Experts for several decades have been searching for signs of life outside Earth and our solar system but they could not find anything other than planets, as many as 5,000, but it has been termed unwise to respond to signals sent by any other living beings in space.
Despite relentless efforts, astronomers only found a molecule called dimethyl sulphide (DMS) from an exoplanet K2-18b at a distance of 120 light years away.
It is an important discovery because it is only produced by life.
However, the late physicist Stephen Hawking believed that it would be unwise to respond to any signal received from an alien life fearing their advancement.
According to Space.com, Stephen Hawking said during an event: “We don’t know much about aliens, but we know about humans. If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms has often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilisations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced.”
He said in 2015: “A civilisation 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.”
Despite, warnings, he encouraged experts to look for alien life. He said: “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,” he believed.
It’s time to commit to finding the answer, to search for life beyond Earth, Hawking said, adding that the “breakthrough initiatives are making that commitment. We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know.”
