When British cosmologist Stephen Hawking warned against contact with extraterrestrials in a new Discovery Channel documentary, he was repeating a well-worn argument. “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.”
But Hawking’s reasoning is flawed on a number of counts. First, we can ask why the aliens would come here with guns blazing. What could they possibly want? Hawking suggests that Earth’s resources might be a reason. “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 colonize whatever planets they can reach.”
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