Reasons We Shouldn’t Be Afraid of Aliens

As perhaps we drew exciting and frighteningly closer to discovering life in other parts of the universe, the chorus of people who warn us to be careful what we want is getting stronger. The most famous, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has argued for hitting the brakes, reiterating until 2016 his concern to seek alien contact in his comments on possibly life in Gliese 832c: "One day, we could receive a signal from a planet like But we must be careful not to answer, because knowing an advanced civilization could be as if the Native Americans found Columbus. "That did not turn out so well." For example, European germs were deadly to the natives and some feared that they might happen to us.

Astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell, however, does not agree with all of this. From their perspective, things are considerably less frightening than many people think. In an article recently published in the Literary Hub, it offers a number of solid comforting arguments for why we should stop worrying.

1. Why foreigners would not want to enslave us or race with us

Slaves

Of course, humans have enslaved other humans throughout our history, but we are not so advanced. Our collective sense of guilt can make us fear that someone else will do to us what we have done to others. Dartnell says we're seeing this wrong.

There is a growing concern that we will soon find ourselves competing for jobs with robots. After all, they can offer a way to work more efficiently than humans. Dartnell points out that any civilization advanced enough to cross space and reach here would have no need for slaves. He writes: "Building robots, or other forms of automation or mechanization, would be a much more effective solution to the job, people are weak compared, harder to fix and need to be fed."


As for loving us for parenting, Dartnell points out how perfectly synchronized the chemistry of two organisms is to allow mating - indeed such mismatches are what separates one terrestrial species from another. For reproduction to be possible, here is a brief list of some of the things that aliens would have to share with us. The same:



Dartnell concludes that it is "unbelievably unlikely that an entirely different evolutionary lineage of life from an evolutionary lineage is compatible."

2. Why foreigners do not want to eat us

Cook Book

As food, we probably would not agree with them. In order for a foreigner to derive any nutrition from us, they would have to be biochemically similar. They would have to have enzymes that would allow them to successfully break and make use of the amino acid polymers, base and sugar polymers, and phospholipid membranes of which we are made.

Dartnell points out that although there is a possibility that they are made of the same things that we - amino acids, sugars and fat molecules have been found in meteorites, suggesting they are common throughout the universe - there is an interesting additional wrinkle: enantiomers. Simple organic molecules can occur in mirror images of each other. As Dartnell says, it's like the way your two hands are the same, but you can not place yourself above the alignment. All life on our planet has left-handed amino acids and "right-handed" sugars, and any creature that seeks us for sustenance would have to have the same, even if it shares our basic microbiology.

Unless we're very tasty.

3. Why foreigners would not come here to steal our water


Bottom line, there is plenty of water everywhere, water that would be easier to acquire than the things we have. A thirsty alien visiting our solar system is likely to head directly to Jupiter's moon Europa, which has more liquid water under its icy surface than the one we have here. There also seems to be a lot of water on other icy moons and even on comets and asteroids, the likely sources of our own H2O. It would be easier to suck it up from one of those smaller bodies than from a planet like ours so seriously trying to keep our water in its place.

4. Why foreigners would not come here for some other raw material

Again, asteroids seem a more logical place to get any of the building materials we have here, like iron, nickel, platinum, tungsten and gold. The lack of gravity would make them easier to extract from a smaller body. In fact, there are companies in land planning asteroid mining operations.

What Dartnell suggests may make us a bit more special In this sense is plate tectonics, which has not seen many other places until now, and could theoretically produce something that we are not aware of that a foreigner might want. Maybe. Why foreigners do not want to colonize and live here