Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking

Agreed thats why i stopped talking to my missus years ago

Very sensible.

quote:

Hawking has no more qualifications to discuss this than your next door neighbou

Surely this is only partly true. My next door neighbour is not particularly good at maths and probably has no idea how many stars there are in the universe or what proportion of them might conceivably be orbited by planets capable of supporting life. While Hawking's answers to these questions would be highly speculative I suspect he's much better placed than my neighbour to form an opinion on the probability of intelligent life evolving on the basis of various sets of optimistic or pessimistic assumptions.

When it comes to the bit about whether or not they'd be friendly, I agree, my neighbour's guess is as good as his. It does strike me though, that our former practice of sending out pictures of vulnerable naked humans accompanied by a road map to earth may just have been a potentially disasterous manifestation of sixties optimism. Good job the aliens are likely to be so far away.

My opinion is that it is almost a certainty that extra-terrestrial life exists, will exist, has existed.

However, due to the vast distances of space, we are likely never to meet them if on the off chance we are alive and active at the same time.

Timing is everything.

And boy I hope they never make contact, look at the aboriginal peoples of the Americas and Australasia and what happened when the Europeans made contact !!

quote:

Originally posted by Sniper:
He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact'.

Aliens can be easily spotted at any US Post office.

quote:

Aliens can be easily spotted at any US Post office.

Not in Arizona!

quote:

Originally posted by shoot6x7:
And boy I hope they never make contact, look at the aboriginal peoples of the Americas and Australasia and what happened when the Europeans made contact !!

This is obviously Hawking's point.

I up for meeting 7 of 9.
Warp 9.

Very sensible. 7 of 9 hmn.

They must be out there and Hawkin is totally right. We must not make contact. If they are that advanced it is likely that their HIFI's could sound better than ours. Could put Naim out of business?

well meeting them in our universe would mean talking to a microbe or diatom if that. If they show up here in spacecraft be very afraid, they have much better technology except in music kit.


Interesting how most Sci-fi is about destruction and few like Close Encounters and ET are positive experiences.

I am sure intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe - shame there's not much of it on earth!!

Oh damn,

Bit late for me.

Most of my clients seem to have come the planet ZOG.

Some have an Antipodean command of the english language, others still murder the English language with their alien mispronounciations.

I cant accept that we are alone in the universe.

Still even if we travel at one million times the speed of light then i doubt we will find friends on another planet.

Star Trek i believe to be real just totally and completely unattainable even in the distant future.

Even if we could produce a rocket that could attain a continuous 1 g acceleration it would take multiple generations to get anywhere meaningful.

If we could would we do to them what we did to ourselves, we seem to have a nasty of travelling to distant lands. We then murder and kill the original inhabitants and create a new utopia for ourselves.

I doubt human nature would change too much in the future.

Still i still consider Gene Roddenberry a true genius.

His vision of the future is probably pretty close to what may be.

We still have not managed a reliable means to get to the moon!!!!!!

Mind you M.I.B. may be real too!!!!!

David

1 g acceleration can't cut it so think jumpgates, wormholes, B5, DS9 and let them come to you.

quote:

Originally posted by shoot5x7:

However, due to the vast distances of space, we are likely never to meet them if on the off chance we are alive and active at the same time.

Even if we do meet them, due to the vast distances, biological life forms will not be able to survive the voyage. We will probably be meeting machine based intelligent life with the capability to self-replicate and evolve.

Dear Roy,

actually i think you will find 1g is sufficient.

10 metres per second per second.

10
20
30
40
50m per second and only 5 seconds

for those with an arithmetical bent how fast will you be going after 24 hours.

60 secs in one minute

60 mins in one hour.

60 x 60 = 3600 m per second after 1 hour which is 86400 m per second after 24 hours

which is 86.4 km per second

which is 5184 km per minute

which is 311040 km per hour

this is at 1 g which for the human body is continuously sustainable.

deceleration is the reverse,

So if my maths is right then that is all that is needed to travel in space near distances.

regards david

"Buzzers" said Ford. "Rich kids from elsewhere in the universe with nothing better to do than land on a backward planet, find some poor unsuspecting heeb that no-one's ever going to believe in a remote area and then walk up and down in front of them making "Beep-beep" noises".

20 years ago late at nite i used to listen to a radio show of writers reading their own works, a woman wrote scifi about meeting aliens, waking up in a room and not realizing the forms in the room were aliens. It was really fascinating how she concocted those few hours and how she ended up communicating. Certainly different than tired old male paramilitary paranoia.