Stephen Hawking Fears A Romulan Invasion Fleet

Hawking assumes that visiting intelligent life would be malicious, bent on stealing our resources or simply killing us. I don't necessarily agree with that. My belief is that any alien race sufficiently advanced to develop interstellar propulsion must have overcome genetic and cultural propensities for violence.

He makes a good point though, and I find it refreshing to hear from a thinker:

"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," he said.

What Hawking is suggesting here is that any violent confrontation between us and visiting aliens will be fairly lopsided. But what isn't clearly stated here is the old saying "Columbus brought smallpox, and took home syphilis."
Face-to-face interaction with an alien race would almost certainly kill us, and them. This was alluded to over 100 years ago when H.G. Wells wrote in War of the Worlds that all-powerful aliens reach Earth bent on take-over, only to be completely annihilated by the bacteria and virii we native species have found innocuous for millenia.

So Hawking is right. Shaking hands with aliens would probably mean our doom.


_