How to Avoid Stephen Hawking's Dark Prediction for Humanity

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Personally I think Hawking is turning (or has turned) into some kind of jackass.

He now pretends to be still associated with "Science" but speaks (now) like a fool, with no "Science" to back up his foolishness.

Malevolent indeed. I hope Trump doesn't hear that or we'll soon be spreading our hate and warfare into the rest of the universe. Infinite hate, killing, pain, suffering and warfare...how charming this ass has become.

Perhaps I once admired this person for overcoming adversity (I wonder why?), but now he's just another person using his influence for personal gain (not all "gain" is financial).

feh!

Right now we can't get to the rest of the Universe. The farthest we can get (in person) is to low orbit....

It's the promotion of the mindset that is most disgusting. We really have an overabundance at this time.

Right now we can't get to the rest of the Universe. The farthest we can get (in person) is to low orbit....

You're totally correct..(see how well the Universe protects itself against barbarians??? ).

How much older could a civilization be, compared to humanity? Could older civilizations be thousands of years ahead of us? Millions of years? Billions of years? At this point it seems clear that to regard ourselves as the oldest and wisest civilization in the Universe is just a pathetic joke...would you agree? And in the same vein to imagine we would be the fastest growing civilization in the universe would also be egotistic fallacy.

Statistically, with enough input, someone might ( very roughly) show the place we (humanity) might reasonably stand among the populations of the Universe.

If we use only the limitations of the speed of light (and Hawking's feeble brain power) to define our calculations of advancement we turn our backs on research and the limitless possibilities of our limitless Universe. Incredible discoveries are being made constantly. ("Science Daily" and "Science and Tech Reports" are interesting reads.)

I believe, should we ever meet another space-faring civilization, we will find they've overcome their unsophisticated past (as we must do to truly "travel the universe") to advance into the greater Universal family.

I guess I'll just have to "kick back" and wait and see.

A simple logic test dictates that (hypothetically) if life only evolved on earth and nowhere else then the conditions must have been carefully nurtured by intelligent design (the god theory). The problem for religious fruitcakes is that somebody also has to create "god the creator"!

Plenty of scientists support the Drake equation (based on the sheer number of earth like planets) and the high probability that "intelligent" life has evolved elsewhere in the "known" universe. Based on numbers it's probably arisen millions of times over...

Where scientists project there own "foibles" is the assumption that because no alien has ever landed in Washington and introduced themselves therefore no intelligent life form exists within contactable distance to the nearest habitable star.

The problem is when you add the variable for the "age of the known universe" to the Drake equation then intelligent life has not only arisen many times over but that intelligent life has probably arisen many millions or even billions of years before mankind walked out of the primordial soup in early earth. It then becomes an exercise in demonstrating the feeble nature of the human mind that some of our smartest scientists can't fathom that an advanced being even a few hundred years more advanced (let alone thousands or millions) could not traverse a few light years or at least be aware of our solar system with a habitable planet.

In this respect physicists like Hawking lack foresight that they think a malevolent alien "race" will be only be alerted of our existence if you send out pathetic radio signals. They already know we exist and (up to this point) don't really care that we have elected a narrow minded buffoon as leader of the "free world"

Not exactly.

You cannot "add the age of the universe" to the Drake Equation.

You have to take into account stellar evolution, and nucleogenesis.

The first stars appeared only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang 13 billion years ago, but those stars were composed almost entirely of hydrogen, with a pinch of helium, and no other kind of atoms.

So the first stars did not have heavy elements. Which means that the first stars could not have had planets (much less soil, much less living cells on those planets).

It took billions of years, and several generations of stars (living, dying and exploding into supernovae, and then new suns forming out of nebulae again) for the primordial hydrogen of the universe to be fashioned ( by being baked in the cores of stars, or being forcibly fused in supernovae) into the other elements on the periodic table ranging from light (but heavier than hydrogen and helium) elements like oxygen and carbon, up through iron, Nickel, and uranium, that we have on the earth today.

The Universe maybe 13 billion years old, but it probably didnt become chemically rich enough for life until about 4.5 billiion years ago when our sun's generation of stars formed.

No heavier than hydrogen elements means no planets, and no building blocks for life. So for most of the 13 billion year history of the universe NO life (much less "intellegent life") could have appeared. Indeed life was probably impossible in the Universe much earlier than the birth of our own sun.

So creatures in some distant corner of the galaxy might being living in a solar system thats one percent older than ours (and thus be one percent ahead of us in evolution which would mean that they are 45 million years ahead of us). Creatures millions of years older than us might exist, even tens of millions of years older than us, but NOT "billions" of years older than us. Not possible according to current theory.To recap: The big bang only gave us hydrogen and helium. It took billions of years of stellar nucleogenisis, and supernovae nucleargensis to create the carbon in your body that the protein and DNA in your cells is largely made of. So you you could not have evolved prior to those elements becoming abundant.

Neither could aliens.

I take your point re: nucleogenesis and the age of habitable planets. However scientists are already talking about downloading memories in less than a hundred years! they can forsee the post-biological era possibly within our own lifetimes. This could also incorporate artificial intelligence.

That's a heck of a lot less than your conservative estimates of tens of millions of years. So assuming other sentient beings survived destroying themselves, or having their own AI robots disposing of their useless organic carbon based masters then they will exist but will be in a form that is beyond our understanding. Arthur C Clarke in his Space Odyssey was a much more on the ball than people like Hawking in where he thought evolution would take sentient beings

Not sure what your point is. It still takes biological beings to build robots in the first place.

Yeah but if the robots were built a few million yeahs ago they might have crossed the thousands of light years and found us. Hang on....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyW5KMMDjZw

Consider also that 14 billion years ago (or whenever) there was matter introduced where none had been before (at least I don't remember seeing any). There are no doubt scientific estimates of how much matter was "squirted" (or whatever) into our blossoming new universe. BUT something to remember is (by definition): The universe was much much smaller at this time. In this (more or less) confined area the creation of heavy element rich solar systems through nova events (created by stars with heavy elements in their cores) would have been quite accelerated compared to the universe we observe today. This could mean the creation of heavy element star systems could have happened much faster than imagined.

If this thought were carried to it's logical extreme this could mean there are millions (?) of space faring intelligent races in the universe (remember we're talking about things not nearly as feeble as one tiny galaxy)....and if this should be true, even if only in part, I challenge anyone to estimate how many TOTAL intelligent races there may be, to "discover" and observe (hundreds of millions?).

What would the intelligent viewpoint of these space farers be toward primitive civilizations such as ours??? (Kind of hard to suggest human's approach would be the same as these advanced civilizations.) They could be monitoring us now...assuming the speed of light thingee has been overcome in a practical way. Or perhaps the discovery and usage of "faster than light" communications will be the "guest pass" into the greater universe?

If you look at the published view of the people at the SETI project (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) they are adamant that aliens could not travel "vast distances" which is a somewhat narrow frame of projection assuming aliens are humans with radio transistors sitting on a planet waiting for another humanoid like use with radio signals. Quite daft....

We have zero knowledge of aliens. So suppose anything you wish. It is pure speculation.

We have no evidence that intelligent non-terrestrials exist anywhere in the cosmos, but it is very hard to believe that they don't exist either. In any case we know nothing about them if the do exist. And we clearly know nothing about them if they don't exist. One cannot know anything definite about something that does not exist.

On the one hand it's unlikely they don't exist...life couldn't just arise once in the entire history of the universe
On the other hand because we don't have evidence therefore aliens don't exist (your words)

This is the conundrum scientists grapple with as well. I'm quite sure some of the smug skeptics who laugh at the idea of aliens will be the first to offer elaborate theories when/if the existence of aliens actually comes to pass...

When we speak of meeting aliens we speak exactly the way you infer: We speculate, theorize, just the way our evolving brain/nervous system has taught us to.

This is very nearly what we have done in relation to the Big Bang Theory. We make a few childish assumptions, as though we actually knew what we were talking about. And yet it seems hardly a day goes bye when we are forced again to reexamine our assumptions because of a new discovery or replacement of an old theory with a new, fact generated theory. We're just now beginning to understand the basic underpinning of our universe.

MY fondest speculation (as though it wasn't evident) is that a visiting race has overcome this sickness the human race is cursed with at this time and can teach us this "trick/cure." The discussion of a race which never contracted this sickness is a different type of discussion perhaps best left for another time.

I think the difference is between an "educated guess" (using theorems published in nature or science) or deductive reasoning based on common sense

We rely largely on our sensory perception (tracking objects in space using telescopes tracking visible spectrum, radio waves, gravity etc) to map the universe but actually have no idea what is controlling concepts dark matter. There is a growing popularity for the "matrix model" where we are all plugged into a 3D matrix/grid

I like the dark matter discussions. Perfect proof that it's only been a very short while (cosmologically speaking) since we were eating our food raw, off dirt. And here we are now, still in our race's infancy, with all of eternity spread out before us. I know there will be many many more mysteries to explore, many right before our eyes. Even now there are theories examining the speed of light (of which it seems as though there may be alternate theories, also provable).

We're finding out the Universe is much stranger than we'd thought.