The great astrophysicist Stephen Hawking once warned humanity of a potential disaster if we were to encounter an extraterrestrial civilization.
Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), have significantly impacted computational social science research.
An international research team has recently designed a program called “CosmoAgent”, an enhanced AI framework utilizing LLMs aimed at simulating interactions between human and extraterrestrial civilizations, particularly emphasizing the cautionary advice of the great physicist Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) against indiscriminately sending radio signals into space.
AI has proposed various scenarios that could occur when we come into contact with an extraterrestrial civilization (Illustration: Futura Science).
The project aims to assess the level of danger humanity would face if a civilization were to contact inhabitants of other planets and galaxies.
Stephen Hawking issued several warnings against humanity’s efforts to search for intelligent life beyond Earth. The cosmologist believed that the pursuit of extraterrestrial life could ultimately lead to disaster.
“We do not know much about aliens, but we know about humans,” he stated in 2015.
“If you look at history, encounters between people have often led to the destruction of less developed civilizations,” Hawking said.
He argued that revealing our location and existence to advanced militaristic civilizations could have catastrophic consequences.
This is similar to the consequences observed in simulations when a less powerful civilization encounters a militaristic civilization.
Hawking concluded his warning by asserting that a civilization capable of reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us and might not regard humanity on Earth as more valuable than bacteria.
In the movie capital of Hollywood, many screenwriters often envision bloody invasions, similar to the famous Mars Attacks film directed by Tim Burton in 1996.
Stephen Hawking believed that broadcasting signals into space could lead to an interstellar war (Illustration: UP’ Magazine).
In the context of simulations, when a civilization identifies a militarily weaker civilization, they may carry out a campaign of annihilation aimed at eliminating potential threats.
This implies that when Earth or any other civilization is located near a more powerful militaristic civilization, it could lead to interplanetary warfare, significantly reducing the chances of survival for the less dominant entity.
The research highlights the dangerous nature of interactions with militaristic civilizations and the critical importance of considering military and space strategies for the survival of less powerful civilizations.
The results of this simulation provide experimental validation for Stephen Hawking’s hypothesis regarding the inherent risks of interstellar communication, particularly in the context of sending signals into space that could reveal our civilization’s existence to potentially hostile extraterrestrial entities.
