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The esteemed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has assured us that even the biggest and baddest black holes will just evaporate away. But he’s not so optimistic about the mood of any advanced civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy that we might encounter someday.
"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet," he said on the Discovery Channel's "Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking."
Hawking extrapolates from anthropology to point out that the inferior culture -- us in this case -- would get the short end of the stick in any such close encounter of the rude kind. Thirty-seven years ago Nobel laureate biologist George Wald expressed similar worries: "I can't conceive of a nightmare as terrifying as establishing communication with a so-called superior technology in outer space."
I’ve mulled over these warnings and have converged on what I think are some simple truths, from a purely an astronomical perspective. The bottom line is that I'm not losing any sleep worrying about awaking one morning to see and alien mothership hovering over Washington D.C.
Here are my top five reasons why an intelligent alien species will never invade our planet:
5. Nobody Knows We're Here
As my colleague Ian O’Neill pointed out in an earlier article, electromagnetic waves from telecommunications leaking off the Earth have now expanded out to a radius of merely 100 light years. This volume encompasses over 2000 stars, roughly 200 of which are sun-like. But it covers a feeble one ten-millionth the volume of the Galaxy. Even by very optimistic estimates from the Drake Equation, the nearest super-civilization is well over 1,000 light-years away. And. they won't know about us, if they can detect a signal at all, until after 3000 A.D.
4. An Unlikely Time Intersection
If you were walking along the Appalachian Trail, what are the odds the first person you came across was your same age and was born a day before you? Though the nearest inhabited planet could be only 30 light-years away it is equally unlikely that anyone living there they just happen to be close to us in technological evolution (say by a few centuries or even a millennium). The Galaxy is very old. Therefore it’s more probable that there are intelligent species that are 10,000, 1 million or even 10 million years more advanced than us. Perhaps they abandoned the plodding vagaries of biological evolution eons ago to engineer a new form of existence, one likely to be practically immortal. Therefore, we have as much in common with them as an amoeba has with us....
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