AI analyzes Stephen Hawking's concerns about another civilization

The great astrophysicist of mankind, Stephen Hawking, once warned humanity of a disaster if we encounter an extraterrestrial civilization.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) , have had a significant impact on computational social science research.

An international research team has recently designed a program called "CosmoAgent" , an innovative artificial intelligence framework using LLM with the aim of simulating interactions between human and extraterrestrial civilizations, with a special emphasis on the warning advice of the great physicist Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) about not sending radio signals indiscriminately into space.

AI has come up with many possible scenarios that could happen if we come into contact with an extraterrestrial civilization (Illustration: Futura Science).

The project aims to try to assess how much danger humanity would be in if a civilization came into contact with the inhabitants of other planets and galaxies.

Stephen Hawking has issued a number of warnings against humanity's search for intelligent life beyond Earth. The astrophysicist believes that the search for extraterrestrial life could ultimately lead to disaster.

'We don't know much about aliens, but we know about humans,' he said in 2015.

'If you look at history, human-to-human contact has often resulted in the destruction of less advanced civilizations,' said Mr Hawking.

Hawking argues that revealing our location and existence to advanced militaristic civilizations could have catastrophic consequences.

It is similar to the consequences observed in simulations when a less powerful civilization encounters a militaristic civilization.

Stephen Hawking ended his warning by asserting that a civilization that reads one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us and that they might not consider humans on Earth to be any more valuable than bacteria.

In the world's film capital Hollywood (USA), many screenwriters often imagine landings - at least bloody ones - like in the famous 1996 movie Mars Attacks , directed by Tim Burton.

Stephen Hawking believes that transmitting signals into space could lead to an interstellar war (Illustration: UP' Magazine).

In the simulation setting, when a civilization identifies a civilization with inferior military power, they will launch a campaign of extermination with the aim of eliminating the potential threat.

This implies that when Earth or any other civilization is located near a more powerful militaristic civilization, it could lead to an interplanetary war and the less dominant entity's chances of survival would be greatly reduced.

The study emphasizes the dangerous nature of interactions with militaristic civilizations and the critical importance of considering military and space strategy for survival from less powerful civilizations .

This simulation result provides experimental validation for Stephen Hawking's hypothesis about the inherent risks of interstellar communication, especially in the context of our transmitting signals into space, which could reveal the existence of our civilization to potentially hostile extraterrestrial entities.