by D. Vogt

Created on: July 09, 2010

Earlier in 2010, the famous physicist Stephen Hawking made headlines with the controversial remark that our search for extra-terrestrial intelligence is putting Earth at too great a risk, since it may provoke an unwanted first contact with hostile aliens. In his popular television documentary series "Stephen Hawking's Universe," Hawking explained that sending messages into the stars could risk attracting attention from "nomads, looking to conquer and colonize": in other words, an advanced extraterrestrial civilization which had used up the resources on its own homeworld and now prowls the galaxy in search of new, exploitable systems.

If we accidentally attract their attention, Hawking notes, the resulting encounter would almost certainly go very poorly for us. The technological disparity between, say, early twenty-first century Earth and an extremely advanced spacefaring race of scavengers would be much greater than that between fifteenth-century Europe and the civilizations of the Americas - and that encounter, Hawking notes, "didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans."

Of course, the likelihood that the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence will attract the wrong sort of attention is incredibly low. However, Hawking's concerns are not new. In the past, similarly minded critics have pointed out that while this risk does seem low, the chances of identifying an alien race in the first place are very low. At best, SETI is simply a waste of money; at worst, it risks exposing us to an alien race that could threaten our very survival.

Not everyone is convinced by Hawking's remarks. Some consider them insulting to humans: after all, by the time our radio signals reach distant stars (which would take mere decades if an alien ship is close by, but more likely centuries or even millennia), and by the time they arrange to travel here (probably at much less than light-speed, meaning even more decades or centuries), humanity will either have killed itself off due to war or climate change, or we will have progressed, too, to the point where we might well be a technological match for any aliens that come our way.

Moreover, the "alien scavenger" hypothesis does have some weaknesses. It is quite plausible that, if alien civilizations do exist, at least some of them are scavengers, having lost or exhausted the resources of their homeworld and set out in search of alternatives. (It may also be that they are searching for some particular mineral not found on their

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