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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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I seem to recall hearing that, if an identical society to our own were currently orbitting Alpha Centauri, our current radio telescopes would probably be able to detect any high-power military radar sweeps that pass their horizon in our direction, but not much else. So for now at least it seems unlikely that we'll be able to detect planetary "radio leakage", regardless of vertical attenuation.
And the radar point raises another good one: vertical attenuation probably wouldn't make a huge amount of difference for detection. Even if they somehow transmitted a signal perfectly horizontally, it would still head into space as the planet's surface curved away from it, and transmission frequencies would almost certainly be tuned to the most transparent bands in the atmosphere, so atmospheric attenuation probably wouldn't make a huge difference. We'd only get relatively brief, regular bursts of signal as the the transmitter's horizon aligned with Earth each day, but for detection that's all you need.
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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...
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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.
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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.