Stephen Hawking Warns Over Making Contact with Aliens

[Peter Lemkin]

While humans have made a few attempts to make contact [I forget which number Voyager had the gold plate with information on who had sent the spacecraft], the message is going out - at light speed - in an ever enlargening sphere of (somewhat) coherent radio, TV, and other electronic communication and activity. Someday, somewhere, they may well get Ernie Kovacs. Later they will get Dallas and our news and perhaps internet and who knows what else we are sending - publicly and secretly. However, I fear by the time it reaches the first intelligent civilization, if they are even interested to come and meet Ernie Kovacs - by the time they were to come most all life on this planet will be gone. This species, here, doesn't seem on the path of longterm survival to me...sadly....and I think that is what happens to most post technology civilizations. Only those who learn to, or somehow started out to, be tolerant, non-belligerent, empathic, and cohesively altruistic likely long survived. Science fiction is full of malevolent societies of even robot/cyborg societies - and they may exist - but they too likely do not last long. The very things we rant and rave about here on this forum - hate, greed, avarice, lying, spying, taking-advantage, war, etc. - are the very things that lead most post-technology societies to self-destruct, as ours seems well on its way to now. i.e. most advanced civilizations would not see us as 'intelligent', only as having had potential, but having not used it - unless I'm very wrong on the future of my species. Given the great distance between civilizations who can communicate and/or travel, unless they have conquered some aspects we don't yet even understand about space-time, few ever get to meet and fewer still want to. I think that is what Hawkings was thinking about.

I miss Ernie Kovacs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chDmPM_p0...re=related