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April 25, 2010
Hawking on Extraterrestrial LifeGrabbing headlines on a slow-news weekend is Stephen Hawking's Discovery Channel series in which he repeats the Sagan view on the likelihood for extraterrestrial life: Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved. He's far from the first to come to that conclusion. Scientists have long been conjecturing that extraterrestrial microbes are present in our own solar system. For the past decade, scientists have been trying to prove that meteorites that originated on Mars contain evidence of such life. However, he also thinks that some extraterrestrial life may develop to intelligence that can travel between stars. His advice on that issue is, well, alarmist: Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity. Well, it's definitely not my area of expertise, but his discussion seems contradictory. He goes from saying that there are likely billions of planets out there (read "resources"), but that aliens might target Earth because planetary resources are scarce. I'm not buying that. Any species that has viable interplanetary travel isn't going to need any specific resource that's found only on Earth or that can only be made from elements found only on Earth (ain't no such thing). No, the real danger from contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life is cultural. Finding out your kind is a late-developing and not very advanced one-of-many tends to derail your development. Hawking's comparison to the "Big Oops" when Columbus ran into America and called it India is apt. Culturally, the societies of the Early American Immigrants (as I like to call them) ended up stressed until they broke, even aside from the things that came with colonization of the Americas. The introduction of new ways of thinking and, especially, new technologies irrevocably altered the culture and would have destroyed what existed in the Americas regardless of whether colonization occurred. In short, what we should worry about is the introduction of alien thought... Except not. Because there ain't no aliens coming to visit. Even if you buy into the idea that extraterrestrial intelligences exist or will exist and that extrasolar travel is feasible at some level of development, the distances between stars are so incomprehensibly vast that interplanetary species aren't likely to come across each other within the lifetime of their species. The same "numbers alone" that Hawking hawks to infer the existence of life out there work against him when considering the possibility that some of that life will ever be in a position to make contact. | Recent Comments
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No, Children, You're Wrong. Once Upon A Time There Was An ONT Lovebomb Cafe The Feds Investigated James Biden's Americore Transactions NYC Begins Handing Out Free Cash Cards to Illegal Aliens, Worth $1200+ Every Month Fire Alarm Puller Jamaal Bowman, Who Has Previously Pushed "Bush Did 911" Trutherism Conspiracy Theories, Now Claims That Jews Are Fabricating Evidence About Hamas' Rape Teams Federal Appeals Court Rules that Pennsylania Must Verify Signatures for Mail-In Voting Jon Stewart Defrauded New York By Severely Undervaluing Home, Depriving New York of the Property Taxes It Deserved Democrat Mega-Donor Sam Bankman-Fried Sentenced to 25 Years for Swindling Billions from Customers Chief Democrat Witness Against Trump in Phony Ukranian Phone Call Impeachment Registers as a Foreign Agent for, Get This, Ukraine Search
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