Mendalla
Happy headbanging ape!!
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Read my post again. That is exactly what I was talking about, @Kimmio . If there are ways around special relativity (and theorists have conceived of them), you would think that someone able to build a Dyson sphere would likely have discovered them. IF (and it's a big, big IF) the mysterious objects do turn out to be a Dyson sphere AND they have not made their way here, that suggests to me that special relativity ain't breakable.
A civilization of that order of capability that was able to bypass special relativity in some way would likely spread very rapidly through the galaxy. Just think what would happen if we actually invented the warp drive from Star Trek. Human colonists would be headed for every potentially habitable world discovered by Kepler in no time flat, not to mention manned exploration missions to other interesting places like this one.
My general feeling is that if special relativity can be bypassed, someone somewhere should have done it by now and we should see evidence of that beyond the sketchy, quasi-mystical experiences described by "UFO encounters". The energy required for the theoretical methods we have come up with (which mostly involve black holes and such like) would certainly be detectable in some way.
Logical conclusion, then, is that either it can't be bypassed or no civilization has ever reached a sufficient high level of science and technology to do it. Either way, it means we're pretty safe on the alien invasion front.
As for Hawking's statements on the subject, I don't think he is anywhere near an authority on the subject. He's a theoretical physicist who is also a Trekkie (and one of the rare Trekkies who had enough clout to get a guest spot on the show). If someone actually involved with the Kepler project or other exoplanet research said it, the credibility would be a bit higher but would still, ultimately, be speculative at best and hardly indicative of how we should proceed.
And even if we do take him seriously, discovering them before they discover us is, in fact, probably our best defence and astronomical research like exoplanet hunting is how we are going to do that. It means, if anything, we need to pursue this field more aggressively just as we need to pursue research into Earth-grazing comets and asteroids (which are a known threat, not a theoretical one) more aggressively. It is an argument for more space research, IOW.
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