 |
|
“Why can’t we speak of a ‘brother extraterrestrial‘? It would still be part of creation,” he said.
“As an astronomer, I continue to believe that God is the creator of the universe and that we are not the product of something casual but children of a good father who has a project of love in mind for us,” he said.
Stephen Hawking’s answer to the possibility is “probably not“.
“Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare.” He adds: “Some would say it has yet to occur on earth.”
Maybe Jesus is an alien… That’s right, he came from Mexico!
Maybe the talking snake that so many believe in is an alien as well!
Aliens???
Is the Vatican so desperate to be hip and so afraid to become even more irrelevant that they are ready to concede that earth and God’s creation is no longer the center of the universe???
Oh wait, even better… they are slowly admitting that the bible is nothing more then stories?
Sounds about as possible as everything that is written in the bible.
Well, both God and Aliens are MYTHICAL CREATURES !!! But is anyone listening to the Vatican when all the Altar Boys grab their ankles at the drop of a mitre and walk around funny ?
“If there is life elsewhere in the universe, Hawking asks why haven’t we stumbled onto some alien broadcasts in space, maybe something like “alien quiz shows?”
If Steven Hawking really said that I have lost a little respect for him. That is the kind of stupid question that someone on this blog would ask.
He of all people should know that our transitions from our own broadcasts when we first started only have reached maybe a dozen or more star systems. (not sure of the actual amount but it is very low) Not to mention that we have know for a while that the strength of them is too weak to reach very far. So how would we expect to hear an inteligant alien lifeform 500 or even 100 lightyears away?
How could he ask such a………Well……… stupid question?
Hawking may be right in this quote:
However, we really should wait until we at least find out whether there is life on Europa, and if so, what form it takes, before making such guesses. For, this is just a guess. It may be a guess from a genius, but it’s a guess nonetheless.
Aliens may be slightly more likely than god, since we do know there is life in the universe and we don’t know of any supernatural forces. However, to really theorize about the statistical regularity of life elsewhere in the universe, or lack thereof, is highly premature given current knowledge.
#5 – J.
Check out the Fermi Paradox at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
or Google it …
“Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has been thinking a lot about the cosmic question, “Are we alone?” The answer is probably not, he says.”
Sounds to me like Hawking is saying we MAY well have extraterrestrial brothers.
The catholic church does seem to take on a mix of “modern thinking” while sticking with the old. The science they see they can’t deny and the moral teachings no one can disprove. A faith built on “values.”
I wonder how many USA catholics really are acceptable to “mother church.”
Of course if there are Space Aliens, they will probably come with their own Dieties and may want to FORCIBLY CONVERT US MERE HUMANS TO THEIR RELIGION – IF THEY DON’T JUST ENSLAVE US !!!
[Geez, calm down Jim. – ed.]
People love to shout out numbers before a sporting event to say what could happen, what shouldn’t happen, what couldn’t happen and what would happen if the thing that would probably happen in a possible circumstance didn’t happen because of what has been seen in the past.
You don’t know until you’ve seen it, experienced it and lived it. And once the football match is over, the speculation means nothing.
So, until you have all that, telling people there’s no need to think beyond your opinion and your conclusion (no matter how many books you’ve read to tell you that you’re right) is plain evil. And even when you have the ‘experience’, closing your mind to other possibilities makes you rather blinkered. This goes for religious zealots who want to kill all heathen as well as the neo-atheists who would rather go to bed with Robert Mugabe than shake hands with a Sunday School teacher.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, religion has caused plenty of wars (not oil, money or power, they’re just the excuse) – but science has made those wars oh so efficient at killing people.
Another reason why we haven’t intercepted any broadcasts from aliens is maybe they broadcast on frequencies we have yet to discover or by other means we can’t yet intercept.
Just because many primitive tribes could not listen to our radio broadcasts did not mean they were stupid. Once they received the technology they could listen all day without thinking “god” is talking to them.
# 7 JimD
Yeah I know all about Fermi’s Paradox and there are many answers to it. I still think the question is stupid. Like when people said If there are little “germs” all over the place making us sick how come we can’t see them? Well the answer to that was pretty simple.
He unlike Fermi has a much better idea of the scale of the universe. Such a question should not even be recognized anymore due to the ridiculousness of the premise.
I think any intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos that is aware of our existence and level of development is reacting us the same way most of us react to seeing Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses. They’re probably ignoring us and until we become reasonable neighbors they’ll be hiding behind the couch with the lights off every time we seek them out.
hawking isn’t worried about being alone in the universe
The Pope looks like an alien.
I, for one, welcome our new FSM overlords.
All I wanna know is where I can get the alien crucifix! Oh and God is a made up delusion to help people cope with a lack of understanding. Just thought I would get my swing in there.
If there is life, what makes you think they would consider us as equals. If they have evolved along the same lines we have, it’s much more likely we would be considered as something to eat.
I think lack of empathy is something that has to be overcome in order for a civilization to survive its own maturity. ie==there are no Klingons. Maybe the Borg, but not Klingons.
Much goes to the concept of the Intelligent Designer. Yes==create time and space and make it 99.9999999999999 hostile to life. Excellent Design.
#20 – bobbo,
I personally like the idea of creating 100,000,000,000 galaxies and 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets just to dump humans on this one. Pretty wasteful god, no?
But, at least one religious wacko is not saying that we’re alone. I wonder what he thinks of whether the whole of the cosmos, all 13.7 billion years of it and counting, are just for us.
I think the current crop of presidential candidates is proof that any aliens will be more advanced than us. And we appear to be going backwards.
> Of course if there are Space Aliens, they
> will probably come with their own Dieties
> and may want to FORCIBLY CONVERT US MERE
> HUMANS TO THEIR RELIGION – IF THEY DON’T
> JUST ENSLAVE US !!!
This will only be true if Scott’s speculations about Europa turn out to misunderestimate the kind of life living there. You know what happens when those Europa-eans go exploring…
SJ
# 20 bobbo
“Yes==create time and space and make it 99.9999999999999 hostile to life. Excellent Design.”
LOL That was very funny.
#22 – TheGlobalWarmer,
Hey!! Something we agree on. Whoda thunk it?
#23 – Sviergn,
I don’t recall making any guesses about what form the life might take. Could be none at all. Could be bacteria. Could be tube worms. Could be dolphins with thumbs, though more likely hyper-intelligent sharks with thumbs since it’d be hard to surface through thick ice.
#21–Scott==if we were all alone in the universe, that would make me think we were “kinda special” but maybe thats just too anthro-centered?
Goes to the whole idea I find fascinating and still don’t understand of the “balanced universe” were all the various forces==gravity, electromagnetic, nuclear, etc where only a few percentages different, the uninverse could not exist as it does. Seems statistically impossible no?
That to me means there must be many different universes, many of them dead or formless because their “physics” is off.==Maybe those universes co-exist or come and go in time.
I better stop, I’m starting to fear the afterlife!
# 26 bobbo
“That to me means there must be many different universes, many of them dead or formless because their “physics” is off.==Maybe those universes co-exist or come and go in time.”
That would kind of be like string theory and isn’t far off from where science of today stands on the issue. Obviously a lot of details are missing but that is one of the general ideas.
“Funes, who runs the observatory which is based south of Rome and in Arizona, held out the possibility that the human race might actually be the “lost sheep” of the universe.”
The dichotomy of a scientist/astronomer and true believer inhabiting the same mind is strange enough for me to be completely convinced that aliens do indeed walk among us.
bobbo, J,
There is indeed a lot of hypothesizing about such things on the part of String Hypothesis. (I’m not personally ready to call Strings a theory since there is not sufficient supporting data. In fact, this may be confusing the IDers about what theory means in science.)
You guys might want to check out The Cosmic Landscape by Leonard Susskind. He goes into that quite a lot, beginning with the 10^500 possible integer solutions to String Hypothesis, presuming them to be real potential universes, and then invoking the Anthropic Principle for why our universe is the way it is.
It’s a good read. However, So is The Trouble With Physics by Lee Smolin, who starts with the same data and forms the conclusion that it’s time to either throw out String Hypothesis as failed physics or at least devote more resources to competing hypotheses.
And, so is Warped Passages by Lisa Randall who has a completely different take on the whole situation and gives some of the possible scenarios for the universe that the model builders (think bottom up instead of top down, strings are top down) are coming up with.
Reading all three back to back to back will make your head spin. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking is probably a prerequisite for all of these. All four are written for a general audience and will be understandable to either of you.
#28 – BubbaRay,
The dichotomy of a scientist/astronomer and true believer inhabiting the same mind is strange enough for me to be completely convinced that aliens do indeed walk among us.
Don’t insult aliens!! This dichotomy of simultaneous idiocy and brilliance may truly be uniquely human. Or, at least we can hope so. 😉