Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking !--Comment--! You can be a top theoretical physicist but it doesn't mean you  automatically subscribe to a few basic, common sense principles it seems. In a recent TV program and as part of related commentary -  Professor Hawking accepts the central tenet of exopolitics - ie: that life exists beyond the planetary geostation but he continues to make the point thatif this is the case -  we should be careful of initiating commuication with visiting intelligences in case they have an agenda to 'conquer us'.

Hawkins suggests:

“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

Discovery Channel Promo for Hawking's New Series

Although the fact open debate is now taking place and the reality of ET life now taken more or less for granted in scientific circles, the professor's point about colonisation can be seen as the result of the post war truth embargo which has resulted in scientific and media bias when examining this crucial area.

Vast amount of contact data -  from both individuals and military -  suggests that whilst their may be certain rogue elements within the numerous groups who have had a sustained interest in this planet - it's fairly obvious that the fact we remain very much un-conquered that agendas on the whole are benign. In fact initiating contact and communication should be seen as a terrestrial priority and maybe the only way of shifting the current calamatous direction of the human race. 

The fact that The Vatican has seen it necessary to suggest that the ET reality fits with faith in a montheistic God, that the British Royal SociETy has recently met to discuss this area and that diplomatic meetings based on the UN framework may also be pushing the topic to national governments suggests that when we scratch the surface of contemporary geopolitical culture -  the extra-terrestrial issue is firmly at the centre of things.

Steven Greer - Disclosure Project responded:

"[it is]....unfortunate that Stephen Hawking has added his voice to a growing chorus of xenophobia and fear regarding what he terms 'aliens.'"

As a scientist, he should know better: Any interstellar civilization would possess such technologies that the meager resources of Earth would be unneeded. If you can travel faster than the speed of light, you can manifest what is needed. Period. Moreover, if they were hostile, since ETs are already visiting Earth (see http://www.disclosureproject.org/ ) this would have been made crystal clear when we detonated the first atomic weapon in 1945. To date, no place on Earth has been invaded or attacked or colonized.
Greer concluded by chastising Hawking for "stirring the war-mongering fear pot" and defending the industrial-military complex. But while Escamilla and Greer and advocate the position that alien life is more likely to be hospitable than threatening to earthlings, others took Hawking's warnings to heart

• Additional comments from Michael Salla and Alfred Webre.

THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.

The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.”

The answer, he suggests, is that most of it will be the equivalent of microbes or simple animals — the sort of life that has dominated Earth for most of its history.

One scene in his documentary for the Discovery Channel shows herds of two-legged herbivores browsing on an alien cliff-face where they are picked off by flying, yellow lizard-like predators. Another shows glowing fluorescent aquatic animals forming vast shoals in the oceans thought to underlie the thick ice coating Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter.

Such scenes are speculative, but Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious point: that a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

The completion of the documentary marks a triumph for Hawking, now 68, who is paralysed by motor neurone disease and has very limited powers of communication. The project took him and his producers three years, during which he insisted on rewriting large chunks of the script and checking the filming.

John Smithson, executive producer for Discovery, said: “He wanted to make a programme that was entertaining for a general audience as well as scientific and that’s a tough job, given the complexity of the ideas involved.”

Hawking has suggested the possibility of alien life before but his views have been clarified by a series of scientific breakthroughs, such as the discovery, since 1995, of more than 450 planets orbiting distant stars, showing that planets are a common phenomenon.

So far, all the new planets found have been far larger than Earth, but only because the telescopes used to detect them are not sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized bodies at such distances.

Another breakthrough is the discovery that life on Earth has proven able to colonise its most extreme environments. If life can survive and evolve there, scientists reason, then perhaps nowhere is out of bounds.

Hawking’s belief in aliens places him in good scientific company. In his recent Wonders of the Solar System BBC series, Professor Brian Cox backed the idea, too, suggesting Mars, Europa and Titan, a moon of Saturn, as likely places to look.

Similarly, Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, warned in a lecture earlier this year that aliens might prove to be beyond human understanding.

"I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive,” he said. “Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.”

Stephen Hawking's Universe begins on the Discovery Channel on Sunday May 9 at 9pm