Refleki : Kalau aliens itu malaekat seperti apa yang diceritakan oleh agama, 
apakah juga tidak boleh bicara dengan mereka? hehehe


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article7107207.ece

April 25, 2010

Don't talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking

Hawking has depicted what kinds of alien could be out there

Recommend? (371) 
THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to 
Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to 
exist - but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it 
that can to avoid any contact.

The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the 
world's leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the 
universe's greatest mysteries.

Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of 
the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even 
floating in interplanetary space.

Hawking's logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he 
points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of 
stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life 
has evolved.

"To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens 
perfectly rational," he said. "The real challenge is to work out what aliens 
might actually be like."

The answer, he suggests, is that most of it will be the equivalent of microbes 
or simple animals - the sort of life that has dominated Earth for most of its 
history.

One scene in his documentary for the Discovery Channel shows herds of 
two-legged herbivores browsing on an alien cliff-face where they are picked off 
by flying, yellow lizard-like predators. Another shows glowing fluorescent 
aquatic animals forming vast shoals in the oceans thought to underlie the thick 
ice coating Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter.

Such scenes are speculative, but Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious 
point: that a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking 
believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move 
on: "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might 
develop into something we wouldn't want to meet. 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 colonise 
whatever planets they can reach."

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is "a little too 
risky". He said: "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."

The completion of the documentary marks a triumph for Hawking, now 68, who is 
paralysed by motor neurone disease and has very limited powers of 
communication. The project took him and his producers three years, during which 
he insisted on rewriting large chunks of the script and checking the filming.

John Smithson, executive producer for Discovery, said: "He wanted to make a 
programme that was entertaining for a general audience as well as scientific 
and that's a tough job, given the complexity of the ideas involved."

Hawking has suggested the possibility of alien life before but his views have 
been clarified by a series of scientific breakthroughs, such as the discovery, 
since 1995, of more than 450 planets orbiting distant stars, showing that 
planets are a common phenomenon.

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 is the discovery that life on Earth has proven able to 
colonise its most extreme environments. If life can survive and evolve there, 
scientists reason, then perhaps nowhere is out of bounds.

Hawking's belief in aliens places him in good scientific company. In his recent 
Wonders of the Solar System BBC series, Professor Brian Cox backed the idea, 
too, suggesting Mars, Europa and Titan, a moon of Saturn, as likely places to 
look.

Similarly, Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, warned in a lecture earlier this 
year that aliens might prove to be beyond human understanding.

"I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can't 
conceive," he said. "Just as a chimpanzee can't understand quantum theory, it 
could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our 
brains."



Stephen Hawking's Universe begins on the Discovery Channel on Sunday May 9 at 
9pm

Related Links
  a.. Oops, that was a bad call, Earth 
  a.. Hello... Are we alone in the Universe? 
  b.. Jonathan Leake 
    a.. 411 Comments


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