The Guardian is asking if Stephen Hawking is right about aliens. What is Stephen Hawking saying?

“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,” Hawking has said in a forthcoming documentary made for the Discovery Channel. He argues that, instead of trying to find and communicate with life in the cosmos, humans would be better off doing everything they can to avoid contact.

The article goes around and drums up all sorts of other naysayers from the “scientific” community.

“Extremophiles” are species that can survive in places that would quickly kill humans and other “normal” life-forms. These single-celled creatures have been found in boiling hot vents of water thrusting through the ocean floor, or at temperatures well below the freezing point of water. The front ends of some creatures that live near deep-sea vents are 200C warmer than their back ends.

“In our naive and parochial way, we have named these things extremophiles, which shows prejudice – we’re normal, everything else is extreme,” says Ian Stewart, a mathematician at Warwick University and author of What Does A Martian Look Like? “From the point of view of a creature that lives in boiling water, we’re extreme because we live in much milder temperatures. We’re at least as extreme compared to them as they are compared to us.”

Quit being a P.C. whore.

Paul Davies, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University and chair of Seti’s post-detection taskforce, argues that alien brains, with their different architecture, would interpret information very differently from ours. What we think of as beautiful or friendly might come across as violent to them, or vice versa. “Lots of people think that because they would be so wise and knowledgeable, they would be peaceful,” adds Stewart. “I don’t think you can assume that. I don’t think you can put human views on to them; that’s a dangerous way of thinking. Aliens are alien. If they exist at all, we cannot assume they’re like us.”

See, this is all just ridiculous. Because there was some fucking movie that recently made $2.7 billion. And apparently this movie (I don’t know for sure. Maybe I’ll watch it this weekend and update this post.) had the audience rooting for the fucking aliens. So if the fucking aliens came down, but were the assholes looking for unobtanium (seriously?! People are obsessed with a movie that actually has something called “unobtanium?!” Fuck, maybe I won’t bother watching this movie.), then we’d get to be the underdogs that everybody loves.

And we could make reality TV out of it and news programs and it would all be beamed into space to entertain the aliens of Beetleguise or Xenu or where ever it fucking gets to in 1,000 years. Then we are all movie stars!

Think about it! You and me on TV. That would be fucking rad. And we wouldn’t need to eat horse testicles or be berated by an English douche bag.

The aliens would be all superior and probably eat uranium for breakfast so our nuclear bombs would just be like spinach for Popeye. Then, in the end, we would win because they didn’t have a cure for the common cold. Or syphilis. Whichever.

So quit being a Negative Nancy, Stephen Hawking. And shut up with the logic. I mean, sure, millions of people will most likely die. But then the History Channel would have something to thrive on once people got bored with WWII documentaries.
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P.S. That last line was partially stolen from Doug Stanhope (and not nearly as cutting). So go buy his album, No Refunds, because it is fucking funny.