Don't contact Aliens - Stephen Hawking

They will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria," the British physicist warned.

British physicist Stephen Hawking has warned against announcing our presence to any alien civilisations, especially to those more technologically advanced than humans.

Our first contact from an advanced civilisation could be equivalent to when Native Americans first encountered Christopher Columbus and things “didn’t turn out so well”, Hawking said in a new online film.

The film, Stephen Hawking’s Favourite Places, takes viewers to five significant locations across the cosmos, on his spacecraft — the SS Hawking.

In the film, Hawking performs a hypothetical flyby of Gliese 832c, a potentially habitable exoplanet located 16 light years away.

“One day we might receive a signal from a planet like Gliese 832c, but we should be wary of answering back,” he said.

“They will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria,” Hawking warned.

“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,” he was quoted as saying by The Guardian.

Not the first warning

It is not the first time Hawking has warned about the prospect of hostile aliens.

Launching the Breakthrough Listen project, which will scan the nearest million stars for signs of life, last year Hawking had suggested that any civilisation reading our messages could be billions of years ahead of humans.

“The Breakthrough Listen project will scan the nearest million stars for signs of life, but I know just the place to start looking,” he said, in the film that appeared on the online platform CuriosityStream.

Source:The Hindu

Comments

Amelia Dyer , a devil who lived in disguise

Amelia Dyer is believed to have murdered hundreds of babies during the 19th Century. Her crimes led to one of the most sensational trials of the period and shone a spotlight on the Victorian practice of "baby farming". How did a seemingly respectable woman stoop to such cruelty? On 30 March 1896, a parcel weighted down with a brick was fished out of the River Thames in Reading. Inside, swaddled in layers of linen, newspaper and brown paper, was the partially decomposed body of baby Helena Fry. White tape had been wound around her neck, with a knot under the left ear. It was a gruesome discovery, but one which would lead detectives to unravel the crimes of one of the 19th Century's most notorious child killers. Born in 1837 to a shoemaker in a small village in Bristol, Dyer had endured a tough childhood in which she was the main carer for her mentally ill mother. As an adult, she became a nurse. But, rather than use her skills to care for people, she embarked o...

Reincarnation from Egypt

When Dorothy Eady arrived to Egypt for the first time, it was obvious to her that she had been there before. But her last visit near the Nile may have taken place thousands of years earlier. Dorothy was born on January 16, 1904 in the London suburb of Blackhearth. Doctors believed that she would not survive a terrible fall when she was three years old. However, it seems that the accident she faced was the beginning of her unbelievable life - a moment of opening the gate to the memories of a past life. Over the years, many skeptics tried to disprove Eady’s mystifying tale, but nobody could ever fully negate that she was one of pharaoh Seti I’s (c. 1290 - 1279 BC) lovers. An Ancient King’s Lover? Dorothy grew up in a Christian family and she attended church regularly when she was young. One day, her parents took her to the British Museum. While looking at the photograph of the temple of Seti I, a pharaoh of the 19th dynasty of the New Kingdom Period (and the father of Rameses ...

Second Birth of Buddha ... Mulbekh, India

Situated 45 km from Kargil and 260 km from Leh in Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, Mulbekh Monastery is famous for its two gompas and the nine mtr tall statue of Maitreya Buddha. The Mulbekh Monastery with its gompas stands on a peak above the Srinagar-Leh highway. The two gompas are of Drukpa (new Buddhist school) and Gelugpa (old Buddhist school). Another reason for Mulbekh Monastery’s fame is the 30 ft long limestone sculpture of Maitreya Buddha. Carved onto the rock face, the sculpture of standing Maitreya Buddha overlooks the National Highway 1D between Leh and Kargil. The sculpture measures nine meter from base to its top. Maitreyas is also known as Chamba so Mulbekh Monastery is popularly known as Mulbekh Chamba. Along with the nine meter tall Maitreya sculpture, there are many prized relics along with the statues and frescoes in the monastery. The rock sculpture is believed to have been carved by Ladakhi missionaries to propagate Buddhism. Though the rock sculpture repre...

Sunny side of life

Search This Blog