Stephen Hawking: Avoid Contact with Aliens

Genius physicist Stephen Hawking thinks that it's likely that there's intelligent life in the universe beyond our solar system. And he advises that we should avoid contact with aliens:

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.”


Do you agree with his advice?

Link via Glenn Reynolds | Image: US Department of Health and Human Services

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I think many of the nay sayers are looking too narrowly at stephen's idea.

First in conjunction to the basic idea that aliens would want the resources of earth someone made the point of the same precious metals being in our asteroid belt. If beings with the capacity of such great traveling distance needed resources they would take more than just what earth had to offer they would essentially take over our solar system, wiping us out simply because we are the only intelligent life here, that we know of anyway.

Since hawking's ideas, biology and physics have grouped potential intelligent life into i believe its 3 classes. class 1 controls the complete power of the planet, meaning they master their immediate resources. 2 controls a star meaning they have used up their planetary resources or realized it was more beneficial to skip those resources and go for completely harnessing a sun. And the third class harnesses the power of multiple stars.

More than likely if hostile aliens come here they will be of type 3 class due to thier ability to travel across multiple galaxies and would be looking to consume not only this planet but the galaxy.

and to simply also try and make the argument that it would cost them more resources to invade our galaxy than to leave us alone. first this group is clearly nomadic meaning they either move or they die. secondly you are basing thier technology and resources on our technological frame of reference and the technology we have currently is just rediculously wasteful, more intelligent life as someone else said would be using resources and techniques unfathomable to our minds right now.

The truth just is that there is absolutely no reason why an advanced civilization would come to earth without the intent of harming us. We cant contribute to thier civilization other than resources we truely have little or no control over and we would not be smart enough to defend ourselves either.
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There are a few planets in the solar system that can support life, I think aliens know this and travel from planet to planet studying and gathering specimens, learning, etc. So the question is shat do we have to offer them that they already know about us. What is the need for them to contact us. We are dealing with a highly sofisticated race. We only want to contact them so we can understand them and take whatever we can get from them all their knowledge and technology, kill a few so we can understand how they work. Yes we yearn for contact for our own selfish reasons. The only thing we can teach them is how to destroy a planet like ours with global warming, or exploitation of natural resources or pollution, etc. We as a species have nothing to offer aliens. Scientist want to find and travel to distant planets like ours not only to find new life and prove we are not alone, but to find another earth so we can move there cause we made such a mess of this planet, but being human we will make the same mistakes again, the greedy will always be greedy and future generations will most probably do the same thing again like we are doing. The best thing that could happen is the aliens exterminating humans from this planet,in the scheme of things we serve no purpose, except to take and take without remorse. We are a plague on the planet.
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We are agrssive and brutal race, we torment and slaughter miolions of "animals" - other living beings in unnatural way.

We have huge concentration camps called meat industry.....

If we have no remorse for our cousins how could we have for "animals" from another planet???

They would be right to rid the Earth of pest called humans!
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I think now that we are getting so sophisticated today, we are getting closer to extra terrestrial point of view. Christopher Columbus came to america with the knowledge where law was "black people arent people. women cannot vote." etc. According to many religious theory, "the gods decended from the sky." giving the majority of global tribs and cultures certain knowledge to pass on generations to generations till this day. The only thing is that they "misinterpet" the view of advance race beings as "gods on flying ships". If we ever make contact with the aliens, or if they ever come back to us to reveal themselves as the world as we know it today, from knowledge we know; i think we can have a universial change. a change to mankind. a change to life. having a new point of view on everything we theorize or know.

im sorry if im going to long on this comment and im sorry for my bad english.

What im trying to say in general is that we are becoming more closer to being like them. becoming not only technologicaly, more advanced, but also more spiritually advanced.
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