14 DAY TRIAL // Renowned theoretical physicist and author Stephen Hawking recently said that we should avoid making contact with aliens, even though extraterrestrial life is sure to exist. The expert believes that the probability of other civilizations existing in space is very high, but ads that he fears an encounter would resemble the colonization of the New World by Spanish conquistadors. Obviously, that didn't turn out to well for the Native Americans. Hawking says that we should at least avoid calling for contact.
Over the past decades, various efforts to contact potential civilizations in the Milky Way and beyond have been carried out, either through solid-state means, or through radio waves. Various discs and recordings have been placed on spacecraft sent into deep space, while radio telescopes sent various codes in numerous directions. Astronomers in organizations such as SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) are hopeful that first contact will be made shortly, but Hawking says that we'd be better off on our own, without an alien civilization raiding the Earth for resources.
“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. We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet,” the famous physicist says. According to the BBC News, Hawking told Discovery Channel in a new series that he finds the concept of extraterrestrial life existing elsewhere in the Universe to be valid. “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,” he said.
“Closer to home, the evidence that life could exist on Mars is growing. We will only know for sure when the next generation of spacecraft, fine-tuned to search for life, are launched to the moons of Jupiter and the arid plains of Mars in the coming decades,” says University of Manchester physicist, professor Brian Cox. Astrobiologists say that the chances of life existing in the Milky Way and beyond are very high, but add that most of it may be made out of microbes and other microorganisms. The real challenge is finding more complex organisms. And discovering a civilization that is as advanced as our own, or even more so, is even more difficult.