![]() The biggest and most active hunt for life outside Earth started in 1960, when Frank Drake pointed the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia towards the star Tau Ceti. Those broadcasts have been streaming into space for years – the oldest is already more than 80 light years from Earth – so it is already too late to stop passing aliens watching every episode of Big Brother or What Katie and Peter Did Next. If we were really worried about shouting in the stellar jungle, Shostak says, the first thing to do would be to shut down the BBC, NBC, CBS and the radars at all airports. They could have found us a billion years ago." If they're interested in resources, they have ways of finding rocky planets that don't depend on whether we broadcast or not. "If their interest in our planet is for something valuable that our planet has to offer, there's no particular reason to worry about them now. "This is an unwarranted fear," Shostak says. Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Seti Institute in California, the world's leading organisation searching for telltale alien signals, is not so sure. So, when someone with Hawking's knowledge of the universe advises against contact, it's worth listening, isn't it? And it is not unreasonable to expect some of that alien life to be intelligent, and capable of interstellar communication. There are, after all, billions and billions of stars in our galaxy alone, with, it is reasonable to expect, an even greater number of planets orbiting them. Hawking believes that, based on the sheer number of planets that scientists know must exist, we are not the only life-form in the universe. He argues that, instead of trying to find and communicate with life in the cosmos, humans would be better off doing everything they can to avoid contact. "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," Hawking has said in a forthcoming documentary made for the Discovery Channel. ![]() Well no, according to the eminent physicist Stephen Hawking. ![]()
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