I don't have much truck with people searching for UFO's, claiming to have seen UFO's, or abducted by UFO's. I'm not much interested in conspiracy theories concerning old air-force sites, crop circles or things of a similar ilk. If their observations were in any way measurable, then scientists would long ago have begun to seriously investigate.
On the other hand, I am interested in the SETI project (a genuine scientific endeavour) and the search for potential life-supporting planets in distant solar systems in the our own Milky Way. And I am especially interested when a person of Stephen Hawking's intellectual stature ventures a comment on the matter.
Prof. Hawking said that our search for alien intelligence may well be misguided as the folks we do contact(assuming that happens) might turn out to be nasty. The reasoning goes that any life-form that can retrieve and understand our communications and is able to traverse the vast distances within our galaxy will also, inevitably, be hugely advanced technologically on us. So really, anything is possible and it is naive to assume that they will be benign in intention.
Hawking has done the math on the probability of life existing elsewhere in the universe and his thoughts need to be taken seriously, in my estimation. Though what conclusions we should draw are open to discussion.
No comments:
Post a Comment