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| 2010/4/25-5/10 [Politics/Foreign/Asia/China, Politics/Foreign/Europe] UID:53801 Activity:low |
4/25 "Aliens may exist but contact would hurt humans"
http://www.csua.org/u/qmq (news.yahoo.com)
Normally I'd just shrug it off when I hear comments like this, but
this time the one who said it was Stephen Hawking.
\_ Why? what aspect of Hawking's intelligence makes him any more
compelling than the 1000s of others who have pointed out this
analogy?
\_ Only Arizona will be safe.
"White man may exist to the east but may hurt our tribe, pocahontas."
\_ A follow-up article: http://www.csua.org/u/qo0
'"Anything that we have here, they could find where they live,"
Shostak said. If there was a resource found on Earth that did not
exist on the aliens' home planet, there would certainly be easier
ways to get or make the resource than coming here.'
I wonder if the Native Americans had similar reasoning before
Columbus arrived.
\_ It's not about the resource, but the cost of obtaining a
resource. There was silver and gold in europe but there was
a way cheaper way to get it from the new world. I think the
same happens today with food, it's cheaper to import than
grow your own. Same with labor (cheaper to buy chinese than
local). Alien physiology is unknowable, but the steady law
of supply/demand is a constant in the universe.
\_ Unless they have replicators.
\_ I'll posit that once a civilization has those deus ex
machines to make anything from nothing, it won't bother
to explore much, or care much, about anything anymore. |
| 7/8 |
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| www.csua.org/u/qmq -> news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100425/sc_afp/scienceastronomyextraterrestrialhawking Aliens may exist but contact would hurt humans: Hawking AFP/Getty Images/File - Aliens may exist but mankind should avoid contact with them as the consequences could be devastating, ... ABC News Sun Apr 25, 6:56 pm ET LONDON (AFP) - Aliens may exist but mankind should avoid contact with them as the consequences could be devastating, British scientist Stephen Hawking warned Sunday. "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," said the astrophysicist in a new television series, according to British media reports. The programmes depict an imagined universe featuring alien life forms in huge spaceships on the hunt for resources after draining their own planet dry. "Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach," warned Hawking. The doomsday scenario is suggested in the series "Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking" on the Discovery Channel, which began airing in the United States on Sunday. On the probability of alien life existing, he says: "To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. "The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like." Glowing squid-like creatures, herds of herbivores that can hang onto a cliff face and bright yellow predators that kill their prey with stinging tails are among the creatures that stalk the scientist's fantastical cosmos. Mankind has already made a number of attempts to contact extraterrestrial civilisations. In 2008, American space agency NASA beamed the Beatles song "Across the Universe" into deep space to send a message of peace to any alien that happens to be in the region of Polaris -- also known as the North Star -- in 2439. But the history of humanity's efforts to contact aliens stretches back some years. The US probes Pioneer 10 and 11 were launched in 1972 and 1973 bearing plaques of a naked man and woman and symbols seeking to convey the positions of the Earth and the Sun. Voyager 1 and 2, launched in 1977, each carry a gold-plated copper phonogram disk with recordings of sounds and images on Earth. Report Abuse Perhaps there is another scenario Mr Hawking might want to consider. Even if life elsewhere in the universe is reasonable to consider, long distance space travel maybe just as impractical for them as it is for us. If any race of creatures is ever advanced enough to travel thousands of light years, they will probably have managed to get a few things right at home first. Human beings don't need to deplete all available resources, we can learn to find ecological balance with our environment and stop over-populating. It means we will have to mature politically, economically and spiritually first but who says consciousness can't evolve? Aliens will not need to travel light yrs just to take ours! Biological dangers and compatibility is more of a concern. If alien are capable of visiting us they would have achieved galactic travel as a result of their advanced technology. They could go anywhere in the universe earth and we humans are very insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Probably we could pose more of a danger to them from Earth's pathogens. Report Abuse i think I'd get my resources from a planet that didn't have anything that could get in my way on it. but maybe we are such small specs that theyd wipe us out anyway. The information contained in the AFP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Agence France Presse. |
| www.csua.org/u/qo0 -> news.yahoo.com/s/space/20100429/sc_space/couldextraterrestrialsreallyinvadeearthandhow com - Thu Apr 29, 3:00 pm ET The human race could be devastated if aliens were to learn of our existence and venture to Earth, warned British scientist Stephen Hawking on Sunday. Aliens have already viciously attacked our spacecraft, savagely kidnapped us, heartlessly conducted experiments on us, and mercilessly aimed their death-rays at us, but of course, all of these crimes have been committed only in novels and movies. "They either come here to find some resource they don't have on their own planet, or they want to use us for some unauthorized breeding experiment." These scenarios play on our most primal human fears of losing the resources we need to survive or not being able to reproduce, Shostak said. In reality, it isn't logical to think that aliens would want to do either of those things, Shostak said. Space travel is expensive and requires an enormous investment, he said. "Anything that we have here, they could find where they live," Shostak said. interstellar travel, they would also probably have very advanced robotic machines, Shostak said. If they wanted to research our planet, they would be more likely to send those machines here than to come here themselves. "It's not like, the hatch will open and we'll see a strange, alien paw coming out," he said. Contact with aliens is extremely unlikely, agrees David Morrison, Director of Space at NASA-Ames Research Center. Any communication that may occur would likely be in the form of radio waves sent from one civilization to another, he said. "We're listening for radio signals," Morrison said, "And we can assume that any civilization that we receive a signal from is more advanced than we are." send radio waves for the last century, so if an alien radio signal reaches us from a distant planet hundreds or thousands of light-years away, that civilization would have to be more advanced than ours, Morrison said. Morrison doubts that an advanced alien civilization would come here to harm us. "Someone once suggested that if a civilization can last for hundreds of thousands of years, it almost surely has solved the problems we have. Even if aliens existed, knew about us, and could travel here, they wouldn't be likely to send an army or the equipment needed to launch an attack on the Earth, said science fiction writer Jack McDevitt. "Imagine putting together an invasion force, only to stick them in containers to travel here for years," McDevitt said. Although contact between humans and aliens has been a key part of many of McDevitt's books, he doesn't think that it's likely to actually happen. It would take a great amount of time for aliens to reach Earth, and any civilization capable of this feat would not want to delegate its fighting force to the task, he said. Report Abuse If aliens come to Earth, and maybe they already have, it won't be a mission of War. As we humans evolve we become more civil to other human beings. Aliens with advanced technology would have already evolved to a being that is more civil and caring of other species. The aliens would be explorers just as ourselves, learning about our universe, exploring to unanswered questions. The aliens may find no need to contact us except for curiousity sake of the various life forms that exist on our planet. More than likely we would have no knowledge that they don't already possess. It's calcutated that there are billions upon billions of planets in the universe that have life, if aliens wanted to take over a planet they would take a clean planet with no intelligent species on it to interfere with them. Just to accelerate and then decelerate a space craft that has enough room to hold say about forty people and their supplies to a mere tenth the speed of light would require more raw energy than humankind has generated in the last 5,000 years of human civilization. So you are looking at forty years with impossible energies required just to get to the nearest star. And how likely is it that the nearest advanced civilization would be so close to us? If the nearest civilization is a hundred light years away, at just a tenth the speed of light you are looking at a minimum of a thousand years in transit. Sure you can imagine warp drives or super advanced quantum jump drives or whatever but they simply are fantasy and don't exist and probably never will exist. Any civilization would face the same travel constraints we face. The distances are simply too large, the energy required too hard to generate, and the travel times too long. It's possible, but the fact that we haven't already been visited strongly suggests that the travel distances are just too vast. Report Abuse you know sceintist have already proven the theroy of generating artificail worm hole as possible. we would be likely to just be like animals in a zoo to them. Hopefully they would just be curious about us and go on their way. Cause any kind of conflict with a race that advanced would be very short for us. Report Abuse Well, they could use a Flying Saucer as a weapon. These spheres could be charged up to give a ten million or more volt pulse. Nasa experimented with my invention (I found the Saucer Technology) and caused a black-out in North America , as they neglected to ask me for advice like they were told.. Teller used it in the anti-missile-missile and it worked.. 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