Humanity should be wary of seeking out contact with alien civilizations warns Stephen Hawking.
Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn’t turn out so well.
In 2010, the famed astrophysicist said that intelligent aliens may be rapacious marauders, roaming the cosmos in search of resources to plunder and planets to conquer and colonize.
“One day, we might receive a signal from a planet like this,” Hawking says in the documentary ‘Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places’, referring to a potentially habitable alien world known as Gliese 832c. “But we should be wary of answering back. Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn’t turn out so well.”
For what it’s worth, some other astronomers believe Hawking’s caution is unwarranted. Any alien civilization advanced enough to come to Earth would surely already know of humans’ existence via the radio and TV signals that humanity has been sending out into space since 1900 or so, this line of thinking goes.
Do you believe alien life exists elsewhere in the universe?
