov. The idea is that any race who makes it into space, surviving its period where massive weapons like A-bombs are useful, would be mature and peaceful.

Of course, that doesn't preclude their being peaceful among themselves and not to outside species, especially those they deem inferior.

Then again I think it more likely that the distance between solar systems is sufficiently great to make the idea of direct contact between systems marginal.

dbackdad said...

I'm with smellincoffee. Interstellar travel is a sufficiently complicated and advanced proposition and any species that had developed that far would seem to possess some maturity.

But I certainly understand the position that if they were so advanced that we might not even register on their scale of life. Kinda like a microbe compared with a human. And who's to say that life has to be carbon-based?

CyberKitten said...

sc said: I almost want to take the optimisitc view, that any race advanced enough to create starships is old enough to have gained maturity about the use of great weapons and imperialism...

You would hope so - but from our own experience more 'advanced' cultures are not necessarily peaceful cultures.

sc said: Of course, that doesn't preclude their being peaceful among themselves and not to outside species, especially those they deem inferior.

Indeed. They could be internally cohesive but very xenophobic. Especially if they've never had any experience with the idea of the 'alien' before.

sc said: Then again I think it more likely that the distance between solar systems is sufficiently great to make the idea of direct contact between systems marginal.

Agreed. Without FTL travel - if such a thing is even possible - the only way we'd probably meet aliens face to face is if they sent colonising ships/fleets. We're much more likely to meet their probes than to meet *them*.

dbackdad said: Interstellar travel is a sufficiently complicated and advanced proposition and any species that had developed that far would seem to possess some maturity.

I'm not entirely convinced on the advancement = maturity argument. I can see that an agressive species might destroy itself before it manages to leave its home planet but I can also see that internal agression and conflict might prompt a military culture to export its more dangerous elements into interstellar space.... just think of the Vikings.

dbackdad said: And who's to say that life has to be carbon-based?

Very true. I suggest that the first aliens we meet will probably be machines that are, as far as we can tell, alive. It would appear that organic life will probably be carbon based (though that could just be my carbon bias speaking) but I see no reason why life-forms need to be organic in the first place.

VV said...

I can't remember where I read it, but some author once said, that the reason we can't discover life out there in the universe is because they're deliberately being quiet so the predators don't find them. We're not smart enough to keep quiet. We keep sending out those signals and sooner or later, the predators will arrive to eat us.