Hawking: Unintelligent life is likely on other planets

The eternal questions that we want to answer but keep eluding us !

That is one conference I would have loved to go to. I did not think that Stephen Hawkings was traveling out of the U.K. that much these days. Interesting Man.

Aliens have Crashed on earth. It is pretty well documented by eye witnesses from the Military during the 40's, 50's and 60's.

Could they be nut jobs? sure, but I like to think they are not. it makes life a little less mundane.

Oh... and if Alien solar systems are anything like ours, their transmissions would not escape their solar system's Helio-pause as the signal would be so weak that it would dissipate into background noise.

When you take into consideration the number of stars in our galaxy, (a $#!T LOAD), the likelihood of just one other solar system having a planet upon which life could evolve, is pretty high. Couple that thought with the vast number of other galaxies that the Hubble has shown us, and the probability of life evolving elsewhere becomes, pretty much, a "given"! To come to any other conclusion would be akin to believing that the Sun revolves around the Earth!
I, myself, have never had any encounters of the first, second, or third kind. I know a few people who claim to have seen "UFO's". I know them well enough to believe that they are not "nutty" or have weak mental constitutions. However, they are not the reason that I believe that there is life elsewhere. It is the sheer mathematics of the conjecture. Given the mind boggling number of other stars that there are, how can there NOT be another happening such has occurred here on Earth?

Carl Sagan once said:

'...for mankind to believe he alone is the only example of intelligent life in the universe is selfish, indeed.'

He may have said this 'billions' of times. :)

I have a personal opinion on UFO's. The vast majority can be discounted as weather phenomenon, sunspots, swamp gas, airliners, and unreliable witnesses. But in the end you come to a hard-core group of sightings, sometimes by multiple witnesses, that CANNOT be explained by rational means.

So should you worry about aliens? Alien abduction claims come from "weirdos" and are unlikely. However, because alien life might not have DNA like us, Hawking warned: "Watch out if you would meet an alien. You could be infected with a disease with which you have no resistance

surprised this came from him, perhaps he was joking. I don't doubt we could have a chemical reaction but the chance of a viral one would be extraordinary slim as it is highly unlikely the virus would have evolved any mechanisms to attack us.

"Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare," he then quickly added: "Some would say it has yet to occur on earth."

Zing!!

Stephen Hawking called for a massive investment in establishing colonies on the Moon and Mars in a lecture in honour of NASA's 50th anniversary.

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn13748-stephen-hawking-calls-for-moon-and-mars-colonies.html?feedId=online-news_rss20">here!

Hawking: Unintelligent life is likely on other planets

It's a certainty on this one!

also is smart enough to make destructive nuclear weapons.

"Watch out if you would meet an alien. You could be infected with a disease with which you have no resistance."

Duct Tape and plastic sheeting! Tinfoil!

Hawking fell for the old TV trap: the expectation that some other advanced civilization will be broadcasting TV or radio or something like that. We apply these human values and expectations with great risk. We assume they will be using radio. We assume the lack of signal means there are no aliens.

Nice and clean and QED, but it overlooks the idea that aliens might have developed some other way of communication that we can't imagine, or is beyond our ability to detect, or that other races might not need broadcasting. I can't imagine every planet is going to need sitcoms and dance shows. How embarrassing if they do need such things.

Here's a more relative example: the US is about to turn off most of our existing TV broadcasts next year. From the perspective of aliens, we're about to go silent. ATSC signals will continue but the old signals are doomed. We, ourselves, are moving to a new technique. If the aliens are still watching for old NTSC signals, they'll never see us. In a hundred years or two hundred, we might even move beyond ATSC. Who knows.

Given that we're going off the air, could aliens be forgiven for wondering if WE exist or not?

Anyway my point is we need to be careful about assuming aliens will do anything like us, and be even more careful about assuming the lack of something we do means there are no aliens.

The shocking thing about Hawking's statement is that he thinks there won't be intelligent life. In a hundred billion two-hundred-billion star galaxies, not one intelligence? He is not usually so obtuse in the face of raw math.

But then again, he does like to stir the pot a bit.

A fun little bit of perspective for you fine ladies and gents, something I like to say to myself when I feel all high and mighty.

-The speed of light is 1,079,252,849 km/h, or to put it another way, one ray of light can go around the planet Earth about (I'll use "abouts" from here on, easier that way) 7 and a half times in one second. Keep that figure in mind. 7 and a half times in one second. Try spinning your finger in a circle 7 and a half times in one second, bet you can't do it, so we're talking REALLY fast.

-The Sun is so far away that it takes a ray of light about 8 minutes to get here.

-It takes a ray of light leaving the Sun about 5 hours 20 minutes to get to Pluto, more than half your working day.

-Now double that distance, about 10 hours 40 minutes for a ray of light to get from one side of the solar system to the other (not counting the Kiper Belt and all that other gunk out beyond Neptune and Pluto).

-Ok, now take that distance and shrink it all the way down to the size of a standard U.S. quarter, or if you like, take a quarter out of your pocket and imagine a little tiny itty bitty sun right in the middle of it. Now imagine it taking 10 hours 40 minutes for a ray of light to get from one side of that quarter to the other.

-NOW, take that quarter, set it on the ground, if that quarter were the size of our solar system, the rest of the Milky Way would be the size of the continental United States. So one, if they were so inclined, could make an argument that our galaxy is pretty &$@!!* big. But then take into account that there are about 200 Billion (with a capital B) other galaxies in the universe.

-So the larger point I'm making is that even if there were 100 civilizations in the Milky Way at least as intelligent as us, it would be like taking a sack of 100 quarters and spreading them out at random across the U.S. Now that would mean the distances between us and other just in our own galaxy would be IMMENSE. So just be patient, people. Give it a couple thousand, or hundred thousand years or so, and maybe we'll finally get a call from on of our neighbors.