Alien assault scenarios are well-represented in today’s Hollywood blockbusters. The invasion of alien ships, the devastation of cities, and the general turmoil give the sense of the end of the world.
However, the chances of a comparable strike on Earth are extremely slim. If aliens were actually hostile, they would invade in a totally different way than shown in the movies.
In one of their scholarly works, astrophysicists Michael Hippke and John G. Leach proposed the hypothesis that an extraterrestrial strike would be far more successful and less costly.
According to them, the Universe is enormous, the distances are too big even for high-speed travel, and building a massive fleet of spacecraft is exceedingly unprofitable. As a result, the aliens may plan an assault based only on the harmful code buried in the letter.
This code will include a highly powerful artificial intelligence that will propagate through the Internet and into all computer networks around the world in an instant. As a result, everything will be targeted: financial institutions, electricity networks, military facilities, and so on.
Such assaults can be avoided if humanity works together. They don’t have to examine communications sent from space or treat them as spam to do this.
According to Michael Hippke, because no one can predict all of the hazards connected with reading it ahead of time, the only way to protect oneself is to destroy it.
The same experts, however, believe that the chances of such an invasion are still slim, and that if such a communication is received, it must be read since the potential advantages are great.