Representing physicists everywhere, we implore you to leave the thinking to intelligent beings, "KiNg"BrAdLeY7.

Hawking's theories are simply based on actual mathematical probability. Firstly, given the infinite nature of the universe and the fact that intelligent life is proven to exist on one planet (ours), the probability of intelligent life existing elsewhere is a certainty. That much you pointed out.

Secondly, Hawking essentially pointed out that the chances of aliens being benign was more or less equal to them being a danger to humankind. In that regard, he questioned whether it was actually advisable to go out and seek intelligent life when it was a 50:50 chance of putting the Earth at risk by attracting unwanted attention.

The problem is that we has humans tend to ascribe human cultural traits to aliens, and that we are likely to be disappointed by the reality. He also pointed out that should aliens be less advanced, humankind has a rather nasty habit of subjugating such cultures it deems "inferior", so either way, the discovery of alien life is unlikely to turn out well.

Yep. Make perfect sense, so why does Bradley have an issue with Hawking stating perfectly sound scientific theory?
It's not like he's some nut job standing in the street shouting "Aliens are coming!", Hawking knows what he's talking about.

To this I pose a different question. When has bradley made any sense?

:D

Good point. He is more akin to the nut job in the street from my previous example....

Is Bradley trying to change his avatar or is the one showing up in chat and on the forum page his old one?

Okay. Dangerous aliens, evil Brexit and black hole multiverse portals, notes taken down, check! Had anyone else spouted that, though, he would be admitted to a good psychologist, instead of being worldwide praised.

When you catch the aliens or teleport to the world of warcraft, please do keep unintelligent old me, informed. Over and out.

This: https://images.gog.com/c8e4c1fe69e1d774fce70f86c0e1cb5484e73dbf6a7b10a8679ce60b9fd57df6.jpg
appears to be his avatar...

I immediately thought of that alien race from Krikkit in the hitchhiker's series that did just this but on a universal scale when they discovered they weren't the only ones out there :)

I think I'm going to be sick.

Why? Our universe is freakin' old, you know... We already know that there are planets similar to our Earth, so there's a chance for life as we know it. And even on non-Earth-like planets there could be a different form of life, that we can't even imagine. Life is a freak and will find a way! Just have a look at our oceans! Deep, deep down, where no one ever heard of the sun, where the water's almost boiling from volcanic activity and where our mighty machines start to crack under the pressure, you'll find some creepy fishes that don't care about these environmental conditions.

And then there are other freaks that'll laugh about "comfortable" situations like the ones I just described. Ever heard of "Tardigrades"? No? Read on ;) With freaky creatures like this one on our own planet, I'd say there's a huge chance to find life on one of the many "uninhabitablle" planets out there. Maybe this little sucker even is from another planet ;) Normally, evolution doesn''t give you the ability to live without water, food and air in a highly radioactive environment with extreme temperature and pressure levels.

We humans are a very young species, but we're traveling to space already. It won't take long until we'll have our first colony on another planet (Mars). AND we're already working on theories about bending spacetime! Heck, NASA is actually working on how to travel faster than light (involves the bending of spacetime). We've only started to get a small grasp of what's going on out there, but we're pushing like mad to make use of it. Why is it so unlikely that an older species already figured out some of those things?

Seriously... We're definitely not the "special snowflake of the universe". I wouldn't be surprised if we make contact with others some day. It's not a question of if, but when!

https://briankoberlein.com/2014/09/25/yes-virginia-black-holes/

https://www.quora.com/How-authentic-and-reliable-is-the-conclusion-of-Laura-Mersini-Houghton-a-physics-professor-at-UNC-who-has-proven-mathematically-that-black-hole-can-never-come-into-being-in-the-first-place

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/03/completely-implausible-a-controversial-paper-exists-but-so-do-black-holes/

there we go. science!

1) He didn't say that there are dangerous aliens out there. He said that if there are aliens out there, and it is statistically likely that there are, should said aliens make contact, the contact will most likely go bad for the less advanced species. What people have been saying for a couple of centuries, even if just in the form of books and movies.

2) He says that he thinks Brexit will be detrimental for the English research community. The English people may be better off leaving the EU, but the research will suffer, since they will no longer be able to get EU grants, or people with EU grants to work for them. So instead of having access to the whole of EU's resources for research, they will only have access to their own resources. That is bad.

3) Read his portal comment again. Our current understanding of physics says that information, not matter, cannot disappear. If an object falls into a black hole, the information it contains must be transferred to said hole, not destroyed. If the black hole then encounters another black hole, what happens to the initial information? It must still reside somewhere. Whether we can observe said somewhere is a different matter (pun intended).

Yeah, but unfortunately, "when" informs "if". We're still relatively early (on cosmological time scales) in the window of habitability for the universe. All we need is to miss our neighbors by a few million years and we'll surely never meet. Or have the rotten luck to be the only intelligent life to ever evolve in this galaxy, while in nearby Andromeda half a dozen survive until our galaxies merge. But that's the when, again. We'll be long gone in a few billion years, and there's very little chance that even with superluminal travel we'd ever cross the vast dark of between.

I hope we get to Europa. I hope those lakes have life, and I hope the tidal shear keeps the subsurface ocean liquid enough for a cryogenic ecosystem. But I don't even hope for meeting an alien intelligence. Too many miles, and too many years.

That would have made my thermal physics classes much, much easier >.>

So this reminds me.

Back in Soviet times, postgrad students had to review the inventions and discoveries of various nutjobs. Fermat''s theorem was finally proved in 1995, but there are still cultists trying to overturn Wiles' proof and hawk theirs (which disregard basic arithmetics).

And in physics, there was a guy who found an alternate solution for the Maxwell equations in their 4-potential form. Awesome, right? Just a tiny problem -- while the abstract vector did look impressive and involved really advanced math, the partial derivatives of it (the meaningful part) were all zeroes. The review system was supposed to be anonymous, but the nutjob somehow found out the name of the postgrad reviewer, tried to get him sued and ruined his academic career.

TL;DR for every Ramanujan or Lavrentyev, there's a million Bradleys.