Sunday, April 25, 2010

Hawking advises avoiding aliens and how supervolcanoes shaped life on Earth

Welcome! "Alien Life" tracks the latest discoveries and thoughts in the various elements of the famous Drake Equation. Here's today's news:
g Abodes – Supervolcano eruptions in Earth's past have played a role in shaping the evolution of life by causing mass extinctions. Scientists are now trying to understand what triggered these enormous eruptions and how likely they are to occur again in the future. See article.
g Life – Chemists have determined the structure of an intermediate form of a unique enzyme that participates in some of the most fundamental reactions in biology. See article.
g Message – Recent discussions within the SETI community have thoroughly explored the issue of whether people with access to radio telescopes should send powerful signals to alien civilizations without some process of prior international consultation. In particular, those exchanges have focused on the question of "Active SETI." See editorial. Note: This editorial is from 2005.
g Aftermath – Genius physicist Stephen Hawking thinks that it’s likely that there’s intelligent life in the universe beyond our solar system. And he advises that we should avoid contact with them. See article.

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2 comments:

Unknown said...

I have a great sheadlongst... especially when it comes to alien life. Who knows what they might be like. They very well could see us as a threat and be dangerous, in which case we gotta be ready. Aliens don't neccesarily have to be peachy and nice, they have the possibility for brutality in that we don't know anything about other life forms in our galaxy.

Rob Bignell said...

I'd suggest that the aliens would be so different from us biologically and culturally that they may not even realize they're being brutal ... which is all the more reason to commit ourselves to scientific/technological literacy and advancement, so we can be better prepared for any threat. And since I believe in giving peace a chance, it's also an argument for us to begin thinking seriously as a civilization about first contact and how to communicate with an exointelligence - in doing so, perhaps we can avoid the misunderstading altogether.