Hawking:
“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach,” 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.”
Response by Mary Voytek, senior scientist for astrobiology at NASA:
“Ignoring the possibility [alien life] and hiding your head in the sand, waiting for them to find us is certainly isn’t a scientifically intelligent way to proceed or a good cultural way to anticipate something like that either...Our approach to it has been to be prepared. We’re not going to get caught, say like the Native Americans when Columbus came to their shores. We’ve been actively listening and hopefully we get some information before any eventual encounter ever happens.”
While I really think Stephen Hawking is selling himself out to sensationalize the whole thing with "Oooo, scary aliens!", I do kind of have to agree with him. Just why are we in such a rush to discover intelligent life in the universe? I think the Cristobol Colon example is perfectly reasonable, who's to say that a technologically superior alien race would be any less hostile than the Spanish Conquerers even if they are doing it for good intentions?
I don't like the NASA scientist's argument, "Our approach to it has been to be prepared". How can you possibly prepare for meeting an alien race that could be thousands, if not millions or even billions of years more advanced than human-beings?
Even the English and French basically wiped out the Native Americans and put them on reservations in the name of "saving" or "civilizing" them. In reality, one race's version of civility is really just subjective to the one with the most power.
So even if we did discover a race in the near future that was
not hostile, it would probably mean they would be less technologically advanced than us, resulting in not being able to interact with them in the first place (being too far away to visit or communicate). If the extraterrestrial race was "more" advanced than us, then they would probably feel the need to "educate" or "civilize" us. In both scenarios finding extraterrestrial life does, at best, barely anything to help the human race and, at worst, causes our destruction or enslavement.
Discuss?