Was Stephen Hawking right about aliens?

In his later years, Hawking repeatedly warned about the dangers of humankind meeting alien civilizations.

Hawking famously revealed his worry that any aliens advanced enough to contact earth would be “looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they could reach” during a 2010 episode of the miniseries Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking.

“If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced,” he told reporters at the Breakthrough Prize initiative in 2015.

“A civilization reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us. If so, they will be vastly more powerful, and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria.”

And in the 2016 documentary Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places, Hawking reiterated his views: “Meeting an advanced civilization could be like Native Americans encountering Columbus. That didn’t turn out so well.”