When the potential of intelligent alien civilisations comes up in conversation, it's usually about the search. How will we find them? Where are they? Are they there at all? What actions should we take if – or when – we find them, or they find us? 
 
 Well, according to physicist Stephen Hawking, we should probably stop trying to contact them at all, because reaching out to advanced civilisations could put humanity and Earth in a pretty risky situation. And the bad news is, we've already been broadcasting our location to the Universe for years. 
 
 Hawking's warning comes in a new online film called Stephen Hawking's Favourite Places, which shows the famed scientist in a CGI spacecraft called the SS Hawking exploring his favourite places in the Universe. 
 
 "As I grow older I am more convinced than ever that we are not alone. After a lifetime of wondering, I am helping to lead a new global effort to find out," Hawking says in the film while exploring Gliese 832c, a planet that lies 16 light-years away and might foster alien life. 
 
 "The Breakthrough Listen project will scan the nearest million stars for signs of life, but I know just the place to start looking. One day we might receive a signal from a planet like Gliese 832c, but we should be wary of answering back." 
 
 In case you missed it, the Breakthrough Listen project is an ambitious attempt to find intelligent life in the Universe by scanning the closest stars for radio signals. The project was funded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner, who injected US$100 million to keep it afloat. 
 
 Recently, the project announced that it would be turning its attention to the hypothetical 'alien megastructure' that some think is causing a star known as KIC 8462852 to oddly dim off and on. 
 
 A more reasonable hypothesis is that the erratic dimming is caused by 'interstellar junk' or a comet swarm, but no one really knows what's going on there yet. 
 
 Despite Hawking's extraordinary effort to find intelligent life in the Universe, he is one of the most outspoken critics of actually trying to communicate with them, an act that he says would potentially endanger humanity, because a distant alien civilisation might view us as inferior, weak, and perfect to conquer. 
 
 "If so, they will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria," he says in the film. 
 
 Hawking often uses the example of Columbus' expedition to the Americas to describe what could happen if an advanced civilisation gets word of our existence, saying that that initial meeting "didn't turn out so well". 
 
 Hawking's warning is rooted in the idea that an alien civilisation, especially one that can pick up our signals and understand where they're coming from, has the potential to be billions of years more advanced than us, making us an easy target to overthrow or invade. 
 
 Reaching out to the Universe isn't the only area of scientific pursuit that Hawking says is risky. 
 
 A few weeks ago, at a lecture at the University of Cambridge, Hawking said artificial intelligence might prove to be "either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity", a feeling that other experts and leaders – such as Elon Musk – have agreed with. 
 
 This fear stems from the fact that AI has the power to learn for itself, making it possible to surpass our human abilities, because we rely on biological evolution – a slow process, to say the least – to become better. 
 
 "[Artificial intelligence] would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate," he told Rory Cellan-Jones at the BBC. "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded." 
 
 While all of these warnings might seem a bit much, it's important for us to think about them before we have to. As the saying goes, it's better to be safe than sorry, especially when world-dominating aliens or AI robots are involved. 
 
 Besides offering an ominous warning, though, the new 25-minute film sees Hawking explore other incredible spots in the Universe, such as Sagittarius A* – a supermassive black hole – and our Solar System's very own Saturn, a planet that Hawking is fascinated with. 
 
 You can check out the film for yourself over at CuriosityStream. ||||| Astronomers are about to start monitoring the mysterious 'alien megastructure' star - known as Tabby’s star - that we first noticed dimming erratically back in 2015. 
 
 The project will monitor the star using the 100-metre-wide (330-feet-wide) Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, searching for any potential alien radio signals that could explain its strange behaviour. 
 
 "The Green Bank Telescope is the largest fully steerable radio telescope on the planet, and it's the largest, most sensitive telescope that's capable of looking at Tabby's star given its position in the sky," said the project’s co-director Andrew Siemion, from the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Centre at the University of California, Berkeley. 
 
 "We can look at it with greater sensitivity and for a wider range of signal types than any other experiment in the world." 
 
 In case you missed it, Tabby’s star – named after the initial study’s author Tabetha Boyajian – made headlines back in 2015 when astronomers noticed that its light dims by 15 to 22 percent for up to 80 days at a time. 
 
 Normally, a star might dim by 1 percent every so often, indicating that a planet is likely crossing between it and our telescopes. A drop of 22 percent, though, is unheard of, especially for such a long time period, which caused a debate to flare up as to what could be causing it. 
 
 One researcher even suggested that the dimming could be caused by a gigantic alien megastructure – like a Dyson sphere – that might be circling the star 1,500 light-years away from Earth. 
 
 Another, more plausible hypothesis is that there's a comet swarm orbiting the star, blocking the starlight in weird patterns, but no one's been able to find evidence to support that, either. 
 
 Now, SETI researchers hope to finally get to the bottom of the mystery once and for all by making it the first project in the Breakthrough Listen initiative, a US$100 million project funded by internet investor Yuri Milner and Stephen Hawking that aims to search for intelligent life in the cosmos. 
 
 It's not the first time the star has been studied. 
 
 "Everyone, every SETI program telescope, I mean every astronomer that has any kind of telescope in any wavelength that can see Tabby’s star has looked at it," Milner said. 
 
 "It’s been looked at with Hubble, it’s been looked at with Keck, it’s been looked at in the infrared and radio and high energy, and every possible thing you can imagine, including a whole range of SETI experiments. Nothing has been found." 
 
 But the new project will be using a much larger radio telescope to effectively 'listen in' to the star and see if they detect any unusual. It's hoped that the additional sensitivity of the Green Bank Telescope could provide brand new insight into Tabby's star. 
 
 To perform their new experiment, a team of SETI researchers, including Boyajian, will record 8 hours of observations for three nights over the next two months. During this time, the team plans on recording about 1 petabyte of radio data - that's a whopping 1 million gigabytes. 
 
 "The Green Bank Telescope is the largest fully steerable radio telescope on the planet, and it’s the largest, most sensitive telescope that’s capable of looking at Tabby’s star given its position in the sky," Siemion said. 
 
 "We’ve deployed a fantastic new SETI instrument that connects to that telescope, that can look at many gigahertz of bandwidth simultaneously and many, many billions of different radio channels all at the same time so we can explore the radio spectrum very, very quickly." 
 
 Basically, the team is searching for a signal of intelligent life in different radio signals, much like you search for music stations with a normal radio at home or in the car. Simeon explains in the video below: 
 
 Despite many claims about the star, the team has remained sceptical that the unique dimming is caused by an advanced alien civilisation. 
 
 "I don’t think it’s very likely – a one in a billion chance or something like that – but nevertheless, we’re going to check it out," said chief scientist Dan Werthimer. 
 
 "But I think that ET, if it’s ever discovered, it might be something like that. It’ll be some bizarre thing that somebody finds by accident ... that nobody expected, and then we look more carefully and we say, 'Hey, that’s a civilisation'." 
 
 There's no word yet on when the team hopes to have all of their data analysed and published, meaning we’re going to have to be patient before we see any sort of results of the study. Hopefully, though, the project will uncover more details about the star and possibly explain once and for all what's going on around it. 
 
 Just last month, researchers suggested that the strange dimming pattern might actually have nothing to do with the star, but interstellar junk between solar systems - so we have still have a lot to learn. 
 
 Check out the video below to hear the SETI team talk more about the project: ||||| Beware responding to signals from far off stars, physicist tells viewers in Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places – a virtual journey across the cosmos 
 
 “We come in peace” might be the traditional opening gambit for aliens in science fiction, but we should be wary about beaming back a response to any advanced life-forms in real life, Stephen Hawking has warned. 
 
 Our first contact from an advanced civilisation could be equivalent to when Native Americans first encountered Christopher Columbus and things “didn’t turn out so well”, he cautioned. 
 
 The comments are made in an online film, Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places, in which the theoretical physicist takes viewers on his own CGI spacecraft (the SS Hawking) to five significant locations across the cosmos. 
 
 On arriving at Gliese 832c, a planet 16 light years away, Hawking reflects: “As I grow older I am more convinced than ever that we are not alone. After a lifetime of wondering, I am helping to lead a new global effort to find out. The Breakthrough Listen project will scan the nearest million stars for signs of life, but I know just the place to start looking. One day we might receive a signal from a planet like Gliese 832c, but we should be wary of answering back.” 
 
 It is not the first time Hawking has warned about the prospect of hostile aliens. Launching the Breakthrough Listen project, which will scan the nearest million stars for signs of life, last year he suggested that any civilisation reading our messages could be billions of years ahead of humans. “If so they will be vastly more powerful and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria,” he said. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stephen Hawking’s CGI spacecraft, the SS Hawking. Photograph: From Stephen Hawking’s Favorite Places 
 
 The 25-minute film, which appears on the platform CuriosityStream, starts at the Big Bang, which has been the focus of much of Hawking’s career. Viewers are also taken deep into a super-massive black hole, Sagittarius A*, where Hawking explains his theory of matter, and to Saturn, which Hawking calls “the most spectacular destination in the Solar System.” 
 
 Finally, Hawking returns to Earth to Santa Barbara where he talks nostalgically of his early career at Cal Tech and times spent on the sunny California coast with his young family. 
 
 “My goal is simple: complete understanding of the universe,” Hawking said. “It’s always been a dream of mine to explore the universe.”
– Stephen Hawking believes that mankind might want to just mind its own business, cosmically speaking. Even as he turns his attention to the search for alien life, Hawking says we should think twice before making any efforts to communicate with alien civilizations, ScienceAlert reports. Any civilization advanced enough to contact Earth is likely to be "vastly more powerful [than us] and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria," Hawking says. He explains that an alien civilization arriving at Earth could use its vast technological advantage to take advantage of our planet in the same way Columbus exploited the Native Americans. Hawking made the comments in a new video, Stephen Hawking's Favorite Places, which can be viewed on CuriosityStream. One of Hawking's current projects, Breakthrough Listen, is dedicated to scanning the nearest million stars for signs of alien life, the Guardian reports. That project's first major target is KIC 8462852, an irregular star that astronomers have theorized may be home to an alien "megastructure." "As I grow older I am more convinced than ever that we are not alone," Hawkins says in the film. "One day we might receive a signal from a planet ... but we should be wary of answering back."