The New Frontier

If Hawking says it's right, it must be right. The aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist but that, instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it can to avoid any contact. Although Hawking believes only a few life forms could be intelligent, he also believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.

Similarly, Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, warned in a lecture earlier 2010 that aliens might prove to be beyond human understanding. “I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive,” he said. “Just like a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.”

Hawking concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.” Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.