Stephen Hawking thoughts

[Rosanella]

These two articles are pretty interesting

left-click once there-->Stephen Hawking: Why Isn't the Milky Way "Crawling With Self-Designing Mechanical or Biological Life?"

...and there--->Stephen Hawking: "Humans Have Entered a New Stage of Evolution"

[AztecastroMcJ]

interesting

esp how says not much chance of intelligent life in universe

not much intelligent life on earth either

know quite alot of dumb humans LOL

[vhbelvadi]

Good articles.

Towards the end of the first article, I came across this sentence:

'"If we should pick up signals from alien civilizations", Hawking warns,"we should have be wary of answering back, until we have evolved" a bit further. Meeting a more advanced civilization, at our present stage,' Hawking says "might be a bit like the original inhabitants of America meeting Columbus. I don't think they were better off for it."'

But, waiting for us to evolve, in my opinion, yields no fruit, for the alien civilisation (from which we recieve the signals) would have evolved parallel to us, no?

[Paxo]

But, waiting for us to evolve, in my opinion, yields no fruit, for the alien civilisation (from which we recieve the signals) would have evolved parallel to us, no?

There is no reason at all to assume another civilisation would evolve parallel to us, probably not at all.

Throughout earth history there have been many mass extinction events which have radically altered the evolutionary steps of many species. Current thinking is that these are not random events but are linked (due to their frequency) to the movement of our sun within the galactic plane causing displacement in the oort cloud, this will be different for other systems.

The age of the system another civilisation comes from could be vastly different to our own, even a few million years difference would make a huge difference, how far has humanity come in 3 million years.

Steve..

[Doc]

Anyone who can travel to Earth will be so more advanced then us, the mind boggles just thinking about it.

So in my view it's pointless waiting for us to evolve. Hopefully they have come in peace and they can show us the future in so many ways.

[vhbelvadi]

There is no reason at all to assume another civilisation would evolve parallel to us, probably not at all.

Throughout earth history there have been many mass extinction events which have radically altered the evolutionary steps of many species. Current thinking is that these are not random events but are linked (due to their frequency) to the movement of our sun within the galactic plane causing displacement in the oort cloud, this will be different for other systems.

The age of the system another civilisation comes from could be vastly different to our own, even a few million years difference would make a huge difference, how far has humanity come in 3 million years.

Steve..

Yet, the fact that our waiting may prove to be useless, still holds good.

The other civilisation may not evolve parallel to us, I agree. But, they may have already evolved so much, that our waiting becomes pointless. Then again, they may have evolved only as much as us, which means their rate of evolution may be anything; so we'd waste our time waiting to evolve further (there may be risks, but there may not be risks, too). The argument that they've evolved far less than us is out of question, as they've been able to send us a signal.

Since even a few million years make a difference, and they might be a few million years older than us, would that not make a difference?

All-in-all, the risk of the other civilisation's being better evolved always exists.

It's like we either reply when we first recieve their signals, or never reply.

[Paxo]

I'm sure there are procedures in place should this ever happen, I'm taking it as read that any civilisation that contacts us directly will be further advanced than us, should we evolve further before getting back, for how long? that would depend on the differential. I think we need to worry about it should it happen, one thing will be guaranteed, things would change overnight knowing we are not alone in the universe.

Steve..

[vhbelvadi]

Yeah, I agree.

(<- sorry 'bout that)