Pandora’s Box and Stephen Hawking

He’s the Albert Einstein of our time. Even more blasphemous, Albert’s superior in many ways. His deformed atrophied body, the shell of a normal man, houses perhaps the greatest mind in the short history of the Homo sapien.

There he is: Stephen Hawking, astrophysicist and genius. In all of his brilliance he’s making a profound statement. He’s saying that we should think twice before attempting to talk to other life forms in the heavens. In fact, his tone is extremely wary in this area.

To this day, we’re still enamored with what lies “out there.” It secretly drives our probing into space. Like children looking to please their parents, we try to do the right thing and be peaceable by sending out songs from the Beatles. We talk in mathematics, the language of the universe. Our clunky machines sail aimlessly to the outer rim with the hopes of our Whoville-type society telling someone, or some thing, that we are here. Yes, we are here.

As we explore, Hawking just sits – compact and scrunched by ALS. His statement about communicating with others in the vast universe is akin to “do not open Pandora’s box”. Anyone else would only garner a nod, a snicker, or a snort of contempt. However, Stephen Hawking is someone we actually stop and listen to. What is he afraid of? What can that supercomputer of a mind really be thinking?

Most humans have no idea that the Earth is a very noisy planet. Our televisions and radio waves, to say nothing of our cell phones and communication arrays, spill an untold amount of static into the galaxy. Even if we wanted to remain quiet and heed Hawking’s warning, we are far too late. Like noisy neighbors having a beer bash well into the wee hours, we have been chattering away for far too many decades.

SETI Institute literally scans the cosmos in search of a hiccup or a cough, anything that denotes sentient life. Our mining for gold has turned up very few specks of evidence, yet we continue to listen.

What is Stephen Hawking afraid of? Klingons, The Borg, Wraiths, or Minbari? My humble opinion tells me it may be something subtler. My judgment, my heart, tells me that Hawking simply feels the “children” are not ready for what we might find or what might find us. In our egocentric way, we fancy ourselves as the Universe’s perfect computers, the ultimate machines, guided by an organic computer whose limit we have yet to realize, but is that really the case? Are we really at the top of the intellectual food chain?

What if there is something more out there? What if there is something so superior, we would be reduced to mere shadows that stretched under the feet of cosmic gods? What if these gods were not benevolent?

What does a wild animal imagine when a rope is flung around its feet and a cloth is thrown over its head? I don’t think we ever really want to know, but we might be able to relate if our efforts at communicating go awry. Our benevolent and fuzzy images of Ewoks or Yoda would be gone and replaced by something quite different. The current hierarchy in our world and in the universe would be irreversibility changed. Our innocence and a whole lot more would leave us forever.

I have a feeling Stephen Hawking already knows what might be in store for us and I fear he may be correct.