Don’t contact aliens, Stephen Hawking warns humans

LONDON - British physicist Stephen Hawking has once again warned the world not to announce the human presence to any alien civilizations, especially to those more technologically advanced than humans.

Hawking is part of a growing number of scientists who think intelligent extraterrestrial life isn’t just real, but probably a lot more common than we might assume. He thinks contact with a hostile alien civilization would probably spell doom for human species.

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“Our first contact from an advanced civilization could be equivalent to when Native Americans first encountered Christopher Columbus and things ‘didn't turn out so well’,” Hawking said in a new online film.

The film, "Stephen Hawking's Favourite Places", takes viewers to five significant locations across the cosmos, on his spacecraft - the SS Hawking.

In the film, Hawking performs a hypothetical flyby of Gliese 832c, a potentially habitable exoplanet located 16 light years away.

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"One day we might receive a signal from a planet like Gliese 832c, but we should be wary of answering back," he said.

"They will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria," Hawking warned.

"As I grow older I am more convinced than ever that we are not alone. After a lifetime of wondering, I am helping to lead a new global effort to find out," he was quoted as saying by 'The Guardian'.

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What he advocates is slinking back into the background and keeping our presence in the universe shrouded until we have a better understanding of how to deal with alien affairs.

It is not the first time Hawking has warned about the prospect of hostile aliens.

Launching the Breakthrough Listen project, which will scan the nearest million stars for signs of life, last year, Hawking had suggested that any civilization reading our messages could be billions of years ahead of humans.

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"The Breakthrough Listen project will scan the nearest million stars for signs of life, but I know just the place to start looking," he said, in the film that appeared on the online platform CuriosityStream.