When the potential of intelligent alien civilisations comes up in conversation, it’s usually about the search. How will we find them? Where are they? Are they there at all? What actions should we take if – or when – we find them, or they find us? Well, according to physicist Stephen Hawking, we should probably stop trying to contact them at all.
Because reaching out to
advanced civilisations could put humanity and Earth in a pretty risky
situation. And the bad news is, we’ve already been broadcasting our location to
the Universe for years.
Hawking’s warning comes in a
new online film called Stephen Hawking’s Favourite Places, which shows the
famed scientist in a CGI spacecraft called the SS Hawking exploring his
favourite places in the Universe.
“As I grow older I am more
convinced than ever that we are not alone. After a lifetime of wondering, I am
helping to lead a new global effort to find out,” Hawking says in the film
while exploring Gliese 832c, a planet that lies 16 light-years away and might
foster alien life.
“The Breakthrough Listen
project will scan the nearest million stars for signs of life, but I know just
the place to start looking. One day we might receive a signal from a planet
like Gliese 832c, but we should be wary of answering back.”
In case you missed it, the
Breakthrough Listen project is an ambitious attempt to find intelligent life in
the Universe by scanning the closest stars for radio signals. The project was
funded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, who injected US$100 million to keep
it afloat.
Recently, the project
announced that it would be turning its attention to the hypothetical ‘alien
megastructure’ that some think is causing a star known as KIC 8462852 to oddly
dim off and on.
A more reasonable hypothesis
is that the erratic dimming is caused by ‘interstellar junk’ or a comet swarm,
but no one really knows what’s going on there yet.
Despite Hawking’s
extraordinary effort to find intelligent life in the Universe, he is one of the
most outspoken critics of actually trying to communicate with them, an act that
he says would potentially endanger humanity, because a distant alien
civilisation might view us as inferior, weak, and perfect to conquer.
“If so, they will be vastly
more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria,” he
says in the film.
Hawking often uses the
example of Columbus’ expedition to the America’s to describe what could happen
if an advanced civilisation gets word of our existence, saying that that
initial meeting “didn’t turn out so well”.
Hawking’s warning is rooted
in the idea that an alien civilisation, especially one that can pick up our
signals and understand where they’re coming from, has the potential to be
billions of years more advanced than us, making us an easy target to overthrow or
invade.
Reaching out to the Universe
isn’t the only area of scientific pursuit that Hawking says is risky. A few
weeks ago, at a lecture at the University of Cambridge, Hawking said artificial
intelligence might prove to be “either the best, or the worst thing, ever to
happen to humanity”, a feeling that other experts and leaders – such as Elon
Musk – have agreed with.
This fear stems from the
fact that AI has the power to learn for itself, making it possible to surpass
our human abilities, because we rely on biological evolution – a slow process,
to say the least – to become better.
“[Artificial intelligence]
would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate,” he
told Rory Cellan-Jones at the BBC. “Humans, who are limited by slow biological
evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”
While all of these warnings
might seem a bit much, it’s important for us to think about them before we have
to. As the saying goes, it’s better to be safe than sorry, especially when world-dominating
aliens or AI robots are involved.
Besides offering an ominous
warning, though, the new 25-minute film sees Hawking explore other incredible
spots in the Universe, such as Sagittarius A* – a supermassive black hole – and
our Solar System’s very own Saturn, a planet that Hawking is fascinated with.
You can check out the film
for yourself over at CuriosityStream.
We know the neighbor hardly who lives next to us so why search for another unknown neighbor in another universe.
ReplyDeleteInteresting that brilliant scientists can imagine that there might be a civilization "billions of years more advanced than us" but can't imagine that that would certainly lead to higher consciousness and a less aggressive and hostile civilization.
ReplyDelete