Science Fiction

Stephen Hawking

In a new series on the Discovery Channel, Hawking explains “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans”.

My own thoughts are that it would be extremely hard to predict what intelligent aliens’ intentions might be, therefore it is safest to not have contact with them at all. That means, as Hawking also pointed out, not advertising our presence in the universe. In my opinion, sending out information out into space to meet these hopefully altruistic, nice aliens, as in the Pioneer 10 plaque, is naive and stupid beyond description. How do we know these aliens are going to be nice or even neutral? How do we know they wouldn’t wipe us out on contact? There is no way to know, therefore wisest to assume the worst. In the Army, they have a concept called “radio blackout”, where everyone turns off radio transmissions so that an enemy cannot find your position by triangulation. Could it be that other alien civilizations come to this same conclusion – that they can’t trust anyone else out there, and therefore enforce a permanent, planet-wide radio blackout? That would be one explanation of why we haven’t detected alien radio transmissions.

I also agree with Hawking’s point that just by statistical reasoning, any alien civilization more advanced than us, especially those with the ability of distant space travel, would be advanced to an extreme compared to us – likely by millions of years.

Do aliens have a
human-like form?

Another point where I would side with Stephen Hawking is that animals on other planets would have surprisingly similar bodily arrangements/features as earth animals. I would go so far as to predict intelligent aliens would have a general human-like form, maybe not too unlike the “grays” type that has evolved in the popular imagination. My reasoning is the principle of convergent evolution – that is, that adaptions to very similar environmental/niche conditions produce similar adaptions.

I’ve noticed most theoretical physicists don’t theorize about evolution and life very well, but I have to say, Stephen Hawking does pretty good!

Arthur C. Clarke, whom I consider the best Science Fiction author ever, died in Sri Lanka at age 90. Sri Lanka had been Clarke’s home since 1956. I loved his books because I love “realistic” science fiction. In other words, he really pondered the scientific/technical feasibility, and many of his depicted scenarios were quite feasible in potential technology and cultural contexts. I can never watch that crap on the Sci-Fi Channel after reading Clarke’s books! Arthur C. Clarke might be best known to the general public as co-author of the book/movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. He wrote over 100 works of fiction and non-fiction, including the books Childhood’s End and Rendezvous with Rama.