April 29, 2010
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Is Stephen Hawking right about aliens?
Just my two cents on this: Aliens may exist but contact would hurt humans: Hawking.
Seems to me that if we are going with the human precedence of amoral colonialism, we'd have to admit that there are significant differences. Being able to send people out on boats across the ocean requires a completely different cultural posture than sending spaceships across many many light years. For our planet to get even slightly out and about into our own solar system even, is likely to require another hundred years or so of not destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons and a whole lot of international cooperation. Hence, we're not likely to be the pirates of space (as cool as that sounds). Any intelligent species that is able and willing to get along with itself long enough to really scale all the improbabilities may well be more socially adjusted than we are.
At least there's at least as good a chance they'll be nice aliens rather than evil ones. That's all I'm saying. And I think the probability (assuming there's even a chance in hell there are aliens regardless) might even favor morally benevolent aliens.
But who knows.
Ben
Comments (8)
I came to the same conclusion. While it is possible to have, as you say, space pirates out there, it seems more likely that any species capable of progressing to such an advanced state would have culturally matured with its technology. For them not to have killed themselves would seem to require a level of cooperation that at least would put them on a moral level of not squashing every other intelligent species it comes across like the conquistadors did to the natives.
@bryangoodrich - Cool.
This came up in the Q&A at a William Lane Craig lecture I was at last night . . . he is not impressed with the speculation of astronomers on whether aliens exist or not. He said the reasoning is more or less driven by "could all that space really be wasted?"
I need to look something up about it . . . I read a book about the history of scientific discoveries called A Short History of Nearly Everything . . .and he claimed that there was good evidence there were millions of other alien civilizations already at an advanced stage. I guess that's bunk? I guess I have to look into it . . . if only I could remember the guy's name he said was the one who proposed that idea . . .
Here we go: http://www.astronomycast.com/transcripts/AstroCast-070212_transcript.pdf
The guy's name was Frank Drake, and came up with something called The Drake Equation as a way to calculate how much life probably exists elsewhere in the universe.
@StrokeofThought - Yeah, we don't have the information necessary to solve the Drake equation, so it's all speculation.
@WAR_ON_ERROR -
That's what I figured. I remember a few months ago when they announced there were 30 or so more planets discovered. The total was something like a couple hundred total planets ever discovered. So apparently we'll have to sit on it until we can actually find a lot more planets.
War is the ultimate diversion of technology.
@StrokeofThought - Wikipedia claims there are 453 confirmed extrasolar planets, btw.