I think [contacting an alien civilization] would be a disaster. The extraterrestrials would probably be far in advance of us. The history of advanced races meeting more primitive people on this planet is not very happy, and they were the same species. I think we should keep our heads low.
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"The ultimate goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe."
"There are no black holes, only gray holes."
"I would like to understand the mind of God, if there is one."
"We are very, very small, but we are capable of understanding the universe."
"The universe is a beautiful and dangerous place, and I'm glad to be a part of it."
British theoretical physicist whose Hawking radiation work and A Brief History of Time (1988) brought black-hole physics to a mass audience while he lived with ALS for 55 years. Closely associated with Roger Penrose (his collaborator on singularity theorems) and Carl Sagan (fellow popularizer who wrote Brief History's foreword). For an intellectual contrast, see William Lane Craig, American philosopher of religion — Craig's Kalam cosmological argument depends on the Big Bang requiring a divine first cause; Hawking's no-boundary proposal was specifically designed to remove the moment that would require one — the cleanest cosmology-vs-natural-theology contrast in modern thought.
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Reaching out to alien civilizations is dangerous, not exciting. Any species capable of receiving or responding to our signals would almost certainly be technologically far ahead of us. Earth's own history proves that when advanced peoples encounter less developed ones, the result is conquest, exploitation, or extinction — not mutual exchange. Since even same-species encounters went badly, the smart move is to stay silent and avoid drawing attention.
Hawking spent decades mapping the universe's most extreme physics — black holes, singularities, the Big Bang — and concluded it is vast, ancient, and indifferent. He co-founded Breakthrough Listen in 2015 to search for signals while simultaneously opposing active broadcasting. His decades living with ALS gave him a visceral understanding of vulnerability: being physically trapped made the idea of encountering an unstoppable superior force far more than theoretical.
Hawking made this argument most prominently around 2010, as NASA's Kepler telescope began finding thousands of exoplanets and SETI funding was growing. The METI debate — whether humanity should actively broadcast our location — was intensifying among scientists. Simultaneously, postcolonial scholarship was reshaping how Western history was taught and understood. His colonial analogy landed with particular force in a moment when the violence of first contact was being newly reckoned with.
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