Hawking Warns Humanity to Avoid Dangerous Aliens

[Canid117]

err, nobody is psychic

smartass

You can't xenoform billions of trillions of tons of water out of nowhere like you have with planet earth. The atmosphere is much easier to alter because by mass there is far less of it.

No but comets that are 99% water burn up nicely on reentry and turn into normal water. If you broke the universe's ultimate speed limit it probably isn't that hard to do little tow job. Though what I want to know is where are you getting your figure from? Do you have any idea how much mass is in the atmosphere? About five quadrillion tons and no I am not making that up the atmosphere is fucking huge.

 

[The Singularity]

God, I love that man.

And really, it's hard not to agree, I mean, by the time a species has actually developed some sort of space travel theve probably used up most of the resouces on there home planet, wether due to wasteful useage, useing the resources to build those ships, or other reasones.

What if they're so advanced that they built a device that allows them to break down any material at the atomic level and reform it into anything they want?

Then we are just more atoms to reshape?

Not likely, it would be vastly more efficient and easy to gain such materials from asteroid fields and uninhabited planets.

Why not? We have the potential to harm them, and if we are relatively close to them or an object they could just strip mine our entire solar system?

 

[The Singularity]

Crazy guy. Also, good work on putting District 9 there. I bet he made all these conclusions from that film.

HAHAHAHA! Very good sarcasm. Steven Hawking is one of the great genius scientists. Hes going to be remembered along with Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton. So yes your intelligence compared to his is like comparing a normal human to a monkey.
I believe he is correct, we need to avoid showing all our cards to the universe, if anything think of this: Weapons we have can destroy our world, and can travel through space without humans. All we have to do is load a ship with hydrogen bombs and send it at a planet.
So what if another Species is more advanced then us?

Also we cannot measure other species at all. Kindness, anger, love emotions etc. might not even exist to another race. Meaning no friendship. They could also just kill us because we might kill them for the same reasons, the other species is another threat to our ENTIRE species.

Any one person is only as smart as we give them credit for. I don't understand this quote. are you insulting or complimenting me...?

No a person is as smart as their brain can work... Thats like saying a computer is only as fast as you give it credit for.
I'm insulting you because you said that Steven Hawking based his statement off of a movie. Because he clearly has nothing else to draw on. Hes a genius, and as such will be remembered forever. Or until all science dies out.

 

[Spiner909]

Crazy guy. Also, good work on putting District 9 there. I bet he made all these conclusions from that film.

HAHAHAHA! Very good sarcasm. Steven Hawking is one of the great genius scientists. Hes going to be remembered along with Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton. So yes your intelligence compared to his is like comparing a normal human to a monkey.
I believe he is correct, we need to avoid showing all our cards to the universe, if anything think of this: Weapons we have can destroy our world, and can travel through space without humans. All we have to do is load a ship with hydrogen bombs and send it at a planet.
So what if another Species is more advanced then us?

Also we cannot measure other species at all. Kindness, anger, love emotions etc. might not even exist to another race. Meaning no friendship. They could also just kill us because we might kill them for the same reasons, the other species is another threat to our ENTIRE species.

Any one person is only as smart as we give them credit for. I don't understand this quote. are you insulting or complimenting me...?

No a person is as smart as their brain can work... Thats like saying a computer is only as fast as you give it credit for.
I'm insulting you because you said that Steven Hawking based his statement off of a movie. Because he clearly has nothing else to draw on. Hes a genius, and as such will be remembered forever. Or until all science dies out.

Bah, no no no. Intelligence is relative, as is (your) opinion. People can't make baseless assumptions on fields of science that that don't even exist yet!

 

[Darkauthor81]

Honestly, if aliens did come to earth starting trouble, they will have picked the wrong race. We've been coming up with better and more inventive ways of killing stuff ever since we realised that rocks and sticks hurt.

Thats a lot of R&D on how to send aliens away crying to momma.

Who's to say their pasts have been more peaceful than ours? They could be genocidal maniacs that developed much more slowly than us and have the advantage simply because their race started a billion years before ours. Besides, as stated the technological difference between us would be massive. No matter how inventive the cavemen are with their rocks and sticks, the guys with the machine guns who burst into their camp and opened fire are still going to slaughter them. Probably before one of them even has time to lift his rock in defense.

 

[Double A]

If anything is going to create world peace it's gonna be war with another world.

]

If that happens, we may end up in pieces.

OT: My horrible pun explains fairly well my stance on the matter, but I'll elaborate. Without proper protection (eg, the orbital MAC gun platforms from Halo 2), we're basically offering our necks for whoever or whatever is out there. We need to be able to fight back as hard as we can before we even try to look for other intelligent life. Even if all the races we find are peaceful, our caution still would have been a good thing, in case they weren't.

 

[Darkauthor81]

Crazy guy. Also, good work on putting District 9 there. I bet he made all these conclusions from that film.

No, he's the foremost expert in quantum physics. I'm pretty sure he knows more about these things than you. That doesn't make him crazy it just makes you inferior.

 

[The Singularity]

Crazy guy. Also, good work on putting District 9 there. I bet he made all these conclusions from that film.

HAHAHAHA! Very good sarcasm. Steven Hawking is one of the great genius scientists. Hes going to be remembered along with Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton. So yes your intelligence compared to his is like comparing a normal human to a monkey.
I believe he is correct, we need to avoid showing all our cards to the universe, if anything think of this: Weapons we have can destroy our world, and can travel through space without humans. All we have to do is load a ship with hydrogen bombs and send it at a planet.
So what if another Species is more advanced then us?

Also we cannot measure other species at all. Kindness, anger, love emotions etc. might not even exist to another race. Meaning no friendship. They could also just kill us because we might kill them for the same reasons, the other species is another threat to our ENTIRE species.

Any one person is only as smart as we give them credit for. I don't understand this quote. are you insulting or complimenting me...?

No a person is as smart as their brain can work... Thats like saying a computer is only as fast as you give it credit for.
I'm insulting you because you said that Steven Hawking based his statement off of a movie. Because he clearly has nothing else to draw on. Hes a genius, and as such will be remembered forever. Or until all science dies out.

Bah, no no no. Intelligence is relative, as is (your) opinion. People can't make baseless assumptions on fields of science that that don't even exist yet!

Intelligence is not relative, clearly we are not as crazy smart as Einstein or Hawking or whoever that one computer programmer was. They think faster better thoughts. If you think intelligence is relative start thinking a monkey is a genius. Then ask it to explain space time quantum theory. Tell us how that goes.
Just because a science field isn't formed yet means you can't already know stuff about it? Good thing astrophysicists and astronauts were around for Einstein. That Helicopters and advanced engineering were around for Da Vinci. Oh wait, thats right!
People have to invent those fields!

 

[Georgie_Leech]

In terms of advanced killing power, I have to say that it's tough to beat the Tsar Bomba (I really hope nothing out there has anything to compare).

 

[Danpascooch]

Honestly, if aliens did come to earth starting trouble, they will have picked the wrong race. We've been coming up with better and more inventive ways of killing stuff ever since we realised that rocks and sticks hurt.

Thats a lot of R&D on how to send aliens away crying to momma.

"We've been coming up with better and more inventive ways of killing stuff"

Yeah, there is ZERO CHANCE that an alien race with INTERPLANETARY TRAVEL ABILITIES knows ANYTHING about freaking innovation!

 

[zacaron]

Honestly, if aliens did come to earth starting trouble, they will have picked the wrong race. We've been coming up with better and more inventive ways of killing stuff ever since we realised that rocks and sticks hurt.

Thats a lot of R&D on how to send aliens away crying to momma.

I think that if the aliens had the power to travel to our planet and they were hostile they'd probably go the route of the covenant and just glass the planet from space before our nukes were even in range...if a nuke can even work in space with the lack of air for combustion and explosives...

 

[Darkauthor81]

Well, we can't silence radio signals leaving our planet, so that's all a moot point. If we are in earshot of an all-devouring alien civilization that has been around for 4 or 5 billion years longer than us, we are dead and there's nothing we can do about it.

I laughed when a poster above suggested we should have some sort of planetary defence set up before sending out signals deliberately. Planetary defence. Yeah. We pretty much discovered all of our modern technology in a 300 year span, and we are going to defend ourselves against a species that have been doing their homework for billions of years. They'd probably be able to instazap our planet with a beam that destroys all organic life from some platform that's located 50 light years away! Planetary defence...

Jokes aside, I find it highly unlikely that there is another intelligent, space travelling civilization out there in the universe. Sure, there are definitely countless planets with life, but intelligent, technological life? I believe that we are a one-of-a-kind anomaly. Nobody knows of course, and hope is a nice and fine form of mental masturbation, but I really doubt it.

Of the 4 billion stars in our galaxy alone you don't believe there could possibly be other intelligent life? Do you have any information to back this up?

That's like saying "I've never met someone from Brussels. Never heard anything about them. But it's CLEAR that we are superior.... Some how. I bet they don't even have cars or running water! Stupid people I've never met, seen, or heard anything about."

Sure, intelligent life is rare. Look how long it took for us to develop. But you have absolutely no basis of comparison. Why couldn't intelligent life develop earlier than us. And once it's there, it's pretty much permanent since they'll have the capability to sustain themselves even during catastrophic change. And if they were even a thousand years older than us (when it's possible they could be millions of years older) they would be massively more advanced than us. Take, for example, Moore's Law. A study of computer advancement shows current generation computer processors are twice as powerful as the ones that came less than two years ago. Add a thousand years of that level of advancement to current technology and suddenly space travel isn't unrealistic at all.

So the statement that there can't be any intelligent space faring life out there is nonsensically egotistical.

 

[Darkauthor81]

Honestly, if aliens did come to earth starting trouble, they will have picked the wrong race. We've been coming up with better and more inventive ways of killing stuff ever since we realised that rocks and sticks hurt.

Thats a lot of R&D on how to send aliens away crying to momma.

I think that if the aliens had the power to travel to our planet and they were hostile they'd probably go the route of the covenant and just glass the planet from space before our nukes were even in range...if a nuke can even work in space with the lack of air for combustion and explosives...

Nukes work by causing hydrogen, which is stored inside the nuke, to fuse replicating a small piece of the sun right here on earth. They don't need air any more than the sun does.

So in a word. Yes. Nukes work in space.

 

[Spiner909]

*snip*

No, I'm saying intelligence and opinion are relative. If I say a monkey is a genius, then in my opinion, he is! Does that mean he necessarily a genius? No. The definition of a genius is relative to the person who is using the term.
Does Hawking consider himself to be extremely smart? Maybe. It is highly probably That people like Einstein and Hawking are wrong, but that doesn't make them any less more 'intelligent'.

Regarding fields of science that don't exist, I don't have much more to add. Black holes, for example. We've never seen one. We've never experienced one. We can only guess on stuff we can't even be sure is true.

 

[Call Me Arizona]

Agreed, we definitely need to err on the side of caution until we become a spacefaring race able to defend ourselves properly from invaders. We definitely don't want a Halo happening where we ONLY have Earth.

 

[ydkwidrmw]

I dont really see how we can 'avoid' aliens. If they were intent on finding us they surely will given the 100 years since the first use of radio.

 

[Carnagath]

Well, we can't silence radio signals leaving our planet, so that's all a moot point. If we are in earshot of an all-devouring alien civilization that has been around for 4 or 5 billion years longer than us, we are dead and there's nothing we can do about it.

I laughed when a poster above suggested we should have some sort of planetary defence set up before sending out signals deliberately. Planetary defence. Yeah. We pretty much discovered all of our modern technology in a 300 year span, and we are going to defend ourselves against a species that have been doing their homework for billions of years. They'd probably be able to instazap our planet with a beam that destroys all organic life from some platform that's located 50 light years away! Planetary defence...

Jokes aside, I find it highly unlikely that there is another intelligent, space travelling civilization out there in the universe. Sure, there are definitely countless planets with life, but intelligent, technological life? I believe that we are a one-of-a-kind anomaly. Nobody knows of course, and hope is a nice and fine form of mental masturbation, but I really doubt it.

Of the 4 billion stars in our galaxy alone you don't believe there could possibly be other intelligent life? Do you have any information to back this up?

That's like saying "I've never met someone from Brussels. Never heard anything about them. But it's CLEAR that we are superior.... Some how. I bet they don't even have cars or running water! Stupid people I've never met, seen, or heard anything about."

Sure, intelligent life is rare. Look how long it took for us to develop. But you have absolutely no basis of comparison. Why couldn't intelligent life develop earlier than us. And once it's there, it's pretty much permanent since they'll have the capability to sustain themselves even during catastrophic change. And if they were even a thousand years older than us (when it's possible they could be millions of years older) they would be massively more advanced than us. Take, for example, Moore's Law. A study of computer advancement shows current generation computer processors are twice as powerful as the ones that came less than two years ago. Add a thousand years of that level of advancement to current technology and suddenly space travel isn't unrealistic at all.

So the statement that there can't be any intelligent space faring life out there is nonsensically egotistical.

Of course I don't have any more information to back this up than you do Out of the many billions of life forms that have existed on our planet though, only one has been intelligent, and that one species managed to evolve due to some crazy improbability, because of some meteorite (or rapid climate change or megavolcano or whatever it was) which was just strong enough to wipe out anything higher on the food chain than small mammals. And then again, only one of those mammals evolved that way. My point is that in my opinion nature does not seem to have much use for intelligent life. It seems to be an extreme anomaly rather than the "usual" way of evolution. As with all extreme anomalies, there is a chance that it has been a one-time thing, even with as many planets as those in our universe. Now, of course, if you start factoring in the Multiverse theories, your brain explodes and anything anyone says is useless.

 

[klakkat]

I disagree with Hawking on a number of points (I'm a physicist; but we won't get into that, particularly since he's MUCH better known than me) but he makes some good points here. WHY are we trying to contact aliens? If they happen to notice us, and are peaceful, great. But if they aren't peaceful, wouldn't it be better if we flew under the radar as long as possible?

 

[bjj hero]

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Right, I've given my answer to your "Aliens would pwn us" argument on post 232 on page 7. Do you only read the first page?

You dirty alien collaborators, you should be ashamed of yourself.