Stephen Hawking literally lives my nightmare:

His mind is trapped in a body that doesn’t work.

The fact that he didn’t commit suicide 30 years ago, I think, makes him the bravest man who has ever lived.

If he – a person who by profession studies all the scary things about space – is afraid of intelligent alien bad guys, I say that is OK.

I know some very strong people who are similarly afraid of spiders. We all have fears, no matter how irrational.

Just because he said it doesn’t mean it’s true.

There is no reason to assume that some superior race of aliens will treat us any differently than we treat ants, so me think Hawking has a point.

The reason I say it’s an irrational fear is simply that the statistical likelihood of us ever contacting an intelligent lifeform that is:

- Capable of locating us
– Interested in our little blue dot for whatever reason
– Close enough to receive said message, muster forces, and get to our location while we’re both still a species

is so slim as to be laughable.

See the Fermi Paradox for more information

Any alien civilisation within range of your communication attempts, probably already knows you exist anyway. Makes no difference.

There’s nowt new here, Hawkwing has had & shared this theory since donkey’s years back.
Me, I think if E.T came calling anytime soon & asked “take me to your leader” i’d point to Stephen’s house coz he’s cool & stuff.

There is no harm in just listening, although many people think the chances of hearing signals from an advanced civilization are pretty remote. If we ever did make contact, the planet sending the signal would most likely be so far away as to make physical contact impossible.

Our radio transmissions decay into noise in just a few light years. It’s doubtfull anyone knows we are here and the odds of us intercepting alien RF transmissions used for regular communications is pretty close to zero since the same physics applies. Our transmissions don’t even get to the nearest star before they are indistinguishable from noise.

I would trust Hawking’s intuition much more than a bunch of relatively uneducated Jellies on this matter (myself included) but it’s also not a clear and present worry to me. Colonialism is inherently destructive. However, I think we’re doing a great job of destroying ourselves so the question is fairly moot.

Yeah because it has worked real well for indigenous populations when “discovered” by more advanced civilization so far.

What @seek said.

Odds are we simply won’t run into each other. Most of the universe is millions and even billions of years away at the speed of light.

I think that our contact with another civilization will occur in somewhat similar circumstances to the Human/Vogon one in A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

as long as it’s not the poetry part

The Fermi paradox is best dismantled by considering the American Indians, who might have seen any potential for colonists from other places in the same way.

Apologies to anyone who has already heard my thoughts on this – because this isn’t the first time.

Years ago when I read Playboy magazine, and I won’t lie here, I didn’t read it just for the articles, though I did often read the articles, in 1977, if memory serves, they had an article entitled Kill Them and Eat Them.

If you’ve read this far, then you probably already know the gist of the article. It was a sort of tongue-in-cheek-but-sort-of-serious essay to answer this very question, “What should we do if we discover alien visitors to the planet Earth?” The answer was contained in the title of the essay, but the essay described why that would be the best policy.

In essence, as others have already noted, any civilization with the technology to A) discover that we actually exist and then B) mount a “manned” (for varying definitions of “man”, obviously) mission to visit and contact us and C) actually make that contact in some unambiguous way as to say, “Here we are, bitches. Talk to us,” (I’m extrapolating on the language a bit; we didn’t speak like that as a rule in 1977, even in Playboy magazine.) would be so far in advance of our technology that there would be nothing for us to offer in the way of commerce and trade. (What do we trade with ants, for example?)

So the only benefits, if any, would be one way: We might be food or we might be pets, but we would not be equals. So the best response that we could make to this advanced civilization, in whatever numbers they chose to send our way (because we have to assume that they would not mount some kind of interplanetary mass colonization effort right off the bat) would be, specifically, to kill them and then eat them.

The point we would have to make to survive as a species (and presumably as the “master” representative of other Earth species) is to be so entirely violent and disgustingly, unwaveringly unwelcoming that we would not even be marked for later follow-up; we’d just be crossed off the list of places to visit, marked as “dangerous, do not attempt landing” on the charts, and bypassed for eternity (we might hope).

I’m thinking that future human interplanetary explorers should be given a copy of the essay, too, as a sort of warning of what kind of reception they might expect from a sapient and capable alien culture on their home planet, in case the roles are ever reversed.

It might help if they brought along a copy of Playboy, too.

The Simpsons had a great alien invasion episode. They had a cookbook entitled How to Cook Forty Humans and also ran for president.

I heard they had another cookbook entitled Serving Humanity.

@LostInParadise And they might use Diet on A Small Planet.

@filmfann – the difference is, the indigenous Americans didn’t know how close England was.

He’s wrong. I heard the alien races were very nice. And that they are vegetarians.

He’s right that any aliens capable of hearing us and coming over for a visit will be ridiculously more powerful than we are.

Given our current leadership and industrial practices, and the way we treat our wildlife, I have a fantasy that they’ll show up and decide to correct a few things, for example to prevent the extinction of non-human species by shutting down our more terrible technologies and practices. I like to think if I were a visiting alien with no Prime Directive quibbles, I’d be making some corrections.

Perhaps we have already been weighed, measured and found wanting. There is a big ol’ “KEEP AWAY” sign posted on the outskirts of the solar system.

I guess you mean “wary”? I agree with that. I’ve never understood why a single government or body of scientists should extend an open invitation to complete strangers without giving any say to the vast majority of Terrans. What gives them the right to speak for all of us, or even all nations, or even some nations? The hubris required for such an act is astonishing.

I agree with the attempts to contact other alien life.
If they haven’‘t self destructed (as the human race is likely to do at this point), then they’ve had to evolve into a fairly benevolent society. I think it’s more likely they would try to help us. And they should be wary of that, as humans have a strong tendency to pervert good things into bad, and humans tend to bite the hand that feeds them.

I find it unlikely that Klingons would have survived societal puberty.

Yall should go back to my thread on stopping SETI. Apparently Hawking and I share these thoughts.