Will we find aliens first or will they find us?

[Scootaloo]

163. I find Hawking's fear of alien contact a little silly

He's basing his argument on the way more technologically advanced societies on earth have tended to treat less advanced ones. Sure,that happened, but Hawking misses the why - resources, whether material like gold, wood, or oil, or ideological like souls or prestige.

A genuinely spacefaring civilization has the technology and scope to gather near-infinite material resources without ever interacting with another civilization. Why on earth (heh) would such a technologically-advanced society bother fighting us for our world, when the can just plunk it down on Mars and get whatever they need from there without a fight?

I suppose there's the possibility of blind-traveling colony ships, some distant civilization going "oh look, a habitable world" and just firing boats full of their people at us on that basis alone, sight unseen. Sort of like the core plot of Interstellar. Such a scenario doesn't seem terribly dangerous - the occupants would be greatly outnumbered, light years (and frankly, hundreds of generations) removed from their base, and the high odds of biological incompatibility means neither side has much to worry about from disease... At least until one side or the other's microbes make the inter-species jump, in which case the population with the slow microbes loses.