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Stephen Hawking Wants To Find Aliens Before They Find Us (cnet.com)
Stephen Hawking is again reminding people that perhaps shouting about our existence to aliens is not the right way to go about it, especially if those aliens are more technologically advanced. In his new half-hour program dubbed, Stephen Hawking's Favorite Places, the theoretical physicist and cosmologist said (via CNET):"If intelligent life has evolved (on Gliese 832c), we should be able to hear it," he says while hovering over the exoplanet in the animated "U.S.S. Hawking." "One day we might receive a signal from a planet like this, but we should be wary of answering back. Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn't turn out so well." Hawking manages to be both worried about exposing our civilization to aliens and excited about finding them. He supports not only Breakthrough: Listen, but also Breakthrough: Starshot, another initiative that aims to send tiny nanocraft to our closest neighboring star system, which was recently found to have an Earth-like planet.
would know that TV and radio -- except for AM -- transmitters are designed so as not to radiate energy where it's wasted (like, for example, towards the sky). Plus, of course, the transition to fiber optics reducing EM emissions even further.
If we figured that out pretty soon after inventing radio, it stands to reason that ETs would have also.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
There's no possibility that aliens capable of FTL would find us remotely interesting. Once you get to that technology, energy and resource problems either have been solved, or become very easily solvable. In addition, given that FTL is far more likely to be developed using AI rather than human intelligence, space faring races (if they bother to be space faring) are more likely to be 2nd order intelligences (i.e. artificial intelligences),rather than 1st order, genetically based naturally developing intelligences).
Bottom line? To space faring AIs, we're squirrels. Our nuts are safe. Really.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Bet you'll never find me.
native americans wanted to find us before we found them...
...humans are just sooo gosh darned tasty that alien civilizations will pay top dollar for a nibble here and there?
If would be just plain bad business to deny them
An entrepreneurial man could lure the niggers out of Charlotte with food trucks...
The Pied Piper Fried Chicken franchise awaits your business.
It makes sense to guess that the dominant species on other worlds got to the top of the food chain because they're also the most skillful killers. It's wishful thinking to suppose that a more technically advanced civilization would be more peaceful and tolerant. Just like it was wishful thinking for the Aztecs to give the Spanish gold and hope they'd go away.
He's right. We should be careful about broadcasting our presence around the 'verse.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
There are no little green men out there Hawkins. There's no one out there and we're quite likely the most advanced species. No one is coming to make contact and there is no one we can make contact to.
Or did you not somehow get that E=MC2 obviously has not been beaten and the immense distances that we cant reach with fesible technolgy in the next 1000 years?
Idiot, worry about things that are in some way fesible.
We all know that "Mr. Hawking" is in fact an alien, residing on our planet to observe us.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The hunter becomes the hunted.
"Nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." -- Stephen Hawking
Once
The answer to the Fermi Paradox: Alien civilizations are cowards, just like us.
He was the guy who basically married general relativity to quantum mechanics, and catapulted our understanding of stellar phenomenon forward by a substantial amount. Long after your bones are dust, people are going to remember him for his important contributions to science.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
by being an "exotic" mouthpiece for mainstream propaganda
How has he advanced science again?
Certainly not by this
Governments are already aware of at least 4 different species whether they like it or not.
(Public) First Contact will be allowed to happen by ~2024 since by then everyone else will realize it isn't that big of a deal.
People will first be angry at what they are doing to "our" planet, and then reluctantly agree.
Black holes and big bang stuff. You know, obscure shit no one cares about.
"Dumbass" is a good description of anyone who believes aliens are particularly likely to be benevolent. The evolution of altruism is by no means universal, particularly altruism towards different species.
If he wasn't crippled, you wouldn't have any idea who he is.
Bane/10.
We're not quiet. Aliens will reason that we must have superior technology. They duck and hope we don't find them. Well, the truth is anyone's guess and this guess was mine.
Bert
Who at times thinks he hears aliens still laughing for a prank long time ago where they secretly pulled a dead corpse from a cave three days after he died.
If you're referring to his lost "bets", my understanding was that he was purposefully making tongue-in-cheek bets against what his gut told him. He's probably not the most important scientist of his generation, but he's not lower-rung. Singularity theory is quite important because that's one of the main areas where our current science breaks down, and he's made some important contributions there.
Yes, he has some extra celebrity because of his medical condition. So what? I wouldn't begrudge him that.
Not to be crass, but dude, get a life and a clue because you are about done here..
There is a near zero chance intelligent life exists anyplace near enough to us that we could detect it, even if we listened really hard. The booming level of local noise and background noise makes the chances of us hearing some signal from 100 light years away less likely than hearing a pin drop a mile away while standing in the middle of a rock concert.
PLUS, if we did happen to get *really* lucky and did happen to catch a signal that was provably not naturally occurring but had to be from intelligent life outside our solar system, what's the chance somebody on the other end would be listening to our reply or that any kind of meaningful conversation is going to take place with round trip times measured in at least decades and likely centuries? And who's to say the other end would be listening that long? Certinally you will never know as your illness is sure to take your life decades if not centuries before confirmation could possibly come.
Finally, in the unlikely event we do find something, we are NEVER going to go there. There is no way we can build a ship capable of protecting and sustaining human life for the length of time required for a one way trip. That is, of course, assuming Einstein was right with that pesky relativity thing which makes "faster than light" travel pretty much impossible.
So Stephen, stop with the attention getting PR stunts like these and concentrate on making the best use of your last few years. Perhaps a bit of soul searching about your mortality and do a bit of thinking about the meaning of life, death and the futility of it all for someone with your world view.. As it stand, is sure seems like you are grasping at straws, trying to "make a name" for yourself in your closing days. Sir, with all due respect, you've already done that better than most, you don't need to play this desperate game to get attention. Come to terms with yourself and don't soil your reputation with such unnecessary stuff....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Let them shoot down the drone.
Earth declares war
Earth sends nanocraft with We come in peace post-it
Earth-base prepares 10 megaton warhead for 'signature required priority overnight' delivery
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Got your aliens right here: https://youtu.be/AdZrDBDGtso
He's a mess and he has low ratings. He's a loser and at least an 8-handicap golfer. Sad! And what's with that voice, right? [imitates Stephen Hawking]
When I'm president, you can bet the aliens will know where we are.
You are welcome on my lawn.
We are a threat to ourselves and in a hundred years (if we survive them intact) a threat to everyone else in the galaxy. Much of Star Trek on this is plausible. They are likely to intervene at least before we become a threat to them.
Then there's the question of what they might want from us. Do we have any resources here that they might want? Any data? That is harder to understand but we cannot rule it out. For that reason, I agree with Hawking. Why take the risk?
To make America Great Again, we should send all the crippled back to -- where do they come from, again?
I actually started my analysis of the Fermi Paradox from the other side. What if some civilization wanted to be noticed? Turns out to be a relatively minor problem, which strongly indicates that no one wants to be noticed. Alternatively, they tried it and got shut up quickly. Bottom line is that no one is trying right now (where now includes the 100,000 years it would take to span our galaxy--still an extremely small value of "now" on the galactic scale).
My position has evolved over the years, but I'm basically standing on the position that the synthetic intelligences (ASIs) that replace the naturally evolved intelligences like us are amused. They are watching and probably gambling quatloos on whether we create ASI successors before exterminating ourselves. Longer version at:
https://ello.co/shanen0/post/v...
Again hoping for "funny" or "insightful" comments at Slashdot, but it's a young article, soon to become an obsolete article...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Some of them are just catching "I Love Lucy" and "Abbott and Costello". Maybe it will keep them occupied for 50 years or so... If they were more advanced than we are, they won't be for long.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
D.C.
No they won't. They'll remember him for being a cripple that speaks with a monotone robotic voice machine.
Hawking is on the lower rung of great scientists, a lot of this theories have been debunked. He just throws out so many that when a couple turn out right, we all give him a standing ovation. If he wasn't crippled, you wouldn't have any idea who he is.
I wasn't sure if you were joking or not, then I noticed you posted this garbage anonymously, so I must assume you were indeed joking. Hawking's greatest achievement may not be his scholarly work but instead the great success he has had in communicating arcane science to the masses and convincing them to think about matters like this in an intelligent, inquisitive way. Guys like Hawking, Tyson, Sagan, and even Bill Nye and Don Herbert have arguably had as big of an impact on society as have Einstein, Bohr, or Tesla. They make otherwise dense and dry topics exciting and interesting, and if there's one thing we need it's more people of all ages maintaining an interest in science, and being open to learning and continuing to investigate the workings of the universe.
You could have said your piece in a less offensive way, too.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
... and thus consider all biological lifeforms inherently dangerous.
When it gets to within 2 light years, it should overshoot and swing around a star and come in from the other direction for tactical sanity.
Any advanced civilization would understand that cooperation always wins, and would never be the first to declare war They might also look just like humans... (might not be as improbable as everyone thinks, there might be only one path to consciousness)
Where physics meets religion.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Hopefully they'll treat us better than we treat lower life-forms. Especially if we happen to taste good to them.
Please stick to hard sciences. A civilization as advanced as the one you suggest would recognize that a new civilization represents more opportunity. Destroying such a civilization would represent an enormous amount of resource destruction for the purposes of... nothing. Your Columbus analogy is a perfect example of your complete ignorance of the understanding of anything outside hard sciences. I thank you for your contributions to hard sciences, and your ability and efforts in communicating these concepts to the rest of, but, please, keep these personal opinions on other matters to yourself.
The likelihood that another life form traveled the 4.5 billion year path to intelligence, as we did, is close to zero. It assumes that there is a bias toward intelligence in evolution, of which there is no evidence whatsoever. The dinosaurs ruled the Earth for hundreds of millions of years and probably still would if the Chicxulub asteroid had not hit the Earth 65 million years ago, part of a very particular series of events over 4.5 billion years. Chimpanzees, who share 99.9 percent of our DNA are not us. They build no cities, write no great books, land on no moons. Hawking has a teenagers' science-fiction understanding it seems outside of Black Holes. And as far as the "Fermi Paradox" is concerned, it is not a paradox at all. We are not living on the Earth, we ARE the Earth. We are not going to settle the Galaxy, or even the Solar System. We can live nowhere else. We are not mere visitors to the surface of the Earth. We are an intrinsic part of the Earth. It would be the same for any "intelligent species." End of question.
E Proelio Veritas.
Logically, the encounter between us and a more advanced society would be less like "Indians and Columbus" and more like "single-celled bacteria and humans".
Assuming the universe is ~15bn years, and the earth's existence to-date (including the evolution of our stellar system, and the giant star from whose planetary nebula we formed) took about 6bn years to evolve from essentially nothing, that means that a more advanced civilization could be anywhere from 0 to 9bn years ahead of us. Let's assume conservatively they're "only" a billion or two years ahead.
On earth 2bn years ago we were in the age of multicellular microorganisms.
So my guess is that they won't even notice us, nor we really even comprehend them, much less "try to communicate".
It's entirely possible that things we've rationalized away, that we simply don't really understand, may be the result of their activity on an incomprehensible scale. When some bored pre-sociopathic kid steps on an anthill, do they have great elaborate ant-scientist rationales for "tectonic migration" to rationally explain why the catastrophe?
-Styopa
I wonder how many people are a little miffed about these people getting credit for their innate curiosity and how many give them credit for giving them the curiosity that was in them all along.
... shouting about our existence to aliens is not the right way to go about it, ...
I heard that Trump is going to build a Space Wall. Not sure who's going to pay for it though. :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If you found a civilization nearby that was just a more technologically advanced version of us, would you want to make contact with them?
No, he did nothing of the sort. No one has successfully "married general relativity to quantum mechanics", that is beyond present day physics.
He has applied quantum thermodynamics to certain aspects of a black hole, but that is not the same thing.
Which bit? Black holes, the likelihood of intelligent life evolving on other planets or the evolutionary stability of universal altruism towards conscious creatures? None of these things involves, invokes or borders on religion.
Donald Trump is a trisolarian.
If we are in the alien's simulation, of course we will never find those aliens.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NUX6pfXRCLA
unless some alien manages to make himself incarnate in the simulation. How would he do that, make a virgin pregnant maybe?
Or, how many people have curiosity as an innate characteristic, but would have never tapped it to useful ends were there not voices like Hawking's in our society.
They could have, instead, become curious about the Kardashians' dinner or something.
If there were aliens more advanced than us, they would have burned through all of their resources long ago.
"Hawking is on the lower rung of great scientists, a lot of this theories have been debunked. "
Bow before the recipient of the Anonymous Internet Keyboard Prize! Okay, now explain to us why Kepler was a chump, and how the orbit of Jupiter can be explained in epicycles.
To make America Great Again, we should send all the crippled back to -- where do they come from, again?
Right at the moment, Brazil.
Useful ends... now that's where knowing about Ecclesiastes and Nietzsche come in handy. I decide for myself what I find useful and fully impose upon the world to bring that about. If a God created me, he built those things into me. If a God is perfect then he wants for me what I want for me only is better at knowing the whole situation. If aliens come, I will be useful to them in some form and they will share resources with me. Of course there is the possibility that this me will die, but the universe is a big place and I feel there is much certainty that another such as me will crop up. A portion of the universe will reflect my will.
the energy cost of travelling to another solar system is so high, that other races will not "take over" another system for the resources. local resources will be infinitely cheaper. even trying to bioengineer our planet for their kind of life is sort of a waste of energy. its gonna be an exchange of data, thats it. hell, cheaper to transmit our DNA structure so that other civilizations can grow us locally.
Very true.
far more advance than we are. We have been using radio for a century or so. So for us to find aliens less advance than we are they would have to be between 10 to 100 years less advance than us. On the other hand the aliens could be billions of years more advance. That is a far bigger space. So the odds are the aliens are far more advance.
Whenever I'm out of my mind enough to look at the world as an outsider, I would advise any aliens to take off and nuke the site from orbit. Though they certainly have some way to just kill off the human species and let evolution try again. Come back in a million years (surely you've managed age) and check if earth intelligence v2.0 is better.
We definitely want to find them first, so we can check if we can conquer, enslave and economically exploit them. If not, to buy us time to improve our military until we can. We didn't claw our way to the top of the food chain for no reason, right?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
some sink, some rise, but we're all turds in the toilet of time, awaiting the cosmic flush
also, my captcha was "invalids", lol
We expect aliens to match our size to some respect, what if they do not?
What if there is intelligent bacteria, or life of a scale that makes our size as bacteria to the aliens, what if our solar systems are but atoms to a larger realm?
How has he advanced science again?
In ways an actual dumb-ass like you are unable to comprehend, obviously.
Now fuck off and play with whatever it is you play with.
Moron.
If THEY are more technologically advanced than we are, THEY already know about us. Or at least they know that there's something peculiar about the third planet around our sun, with its nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere and such.
A portion of the universe will reflect my will.
You have no will. It is an illusion. There is no proof free will exists and as such, believing in it is no better than religion.
As in, the age of the universe? If aliens existed, they would be so far advanced that he, you and anyone else could even fathom it. Now lets put it this way, would we as humans go our of our way to step on a a tiny ant colony in the middle of the desert in Australia?
when the more advanced aliens come he cant run very fast
Once an alien society hears from us, they'll probably think twice about answering us.
You know who tries to locate someone without being noticed? Predators. This sounds like a good way to make aliens wary of us, especially if we're unsuccessful. And it stands to reason that we would be unsuccessful if they're more technologically advanced than us. If they're not, then we have little to be afraid of anyway.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
He did a lot of work on Black hole thermodynamics, such as predicting Hawking radiation.
It's not even an engagement, just a quickie up against a wall.
Our planet is run by powerful families and negative extraterrestrial races. Theirs is this system of slavery we move in (this is why The Matrix had so much impact, because it was a wake up call). Liberation is happening, slowly, but it is starting to speed up as the population wakes up and gets proper information. It is so easy now to talk about ETs, something which would have been laughable a few years ago, and there is much more than little grey men out there. Stephen has a point, we cannot be so naive to believe that all is heavenly out there, but by the way he presents his ideas, it feels as if he is using his name to further a xenophobic agenda. This I disagree with. Victory of the light!
You could have said your piece in a less offensive way, too.
Hello, and welcome to the internet.
Who ordered that?
This. I know Ste personally. Have known him for 30 years. His biggest fear is the fear of being irrelevant. And he accrues threories the way people with self confidence issues accrue selfies on their Facebook profiles. His greatest wish is to be remembered like Einstein - but while he's still alive. His greatest pet peeve? People who actually know Ste applauding his every theory; they know he's desperate, he knows they know he's desperate, they know that he knows they know he's desperate, but they fake their admiration. It peeves him so because these fakers (well, "bullshitters", in his words) are the ones he's so desperate to impress the most.
"You could have said your piece in a less offensive way, too."
Nothing could be more offensive towards Hawking then comparing him to Bill Nye.
And don't hide behind AC if you want another reply.
There's no possibility that aliens capable of FTL would find us remotely interesting.
They don't have to find us interesting, just tasty.
Someone should just slit your throat and see if anything useful comes out of you. We certainly haven't found anything useful coming out of your mouth.
We get it, you're nobody and this makes you mad.
That was Einstein not this dumb ass that only sells things and if believes we are here by mere chance and not something planned, only the structure and properties of the water seems to be designed by some super intelligence beings. Also is astonished to see that he actually thinks they have not already found us . Much more better and worth to read Carl Sagan
Not yet because we are still in a very retarded spiritual evolution. No way a civilization could advance with such stupid selfish way of thinking
an ofense is what is meant it to be
Your Dad's Cock? It all makes sense now.