Slashdot Mirror
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.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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.
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.