Stephen Hawking: Extraterrestrials Are Almost Certain to Exist; If We Encounter Them, Chances Are We’re Doomed

April 25th, 2010

If Martians fell from the sky
What would that do to God?
Would we put the weapon down
Or aim it up at the sky

No one would believe it
Except the fucking nut jobs
They’d laugh and cry
“We told you so!”

Dave Matthews Band — Time Bomb

The mainstream media is, increasingly, driving the meme that we need to prepare for a hostile alien invasion.

Apply simple logic to this: Would humanity, with our petroleum powered junk buckets and pop guns, be capable of defending the Earth against extraterrestrials who can skip from star to star, or warp space, etc? The answer is obvious: No way.

Here’s a more likely scenario: The usual suspects are looking to sink their blood funnels into new and improved multi-billion dollar boondoggles. A fake alien invasion would be the ultimate false flag operation, but with the success of 9/11, why not shoot for the stars?

Via: Times:

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 centre 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 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.”

The completion of the documentary marks a triumph for Hawking, now 68, who is paralysed 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 programme 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 colonise 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.”

5 Responses to “Stephen Hawking: Extraterrestrials Are Almost Certain to Exist; If We Encounter Them, Chances Are We’re Doomed”

  1. realitydesign says:

    What a kook this guy is. Is he seriously lazy to the degree that he doesn’t know there has been human ET contact since the 1930’s? It’s to the point now where one can google National Archive documents. As smart as he is he might need to close a physics book and do a little research.

    Then again, since he is pushing the same old military position: ‘ET is dangerous’, one can wonder who may have already tapped him for ‘help.’

  2. dt says:

    Funny you should mention 911. There’s been a long circulating theory that the WTC towers were packed with explosives at the time of construction. I don’t believe 911 was planned forty years in advance. It does seem possible that the WTC was constructed as a stage-set for just such an invasion scenario.

  3. scarletfire says:

    Resources…well the only thing that earth seems to have that might be rare is water…otherwise are you telling me, Mr Hawking, that Jupiter wouldn’t be a much more likely target in our own solar system (with no pesky natives to resist) as a source of resources. Sadly I find it all to be BS. I’ve read some sci-fi that has done the math and any contact with a race more intelligent than ours (other than dolphins, ants, elephants..etc..) is so out of the realm of statistical probability that any talk of this is an utter waste of time..unless of course you need another boogie man (Muslims anyone?) to scare the masses into submission…I would suggest though that the masses are all ready enslaved..why bother with yet another plan when the elite all ready have complete control…

  4. rotger says:

    Hawking does is doom prediction based on a 400 years old event, but maybe he should take a look at what we are doing today with the new tribes we find in south america. I remember we saw an aerial view of the tribe and they said we won’t try to make contact with them for fear that would completly destroy their social order (if I remember right, it happened in the past that some tribe completly disappeared as a result of an encounter with modern day technology) So maybe, just maybe, a civilisation capable of interstellar travel would wise enough not to make an encounter with us, or at least would not have bad intention.
    Hawking opinion on this subject isn’t more relevant than anyone else opinion. Like Kevin pointed out, we hear news about “new” hypersonic vehicle that can goes into the edge of space, but I won’t fool myself as to think those thing they let us know about are the edge of their knowlegde in this matter. A fake alien invasion would require some kind of believeable “alien” craft, so i’m wondering how far behind the civilian population is in term of space flight. Remember that the current technology used to go into space isn’t that much different that what is what 40 years ago.
    All the cancellations in the NASA replacement spacecraft make its look like they could have something new and better coming soon.

  5. Eileen says:

    Hawking has to be seriously deluded (no offense if his illness is causing this condition, mea culpa), but this ?
    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.” (HAHAHA something we wouldn’t want to meet? – isn’t that what Avatar is all about?(which I loved btw) Then he goes onto say:” 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 think the saying “as you believe, so you shall experience” comes to my mind here. In my mind the alien race is going to come to earth to help us get our collective heads out of our asses. I imagine they will show us a way to live in a way that is benign to the planet we live on. But that’s what I believe, and I think the aliens I may meet someday will be that kind. And thanks for posting that song Kevin, might be time to listen to it again.:)

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