Humans have long been curious of the idea of alien civilisations somewhere in the universe.
Obviously, no ground-breaking discoveries have been made in this field yet, with over a century of work going into the search for extra-terrestrial life.
Amid the search, Stephen Hawking made a chilling admission about possible alien life before his death in 2018.
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Despite discovering over 5,599 exoplanets in our galaxy alone at the time of writing, there are said to be billions that are still undiscovered in the Milky Way.
This is all after discovering the first exoplanets in the 1990s, as we are continuing to exponentially gather more information about the universe with the launch of the James Webb Telescope.
The closest we have come to discovering a hint of life is on exoplanet K2-18b, where dimethyl sulfide is possibly present, which is only produced by living things.
But nothing further was discovered to confirm these suspicions, and the long search for alien life continues.
There is the dilemma of whether it's really the best idea to contact these potentially advanced civilisations and get ourselves involved.
Several scientists have spoke out about the idea, and among them is the most famous of his generation, physicist Stephen Hawking.
Back in 2015, he was launching a project to listen out for alien civilisations and highlighted that it may not be the best idea to communicate with them, even if we receive the first signal.
As per Space.com, Hawking stated: "We don't know much about aliens, but we know about humans,
"If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent
organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilisations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced.
"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."
Almost sticking a knife in the dreams of many who hope to come into contact with aliens one day, it might be worth listening to the man who whipped up the Theory of Relativity.
Despite having reservations of communicating with aliens, he was still an advocate for continuing the search for them: "We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth, so in an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life,
"Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps intelligent life might be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean. Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos, unseen beacons announcing that, here on one rock, the universe discovered its existence?
"Either way, there is no better question. It's time to commit to finding the answer, to search for life beyond Earth. The Breakthrough initiatives are making that commitment.
"We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know," he concluded.
But there is also the chance that aliens are alerted to our presence before we are of theirs, so they may initiate the contact with their assumably advanced technology.
It might be too late to hide, unfortunately.
Topics: Space, Science, Aliens, Stephen Hawking
Joshua Nair