Note: this topic is from 4/25/2010. Thanks nickcarraway.
Posted on 04/25/2010 11:08:20 PM PDT by nickcarraway
British physicist Stephen Hawking, the brilliant man who wrote "A Brief History of Time," says aliens probably exist and frets that if they discover Earth their intentions might be less like the film, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and more like the book, "A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." In the book, alien bureaucrats determine the Earth should be demolished to make way for space highway and blow the Earth up. Sorry. Nothing personal. Prepare to die.
It's not such a crazy thought, says Hawking, in a Discovery Channel series. "To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational," he said.
Then, citing the example of Christopher Columbus' landing in the Americas and colonizing indigenous tribes, Hawking concluded efforts to contact alien races may well be "too risky."
"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet," he said. "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 colonise whatever planets they can reach."
Sounds like the Vikings. Or Romans. Or, yes, Spaniards. [Read Hawking's biography.]
Meanwhile, enjoy this trailer from the "Hitchhiker's" film...
Short minded thinking in science fiction - like how come all intelligent alien cultures are bi-peds and have body structures similar to ours? We are bound by what we know. Alien might be something we cannot conceive.
What an interesting commentary on Dr. Hawking’s worldview. Fear, evil, and selfishness sound like what he sees as the driving force of all life. Sad.
breeding units?
food source
Hawking must be going senile.
Most UFO sightings are so fleeting that if you don't just happen to have your camera in hand and at the ready, you probably won't get the shot before the thing disappears.
A lot of footage of UFOs is captured by people who are in the process of filming something else when a UFO comes into their field of view. Sometimes folks don't spot the UFOs in their footage until they review it later.
Also, cell phone cameras have pretty bad resolution on average, and do a poor job of capturing detail even close up.
...consider if the vehicle is manufactured by Earth's equivalent of "union labor".
LOL
We should also consider that a lot of cases of unstable UFOs were reported in the 40's and 50's, and almost none since then. There may have been something in our atmosphere (radar?) that interfered with their surveillance crafts' guidance systems in the early days.
I always thought that our efforts to broadcast info about ourselves into space was a little nuts.
We simply assumed advanced civilizations would treat us with respect.
But, as the history of the world shows, anytime a technologically advanced culture ran into an inferior one, the latter got nailed.
The whole meme about aliens being benign, a la ET, is simply a projection of our wishful thinking.
ETs could have had sensors or local outposts in this sector for thousands of years prior to WWII, for any number of reasons. Those sensors would have picked up and relayed the signature of atomic detonations, which would have brought on an investigative mission.
That's one theory. I can think of others.
There's every chance that the Sol system is already a territory of some political entity, such as a confederation, empire, or such. If so, there would be remote monitoring, at the very least. Face to face contact would likely be discouraged (if not banned) because of our relative primitive state of evolution.
Countless people have claimed to see ETs. There should be time to take a snap of one short of mind control. But like I said, they might be getting more cautious as tech increases [especially when visiting Louis Farakhan].
I actually caught part of that show last night. And one on time travel. Hawking believes time travel to the past is impossible.
Someone said (I dont know who it was) that either we are alone in the universe or we or not, and either concept is terrifying.
Interesting thought. Time travel to the past is certainly scary. If someone was never born, does he lose his soul?
I personally believe that there is an infinite number of quasi-parallel worlds. [Yanking self back to the cesspool.]
And how much time would it take for this information to reach its destination?
Cordially,
Come on and stretch a bit with me, friend.
If a civilization has the ability to move across interstellar space at faster than light speeds, don't you think they'd also have the means to communicate over those distances with the same (or similar) methods?
Interesting thought. I never thought about a spiritual angle to time travel before.
Note: this topic is from 4/25/2010. Thanks nickcarraway.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
