:lol:
Seriously though, if the Europe of today were to make contact with uncontacted peoples, rather than the Europe of Colmbus' time, the outcome would be far better. A sophont capable of traversing interstellar space should know better than humans of the 1600s, barring societal and cultural differences.
Mr Hawking may be a good physicist, but he isn't an anthropologist, and not even an anthropologist can know how another intelligent organism will react to a certain situation.
Some things don't make sense at all, such as "raiding Earth for resources", with our thick atmosphere, relatively deep gravity well, pesky biosphere and threatened natives...
He is right on one thing though, life, and intelligent life, are probable. You get quite large numbers on even very conservative estimates.
EDIT:
Interesting timing as it seems SETI want to try a different approach and start really looking for signs of stellar engineering instead of radio waves.
That is of course if such engineering is possible, common or required. But the logic behind SETI's approach is sound, I don't think it's worth looking for extraterrestrial signals unless they are very powerful and pointed at you.
INow this is probably way to optimistic because it's all just a bunch of assumtions.
Again, even the pessimistic assumptions give quite large numbers. And at least some of these assumptions have a little grounding in fact, such as stellar attributes.
I would think though that Hawking would be one who believes intersteller travel is virtually impossible.
Virtually impossible? We have spacecraft travelling into interstellar space
right now. Ok, so they're going at pitiful velocities, but going faster should not be too troublesome. Interstellar travel does
not require FTL, although if you want to go anywhere is remotely human timescales you'll have to travel at relativistic velocities.
I think the answer to the so called "Fermi Paradox" is more an issue of observation and time than anything. Signals are not that detectable unless they're aimed at you, and engineering detectable over large distances may not be required or common. And we've only been open to the idea of extraterrestrial sophonts for a century at most, and we've only been discovering exoplanets for the last 20 years.