Stephen Hawking on Unintelligent Life

Speaking at George Washington University this week in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of NASA, Stephen Hawking discussed whether extraterrestrial life exists and, if so, why we haven’t found it, speculating on three answers to that elusive question.

Option one: there isn’t life elsewhere. Presumably Hawking, like other evolutionists, dismisses that notion because that may mean that life on earth is too improbable to have also occurred elsewhere.

Option two is that about the time life-forms figure out how to communicate and travel into space, they also develop destructive weapons that can potentially destroy their entire civilization. Of course, even with this option, we would expect some alien civilizations to have survived their own “nuclear eras” and to be busy roaming about the universe. So where are they?

Hawking’s third option is that life is very common—but “intelligent life” is rare. Giving us another look at his worldview, Hawking jokes, “Some would say it has yet to occur on earth.”

For an evolutionist, this is apparently the best explanation for why evolution hasn’t produced highly advanced alien societies that can communicate with us in the supposed 13 or so billion years of cosmological history. But it seems there’s a bit of a fork in this mix. If evolutionists claim humankind is “nothing special” because of the power of evolution, we would expect plenty of intelligent life to be out there, much of it possibly older than life on earth allegedly is.