If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans.
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"I am an optimist, but I am a realist who understands that science is a slow process."
"Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe."
"The universe is a great place to be, and I'm glad to be a part of it. But it's also a very dangerous place, and we need to be careful."
"There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, and science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."
"The greatest achievement of mankind is to understand the universe."
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.
During an episode of the Discovery Channel's 'Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking'.
Date: 2010
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If an advanced alien civilization ever made contact with humanity, the encounter would likely be catastrophic for us. Just as technologically superior Europeans devastated indigenous American populations—through conquest, disease, and displacement—a spacefaring alien species would possess overwhelming advantages. The power imbalance alone makes peaceful coexistence unlikely; superior capability historically enables exploitation rather than cooperation.
Hawking spent decades studying the universe's fundamental nature, which gave him a uniquely sobering perspective on cosmic scale and intelligence. He consistently warned against active SETI transmissions, arguing that broadcasting our location was reckless. His physics background made him acutely aware that any civilization capable of interstellar travel would be millions of years more advanced—a gap he considered genuinely dangerous.
Hawking made this warning prominently around 2010, amid growing SETI enthusiasm and early exoplanet discoveries suggesting habitable worlds were common. The era saw accelerating radio-transmission proposals and public excitement about contact. Simultaneously, postcolonial scholarship was reexamining European conquest's brutality, making the Columbus analogy both historically resonant and deliberately provocative to optimistic first-contact narratives.
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