THE aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrialsare almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out,humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.

The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinkingon some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centreof stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containinghundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely tobe the only planet where life has evolved.

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said. “The real challenge is to work outwhat aliens might actually be like.”

The answer, he suggests, is that most of it will be the equivalent of microbes or simple animals — the sort of life that has dominated Earthfor most of its history.

One scene in his documentary for the Discovery Channel shows herds of two-legged herbivores browsing on an alien cliff-face where they arepicked off by flying, yellow lizard-like predators. Another showsglowing fluorescent aquatic animals forming vast shoals in the oceansthought to underlie the thick ice coating Europa, one of the moons ofJupiter.

Such scenes are speculative, but Hawking uses them to lead on to a serious point: that a few life forms could be intelligent and pose athreat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could bedevastating for humanity.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligentlife might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imaginethey might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources fromtheir home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads,looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think theoutcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed inAmerica, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

The completion of the documentary marks a triumph for Hawking, now 68, who is paralysed by motor neurone disease and has very limitedpowers of communication. The project took him and his producers threeyears, during which he insisted on rewriting large chunks of the scriptand checking the filming.

John Smithson, executive producer for Discovery, said: “He wanted to make a programme that was entertaining for a general audience as well asscientific and that’s a tough job, given the complexity of the ideasinvolved.”

Hawking has suggested the possibility of alien life before but his views have been clarified by a series of scientific breakthroughs, suchas the discovery, since 1995, of more than 450 planets orbiting distantstars, showing that planets are a common phenomenon.

So far, all the new planets found have been far larger than Earth, but only because the telescopes used to detect them are not sensitiveenough to detect Earth-sized bodies at such distances.

Another breakthrough is the discovery that life on Earth has proven able to colonise its most extreme environments. If life can survive andevolve there, scientists reason, then perhaps nowhere is out of bounds.

Hawking’s belief in aliens places him in good scientific company. In his recent Wonders of the Solar System BBC series, Professor Brian Coxbacked the idea, too, suggesting Mars, Europa and Titan, a moon ofSaturn, as likely places to look.

Similarly, Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, warned in a lecture earlier this year that aliens might prove to be beyond humanunderstanding.

“I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive,” he said. “Just as a chimpanzee can’t understandquantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyondthe capacity of our brains.”

Stephen Hawking's Universe begins on the Discovery Channel on Sunday May 9 at 9pm.