Stephen Hawking warns over making contact with aliens

Page may contain affiliate links. Please see terms for details.

Beardie

Well-Known Member
It's always possible that even if aliens do discover Earth, they may be unable to breathe our atmosphere, or find other aspects of our planet toxic to them. This would place a severe barrier on attempts to raid our resources. One way of overcoming this would be to plant a sort of proxy, or avatar, among us which would bamboozle us into doing the dirty work ourselves. If this happened, it would have tragic consequences for our beautiful, unspoilt environment.


Here, wait a minute...
 

just jim

Guest
Beardie said:
It's always possible that even if aliens do discover Earth, they may be unable to breathe our atmosphere, or find other aspects of our planet toxic to them. This would place a severe barrier on attempts to raid our resources. One way of overcoming this would be to plant a sort of proxy, or avatar, among us which would bamboozle us into doing the dirty work ourselves. If this happened, it would have tragic consequences for our beautiful, unspoilt environment.


Here, wait a minute...

;) You had me at proxy,,,
 

buggi

Bird Saviour
Location
Solihull
actually, i think they will be pretty similar to us. The reason life exists on this planet rather than the others in our solar system is down to a couple of things, in my opinion. The fact that we seem to be the perfect distance from the sun for the perfect climate to survive in (i.e. almost too cold to exist in the poles and almost too hot to survive on the equator but just right in between, so if the planet was nearer or further to the sun we'd be doomed because the temperature would be too hot or too cold to live in). And the fact that we have one moon, which keeps the earth on an axis (two or more moons would see the earth swivelling in all sorts of directions meaning it would be equator hot one day and north pole cold the next, and i saw that on the National Geographic channel before you ask).

So I have deduced that life on this planet only exists because of the range of temperature due to the distance from sun and the fact we have one moon. it doesn't exist on any of the other planets as far as we know (maybe microbes on mars). Therefore life would only exist on a planet that is similar to our own and in that respect, life would probably develop in much the same way and take the same form.

what do you think to my theory (waits for it to be ripped apart)

and if they are similar to us, they will probably come here, kill us, pillage the earth and leave. or they might just pop in for a cuppa
 

Mark_Robson

Senior Member
buggi said:
So I have deduced that life on this planet only exists because of the range of temperature due to the distance from sun and the fact we have one moon. it doesn't exist on any of the other planets as far as we know (maybe microbes on mars). Therefore life would only exist on a planet that is similar to our own and in that respect, life would probably develop in much the same way and take the same form.
That's the obvious conclusion but the experts would totally disagree with you about what form intelligent life might take. We have evolved to our present state because of many flukes and the environment that we live in but lets for the sake of argument pretend the the asteroid that wiped out the Dinosaurs 65 million years ago didn't happen. The dominant species today might be Velociraptor. Or lets go even further back in time to 250 million years ago when over ninety percent of the life on Earthwas wiped out. It was this event killed the big reptiles and allowed the Dinosaurs to evolve. I wonder what intelligent life would look like if that event hadn't occurred?
My point is that intelligent life could take many forms and it may be that we are the only space faring life form that evolved from primates. Our next closest neighbours may have spaceships full of water and may look like Guppies.
 

buggi

Bird Saviour
Location
Solihull
my mum would say that God wouldn't make the same mistake twice, so they'd look totally different from us and probably be quite pleasant ;) Unless of course, it has just occured to me, that we are the 2nd draft and they are not pleasant at all!

watched a programme last night on one of the satellite channels about an alien sighting in america (can't remember which state), that loads of people reported at the same time, jamming police station switchboards. It was quite interesting, they all reported seeing the same thing and they (they being investigators/scientists etc) did a reconstruction of the UFO and how big it would be using all kinds of technology.

the conclusion was that it was definitely an "unidentified" flying object, be it alien or not, totally un-aerodynamic and beyond the capabilities of man. It was interesting to see that so many independent witnesses saw the same thing.
 

marinyork

Resting in suspended Animation
Location
Logopolis
buggi said:
what do you think to my theory (waits for it to be ripped apart)

I think it's a really difficult question to answer. The porridge problem, people argue about a whole host of things. Our planet isn't thought of as particularly special in the sense that it is thought that both Mars and Venus were more similar to us and us them in the past. We only know a limited amount about 300 or so and growing exoplanets.

As for life like us, people have ran simulations on DNA and base 4 came up the best, closely followed by one of the others and the others fairly unlikely.
 

rh100

Well-Known Member
The article also mentions the recent series with Brian Cox, which talked about the presence of water in our own solar system, and the fact that microbes exist in the most inhospitable places in the Earth, except maybe the Atacama Desert, this would make you think that microbes could easily exist out there.

There was a quote by somebody that said something like I find it amazing that there could be life out there, and equally amazing that we could be alone.

Any life out there would surely be a product of it's own environment, and quite possibly unidentifiable by us as being life.
 

Davidc

Guru
Location
Somerset UK
Hawking does say, as do others in the field, that most life elsewhere is probably microbes. It's the exceptions, the advanced possibilities, he's concerned about. What he says does make sense.
 

colly

Re member eR
Location
Leeds
marinyork said:
Cox did mention panspermia and exogenesis, but they've both gone out of fashion.

I've always thought that's a bit of a red herring really. In the same way as the suggestion that most of the water on Earth might have come in on comets.

I mean both theories might actually be how things occurred but that would still beg the same fundamental questions:

How did life evolve and what is the source of the water originally?
 

Globalti

Legendary Member
It would be great if Earth was invaded by a species of metal-eating alien who just happened to enjoy scoffing motor cars for a meal.
 

Mark_Robson

Senior Member
colly said:
I mean both theories might actually be how things occurred but that would still beg the same fundamental questions:

How did life evolve and what is the source of the water originally?
Water atoms, like most other atoms are created by dying stars and after discovering extremophiles on hydrothermal vents scientists have concluded that the only essential condition for life as we know it is liquid H2O. Of course that still doesn't explain how life evolved in the first place, there are lots of theories but no definite answers.
 

MacB

Lover of things that come in 3's
Life existing elsewhere - yes and many times over

Intelligent life elsewhere - I would say yes - however viewing intelligence as an evolutionary step would mean that there was a need for an imperative to force that step.

Intelligent life visiting earth or likely to do so - I struggle with this when faced with the size of the universe and distances involved. I'm also not convinced by the idea of giving aliens, so advanced, primitive human characteristics around empire and domination.
 
Top Bottom