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Stephen Hawking: If aliens call, we should be 'wary of answering'

Cardinal said:
If it came to war, an alien civilization with interstellar travel would have an infinite variety of ways to squash us like bugs if that was their pleasure.
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This is assuming that the alien species has no greater interest in the galaxy around them than spending a couple days exterminating one of the only natural biospheres in the galaxy. Planets in the habitable zone of their solar system with nickel-iron cores and sustainable atmospheres are unimaginably rare, and on a galactic scale are literally priceless - how many of those ways prevent any kind of counterattack without completely ruining that precious, precious band of livable environment?
 
Screw that.

If an alien race calls...I am answering.

Maybe they have solutions to many of Earth's problems.

And if the are just looking for a race to conquer...so be it.

Playing it safe is for the weak.


Besides, the 'New World' analogy is inaccurate. The Spanish/Europe were going to conquer the America's whether they were inhabited or not. Had the natives hid for as long as possible they still would have been conquered and they still would have been mostly wiped out by disease.
 
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Cardinal said:
They've been sticking things up our butts since the 1940's. I think they've got all the human samples they need.
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and those are either very obvious hoaxes, or very sloppy reconnaissance missions that HAVEN'T led to the mass extermination of humanity after about 70 - 80 years. I think we've got a shot at protecting ourselves, assuming it does somehow come to war.
 
Jesse Booth said:
Without obtaining a human sample first? There's a possibility that whatever we encounter won't even be carbon based, and any kind of diseases they're aware of wouldn't even recognize us as life forms, and vise-versa. How would they engineer a virus to kill us without collecting a decent sample size of the species they know nothing about and risking detection? How many ships would it take to surround a planet, and how quickly do you think people would head for the hills if one of our numerous space programs or countless telescopes caught sight of one of these ships surrounding our planet? Don't forget that a large majority of the actual weaponry that would give us any kind of edge against an alien force in naval-based, good luck hitting all of those with contagions as well.

Not to mention, in modern times we're clean enough that viruses have a far more difficult time spreading than they have in previous eras.
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I've already abducted a bunch of humans and have been studying them for a hundred years or more. duh! With our advanced technology we've already extended our lives via genetic rejuvenation expanding our life expectancy to a millennium.
 
Fishking said:
I've already abducted a bunch of humans and have been studying them for a hundred years or more. duh! With our advanced technology we've already extended our lives via genetic rejuvenation expanding our life expectancy to a millennium.
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And yet we're still here. Fancy that. ;)
 
Any species advanced enough to travel to us probably has a very high degree of self-awareness and respect for life, otherwise they would not have survived the trials of their own planet.

Hawking's statement is based on what humans would do because we are not yet at that point of advancement.
 
Northern Light said:
Any species advanced enough to travel to us probably has a very high degree of self-awareness and respect for life, otherwise they would not have survived the trials of their own planet.

Hawking's statement is based on what humans would do because we are not yet at that point of advancement.
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That's assuming the natural course of all sentient life is to become more peaceful. While we can make an argument that human life at the very least has that tendency, we cannot make any assumptions about extraterrestrial life. I'm going out on a limb even in assuming that they need a reason or purpose to travel across the galaxy.
 
I for one, welcome our new overlords...

 
This is why we need Trump. He would build a wall around the earth and make the aliens pay for it.
 
Jesse Booth said:
A fantastic meme, and one that needs to be extended to the entire length of the original song if you ask me.
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Agreed. A fantastic meme.

Just like how Harambe was a fantastic gorilla.

#PrayForHarambe
 
sanman said:
Reknowned physicist Stephen Hawking has warned that if we do receive message signals from extraterrestrial life, we should be wary about responding to them, lest we suffer the catastrophe of alien invasion as a result:

Stephen Hawking: If aliens call, we should be 'wary of answering'
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um haven't we been beaming are location out into space for decades?

hell an interstellar civilization could probably build telescopes that would tip them off to us or self replicating probes to scour the entire galaxy with

it kind of worrisome an advanced civ has not spread across the entire galaxy yet
 
Jesse Booth said:
Humans are far, far more destructive than we give ourselves credit for. I think we could handle ourselves fairly effectively if it came to war.
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but aliens might be the same way only with thousands or millions of years on us technology wise possibly with the resources of multiple star systems and biological and cybernetic enhancements that make them stronger faster and smarter if they are not just pure machines
 
Yeah but comparing to Columbus is dumb. We have nothing materially they would want to make the trip for
 
Jesse Booth said:
The U.S. Army Is Firing 100 Mile Range, 5,000 Mile Per Hour 'Big' Guns | The National Interest Blog

And that's just the infant stage of our rail gun studies. Between that and nukes, I think we could handle alien life somewhat competently. And besides, human history and even biology is ludicrously bloody. We set off nuclear weapons in our ONLY biosphere, we have enough firepower stored up to literally end all life on earth, we're the greatest pursuit hunters the planet has ever crafted, and we're one of, if not the most adaptable species in natural history. We drive countless species to extinction through disinterested negligence. For Christ's sake, we nailed our god to a stick!
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ya but you have no one else to compare us to and ate technology even for are weapons is still in its infancy as you say

if aliens jsut dont want competition down the line they dont need to subdue us just destroy us all which should be easy for them if they can get to us
 
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