Stephen Hawking Thinks Aliens Likely 579
OMNIpotusCOM writes "Noted astrophysicist Stephen Hawking thinks that alien life is likely, albeit primitive, according to a lecture delivered at George Washington University in honor of NASA's 50th anniversary. It begs the question of if we need to consider a Prime Directive before exploring or sending signals too far into the depths of space."
too much st (Score:1, Interesting)
No it does not. Kindly switch off the television now. If the universe were chock full of alien life that you couldn't miss if you threw a stone, and if we were somehow superior in technology and progress to all of them, then it MIGHT become an issue. But not in your lifetime, bub.
if we ever find intelligent life (Score:2, Interesting)
Hawking isn't an astrobiologist (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why is this newsworthy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Prime Directive? (Score:1, Interesting)
I mean, do we think cows have a culture? How about chickens? Just a "pecking order" right? As long as it "tastes like chicken" it must be food...
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fictional rules will be no help (Score:2, Interesting)
"Oh, they must not wanna interfere because 'we're not ready yet'."
What crap! WTF is so damned "magical" about the state of some planet's culture when they invent interstellar travel, as opposed to 50 or 200 or 1000 years earlier?
For most of human history, the vast bulk of the population lived in misery, while a few kings lived at the top. Preserve this for century on century?
Any space culture that does that is no no friend of humanity or justice.
Best Quote on UFOs ever (Score:2, Interesting)
because the aliens compress their data stream! (Score:4, Interesting)
Plans to recognize alien signals are all based on finding redundancies in the transmission. But from the point of view of an alien signal engineer all redundancies are opportunities to save energy and transmission time by adding compression! The more compression you add, the more your signal looks like random noise. Also the aliens might be using spread spectrum techniques which make a signal even more difficult to detect.
Think of it, the FCC is already starting to require TV signals to move to digital in order to save bandwidth that can be resold to the cell phone companies. How long will it be till the FCC requires that these signals be compressed? Our signals are already becoming more difficult to detect.
Probably in the natural technical evolution of any species there is only a very small window where the species is smart enough to use radio energy for communication but not smart enough to use enough compression to make its signals look like random noise.
Thus our SETI efforts are looking for a needle in a heystack and failure only indicates that species in a transitional phase like us is very rare.
Stephen Hawking should have thought of this.
The flaw in the argument is: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, we don't know any such thing.
Current life technology is based ultimately on oil- or coal-derived fuels and there is no realistic prospect that we will have enough of these to support a serious space program. Point me in the direction of a single alternative technology that will provide the kind of energy required.
Even assuming such a technology, consider the effect on the atmosphere of launching through it the quantities of stuff needed to build a base somewhere that could act as a resource centre for further advance. Even the dumbest politicians won't support a project that would probably wipe out life on Earth.
The fact is that our civilisation runs on oil and coal - still. Every improvement in utilisation has been incremental; there have been no serious technical breakthroughs for over 100 years (gas engine, gas turbine and Diesel are all over 100 years old.) Our current civilisation is dependent on using up irreplaceable fuels. All the proposed technical fixes - nuclear, wind, wave - are either heavy plant (nuclear) or low energy density (wind and wave.)
Given the relationship between star size and longevity (it's inverse) we can safely say that the more likely a civilisation is to be around long enough to develop technology, the more likely it is to run out of energy before going anywhere.
"It means that the first species capable of colonizing the galaxy, WILL colonize the galaxy before any other life can get a chance to evolve" - again untrue unless seen from hindsight. The capability to expand beyond your own planet is useless if the nearest planets do not have the resources to permit further expansion. If you don't understand that, learn some military history and you will start to understand the problems of supply logistics. As Winston Churchill once remarked in WW2, when someone criticised the Egyptian government "It takes 20 Egyptians to keep one British soldier in the front line." For space colonisation, I suspect the numbers are more like millions to one.
I don't care much for meeting advanced aliens (Score:4, Interesting)
And if we are more advanced than them, we will exploit them.
I think it's more likely that, in an evolutionary time-frame, we'll colonize our solar system (and beyond), and extra-terrestrial humans will evolve in different directions and become the "aliens".
Re:colony ships (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:But The Real Question: (Score:3, Interesting)
Note that this neatly misses the fact that people have gone outside and stood still while the wind blew past them at two or three times this speed without suffocating. People will always come up with creative ways to misunderstand the world around them. We're still doing it now.
Re:Hawking's opinion counts for little (Score:2, Interesting)
1) You start out by pointing out that Hawking is not particularly qualified to discus the probability that there is intelligent life on other planets.
2) Then you suggest that you may be more qualified than Hawking because of your work in biochem.
3) You offer corrections to Hawkings points that are based on not-biochemistry.
4) You close with some biochem talk, which is basically in agreement with Hawking (life may be common).
Why is it always primitive life? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The Prime Directive is Evil (Score:2, Interesting)
We know that they will probably have to be advanced beyond stone tools and wooden spears - to manufactured materials of some kind - because the properties of those make it extremely difficult if not impossible to implement space travel with. We know they probably have some kind of automation and information processing - analagous in some degree to our electronics - because we're pretty sure that without those in some form, it's extremely difficult if not impossible to implement space travel.
Systems of social organization are a lot like technology in that they can be analyzed and their properties can be (in theory at least) shown to be suitable or unsuitable for the infrastructure required by advanced technology. That analysis is less certain, because we can only look at the systems we already have experience with, but we've seen how tribalism, feudalism, socialism, etc., have reached their scaling limit such that they are unsuitable for a certain level of technology. I believe, though you may disagree, that we are nearing the scaling limit for democracy and centralized government as well, and will have to move beyond them to go much further.
If that is true, it is also reasonable, though far from certain, that a civilization advanced enough to do what we cannot yet do will have advanced their systems for social organization to a form suitable to those needs.
Just Because They Have FTL . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
If something hard to us maybe easy to them, the oppisite may be true too.
Re:But The Real Question: (Score:2, Interesting)