This came out on Yahoo news on Monday (Apr 26, 2010).
Aliens may exist but mankind should avoid contact with them as the consequences could be devastating, British scientist Stephen Hawking has warned.
“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans,” said the astrophysicist in a new television series, according to British media reports.
The programmes depict an imagined universe featuring alien life forms in huge spaceships on the hunt for resources after draining their own planet dry.
“Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach,” warned Hawking.
These days, Stephen Hawkings has said nothing novel except the usual ‘garden variety’ ideas from fiction paperbacks anyone can pick from Amazon.com. Has he been watching District 9 or re-runs of Independence Day recently? Or perhaps it was the recent remake of ‘V’, where in the original series, reptilian aliens came to our world to pump the Earth dry and packed us into cryogenic tubes to send back to their home world as *gasp* food! A friend of mine said this makes even the most scary horror movies looks like documentaries. Indeed, this is almost laughable and it would not have been big news had this been someone else.
Seriously, at the rate we are going I am more concerned with extinction over extermination by an alien race. Either way, a long time ago I told some of my friends something similar: “If there are aliens who can cross interstellar distances requiring several hundred years at the speed of light in a few days or less, I would be wary and concerned. After all, we have nothing capable of returning a visit to their home planet and that simply means they could strike at us while our options of retaliation would be rather limited.”
To understand why I am in that opinion, consider the war in Iraq and Afghanistan where the technologically sophisticated Americans plummets their less sophisticated opponents endlessly. Had the Iraqis militants or the Taliban the capabilities to send their own forces across the planet to the U.S., the fight would never be so one sided. Basically, incapable of reaching the alien home world on our own means our options of retaliation will at least be as limited as those of the Iraqi militants or the Taliban. We can see a similar situation with the Koreans and Chinese against the Japanese invaders or the Vietcong against the Americans during the Vietnam War.
I am in the opinion that the ability to bring the war to the enemy’s doorstep is important. That came to my mind when I was reading Wing Commander: End Run at least more than five years ago. It isn’t a fantastic read. I read it because at that point in time I was crazy about everything related to the game “Wing Commander”. (In fact, I have never quite forgiven Electronic Arts for killing this wonderful game series not long after it acquired Origin Systems.)
Back to the book, some of the reviews of the book mentioned that is the sci-fi version of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo – the American’s first answer to the audacious and atrocious Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. While that air raid has debatable, and perhaps even negligible effect on the Pacific War, it was a necessary act to remind the Japanese militarists that they have picked an enemy they should never have trifled with. Therefore, our inability to strike back at the aliens’ home planet would not only be an insurmountable weakness, but also a rather scary prospect.
Anyway, opinion on whether aliens will be malevolent often differs between my friends. Some are in the opinion that an alien race which is capable of such an undertaking will consider war and aggression to be an absolute last option in interstellar relationships. These friends believed that alien races capable of interstellar travel will have either attained a level of technological achievement (or even spiritual enlightenment) that puts material wants and cravings beneath them. That said, I am in the opinion that technological advancements will not necessarily lead to a better quality of life, and in some cases may even bring more misery. We just have to look at some of the damage our technological civilisation has done to our world.
There are also those who believe that we have nothing to fear from sentient life in other parts of the universe. They might be facing more technological barriers to not only leave their planet but also to survive. In fact, some believe that alien life may also exist in a form that is unrecognisable as life to humans, or in the worse case completely unsuitable for living in our environment.
Only a very small group shared my opinion that there is a possibility that an alien race maybe hostile. Even so, we believe that how they would treat encounter with an alien civilisation would depend on how their planetary unification is achieved and / or their initial objective in space exploration and expansion.
It is my opinion that if we run into an aggressive race of aliens, the Native American scenario may not be the only we might experience. We might also experience unequal treatment and humiliation, such as what happened to China after the Opium Wars in the mid 1800s.
In short, it really does not require the genius of Stephen Hawkings for us to imagine how it will be if aliens showed up at our doorsteps. You can even just look at the impact to the Japanese when U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry and his “Black Ships” sailed into the Bay of Tokyo and make a whole point out of it.
Fortunately for the Japanese, the end result from that may still be considered rather positive. It initiated reforms which saw to the rapid modernisation of Japan. All we could hope for would be that our species as a whole would be as fortunate, and also that we have the resilience and flexibility of the Japanese people.