When Stephen Hawking says he has something to say about extraterrestrial life, you can bet many people will be listening in to hear. There are very few things that can be said about extraterrestrials that aren’t going to be controversial. And there are very few people who are going to cause quite as much of a stir when talking about universal matters than the famed physicist.
When Hawking made the suggestion that we need look only at Earth’s own history to see the potential conflict if humans ran into extraterrestrials, it was Paul Hellyer who would respond. Hellyer is Canada’s former prime minister and a believer in the potential for extraterrestrial visitations.
While this isn’t the first response to Hawking’s opinion of the extraterrestrial phenomenon, many outspoken advocates of a future cooperation with alien visitors are saying that hostile aliens are unlikely to be in our immediate future, instead suggesting that previous observations and several theories on the subject suggest any alien visitors we may meet in the near future would most likely not only be friendly, but could even have humanity’s best interests at heart.
Hellyer suggested that many Earth technologies could have been descended from technology received from an extraterrestrial source. Some advocates of the Roswell UFO crash theory have noted the significant leaps forward Earth’s technology made in its wake. Those who suggest we could have reverse engineered many inventions, say the timing is no accident.
Both Hawking and Hellyer have come quite far in their careers and are described as possessing a prodigious intelligence. Both agree aliens are a very real possibility – or even an inevitability.
Hellyer, in a televised interview with msnbc news referred to the myriad eyewitness accounts as well as documentation by government authorities suggesting there’s more to the UFO phenomenon than just sensational headlines. Encouraging a proper and serious discourse on the subject, Hellyer suggests that extraterrestrials are one of the more important subjects our planet faces today.
It is important to keep in mind that Hawking’s statement was based partially on a projection of what level extraterrestrial technology would need to achieve in order to be able to span the immense vastness of space between stars and applying that to previous historical incidents. And it’s true that we need only look at historical precedent to discover what happens when one civilization with a technological advantage comes across another. Although it should be noted that these encounters in the past have dealt exclusively with human civilizations interacting with one another, and we don’t fully know what might happen with a life form that developed on a completely different planet.
The debate was prompted when Hawking speculated on the subject in a recent documentary series entitled “Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking.” The documentary also touched on subjects ranging from the very fabric of the universe to projections on the possibility for time travel. If we do meet aliens at some point in humanity’s future, we will likely not know how friendly or hostile they may be until we actually make first contact – and if that contact has already been made, then the mystery still pervades, withstanding scrutiny from some of the world’s greatest minds.
Will Hawking find himself drawn into a debate, defending his point of view on the matter as he becomes more outspoken on humanity’s need for caution when dealing with extraterrestrials?