“We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet,” Hawking said in 2010. He has compared meeting aliens to Christopher Columbus meeting Native Americans: “That didn’t turn out so well,” he said.
Others have warned of catastrophic consequences ripped from the pages of science fiction: Marauding aliens that could follow our message like a homing beacon, and come here to exploit Earth’s resources, exploit humans, or even to destroy all life as we know it.
“Any civilization detecting our presence is likely to be technologically very advanced, and may not be disposed to treat us nicely. At the very least, the idea seems morally questionable,” physicist Mark Buchanan argued in the journal Nature Physics last fall.
Other astronomers think it’s worth the risk — and they add, somewhat darkly, that it’s too late anyway. We are a loud species, and our messages have been making their way through the cosmos since the dawn of radio.
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