By Steve Hynd
Quote of the day comes from Stephen Hawkings, who's sure there's intelligent alien life out there but warns that meeting aliens might place us in the position of being Native Americans post-Columbus.
"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."
Yup.
ditto to your "yup"
ReplyDeleteI fancy the idea that if there indeed is intelligent life out there, there's a good chance that at least some of its incarnations are more advanced than homo sapiens. Which is to say, it is likely that some of these extraterrestrial forms of intelligant life have already mastered the developmental stage of technically being able to anihilate ones own existence while not yet possessing the ethical maturity to securely tame that impulse. That is more more than can currently be claimed for the master species of planet Earth.
ReplyDeleteSo I imagine that for the time being humanity might be under some sort of quarantine, until that evolutionary bug sorts itself out one way or another. If we go down the wrong route on this problem, we may end up as just another one of the failures at the experiment of life in the vast universe of space and time. Regrettable, but there may be others that look a little bit more promising.
I think all this space alien talk is silly. And is most likely rooted in the fact that the universe is a big, dark, empty, and lonely place. It's comforting to think we're so important that some others (out there) might be so inclined to engage us in our awesomeness.
ReplyDeleteTruth be told, any living thing so developed that it could traverse the vast stretches of time and space would by all logic see us, and all our stuff, as profoundly inconsequential.