(This weekly feature is being posted a day early this week because of the Christmas holiday on Sunday)

I’m with Stephen Hawking on this one: “If there are any intelligent life forms out there, we’re playing a dangerous game by trying to contact them,” as reported in a Daily Mail article, among others.

Hawking figures aliens would want to conquer us if they knew we were here.

Other people disagree, the Daily Mail says, quoting Seti Institute co-founder Jill Tartar in an article asking if aliens are trying to contact us after reports from Montreal’s McGill University of mysterious blasts of radio energy that were detected from deep space. She reasons that a civilization from another world capable of travelling here will be “sophisticated enough to be friendly and peaceful.”

I don’t think so. They would conquer us for several reasons, including: we as a species seem to be mentally deranged and are destructive to the point that we could make this planet uninhabitable for life; and if we were to actually start colonizing other planets, we would probably destroy them, too. In other words, they would see us as little more than cancer cells that should be eradicated.

And, of course, there’s a lot to be plundered on Planet Earth: water, minerals, man-made stuff, etc. If the folks from the other civilization are anything like us, they have used their technological advancements to make more effective weapons of mass destruction — as well as cool beam-me-up smartphones and video games and other toys.

Then there was another report this past week suggesting our universe is actually a lab experiment in some other universe, which in turn may be a lab experiment in . . . you get it, right? The idea came up in a Coast to Coast AM show, with links to some cool articles that are fun to read, at the very least. Read about our universe, the gelatinous blob, here. And here for Part 2.

It all reminds me of a short story I wrote, called The Aquarium. It is fiction . . . or is it?

About Sunday Reads posts: This is a weekly feature (a day early this week, because tomorrow is Xmas) giving us all a chance to point to an article or two that we found interesting in the preceding week, or the morning of. They can be offbeat, humorous, weighty commentary, whatever. Personally, I’ll go the lite route for this feature, since I post so much serious stuff during the week.

So, if you have any recommendations, please point to them in the readers’ comments section below.

— Jillian

Photo credit: shadowwwww via Foter.com / CC BY-SA