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Will Aliens Be Hostile?

by Nancy Atkinson on May 4, 2010

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Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking caused a bit a of buzz last week when he warned that we shouldn’t attempt to contact aliens because the outcome probably wouldn’t be good (for us, anyway). But once again, Neil deGrasse Tyson is a voice of reason about the whole thing.

Watch a clip from the Discovery Channel’s “Stephen Hawking’s Universe” about fearing aliens.

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About

Nancy Atkinson is Universe Today's Senior Editor. She also is the host of the NASA Lunar Science Institute podcast and works with the Astronomy Cast and 365 Days of Astronomy podcasts. Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador.

Tagged as: aliens, Stephen Hawking

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  • Lawrence B. Crowell

    Maxwell: You are right that we don’t know, but we can make an reasonable conjecture about this issue. Your idea of nonsentient beings might be similar to Hoyle’s dark cloud, where a collection of elements that are not sentient act in consort to consume other planets. I doubt this is a frequent occurrence in the unvierse.

    LC

  • Maxwell

    “I doubt this is a frequent occurrence in the universe.”

    I don’t disagree that any particular sci-fi scenario could be seen as extremely far fetched.

    The chances of running across anyone else out there, particularly interstellar space locusts, are small. The implications for life on earth if we do are enormous.

    You take a very small factor and multiply it by a very big one and… Well, there you go.

  • Frosted

    Hey everyone, i am not a scientist, so everything you guys say impresses me, i am just a teenager who loves space, but anyway, regarding this topic, i read somewhere a while ago, that for a life to exist on any other planet, it must have almost the same conditions as on Earth, and thus, any humanly intelligent being would look like us, maybe some differences, but still, so if they do look like us, wouldn’t it be easier to contact? or is this theory just totally wrong?

  • Maxwell

    You figure this planet has had life on it for 500 million years or so. 200 to 300 million of those years with nothing but bacteria and only the last million with anything resembling human kind.
    There could have been dozens of good candidate species for tool using that don’t resemble us in any way.

    Even if aliens are exactly like us, we don’t get along very well with ourselves (which is the point Hawkins is making).
    In our own history we’ve had many instances of humans meeting humans from other nations and tribes. The end result was almost always disastrous for one of them.

    So now we’re meeting strangers with no starting point for technology or biology… its a risky setup no matter how you spin it.

  • Lawrence B. Crowell

    It is possible life could exist on a wide range of planetary environments. Maybe there are life forms in the ocean mantle of Europa. Mars may have life as well, and methane out gassing is suggestive. On Earth there are bacterial life forms adapted to living deep underground which feed off of geo-chemical products.

    However, to get complex life I would suspect the environment may have to be somewhat comparable to Earth’s surface. Temperatures, water content, salinity etc probably can’t be wildly different from here.

    There is of course the prospect for entirely different biochemical bases for life. Maybe Triton has ethane based life which uses boron or phosphorus instead of carbon for part of the chemical backbone. Maybe there is silicon or silicone life forms. However, this is out on a speculative limb that is hard to plumb.

    LC

  • Jean Tate

    How did the passenger pigeon become extinct?

    To what extent have y’all projected your own images of humanity onto ‘aliens’?

    Did individual passenger pigeons manage to work out why so many of their kind were being slaughtered?

    How have our ideas on the nature of sentience and intelligence elsewhere in the universe changed in the past 10,000 years?

    Who would care to hazard a guess as to what our attitudes towards/ideas on/etc ‘aliens’ will be in 10,000 years’ time?

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