I think Stephen Hawking himself said that it was a mistake to broadcast radio waves

out into the universe because the aliens are going to be out there and they're going

to be like conquistadors and they're going to want to take over our planet for their resources

and various other things.

There's a couple of responses you can have to the idea of evil aliens coming to get us.

The first of which is the only way to make progress, off into the infinite future, to have

the technologies that would enable you to traverse the galaxy.

Just to have this vision of knowledge that Popper had, namely that you were freely able

to explore the space of ideas, able to falsify assumptions and to not have centralized

authorities and force being used on people which dampens down creativity.

To have a maximally creative society, you have to have freedom, you have to have liberty,

and therefore you will have a non-violent society.

You will have a society which values creativity as an end in itself.

When we encounter the aliens, we should expect not that they're going to be immoral bastards

that are going to want to take over our resources, but the opposite.

They're going to look at us and think what primitive savages we are.

They're going to think that we're moral midgets and they're going to want to teach us.

They're not going to want to put us in prison or anything like that because knowledge is

a unified whole.

If their physics is so much better than ours, which enables them to approach the speed

of light or to use some weird general relativity gravity thing that creates wormholes so they

can get through space faster than speed of light, all of their sciences are going to be so

...