How Stephen Hawking Inspired Battleship

Peter Berg has heard your criticism of his concept for Battleship, out May 18. "There was a certain inherent skepticism when people heard that Battleship had aliens in it," Berg says. "I was happy to say that my inspiration was Stephen Hawking. You can check my math."

It all started with Hawking's television show Into The Universe and its episode on Goldilocks planets, which are just the right distance from a star to potentially support life. Hawking described a scenario where Earth's scientists reach out to those planets with signals inviting any life on that world to come visit us. "He said that this was a horrible idea," Berg says. "If there would be any chance of an alien encounter, we should try and avoid that at all costs. The chances of it going well are virtually nonexistent."

That's exactly the setup in Battleship, which opens in a fictional 2005 with NASA scientists discovering and subsequently sending such a signal to a Goldilocks planet, Planet G. Fast-forward to the present day: The aliens have gotten our message and sent five ships, which land in the ocean off Hawaii, where the US Navy and other naval forces from around the world are taking part in RIMPAC. "The aliens don't come as a conquering force," Berg says. "They come as a recon group that has utilized every bit of technology they have to come and see who sent the signal and to explore the planet." While the aliens' aim on Earth isn't explicitly stated, Berg says that their goal is "resource allocation, if they decide they like what's here." A miscommunication leads to all-out warfare between the aliens' ships and our destroyers.

Berg worked with advisors from the National Academy's Science and Entertainment Exchange to further develop his alien visitation idea. One of those scientists was Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, who met with Berg to talk about what might make the aliens want to come to Earth and pick a fight. "I don't think there's anything actually in terms of natural resources," Shostak says, "because they've got all that where they are, and the shipping costs are so large... Aliens don't really need to come here and take on the US Navy if all they want is bottled water."

So what reasons did Shostak and his colleagues give that could spur aliens to visit? If they could come this far, then they'd already have all of our scientific knowledge and more. "The only thing that we have that's special is our culture," he says. The aliens might also be interested in what we'll become, Shostak says. "It may be that they have experience with biological intelligence springing up on planets that eventually becomes a competitor or a threat, so they just routinely go around and wipe it out. If they saw us as a potential threat, they might have a policy to say, 'These guys might make self-replicating machines, they'll chew up our universe, so let's not let them do that.'"

And while NASA hasn't found any truly Earth-like planets yet, Battleship's basic premise isn't unreasonable: The Kepler telescope has already found some planets within the habitable zone. "One of the more famous ones is Kepler-22b," Shostak says. "It's unlikely to be very much like Earth, but it might have liquid water on the surface. We haven't found a cousin or twin of Earth, but that will probably happen within a year or two."

As for Hawking's concerns about sending messages into space, Shostak says it's too late?we're already broadcasting. "NASA did broadcast a message into space a couple of years ago, to Polaris," he says. "They sent a Beatles song." And any civilization capable of coming here to wipe out humanity would be able to pick up the proof of our existence: our radar, television signals, FM radio, and even the lights of our cities. "If you're going to worry about this, you have to stop all that broadcasting, and it means turning off the radar at JFK, and all the lights in New York City. And not just for the week or for the month or the year, but for forever," Shostak says. "In other words, you've got to circumscribe human endeavors for the rest of the time we're on this planet. That seems a little bit paranoid to me. And it's also never going to happen."

If aliens had the right kind of antennas and telescopes, they could find out all kinds of information about us. "But if they're only at our level, they won't be able to pick up our signals," Shostak says. "And if they're only at our level, they're not going to come here and destroy the planet either, are they?"

In fact, the speed with which the aliens get here also causes some problems with the timeline of the story. "The nearest aliens are likely to be many hundreds or even a thousand light-years away," Shostak says. So breathe easy, Earthlings: We're going to be waiting a long time for aliens to come and sink our battleships.

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