We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.
Stephen HawkingRead
To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.
Interpretation
Hawking expresses that while mathematics supports the possibility of extraterrestrial life, understanding their nature poses a greater challenge.
In this quote, Stephen Hawking highlights the intersection between mathematics and the search for extraterrestrial life. He argues that the numerical possibilities suggest that aliens could exist, but the true difficulty lies in theorizing about their characteristics and behaviors, as this requires creative and speculative thinking that goes beyond mere numbers.
In practice
This quote can be used in a lecture about the potential for extraterrestrial life.
We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.
I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. Its a crazy world out there. Be curious.
I was not a good student. I did not spend much time at college; I was too busy enjoying myself.
The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological-technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century.
In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.
Freedom is absolutely necessary for the progress in science and the liberal arts.
The application of algebra to geometry ... has immortalized the name of Descartes, and constitutes the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences.
The universe has really never made things in ones. The Earth is special and everything else is different? No, weβve got seven other planets. The sun? No, the sun is one of those dots in the night sky. The Milky Way? No, itβs one of a hundred billion galaxies. And the universe - maybe itβs countless other universes.
If you want to become a fossil, you actually need to die somewhere where your bones will be rapidly buried. You then hope that the earth moves in such a way as to bring the bones back up to the surface. And then you hope that one of us lot will walk around and find small pieces of you.
Haemoglobin is a very large molecule by ordinary standards, containing about ten thousand atoms, but the chances are that your haemoglobin and mine are identical, and significantly different from that of a pig or horse. You may be impressed by how much human beings differ from one another, but if you were to look into the fine details of the molecules of which they are constructed, you would be astonished by their similarity.
The universe is a symphony of strings, and the mind of God that Einstein eloquently wrote about for thirty years would be cosmic music resonating through eleven-dimensional hyper space.
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