Ryan Fernandez

In a single stroke, world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking managed to seriously wound my faith in the future of humanity.

According to an article on the Yahoo News website, the man who might be considered one of the biggest geeks in the world proclaimed that he believed the existence of extraterrestrial life was mathematically possible.

At the same time, he warned that a first contact event might be something more akin to "Independence Day" or "Avatar," rather than "Star Trek."

Actually, Hawking likened a potential first contact to Christopher Columbus' landing in America, with human beings playing the role of the Native Americans.

We all know how that turned out.

How did our future become so grim?

Granted, our present-day world is clearly not the utopia the philosophers of old might have imagined it to be, what with global warming - excuse me, "global climate change" - racial tensions, religious conflicts, economic meltdowns and an exponentially increasing population amid dwindling natural resources.

Still, in such craptastic living conditions, you'd think people would be even more inclined to believe in something that would offer a modicum of hope for a better future (and no, I'm not even going to go into religion).

I know that optimists invented the airplane and that a pessimist invented the parachute, thank you Gil Stern, but is it too much to ask that people believe in the existence of benevolent extraterrestrials who do not seek to "serve man," drink all our water or use us as cannon fodder in an intergalactic war?

Take a look at the words "first contact" - two words that seem to evoke the very spirit of hope for the future.

They're words that, for geeks the world over, conjure images of mysterious signals being received from the depths of space, of mile-wide spacecraft majestically hovering over our cities, and aliens with rubber foreheads greeting us with anatomically impossible-to-produce hand signals.

The ideal first contact scenario would usher in a planetary renaissance as our new extraterrestrial friends generously use their advanced technologies to uplift humanity from its sorry state of affairs.

Thus enlightened, mankind would then take to the stars and join its interstellar brethren to promote the spread of knowledge and goodwill throughout the universe.

Yeah, right.

Not according to Hawking.

Those signals our intrepid astronomers detect might be our only warning in the face of a horde of alien locusts ready to descend upon our hapless world and consume every last resource before moving on to another star system.

Imagine aliens coming down from the starry void, their great ships blotting out the sun.

As they hover over our cities, they send a message demanding our natural resources. In exchange, they will not use their death-rays to blow us all to kingdom come.

Regardless of our feelings on the matter, they start landing machines to systematically strip-mine our world of minerals, metals, gases, water, biomass and whatever else might be important to a space-faring race of planet eaters.

I want aliens with whom I can live long and prosper, because I, for one, would not welcome any new alien overlords.