From The Sunday Times
April 25, 2010
Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking

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.”

The answer, he suggests, is that most of it will be the equivalent of microbes or simple animals — the sort of life that has dominated Earth for most of its history.

One scene in his documentary for the Discovery Channel shows herds of two-legged herbivores browsing on an alien cliff-face where they are picked off by flying, yellow lizard-like predators. Another shows glowing fluorescent aquatic animals forming vast shoals in the oceans thought to underlie the thick ice coating Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter.

Such scenes are speculative, but Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious point: that a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. 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.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “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.”

The completion of the documentary marks a triumph for Hawking, now 68, who is paralysed by motor neurone disease and has very limited powers of communication. The project took him and his producers three years, during which he insisted on rewriting large chunks of the script and checking the filming.

John Smithson, executive producer for Discovery, said: “He wanted to make a programme that was entertaining for a general audience as well as scientific and that’s a tough job, given the complexity of the ideas involved.”

Hawking has suggested the possibility of alien life before but his views have been clarified by a series of scientific breakthroughs, such as the discovery, since 1995, of more than 450 planets orbiting distant stars, showing that planets are a common phenomenon.

So far, all the new planets found have been far larger than Earth, but only because the telescopes used to detect them are not sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized bodies at such distances.

Another breakthrough is the discovery that life on Earth has proven able to colonise its most extreme environments. If life can survive and evolve there, scientists reason, then perhaps nowhere is out of bounds.


Hawking’s belief in aliens places him in good scientific company. In his recent Wonders of the Solar System BBC series, Professor Brian Cox backed the idea, too, suggesting Mars, Europa and Titan, a moon of Saturn, as likely places to look.

Similarly, Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, warned in a lecture earlier this year that aliens might prove to be beyond human understanding.

“I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive,” he said. “Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.”

Stephen Hawking's Universe begins on the Discovery Channel on Sunday May 9 at 9pm

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7107207.ece

Seems someone else started a thread about Stephen Hawking.

The interview was aired last night.

Join the Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking here:

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=59757

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer of the SETI Institute. More on Larry King Live.

Stephen Hawking's Warning on Space Aliens

Aired April 30, 2010 - 21:00 ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

LARRY KING, HOST (VOICE-OVER): Tonight, could aliens from other worlds conquer and colonize planet earth? Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says it's possible, and issues a warning for all of us.

Stop trying to contact other life forms now, just in case they're out there and they're hostile.

STEPHEN HAWKING, THEORETICAL PHYSICIST: They are likely to be more advanced that us.

KING: Hawking joins us, answering our questions, sounding the alarm. Believer Dan Aykroyd is here, too.

DAN AYKROYD, ACTOR: Honestly, I don't belief they're a mass threat, but I do believe they're breaking the law.

KING: Aliens from out of space, real threat to human race? Next on LARRY KING LIVE.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KING: Good evening. You can say that this show tonight is out of this world.

John Smithson is executive producer of "Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking." As is Ben Bowie. Both join us from London.

In their documentary -- astrophysicist Stephen Hawking will join us later -- warns that contact with extraterrestrial life might not go so well. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HAWKING: So 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.

(END OF VIDEO CLIP)

KING: John, do you -- you're producing the show. Do you accept the theory?

JOHN SMITHSON, EXEC. PROD., "INTO THE UNIVERSE WITH STEPHEN HAWKING": Well, we -- we're working with one of the greatest living scientists, one of the best scientific brains in the world. And I'm not a scientist. My job on this series for Discovery Channel was to bring the views, the vision, the imagination of this great scientist to a mass audience.

Watch -- these are the words of Professor Hawking. I'm not -- don't have the scientific credentials to second guess Professor Hawking. I'm prepared to believe him because he is such a great scientist.

And what we said about aliens in that program was very much what Stephen Hawking wanted to say. For years he had been lecturing about -- about lots of things including the possibilities of alien life.

What we were able to do for the first time using the wonders of computer graphics was to visualize with Professor Hawking hypothetically what they might look like. That's what we're able to do here.

KING: Ben, how did this come about? How did you and Stephen and John all get together and do this?

BEN BOWIE, EXEC. PROD., "INTO THE UNIVERSE WITH STEPHEN HAWKING": Well, Discovery wanted to do a new and exciting show on cosmology. And so we sat around the table for a while and we thought who best to do it. And, you know, there isn't a bigger name than Stephen Hawking.

So it was a very simple, very, very short list for everyone to work with. And then we pitched it to him. And you may know that Stephen takes quite a while to respond to questions.

KING: Yes.

BOWIE: So we gave him our pitch, showed him the tape, and we had to wait a while. But thankfully the answer was yes, I'd love to do it. So that's how it got going.

KING: John, are you surprised at the reaction it's gotten around the world?

SMITHSON: No, I'm not because, you know, Professor Hawking is this distinguished academic as we've said. But also he wants to bring science to a new generation, to people around the world.

And he is prepared to -- everything he says of course is immaculately scientifically sourced. But he wants to entertain people. And by entertaining them, he wants to interest them in science.

So you know, every -- this was done really incredibly closely. We've been working with Stephen Hawking for three years on this. And he really did want to somehow popularize, you know, his views, the universe inside his mind.

So I think he leapt at that chance of doing a series that was both totally big deal science, definitive science about what we know about the cosmos, but in an educating and in an informative and in an entertaining way so that a global audience on Discovery Channel could be sort of interested in this.

KING: Ben, does the British government take this seriously?

BOWIE: I'm not -- I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer that, but I don't think so.

KING: John -- well, no, Ben, you first. The tendency has been to kind of dismiss this until Mr. Hawking arrived, as kind of kooky, right?

BOWIE: I think that --- you know, maybe it's been overstated slightly from what he actually says in the film. You know what he says in the film is that if intelligent aliens exist -- that's a big if -- and they were to meet us -- that's another big if -- then we might be wise to treat them with caution.

more.............

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1004/30/lkl.01.html

Into The Universe - repeats tonight on Discovery.

also how the universe works :-)

My local programming schedule on Discovery Channel is showing a 'Deadliest Catch' marathon running well passed 9pm, and the channel's website is showing the same with no mention of Hawking's show on their schedule. Does anyone know if Hawking's show is still going to be aired tonight?

They all aired. (Sorry) May 9, must have been the UK. date. 2 May 2010, which is when i posted that. Only to say they were being re-aired.

Someone on the other thread said they are available on You Tube.