FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
Stephen Hawking: Aliens Gonna Get You
04.26.2010
05:03 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image

Physicist Stephen Hawking has suggested (in his new documentary series) that aliens almost certainly exist in the universe (by dint of the sheer numbers and probabilities involved)—but that we’d probably be better off not looking for them, since they might eat our poor asses.

THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. 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.

The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

(Image above is taken from a Bad Astronomer post on a New York Times depiction of aliens from Venus and Mars from 1912.) (He also counters Stephen Hawking here.)

(Times Online: Don’t Talk to Aliens)

(Stephen Hawking: A Briefer History of Time)

Posted by Jason Louv
|
04.26.2010
05:03 pm
|