Humanity's wiiled contact with aliens,.....

Humanity's willed contact with aliens, Stephen Hawking warns, could mean devastation

The scientist has a point

When one of the world's leading cosmologists delivers his considered opinion on something intrinsically connected to his area of expertise, it pays to sit up and pay attention. The first part of Stephen Hawking's argument - that some where in the universe, alien life is certain to exist - is really not problematic at all. 

        To believe that in a universe with trillions of stars, life has evolved on just one planet would be an act of monstrous, misguided anthropocentriusm. And that leads to the second part of Hawking's argument. If we have not been able to effectively explore even our soar system, What makes us so eater to find life on other planets, and is it reasonable to search for it? answers, in order, are 'misguided optimism' and 'no'.

         For once, ironically, hollywood might beright on this issue.While the numerous alien invasion movies it has churned out over the decades might be over the top and entirely lacking in coherence in many instances, their basic premise holds true - what reason do we have for assuming that any alien life we come into contact with will be well disposes to us? If we do find more developed alien life forms - or they find us - they are farmore likely to perceive us as alien elements in their environment and react accordingly. And if they have technical capabilities more advanced  than humanity, it could be cortains for us.

       As Hawking says, we need only look at ourselves to rrealise the likelihood of such a scenario. Our history is littered with the bones of conquered peoples. In any contact between two alien groups, uncertainty and resultant hostility are always likely to be the dominant factors, with the more powerful group trying to exploit the weaker.