Don't talk to strange aliens, says Hawking: post to share

Don't talk to strange aliens, says Hawking
Posted Apr 29, 2010
BY CRAIG BAKAY

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EMC Editorial For many of us, browsing the Sunday newspapers from around the world on the Internet has become an enjoyable pastime. This past Sunday, there seemed to be a lot of electronic ink devoted to Stephen Hawking's new documentary series, Stephen Hawking's Universe, that debuts May 9 on the Discovery Channel.

Hawking, you will recall, is the astrophysicist who gave us A Brief History of Time. And has received every scientific award of note despite being in a wheelchair with ALS.

If you want to know about black holes, Hawking's the guy you go see.

In this new series, Hawking argues that extraterrestrial life has to exist, and points to searches for microbial life on Mars and Jupiter's moons, particularly the frozen Europa.

Hawking further speculates that there very well could be intelligent life out there too, and in his opinion, contact with them might not be in our best interests.

"We have only to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet," Hawking said in the Sunday Times Online. "If aliens ever visit us, the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans."

That would seem to make sense.

One inarguable truth is that if an alien race can get to Earth, they have to be more advanced technologically than us. We can't get to them, so they're already one up on us.

The arguments for the existence of alien life are of course based on some speculation, but the astronomical numbers involved make it unlikely we're the only place life emerged.

If you take the number of 200 million stars in our Milky Way Galaxy (and it's a small one) and perhaps 200 billion galaxies out there, you get a lot of potential places where a biosphere might emerge.

Our star, Sol, is a main sequence star, about mid-life for the sake of argument. This means two things: 1. There's nothing unusual about our star and 2. There are lots of stars out there a lot older than ours.

In fact, most of the stars we see in the night sky are so far away that it could be billions of years before the light from them gets here. For all we know, half the stars out there might be long gone already.

But, it also means that there's a good chance one of them had a planet like Earth, just far enough away from its star to be not too hot and not too cold with the right concoction of elements to form nucleic acids.

Of course that doesn't mean those planets would necessarily produce intelligent life, let alone opposable thumbs to build things.

But, then again, who's to say we're the be-all and end-all of evolution?

It very well could be that the development of intelligence in a planetary biosphere is inevitable, certainly there are scientists out there like Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, who believe it is.

But, scientists have been known to be wrong from time to time and let's hope that if aliens are about to visit, they're more like ET than the ones in Independence Day.

http://www.emcfrontenac.ca/20100429/editorials/Don't+talk+to+strange+aliens,+says+Hawking