Close encounters of risky kind
Aliens may exist, but that's no reason to try to contact them, warns world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking.
According to London's The Sunday Times, the famed British astrophysicist says the chance that alien life forms exist is "perfectly rational" in a new television documentary series, set to air on Britain's Discovery Channel next month.
The 68-year-old Professor Hawking, who has spent three years working on the TV station's documentary series Stephen Hawking's Universe despite being paralyzed by motor neurone disease, says that in a universe populated with 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars, it is highly unlikely that Earth is the only place where life has evolved.
"To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational," Prof. Hawking said, according to The Sunday Times.
"The real challenge is working out what aliens might actually be like."
Prof. Hawking says the aliens could be microbes -- basic animals such as worms which have been on Earth for millions of years -- but also suggests that extraterrestrial life could develop much further.
The documentary series, which airs in Britain next month, uses imagined illustrations to explain why Prof. Hawking believes in extraterrestrial life and the forms it could take.
One scene in the documentary depicting shoals of fluorescent animals living under thick ice on Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, while flying yellow predators preying on two-legged herbivores roam in another, according to The Daily Mail.
"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't
want to meet," said Prof. Hawking, who communicates using a speech synthesizer.
"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."
The scientist behind such books as A Brief History of Time, who also rewrote large parts of the TV series' script and reportedly kept a close eye on the filming, warns that contact with alien life could spell disaster for the human race: "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 American Indians."
John Smithson, an executive producer for the Discovery Channel, told The Sunday Times that Prof. Hawking wanted "to make a program that was entertaining for a general audience as well as scientific and that's a tough job, given the complexity of the ideas involved."
Prof. Hawking has previously suggested an open-minded attitude to extraterrestrials, but the discovery of more than 450 previously unknown planets orbiting distant stars since 1995 is believed to have strengthened his belief.
So far, all the new planets found have been far larger than Earth, but only because the telescopes used to detect them are not sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized bodies at such distances.
Another breakthrough regarding the theory of aliens is the discovery that life on Earth has proven able to colonize its most extreme environments.
If life can survive and evolve here, then maybe nowhere is out of bounds, some scientists believe.
Prof. Hawking is not the only expert to speculate about aliens, though. In the recent BBC documentary series Wonders of the Solar System, British professor Brian Cox suggested that Mars and Europa and Titan, a moon of Saturn, are also possible places to look for extraterrestrial life.
"We will only know for sure when the next generation of spacecraft, fine-tuned to search for life, are launched to the moons of Jupiter and the arid plains of Mars in the coming decades," Prof. Cox said, according to the BBC.
Prof. Hawking, who retired as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge last year, is set to come to Canada this summer to conduct research and participate in a televised outreach event at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo.
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2951052#ixzz0mCwHi3dV
Aliens may exist, but that's no reason to try to contact them, warns world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking.
According to London's The Sunday Times, the famed British astrophysicist says the chance that alien life forms exist is "perfectly rational" in a new television documentary series, set to air on Britain's Discovery Channel next month.
The 68-year-old Professor Hawking, who has spent three years working on the TV station's documentary series Stephen Hawking's Universe despite being paralyzed by motor neurone disease, says that in a universe populated with 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars, it is highly unlikely that Earth is the only place where life has evolved.
"To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational," Prof. Hawking said, according to The Sunday Times.
"The real challenge is working out what aliens might actually be like."
Prof. Hawking says the aliens could be microbes -- basic animals such as worms which have been on Earth for millions of years -- but also suggests that extraterrestrial life could develop much further.
The documentary series, which airs in Britain next month, uses imagined illustrations to explain why Prof. Hawking believes in extraterrestrial life and the forms it could take.
One scene in the documentary depicting shoals of fluorescent animals living under thick ice on Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, while flying yellow predators preying on two-legged herbivores roam in another, according to The Daily Mail.
"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't
want to meet," said Prof. Hawking, who communicates using a speech synthesizer.
"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."
The scientist behind such books as A Brief History of Time, who also rewrote large parts of the TV series' script and reportedly kept a close eye on the filming, warns that contact with alien life could spell disaster for the human race: "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 American Indians."
John Smithson, an executive producer for the Discovery Channel, told The Sunday Times that Prof. Hawking wanted "to make a program that was entertaining for a general audience as well as scientific and that's a tough job, given the complexity of the ideas involved."
Prof. Hawking has previously suggested an open-minded attitude to extraterrestrials, but the discovery of more than 450 previously unknown planets orbiting distant stars since 1995 is believed to have strengthened his belief.
So far, all the new planets found have been far larger than Earth, but only because the telescopes used to detect them are not sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized bodies at such distances.
Another breakthrough regarding the theory of aliens is the discovery that life on Earth has proven able to colonize its most extreme environments.
If life can survive and evolve here, then maybe nowhere is out of bounds, some scientists believe.
Prof. Hawking is not the only expert to speculate about aliens, though. In the recent BBC documentary series Wonders of the Solar System, British professor Brian Cox suggested that Mars and Europa and Titan, a moon of Saturn, are also possible places to look for extraterrestrial life.
"We will only know for sure when the next generation of spacecraft, fine-tuned to search for life, are launched to the moons of Jupiter and the arid plains of Mars in the coming decades," Prof. Cox said, according to the BBC.
Prof. Hawking, who retired as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge last year, is set to come to Canada this summer to conduct research and participate in a televised outreach event at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo.
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2951052#ixzz0mCwHi3dV
