Hawking Warns Humanity to Avoid Dangerous Aliens

[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.

Your idea about geniuses is redundant. High IQ and good use of it=genius. If you are wrong all the time then you clearly are not smart...
We can see black holes just as much as we can see every every star and planet, maybe even more so. We just can't see them in our tiny eyesight. It has a massive gravitational lens and is itself small(compared to other stuff) we have pictures of them absorbing stars gases, and the most obvious sign is that there is a GIGANTIC black circle surrounded by other lights. If there is a person in black walking across a field in daylight you can still see them, by the absence of light. Please learn a little about space before replying.

Why do you feel the need to bring this up days after we finished this? My ideas of intelligence are my own, so feel free to continue.

 

[zana bonanza]

Even if they were friendly, contact with an alien species would throw our world into chaos. I mean, honestly, how would you react? I'm pretty opened minded and I'm sure there is other life out there somewhere, but if a bonafide alien drops by to say hello, I will freak the hell out.

 

[Scumpernickle]

We're big enough jerks to start wars with our own species, what makes anybody think it will be any less so with a different species.

I'd rather be wondering about whats out there than being enslaved or executed by alien races.

 

[Agayek]

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.

Unless, of course, said aliens possess technology that will negate our current forms of killing things.

There are 2 ways of doing this I can think of off the top of my head, that are theoretically possible, if not plausible:
1) Force fields - No really, these actually are feasible in modern science, we just lack the technology to actually do it (we lack the understanding of quantum mechanics to handle the amount of energy required). Electromagnetic fields can be created that will prevent most magnetic objects from being able to enter (the exception is if the object has sufficient kinetic energy). It's not that much of a stretch to think an alien race with sufficiently advanced technology (which interstellar travel would qualify as, I imagine) could make use of it.

2) Quantum mechanics shenanigans (ie, cancel a nuclear reaction in process, manipulate gravity/space/time, instantaneous teleportation, etc). With such things are quantum pairs and special relativity, it is not unlikely that an alien race would be able to develop a way to manipulate space-time in a variety of fun ways. I'm no expert on it, but what I do understand of quantum mechanics means we don't know enough to know how much we don't know, so anything is really possible.

 

[Agayek]

-force fields are weak. rail gun destroys it in ONE SHOT.
-teleportation is impossible on the grand scale that is needed.
-the need for quantum mechanic weapons are quite minimal. you dont need a death star to control an resource mine.

1) If they have developed a significantly more efficient source of power, there's no physical reason they can't have significantly more powerful force fields. It requires several orders of magnitude more current to generate the EMF for such a field, but it's theoretically possible if one were to find/develop a sufficient source of current.

2) That we know of. We don't understand enough quantum mechanics yet to say definitively (that I'm aware of, there may have been some discoveries in the last year or so that I missed) that we'll never be able to manipulate the grand scale from the quantum.

It would make sense, though, that if you can manipulate the small scale, all it would take is more power to do the same thing on the larger scale. For example, if you can teleport a single atom, you then apply the same basic techniques to every atom/molecule in a spaceship. It would require significantly refined techniques to do so and not come out with a gigantic atomic mishmash on the other side, but there's nothing that says it's impossible.

3) You are applying human logic to an alien mind. That doesn't work. By their very nature, we cannot understand or comprehend how they think. It might make perfect sense to them to have Doomsday Weapon #133 guarding a small box-canyon in the middle of nowhere. You can't apply human logic to the way an alien race would think. It's certainly possible they'd think like us, but it's highly unlikely (about as likely as large-scale quantum events happening spontaneously, actually). They evolved in a completely different environment, obeying completely different rules of behavior. There's no telling what they will decide to do one way or the other.

 

[feather240]

I don't see how it would really matter, if they're intelligent enough that we have no chance against them I don't see why they would need to kill us in the first place. Besides, I bet there's already several armadas already converging to Sol.

 

[The Singularity]

Why do you feel the need to bring this up days after we finished this? My ideas of intelligence are my own, so feel free to continue.

I do not log on every single day, and when I do theres some idiot quoting me claiming that half the universes mass is a myth. That has to be replied too.

 

[Spiner909]

So I apparently said half the universe is a myth.
Hmm.

Odd how how find these words, seeing as I didn't write them.

 

[Weaver]

One of the things though, if the aliens are advanced enough to presumably reach near light speeds, they would have developed an energy source so efficient it is nearly beyond comprehension. They wouldn't need our resources.

 

[nondescript]

Interesting that he assumes that since they apparently (like earthlings) will use up resources until there are no more, he doesn't go on to hypothesize that they might have learned their lesson. Then again, maybe Mr Hawkings has been watching a lot of "Independence Day" as opposed to "Suburban Commando."

I'm just glad he didn't mention Greens and Grays. That's when I start questioning the validity of such statements.

 

[Vigormortis]

snip

Agreed on many points, however, I think Avatar's plot actually emphasized the financial and engineering difficulties of colonizing and exploiting another world. The spacecraft they arrive in, the Venture Star, is so incredibly expensive and ponderous that only the insane value of the unobtainium is able to justify it. It's over 1.6 km in length, so I presume it would weight more than 500,000 metric tons, yet it has space for only 350 tons of payload. 350 tons of unobtainium, priced at $20 million per kilogram = estimated value $7 trillion.

That's a lot of money. Basically, it's the only plausible reason we'd want to go into space. Interstellar space, I mean. And even so, the Venture Star uses an antimatter engine, something like a pion drive that annihilates matter and antimatter at a 1:1 rate. Creating such quantities of antimatter would probably cost more than $7 trillion in real life, even in 2150 or whatever the year is in Avatar. Though, if they found a cheaper way, they probably make a small profit with every trip to Pandora and back.

Unless the aliens find something so valuable in our system (and I can't think of anything that we wouldn't get our hands on first) we're not worth the effort. Not even for scientific purposes. And aside from some made-up supercompound that would make our system important, they can get most resources in their home system (as can we - Europa is brimming with more water than Earth itself, Titan has entire seas of gasoline, the main-belt asteroids have all the metal you could ever wish for).

Well said. I would argue though, even if there were some mystical material worth "trillions" to a conquering alien species, it would still not out-way the resources needed to simply travel to Earth, eliminate/subjugate humanity, mine/harvest said material, then ship it back. (or even just mill the stuff here or in orbit) I'm just saying, the distances in space are so mind-bogglingly vast, even when considering faster-than-light travel, it's just not feasible.

I found it interesting that you brought up Europa and Titan, though. I was going to use them as, ironically enough, examples of why Mr. Hawkings aliens could more easily mine other celestial bodies nearer to them instead of coming hear to conquer us. I wasn't sure how many people would actually be familiar with the geologies of those moons. (that, and my rant ran long enough as it was)

(I've heard it said that NASA considers Titan and it's massive methane oceans to be a future jumping point for solar and possibly extrasolar missions.)

 

[rddj623]

Seems the logical decision to make. The chance that they'll destroy us at all makes it not worth reaching out to them. Even 50/50 isn't good enough, and it seems he thinks it's slanted more towards dangerous then noble.

 

[kikon9]

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.

Yes, but a civilization that has that level of technology would be able to just take the resources from uninhabited planets. There are a lot more of those than there are inhabited planets, and it would be easier to take the resources from rocks and ice than from humans that have a nasty habit of objecting when you attack them. Economically, you would be more intelligent to take from Jupiter's moons than Earth. The only reason a species smart enough to develop space travel would attack us is if they are warmongering to begin with.

 

[SelectivelyEvil13]

I'm sorry, but I have to lean away from his argument. Any lifeforms advanced enough to do such a thing, in all likelihood, would not do the human thing of digging themselves into such a desperate rut in the first place to necessitate the invasion of another habitable planet. Senseless genocide would fall more upon religious/ideological dedication like an interstellar jihad or humanity's resistance to such subjugation rather than a last ditch effort to milk what materials the alien species would need from Earth.

The reason I say this is because, as others have stated prior, it simply is a lot riskier when dealing with belligerent humans. An ideological pursuit, however, is something we see in today's world: it is risky, senseless, and gratuitously violent in the end, but it is "justified" by a "higher calling" of sorts.

That is but one situation that I feel would invoke a hostile alien encounter before anything pertaining to the cost/benefit of exploiting our natural resources. The technological capacity and presumable knowledge and experience behind an advanced species would lean more towards rational responses towards resource scarcity rather than exterminating an entire species for minimal long-term benefit. It is remenicient to our energy crisis: fighting over a dying energy source at the cost of human lives or find an alternative that is renewable or can be easily obtained without suffering?

My last concern for conceivable threats to humanity is alien attack given the lunatics behind the button(s) and the hair-trigger response said crazies have regarding violent recourse.

*edit* My 666th post: Have I summoned the alien demon lord to piss all over everything I've just said and literally annihilate us all because it was bored and did not feel like playing chainsaw checkers with sniveling slaves? Oh bloody hell...