In a warning against Earth eagerly seeking out contact with extra-terrestrial life, Stephen Hawking recently stated: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America.” So by that does he mean that the commander of the alien fleet will be scorned as a crank when he claims the universe is dimensional past their solar system, that he’ll be laughed off of his home planet and have to go to another planet for support for the voyage to Earth, which consequently he thinks is just an easier way to get to the other side of their own solar system for trade, and on the way he’ll get lost somewhere in the asteroid belt and bounce around our solar system until he happens upon our Earth, which he thinks is another planet altogether, that he’ll face mutiny and arrest, and then he’ll get shipwrecked on Venus for a year or so, and he’ll eventually return home a broken man and die thinking his life has been a complete failure, never realizing the true identity of the world he has discovered, but at least he’ll get a city named after him in Ohio? Is that what he means? Because from my understanding of it, it wasn’t so bad when Christopher Columbus first landed in America; it was kind of worse later on, like when Hernán Cortés came and stayed for a while, saw lots of gold, and kind of felt a little bit of disapproval about the natives’ treatment of their neighboring tribes. But I guess you can’t expect something specific like that from an astrophysicist, a field in which accurate details aren’t quite so important. I mean, with all that black space out there and everything way out so far away, it’s not like we can actually go out there and check their work or anything. I’ll bet they could just make up a bunch of equations with all kinds of random letters and symbols in them and pretend that they mean something and most of us would be none the wiser. And they’re just sitting there laughing at us about it! The nerve! I think that Stephen Hawking is just afraid of the aliens showing up and revealing to us all how wrong all of his theoretical work is. They’d laugh and laugh and point at his blackboard full of equations and slap each other on the backs with their tentacles or whatever, and Hawking would just sit there turning red: embarrassed, exposed to the whole world. Yeah, he knows that alien life forms would be more intelligent than us if they made it all the way here, and he just doesn’t want anyone smarter than him around here. He’s like the one-eyed man who is king in the land of the blind: he just doesn’t want anyone else with, like, twenty eyes or whatever showing up to overthrow his power.
His warning is a little late, however. Naïve hippies have been sending messages into space for years, and Carl Sagan sent some engraved invitation out into space on the Voyager space probe (the Voyager Golden Record) hoping to attract some attention, since his penny-ante Arecibo message was apparently laughed off and ignored in great numbers like the E.T. video game it looks remarkably similar to. But that doesn’t mean that they won’t find them and come calling someday soon! Since we can’t undo these noble attempts to contact our future oppressors (why didn’t Hawking say something before it was too late? Thanks, Captain Hindsight!), we can at least try to stem the tide of invaders with an addendum of cautionary tales. I say we send up some extra material on a Golden DVD that says, “Oops, we forgot to tell you that we’re constantly being attacked by giant monsters (show some scenes from Godzilla, King Kong, and Rodan movies), that we have plagues of vampires and werewolves constantly seducing our youth (show scenes from the Twilight movies and all the clones… I guess we’ll need a boxed-set of DVDs!), oh, and that we have a reactionary military that’s always shoot-‘em-firstiest when it comes to alien visitors (show scenes of Klaatu getting shot, the military defeating the aliens in Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, Plan 9 From Outer Space, etc.).
Oh, and by the way this is just a joke; of course Hawking is brilliant, so please spare me the angry physicist letters threatening to remove me from the force of gravity or whatever. And by the way, when is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN going to swallow the planet up in a black hole looking for the Higgs boson? I’m beginning to think that thing was a waste of money!
