Mailund on the Internet

I hate to disagree with someone as smarter than me as Stephen Hawking, but I just cannot share his fear of alien visitors:

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.”

If the aliens have the technology for interstellar travel, I doubt there is much point for them in raiding our resources. The resources you can find on Earth you can find in by mining asteroids as well, which is probably easier than dealing with the gravity well of Earth. Plus, if they have the resources to travel between stars, how much need will they have for the resources of Earth anyway?

They might decide to exterminate us just for the heck of it, but raiding our resources I’m just not buying.

As for communicating with aliens in the first place, I am not too optimistic.  I’m sure they are out there, mainly as simple life, probably, but also as highly technically evolved civilizations. I just find it highly unlikely that, in the vastness of the Universe, life only evolved on Earth.  But what’s the chance of finding someone on roughly our level of intelligence?  If they are much dumber, we won’t be able to communicate with them in the first place, and if they are much smarter than us, why would they want to communicate with us?

I hope they will.  There’s a lot we can learn from aliens much smarter than we are, but I’m not too optimistic…

Update 27/4: See also Gene Expression: The aliens are out to get us! and Starts with a Bang: If Aliens Exist, should we be eager to meet them?

This one made me laugh:

They may be able to get the correct answer on a multiple choice test that asks about a critical p-value. I have lived over half a century now and discovered that life holds very few multiple choice tests.

From the incoming links I just found that I was listed on the Top 15 Bioinformatics Blogs in 2010 at Knowledge beyond words.

Cool, but perhaps not that deserving since I basically haven’t blogged since the fall last year.  But I’ll get right on it, as soon as I have something interesting to share…

That being said, I think all of the (other) blogs listed there are worth following.  I was already reading most of them, but five were new to me.  After scanning through them quickly, I have added those five to my RSS reader.

It is twenty years today that the Hubble space telescope was launched. Since then, it has produced truly marvelous pictures of our solar system, our galaxy and the furthest parts of our universe.

Well, maybe not quite for the entire duration, there was a small glitch with the mirror that wasn’t corrected until 1993… but on a day of celebration like this, we shouldn’t dwell on that.

For much more on Hubble, check out NASA’s webpage, and for a lot of beautiful pictures, check out Starts with a Bang.