Stephen Hawking special

Post Reply New Topic

I enjoyed his explanation on why humans should not seek out contact with aliens:

"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."

Well...That's being pessimistic though. =/ But to be honest, what would humans do if they found a planet they can live on which was populated by indigenous species? <.<

But he assumes aliens are much like ourselves....human that is.

What if they aren't?

What if they're like vulcan or something....

We'd fry their pitiful cannons and ironclads with the thermal rays of our manipedal fighting machines, then drink their healthy young blood and have a yodelling contest, of course!

Or just nuke 'em from orbit. One or the other.

Seriously, my suspicion is that Wells was sort of on the right track, and that we're going to turn out to be fundamentally and lethally incompatible with any alien biospheres we might encounter, meaning that there aren't any worlds we "can live on" unprotected.

A suicidal risk to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Vulcans might not be the best example for the point. They are innately ultra-violent, manage that violent nature with cold, calculating logic. If they were to find their home world uninhabitable and found another that could act as substitute, simple logic would dictate that the technologically superior species take control of the planet, while the inferior be subjugated or (more efficiently) eliminated. Emotional considerations such as prior occupancy or the eradication of a species would not sway them. Species are eradicated by natural disasters all the time. Consideration irrelevant.

Our own planet is in danger of becoming uninhabitable at some point in the not-too-distant future. Say we had the technology to Terraform Mars - drop a Genesis device, so to speak, and cover the planet with Earth flora and make the atmosphere breathable and relatively comfortable almost overnight. now suppose in so doing, we would annihilate millions of types of Martian bacteria, hundreds of species of worms and microbial insects - countless forms of life which might or might not to one degree or another be sentient. Think we'd feel a twinge of conscience about doing it? Think PETA would raise a stink?

Now imagine any species with the technology to get from one solar system or galaxy to another. How much more advanced than us would they have to be to manipulate a wormhole for transit? Advanced enough that they might be likely to see us as of no more consequence than indigenous squirrels? Would they engage in some cosmic catch-and-release research program (like the grays do?), or just vaporize us and be done with it? They might be immature and wicked enough to engage in Machiavellian playacting in order to carry out an infiltration scheme for World Domination like the Reptoids in V, or the aliens in The X Files - but that's really a lot of unnecessary trouble to go to, dontcha think? I mean, at the stage where you can dimension-hop through your own Tesseract, Phasers and Transporters would be childrens' toys. Spaceships...puh-leeeze...


Of course, how would we go about fighting off something like that? Help, bacteria! Help!

Last edited by Willard on 26 Apr 2010, 1:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The more likely threat would be microbes and diseases against which human immune systems have absolutely no defense.