2024-04-11 10:59:40
And it’s even managed to identify some intriguing potential clues to life, including the discovery of dimethylsulfide in the exoplanet K2-18b, a gas that only life on Earth produces. However, if we were to find a planet with life or advanced civilizations, should we make contact?
Not everyone thinks it’s a good idea, including physicist Stephen Hawking. in 2015 Hawking explained why it’s probably best not to make contact.
“We don’t know much about aliens, but we do know about humans,” Hawking said. – If we look at history, human contacts with less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced and primitive technologies have ended badly for the less advanced ones. A civilization that reads one of our messages may be billions of years ahead of us. If so, they will be much more powerful and may consider us no more valuable than we consider bacteria.”
This is similar to the theory put forth in Liu Cixin’s science fiction novel The Dark Forest. In the book, one character states that given the lack of clarity about the intentions of the alien civilizations, it makes sense not to make contact. If even one civilization is hostile or determined to destroy all other possible threats to its civilization, we should be careful not to make our existence too loud.
Despite Hawking’s fears about alien contact, he strongly advocated the continued search for extraterrestrials.
“We believe that life appeared spontaneously on Earth, so there must be other forms of life in the infinite universe,” Hawking continued. – It is time to commit to finding an answer, to search for life beyond Earth. We are alive. We are smart. We have to find out.”
Of course, the decision whether to inform alien civilizations of our existence may not be within our control. It is possible that aliens can find us in similar ways as we find them (only they could search for not hundreds, but thousands of years), or they can even pick up the signals that we emit from our planet. It may be too late to hide, writes IFLScience.
2024-04-11 10:59:40