Stephen Hawking says aliens will be nothing like presidential candidates

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.

Before the US election campaign is over, will someone suggest building a wall in the sky to protect us against aliens?

You know, the ones who, in movies, fly in from above and have ill intentions toward us?

I ask only because the search for alien life potentially took a big step forward yesterday.

Billionaire Russian investor Yuri Milner and physicist Stephen Hawking were among those announcing humanity's plan to send mini-spacecraft toward the Alpha Centauri star system, where they might find life-supporting planets.

Hawking, though, couldn't help but offer quipsome comments about alien life and its relationship to humanity.

As the Independent reports, the famed physicist mused: "What makes human beings unique? Some say it's language or tools. Others say it's logical reasoning. They obviously haven't met many humans."

It's true that humans don't often respect logic as much as physicists might wish.

Hawking was willing to consider whether there might be some connection between humans and aliens.

Asked what alien life looked like, he replied, "Judging from the election campaign, definitely not like us."

I wonder which of the presidential candidates he might have had in mind. It could have been all of them, of course.

Perhaps, though, he might have been especially moved by the antics of people who consider that those who aren't perfectly like them are somehow to be feared.

There again, Hawking himself has expressed many fears about aliens of the outer space kind.

He's worried that they might hate us. He fears that if they happened to wander to earth, they might simply crush us and be on their way.

Of course, it could be that they're already watching our elections and other peculiar habits and saying to themselves: "Why would we ever bother to visit those primitives? Look at the silly devices they're sending up to find us."