Hawking Advises Against Alien Contact

If E.T. Ccalls, don't pick up. That's the advice from famed physicist Stephen Hawking. Hawking believes that life most certainly exists on other planets, but most likely consists of small microbes of animals. However, Hawking says in his new Discovery series “Into the Universe” that if intelligent life is exploring space, they are most likely nomads seeking to conquer and colonize.

Hawking compares this to Columbus' discovery of America, which he states, “didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

Do you believe in Hawking's theories about life on other planets? Do you think we will ever make contact with aliens?

Nikki Lorenzini
I really do not believe in aliens. My theory is, if aliens do exist, why haven't we come in contact with them before? If they are like nomads, why haven't they already plopped themselves onto our planet already? And what makes us so important that they would colonize here, on earth. There are still 8 other planets that they can conquer and colonize. What makes us think that we're that great that they just have to colonize us now?

Also, he's saying that they will be small microbes of animals. So, what makes us think that they are not have not come in contact them already, and categorized them under some new species that we just discovered. If aliens are real, how would we really know what they look like? For all we know, they can be a new form of caterpillar they discover in some remote island off of Australia in a year or two.

I would like to see Hawking spend some time studying something more substantial, like how to save the planet from ourselves than from an impending doom of aliens that we have yet still to discover.

David Loftus
A little exposure to the mind-bogglingly massive numbers of galaxies and stars out there (and therefore, logically speaking, planets as well), and the similarly mind-boggling amount of time most of them have been in existence, should convince anyone that the odds of there being other life in the universe are so big that it’s more of a certainty than a question for debate. Why haven’t we heard from it?

If I may respond to the questions raised by Ms. Lorenzini, to ask why aliens have not contacted us before is perhaps not to consider (for one thing) the forbidding logistical challenges of space travel (tremendous distances, versus the amount of fuel and probably breathable atmosphere one must bring along), and (for another) the minuscule amount of time we inhabit and take for granted as being “the whole picture.” We are as mayflies, who live but a few minutes to a few days (looking them up on Wikipedia, I am charmed to learn their taxonomic Order is “Ephemeroptera”), wondering why Plato hasn’t called us on the phone. Perhaps aliens are on their way toward Earth, and have been for centuries, but they have a lot of ground (err, space) to cover and our planet is so tiny, such a dust speck on the vast canvas of the universe, that it will take them an unimaginable amount of time to get here, and they may just miss us (or may have already). Another possibility is that those forbidding distances and logistics tend to heighten the chances that life on other heavenly bodies tends to stay where it is until either its own mistakes or planetary cataclysm destroy it and make room for another iteration of life (as may happen to homo sapiens). In any case, we’re more likely to hear from them, sending electromagnetic messages across that great vastness, just the way we are with SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence project).

My suspicion is that in raising the issue, Hawking was mainly trying to start a little controversy among his colleagues and the relatively small circle of fans of his work and cosmology in general; and to remind everybody that he’s still alive and kicking -- no small matter, since he’s been thinking, writing, and living for decades with a neuro-muscular dystrophy related to ALS that has left him nearly entirely paralyzed. If I may toot my own horn in a small way, one of my favorite writers, Harlan Ellison, was commissioned by National Public Radio in 1994 to write a holiday story, and he composed a futuristic Chanukah tale called “Go Toward the Light” about a scientist who uses time travel to go back to the Maccabean Revolt (2nd century BCE in Jerusalem), when a mere 10,000 Jews out-fought 60,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry under the Syrian king Antiochus; and the men from the future are basically responsible for the “miracle of the oil” that inspires the menorah lighting of the Chanukah holiday. I had the chance to proof-read and fact-check the story before it was published in book form, in the collection titled Slippage, and I objected to a passing reference to a still-active Stephen Hawking in a story that clearly is set well into the 21st century. So in the version printed in the 1997 story collection, Ellison inserted a reference to a scientific advancement that has Hawking still going strong. Maybe not as cool as first contact with aliens -- or the fact that Hawking is still doing his thing today on his own steam -- but I was kind of pleased.