Hawking Warns Humanity to Avoid Dangerous Aliens
- Thread starter Tom Goldman
- Start date
Hawking is obviously a brilliant man, but in this case his opinion on this matter is no better than anyone else. Now I'm not saying he's wrong, I'm just saying that just because the man is a brilliant physicist doesn't make him an authority on the subject of extraterrestrials.
I tend to agree with his views on this. Purely going by history, when two different groups meet for the first time, the more advanced one has a tendency to attempt to enslave/destroy the technologically inferior one.
English colonists and Australian Aboriginals, Spanish and the South Americans, Romans and most of the people they met, etc...
English colonists and Australian Aboriginals, Spanish and the South Americans, Romans and most of the people they met, etc...
No offense, but Hawking's been slowing loose credibility with the science community. He's been saying a lot of crazy crap lately.
There's a 50/50 chance that the aliens will or will not be hostile. If we had the technology, I'm sure we'd try to go explore new worlds as well.
There's a 50/50 chance that the aliens will or will not be hostile. If we had the technology, I'm sure we'd try to go explore new worlds as well.
Part of the concern, of course, is that an alien species may be more paranoid than we are.
Assuming that there is no loophole in space travel; that in order to get from point A to point B within any reasonable time scale you have to accelerate to extremely high velocity, then interstellar trade is functionally impossible.
Operating under the assumption of this technological plateau, other races aren't going to know anything really significant that you don't know already, so even trade in pure data isn't particularly rewarding.
But while it's not practical to engage in interstellar commerce, it's certainly possible to engage in interstellar war. Accelerate an object to 90%+ of lightspeed, and it's entirely likely we'd never even know what hit us. Thwack. Dead planet. No more humans.
Now, you could ask why aliens would exterminate us on sight. To which the simple response is: Why wouldn't they?
Our continued existence serves no practical purpose for them, and there's always the risk that someday we might decide to wipe THEM out, so logically it makes sense to get rid of us first.
There's an excellent work of fiction on this topic called "The Killing Star", by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski.
Assuming that there is no loophole in space travel; that in order to get from point A to point B within any reasonable time scale you have to accelerate to extremely high velocity, then interstellar trade is functionally impossible.
Operating under the assumption of this technological plateau, other races aren't going to know anything really significant that you don't know already, so even trade in pure data isn't particularly rewarding.
But while it's not practical to engage in interstellar commerce, it's certainly possible to engage in interstellar war. Accelerate an object to 90%+ of lightspeed, and it's entirely likely we'd never even know what hit us. Thwack. Dead planet. No more humans.
Now, you could ask why aliens would exterminate us on sight. To which the simple response is: Why wouldn't they?
Our continued existence serves no practical purpose for them, and there's always the risk that someday we might decide to wipe THEM out, so logically it makes sense to get rid of us first.
There's an excellent work of fiction on this topic called "The Killing Star", by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski.
Yes look at ourselves. We are no more advanced then we were a few hundred years ago. We fight for the same reason we have always fought- land, religion, politics. We just fight wars with different weapons, and have iPods. Next week we could have a world war, be invaded, have a civil war, and society comes crumbling down. For a civilization and a species to become space-faring and have the abilities of interstellar travel, they would almost HAVE to be peaceful. A species cannot advance unless there is world-wide peace. To achieve that, eliminate the causes of war (stated above).Tom Goldman said:
All the science, time, and money that has gone into making weapons to eviscerate the human race has raised us to low-orbit around our planet. Where will we go when we have peace?
That's assuming there's only one way to accomplish everything. This was somewhat addressed in Mass Effect, where:
The Reapers, a super advanced machine race, want to discover different approaches to technological problems that they have already solved. To do this, they wipe the galaxy clean of life, then leave artifacts near developing cultures so that they will be discovered and new technologies built from them using different approaches than the Reapers themselves used while they were a developing culture.
The Reapers then enter a dormancy cycle and return 50,000 years later to absorb the innovations of the interim species and add them to their own technologies. Since they are machines themselves, the inherent goal is self improvement.
The Reapers then enter a dormancy cycle and return 50,000 years later to absorb the innovations of the interim species and add them to their own technologies. Since they are machines themselves, the inherent goal is self improvement.
Given a wide variety of species and an equally wide number of possible solutions to space travel and other technological hurdles, one could draw the conclusion that each species' specific technological idiom will be sufficiently distinct from other species to justify trade or at least hesitation in the commencement of outright annihilation.
Of course there's also Carl Sagan's theory that any culture sufficiently complex to produce intergalactic space travel must also be sufficiently stable to allow that technology to develop and would therefore be beneficent (or at least not belligerent) by default.
I think the point is we have to instantly assume that they want to destroy us. It's a reasonable assumption, given that's probably what we'd do in their situation and the risk of being destroyed is too serious to muck about with.Vrex360 said:
Look again at the title "Hawking warns humanity to avoid dangerous aliens" it sounds obvious, but what you have to realise is that if aliens might want to destroy us then that means they definitely are dangerous.
Honestly, as many other people have said in this thread, the chances are that we would attack them first. Or maybe they'll look like humans but are really reptiles underneath and pretend to give us gifts. And maybe kittens will fly out my anus with assault rifles that fire peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
We'd best avoid contact with aliens until we can discover The Hammer of Dawn or The Lost Ark.
Lame jokes aside, we shouldn't stand still and search for contact.
Get up your fat asses and craft us millions of battleships! I want to go to space! Gees...
Lame jokes aside, we shouldn't stand still and search for contact.
Get up your fat asses and craft us millions of battleships! I want to go to space! Gees...
I think the main point that springs to my mind is that we're fast on our way to becoming those aliens. Think about it, we're intolerant arseholes, we're quickly draining OUR planet's resources, and we're VERY good at finding new ways to kill shit then piss on its ashes.
