Stephen Hawking Is Terrified Of An Alien Invasion, And The Reason Makes Nothing But Sense [View all]

[eridani]

http://www.upworthy.com/stephen-hawking-is-terrified-of-an-alien-invasion-and-the-reason-makes-nothing-but-sense?c=upw1

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Neil deGrasse Tyson: We have a certain intelligence gap between us and the other creatures on Earth. You don't walk by the worm on street and say, "Gee, I wonder what he's thinking? I'll somehow have deep insight..." No! You step on the worm, all right? This is what we do as humans. So I wonder, if in fact, we have been observed by aliens, and upon close examination of human conduct and human behavior, they've concluded that there's no sign of intelligent life on Earth.

Let me tell you a couple of things. Earth, NASA says we go into space by launching into Earth orbit. Do you know how high above Earth the space station orbits? No, you don't know? I'll tell you, 3/8 of an inch. And we tell ourselves that that's space. Excuse me, that's just driving around the block. Right? And that dude who jumped out of a balloon...

Ohh, the edge-of-space jump. On this, if the Earth were this size, it'd be 1/16 of an inch above the surface. That's where he jumped, right there. See that? No, you can't see it because it's a 1/16 of an inch. So on this scale, where's the moon? It's 30 feet away. It's not in this office. It's three offices down. On this scale, where's Mars? It's a mile away. Where is the nearest star system? Forget it! So if an alien traversed that distance - and all we're doing is driving around the block - they're more advanced than we are.

And by the way, Hawking is all worried that aliens might suck our brains out. That concern comes from the fact that when any of us explore the world with high-technology ships and came upon a civilization less advanced, it was bad for the less advanced civilization. They either were completely wiped out or subjugated or enslaved or whatever. So I think his fear about aliens is a reflection of his actual knowledge about humans, how humans treat each other, not real knowledge about how actual aliens would treat us. So there you have it, Earth.