Stephen Hawking Believes Intelligent Aliens Exist!

The famous physicist Stephen Hawking believes aliens exist in the universe but that they would be likely to conquer us rather than make friends. So we are looking at meeting Klingons or Romulans as opposed to Vulcans or Betazoids! From the article:

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has repeated his long-held belief that intelligent aliens are likely to exist, and that a visit by them to present-day humanity would probably have unfortunate consequences for us.
“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational... If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”
“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet," he argues. "I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”
Alternatively, in the case of aliens having originally evolved on an Earthlike world, it might simply be their goal to seize and colonise ours, as Prof Hawking says - regardless of the status of their homeworld, they might like to have another. The mere fact of their being able to get here across interstellar distances would tend to suggest they might be technically capable of overcoming humanity and exterminating or enslaving us - or confining limited numbers of us to reservations, if they were relatively kind aliens.

Ok, now I am thinking of the aliens from Stargate such as the Goa´uld or Wraith, yikes! His thoughts on the alien life are very interesting and oppose some the ideas of some of his colleagues who think that life on Earth is a fluke and no other life may exist in the universe.
You can read the entire article HERE.

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The Eerie Silence by Paul Davies

Physicist Paul Davies has written a book that is exactly the kind of topic I like to read. The basic question he asks is:

If aliens exist, where are they?The physicist Enrico Fermi asked this question 60 years ago, and it has since come to be known as the “Fermi Paradox”. Given how vast the universe is, and the billions of years that life has had to spread across the cosmos, why have we not found any evidence of alien life?Paul Davies takes a fresh look at this question in his engaging and thoughtful new book, The Eerie Silence.

He goes on to discuss if life on Earth is a simple fluke or there is a possibility that life does exist somewhere out there in the vast Universe.

He also explains that communication may take time:

Even if complex life can be found elsewhere, does that mean it will be intelligent? By “intelligent,” we often mean a species that will use science to investigate the universe. Davies again throws cold water on our assumptions, saying the scientific method is a specific outcome of Greek philosophy and medieval European monotheism. Despite this, Davies gamely uses the Drake Equation to estimate there could be 10,000 civilizations in the galaxy capable at this time of communicating by radio waves.

“At this time” is an important element of his estimate, since a barrier to interstellar communications is not only distance but time. Consider aliens living one thousand light years away. Davies points out that if they were able to see Earth in their telescopes, they would not see us as we are today, but as we were in the year 1010 A.D. - long before we invented radio dishes. And because human radio technology is only about 100 years old, it will take another 900 years for our first signals to reach them.

His writing would suggest he feels we are alone in the Universe but in true scientific form he states:

Still, the fact that we don’t know and may never have the answer about alien life is reason enough to keep searching, says Davies. By stretching our minds to try to envision all the possibilities in our search for aliens, not only may we one day find what we seek, but in the process we also will learn about many other deep and enduring mysteries of the cosmos.

I would like to think that life does exist in the Universe, but then again that is why I love science fiction, and I am not being unrealistic, in my opinion, because nothing has been proven to exclude the fact that life does not exist beyond our galaxy. It is a book that gets you thinking about all the possibilities in life.

LINK.

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A Spatial Collection of Strange Worlds

I like the article I found at Space.com describing all of the different kinds of planets being discovered out in the Universe, such as Hot Jupiters, Pulsar Planets, Super-Earths, Water Worlds( yes like the movie!), and Free-Floating Planets, among others.

Normally planets are thought of as orbiting stars, but there are hints a number of bodies with the mass of gas giants might be free-floating. These might either have escaped from their suns or never had a star to begin with, born in star-forming regions without the mass needed to ignite.

Roughly a half-dozen candidate free-floating planets have been found so far, either still glowing from the heat released as their gravity contracts their mass, or from the rare times one passes in front of a star and magnifies the light from the background star. "It's not clear whether you call them planets because they formed as part of a planetary system and were subsequently ejected or formed as super-small brown dwarf stars with the mass of planets," Beichman said.

The Free-Floating Planets remind me of an episode of Star Trek:Enterprise entitled "Rogue Planet" in which the crew finds a planet out on its own, away from other planets and their sun and have an interesting encounter with an alien race hunting another sentient alien race.
The study of different kinds of planets is fascinating. Here is a clip from the Enterprise episode.

Alien First Contact

First contact with alien creatures is the core of science fiction literature, movies, and television; and the kind of aliens we encounter range from benevolent beings to acid for blood reptilian-like monsters. While we love to read or watch science fiction aliens, scientists actually theorize what an alien life-form could look like and how we would react to an actual face to face meeting.

Scientists feel that there are two possibilities, one being we will visit aliens from the "neighborhood" or we will be in verbal contact with a more distant alien civilization.

The article explains that if we contact alien life in our solar system:

If first contact turns out to be within our solar system, then at least we have some prior knowledge about the available habitats. Several spots might be suitable for Earth-like life based on carbon biochemistry and using water as a solvent. The subsoil of Mars may be warm enough to host microbes akin to Earth's bacteria, for example, and there could be larger beasts swimming in the watery oceans of some outer moons of the solar system - especially Jupiter's moon Europa. There's every chance that a deep aquatic ocean lies beneath Europa's ice, stretching right down to the moon's rock core, where volcanic vents pump out hot, nutrient-rich water.

Then the article goes on to explain how the aliens we talk to may exist:

And then there is the fact that in order to contact us, ET must be able to send and receive radio waves or laser beams, or use some other medium to reach across the light years. So either they are vast creatures that have evolved natural radio-wave organs to talk and listen to each other, or they have developed technology. For that, intelligence alone is not enough. "The thing that advances us as a species is that we are social," says Schulze-Makuch. "One of us alone is not very smart - I'm so dumb I can't even build a radio. It is by working together that we got on the moon."
So message-sending aliens will probably have some form of society. It need not be anything like human societies, however. "There are meta-intelligences in the societies of bees and termites. I can imagine something like a termite or ant colony that gets really intelligent," says Schulze-Makuch. This does not tell us, however, whether they will be furry, scaly or slimy. Even on Earth, clever brains come in a wide variety of packages: dolphins and primates, parrots and crows, sea otters, honey badgers, octopuses and squid.

If you love science fiction or just the idea of making contact with an alien species, I suggest reading the entire article, it is well worth the time, it will change your perception of what an alien is and how we might contact each other.

Here is a link to the full article.