Hawking Joins Search for Extraterrestrial Life

Jeremiah 29:13
“And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.”

In an interview with Britain’s The Guardian newspaper in 2011, famed physicist Stephen Hawking warned that the efforts by the SETI Institute to actively “contact possible intelligent life out there is way too risky and dangerous.”

In a report on why he fears contact with alien life, Hawking wrote: “I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach. If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

Fast forward now to July of 2015, and you’ll see that professor Hawking has become much more hawkish in searching for extraterrestrial life. Stephen Hawking joined tech investor Yuri Milner and famed astrophysicist Lord Martin Rees in announcing the launch of Breakthrough Initiatives. Over the next 10 years, Milner will invest $100 million in this project that will give scientists access to some of the best telescopes in the world. This, they feel, is one giant step forward in the search for extraterrestrial life.

However, they will come up just as empty-handed as the SETI project did after decades of fruitless searching. Breakthrough Initiatives is searching for the wrong thing, you see. If they searched for God – the giver of all life – they would find Him when they searched with all their heart.

Prayer: Heavenly Father, I know that the search for extraterrestrial life is really just an attempt to prove that our planet, teeming with the life that You created, is nothing special. I pray that many scientists will turn to You after failing in this endeavor to find life elsewhere. Amen.

Author: Steven J. Schwartz
Ref: Dave Masko, “UFO sightings warn of alien invasion, states Stephen Hawking who fears SETI’s search,” HULIQ, 5/28/11. Heather Kelly, “Search for alien life gets $100M and Stephen Hawking’s blessing,” CNNMoney, 7/21/15. Photo: Stephen Hawking, shown in 2008, has long feared that an advanced civilization might wipe out mankind.