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I personally think that considering the size of the universe, it would be foolish to think that we are the only thing alive. The probability of this is actually quite small.

 

I would like to point out that what we perceive as life is probably far different than other life forms. The physical conditions these life forms require to live may be far different than ours (i.e., maybe they need CO2 to live, or need extreme heat or cold to thrive, or radiation...etc.) and even the physics of their makeup and the physics of how their environment works could be far different than ours.

 

Whatever the case, I agree with Hawking. I think it's a bad idea to attempt to contact them.

 

"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." - Hawking

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I've been meaning to weigh in here but I've had an addled brain for a while and haven't been able to collect my thoughts. Turns out I had pneumonia and I've been a sick puppy for a while now, so I don't feel so bad about not being lucid enough to chat here.

 

I've been a "fan" of the paranormal my whole life. Since I was old enough to read I gravitated toward books about the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, UFOs, etc. Like so many others have said already in this thread, I feel the odds of there not being life out there to be almost too remote to contemplate - essentially nil. There has to be life out there, and intelligent life both behind and WAY ahead of us.

 

Our planet has existed for 4.5 billion years, and life has existed here for about 4 billion of those years. Advanced life has been around for about 3.5 billion years, and has survived mass extinctions in some form or another several times. But the key thing to think about here is this: It only took a few million years, just an eyeblink in Universe Time, for life to go from "advanced" to "intelligent" here on Earth. With so many stars and so many planets, the odds are good that at some point, somewhere, life as intelligent as ours has already evolved and is currently evolving. The ingredients that made our common amino acid-based ancestor are common in the universe, so common that it seems almost impossible that they wouldn't have coalesced in the same way somewhere else, with the same results. Even if the rates of success were 1 in 1,000,000, it has to have happened somewhere else.

 

I'm unsure whether I agree with Hawking's take on alien contact. In general I would say he's right, that contacting aliens and having them come here would be dangerous, since necessarily they would be technologically more advanced than us, and that could spell danger. At the least it would make a situation we could not control. But that's presuming they are like us, warlike and aggressive, and we just have no way of knowing if our species' ways are common to other races or if they are like the unafraid wise man who stood his ground when Alexander the Great's bodyguard demanded he move out of the road to let them pass. When he refused, they said to him, "Who are you to deny Alexander, who has conquered the world?" He replied, "I am the man who has conquered the need to conquer the world." Alexander ordered his men to ride in the grass around the man, and left him go on his way.

 

Will the aliens we meet be like Alexander, or like the wise man? That's the key question, and of course we won't have the answer until they get here.

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I tend to think that short of a global dictatorship, intelligent space-faring alien life would have to live at least somewhat peaceably. This would be because space travel is such a monumental cost in resources. Without a entire planet's support (the type of cooperation that comes with peace), the necessary technology would have led to the races destruction before leading to its claiming outer space.

 

Or possibly imminent planetary destruction could facilitate space travel I suppose - and then this would necessitate a need for resources. But why pillage an existing planet, when all the resources a space-faring colony would ever need could be found in (near)unlimited amounts on an asteroid belts. They would have all the Hydrogen, Carbon, Oxygen, and Metals they would ever need.

 

I would be most worried about experimentation and collection. Kind of like when humans find a new species in the rain forest, they either put it in a jar of formaldehyde, dissect it, or stick it in a zoo.

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