Steve Hawking - On Aliens

[MC]

WASHINGTON - Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has been thinking a lot about the cosmic question, "Are we alone?" The answer is probably not, he says.

If there is life elsewhere in the universe, Hawking asks why haven't we stumbled onto some alien broadcasts in space, maybe something like "alien quiz shows?"

Hawking's comments were part of a lecture at George Washington University on Monday in honor of NASA's 50th anniversary. He theorized that there are possible answers to whether there is extraterrestrial life.

One option is that there likely isn't life elsewhere. Or maybe there is intelligent life elsewhere, but when it gets smart enough to send signals into space, it also is smart enough to make destructive nuclear weapons.

Hawking said he prefers the third option:

"Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare," he then quickly added: "Some would say it has yet to occur on earth."

So should you worry about aliens? Alien abduction claims come from "weirdos" and are unlikely. However, because alien life might not have DNA like us, Hawking warned: "Watch out if you would meet an alien. You could be infected with a disease with which you have no resistance."

The 66-year-old British cosmologist, who suffers from ALS and must speak through a mechanical device, believes "if the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before."

Hawking compared people who don't want to spend money on human space exploration to those who opposed the journey of Christopher Columbus in 1492.

"The discovery of the New World made a profound difference to the old. Just think we wouldn't have had a Big Mac or KFC."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080421/ap_on_sc/stephen_hawking;_ylt=AjwrZuRB1WW0haUZgG1Y6Cis0NUE

 

[sub]

Very interesting stuff, I've always loved discussions about space / aliens.

It would be absurdly arrogant to believe that Earth the only only place in the Universe life can occur. There are trillions upon trillions of galaxies out there, surely we can't be alone.

 

[Optional]

I don't understand why aliens would have to communicate using radio waves. They could just as easily use a different light frequency that we do not bother to detect. It is possible they don't even communicate using light but through some other medium unknown to us.

 

[Zeonix]

The logic behind searching for radio waves is that it's what a relatively primitive civilization (class 0) would use to communicate over long distances. So you're searching for radio waves to communicate at the lowest levels, allowing you to reach far more races than if you were to try to communicate using something far more sophisticated, which would have a lower chance of being detected by a lesser (equal or close to it) civilization. We're looking for our equals and our superiors. A superior civilization, we think, would use this same logic and use a primitive means of communication so that we'd (our level of civilization) detect and decipher the message. Since we haven't found anything thus far, we're basically working our way up the ladder. For example, we're sending and attempting to detect laser pulses (I think that's what they're called) now.