When the potential of intelligent alien civilisations comes up in conversation, it's usually about the search. How will we find them? Where are they? Are they there at all? What actions should we take if – or when – we find them, or they find us? 
 
 Well, according to physicist Stephen Hawking, we should probably stop trying to contact them at all, because reaching out to advanced civilisations could put humanity and Earth in a pretty risky situation. And the bad news is, we've already been broadcasting our location to the Universe for years. 
 
 Hawking's warning comes in a new online film called Stephen Hawking's Favourite Places, which shows the famed scientist in a CGI spacecraft called the SS Hawking exploring his favourite places in the Universe. 
 
 "As I grow older I am more convinced than ever that we are not alone. After a lifetime of wondering, I am helping to lead a new global effort to find out," Hawking says in the film while exploring Gliese 832c, a planet that lies 16 light-years away and might foster alien life. 
 
 "The Breakthrough Listen project will scan the nearest million stars for signs of life, but I know just the place to start looking. One day we might receive a signal from a planet like Gliese 832c, but we should be wary of answering back." 
 
 In case you missed it, the Breakthrough Listen project is an ambitious attempt to find intelligent life in the Universe by scanning the closest stars for radio signals. The project was funded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, who injected US$100 million to keep it afloat. 
 
 Recently, the project announced that it would be turning its attention to the hypothetical 'alien megastructure' that some think is causing a star known as KIC 8462852 to oddly dim off and on. 
 
 A more reasonable hypothesis is that the erratic dimming is caused by 'interstellar junk' or a comet swarm, but no one really knows what's going on there yet. 
 
 Despite Hawking's extraordinary effort to find intelligent life in the Universe, he is one of the most outspoken critics of actually trying to communicate with them, an act that he says would potentially endanger humanity, because a distant alien civilisation might view us as inferior, weak, and perfect to conquer. 
 
 "If so, they will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria," he says in the film. 
 
 Hawking often uses the example of Columbus' expedition to the Americas to describe what could happen if an advanced civilisation gets word of our existence, saying that that initial meeting "didn't turn out so well". 
 
 Hawking's warning is rooted in the idea that an alien civilisation, especially one that can pick up our signals and understand where they're coming from, has the potential to be billions of years more advanced than us, making us an easy target to overthrow or invade. 
 
 Reaching out to the Universe isn't the only area of scientific pursuit that Hawking says is risky. 
 
 A few weeks ago, at a lecture at the University of Cambridge, Hawking said artificial intelligence might prove to be "either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity", a feeling that other experts and leaders – such as Elon Musk – have agreed with. 
 
 This fear stems from the fact that AI has the power to learn for itself, making it possible to surpass our human abilities, because we rely on biological evolution – a slow process, to say the least – to become better. 
 
 "[Artificial intelligence] would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate," he told Rory Cellan-Jones at the BBC. "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded." 
 
 While all of these warnings might seem a bit much, it's important for us to think about them before we have to. As the saying goes, it's better to be safe than sorry, especially when world-dominating aliens or AI robots are involved. 
 
 Besides offering an ominous warning, though, the new 25-minute film sees Hawking explore other incredible spots in the Universe, such as Sagittarius A* – a supermassive black hole – and our Solar System's very own Saturn, a planet that Hawking is fascinated with. 
 
 You can check out the film for yourself over at CuriosityStream. ||||| Beware responding to signals from far off stars, physicist tells viewers in Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places – a virtual journey across the cosmos 
 
 “We come in peace” might be the traditional opening gambit for aliens in science fiction, but we should be wary about beaming back a response to any advanced life-forms in real life, Stephen Hawking has warned. 
 
 Our first contact from an advanced civilisation could be equivalent to when Native Americans first encountered Christopher Columbus and things “didn’t turn out so well”, he cautioned. 
 
 The comments are made in an online film, Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places, in which the theoretical physicist takes viewers on his own CGI spacecraft (the SS Hawking) to five significant locations across the cosmos. 
 
 On arriving at Gliese 832c, a planet 16 light years away, Hawking reflects: “As I grow older I am more convinced than ever that we are not alone. After a lifetime of wondering, I am helping to lead a new global effort to find out. The Breakthrough Listen project will scan the nearest million stars for signs of life, but I know just the place to start looking. One day we might receive a signal from a planet like Gliese 832c, but we should be wary of answering back.” 
 
 It is not the first time Hawking has warned about the prospect of hostile aliens. Launching the Breakthrough Listen project, which will scan the nearest million stars for signs of life, last year he suggested that any civilisation reading our messages could be billions of years ahead of humans. “If so they will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria,” he said. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stephen Hawking’s CGI spacecraft, the SS Hawking. Photograph: From Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places 
 
 The 25-minute film, which appears on the platform CuriosityStream, starts at the Big Bang, which has been the focus of much of Hawking’s career. Viewers are also taken deep into a super-massive black hole, Sagittarius A*, where Hawking explains his theory of matter, and to Saturn, which Hawking calls “the most spectacular destination in the Solar System.” 
 
 Finally, Hawking returns to Earth to Santa Barbara where he talks nostalgically of his early career at Cal Tech and times spent on the sunny California coast with his young family. 
 
 “My goal is simple: complete understanding of the universe,” Hawking said. “It’s always been a dream of mine to explore the universe.” ||||| Renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking said in a speech at Oxford University Union that humanity only has about 1,000 years left of viable existence if it doesn't leave the planet and colonize the stars. 
 
 The professor argued that humanity is unlikely to survive all of the different crises we will face over the next millennium. But humans can avoid extinction, he said, if we have colonized other planets by that time, giving humanity a fighting chance away from our "fragile" Earth. 
 
 Dr. Hawking's prediction may seem gloomy, but much of his speech took an optimistic tone. After all, a thousand years is a long time to figure out how to colonize space, and plans are already underway for humans to visit Mars with an ultimate goal of colonizing the red planet. Scientists continue to discover potentially habitable exoplanets elsewhere in the galaxy that could potentially be new homes for humans – if we can make it there. 
 
 During his speech, Hawking noted that the biggest and most immediate challenge for humanity will come in the next century, with threats such as potential nuclear terrorism, climate change, and the rise of artificial intelligence potentially outcompeting humans foremost in his mind, according to The Washington Post. 
 
 "Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years," Hawking said in the speech. "By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race." 
 
 NASA has already discovered thousands of exoplanets using telescopes like Kepler, which can detect planets based on fluctuations in light created by planets passing between their stars and the telescope. While only a few are potentially habitable, and almost all are out of the reach of current technology, a rapid increase in our ability to detect Earth-like planets and the development of new propulsion methods could one day lead us to multiple new worlds for future generations to inhabit. 
 
 While large-scale colonization of space still feels like a goal rooted more in science fiction than science fact, Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive officer of Tesla and SpaceX, unveiled a plan last September to begin colonizing Mars by 2024, beating NASA's timetable for such a task by 10 years, as the Christian Science Monitor's Lonnie Shekhtman reported: 
 
 Mars' first colonists will contend with unprecedented obstacles. First there's the hefty price tag. Under current conditions, Musk estimates that a trip to Mars would cost about $10 billion per person. (By comparison, NASA pays $70 million per seat to fly on a Russian spacecraft to the International Space Station). By some projections, it would cost NASA around $100 billion over 30 years to send astronauts there and bring them back. Other predictions have attached a $500 billion price tag to the trip. As of today, there isn’t a rocket in operation that can transport humans even to the moon, which is 200 times closer to Earth than Mars. To make colonization sustainable, Musk says, would require reducing the cost to about $200,000 per person, or approximately the median cost of a house in the United States. Achieving that would involve making rockets reusable and increasing capacity and efficiency of the Mars journey. Musk estimates that SpaceX initially would need to build a fleet of about 1,000 ships, carrying 100 people, departing from Earth every 26 months to make the venture economically viable. "The key is making this affordable to anyone who wants to go," Musk said. 
 
 While exploration farther into space stalled after the end of the cold war, the growing role of private space companies in recent years has created a new kind of space race between corporations such as Boeing, Blue Origin, and SpaceX. The commercial nature of corporate space programs ensures a cash flow that traditional government agencies can't always count on. Private companies often collaborate with NASA to facilitate many of the government agency's more ambitious projects, including the co-development of NASA and Boeing's Space Launch System, a heavy-lift rocket for deep space exploration, as the Monitor previously reported. 
 
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 This kind of collaboration might allow humanity to spread out into space before we hit Hawking's expiration date in 1,000 years. 
 
 "Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet," Hawking said, according to The Independent. "Try to make sense of what you see, wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up."
– Stephen Hawking believes that mankind might want to just mind its own business, cosmically speaking. Even as he turns his attention to the search for alien life, Hawking says we should think twice before making any efforts to communicate with alien civilizations, ScienceAlert reports. Any civilization advanced enough to contact Earth is likely to be "vastly more powerful [than us] and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria," Hawking says. He explains that an alien civilization arriving at Earth could use its vast technological advantage to take advantage of our planet in the same way Columbus exploited the Native Americans. Hawking made the comments in a new video, Stephen Hawking's Favorite Places, which can be viewed on CuriosityStream. One of Hawking's current projects, Breakthrough Listen, is dedicated to scanning the nearest million stars for signs of alien life, the Guardian reports. That project's first major target is KIC 8462852, an irregular star that astronomers have theorized may be home to an alien "megastructure." "As I grow older I am more convinced than ever that we are not alone," Hawkins says in the film. "One day we might receive a signal from a planet ... but we should be wary of answering back."