Saturday 1 May 2010

Stephen Hawking: Beware of big bad aliens!

Stephen Hawking. Image courtesy of NASA.



Joel Kontinen

Sending messages to outer space might not be a good idea. Greedy aliens, who have run out of green pastures on their home planet, might arrive with their giant spaceships and treat us like the early European conquerors treated the American Indians.

Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking disclosed this while advertising a series he made for Discovery Channel. Hawking says that the sheer size of the universe almost guarantees that we are not alone.

Hawking’s logic is based on the assumption that since (as he believes) life originated randomly on Earth (or, as he suggests, an asteroid brought the building blocks of life from elsewhere), it must also have originated randomly elsewhere in the universe.

However, if we believe that God has created all life, we might forget speculations about greedy aliens.