Hawking and his “fellows” are nuts, sautéed in his celebrity.
If they ever come - which I doubt as the distance scales are so vast, and they’ve only had the same basic time frames to develop in anyway - I’d want to know how they did it.
There's nothing nuts about being cautious as far as signalling to a more advanced civilization that we're here for the taking.
I have to agree with Hawking on this one...