Reflecting Human Nature in Aliens

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That was a good episode. Oh my god, we talk about that all day. Sorry I asked. Coming up, the alien edition of Star Talk. Welcome to Star Talk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide . Star Talk begins right now . This is Star Talk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. We've got a cosmic queries edition . One I'm very much looking forward to. And to help me out here, we got Paul McCurio. How are you doing, man? I'm good, buddy. Good to see you. All right, all right, comedian Paul McCurio. And sometimes we cannot do a show without our geek in chief. That would be Chuck Lou. Charles Luke, how you go? Come on. Doing very well. Thank you so much, Neil. Hi, Paul, I'm not friendly colleague, Charles Lou. That's not what you were saying about him . It was a lot of like Charles. So you are the Baron and remind me of your title. Baron? Yeah, he we have a Baron. Oh congratulations, please genuflex In your chair . No, don't have a stroke, just genuflect. Yes, I'm a baron now. Do you have a title? I don't remember. Um that means you don't if you're trying to think. No, I don't think I will work on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really okay. It's really okay. I let me remind people . Oh my gosh, the hand y quantum physics answer book. Now that's a book, not that thing you got. Come on. Well, my book don't you you just talk a smack about my little book . Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. Okay. But Charles Liu. This is not your first rodeo with the handy answer franchise, right? What we are the handy answer? Astronomy and handy physics. Handy answer book. Astronomy, physics, and quantum books. Yeah, we were able to dig really deeply into a lot of the mysteries that we couldn't cover in a big encyclopedic book like that. And there's nothing like a m mysteries in quantum physics. significant contribution to the literature of science that's trying to reach the general public. I have a book. Did I ask you? It's the two two thousand best fart jokes. And it's really good. Today's topic is aliens. Love it. Love it. How could that not be the topic of every possible conversation everyone ever has? Aliens. And but before I begin, we're recording this on your birthday. That is correct. That is my birthday. I called my office. Frankly, I forgot it was your birthday until I said, I scramble, what can I get them? And so I went into my deep in my archives, into my drawing. And I have what is this pretty looks pretty pocket protector. Nerd Prize. I know. Because you're you're a co-host on a science show. Officially a nerd. We're turning you into a nerd. Yes. So let me say that you're switching that box. There we go. Unzip it. There you go. There we go. Hang on a second. Let me put my , let's go. Waity. Hey Jerry Lewis. Was Jerry Lewis a nerd? Well that was in that role. Yeah, in that role. That was the thing that broke him out. Hey, waity, Dave. Okay, hang on. Let me load it up. Wait a minute. I gotta load it up now. Yeah, there we go. You gotta have your red. You gotta have your blue put it all in. There you go. And you got the thing. And then we got the green. RGB. RGB. And then this is my regular use pen right there. There you go. All right. All right. I am already 10 IQ's point smarter. Thank you. Thank you. All right, this is cosmic queries. So people wrote in. Uh they know that the topic is aliens. Wonderful. When I was a kid, I wanted to be abducted. All the time I spent out alone as an astronomer, you know, yeah, with your telescope alone in the dark sky looking up at the stars. Did you want to be probed to the city? No, that's the only one. Can I say that? I do. Come on. I spent a lot of effort exploring what that first encounter would, should or could be like. And I put it in a book. Take me to your leader. It's what should you do when an alien walks up to you and says, take me to your leader. How do you know that they're not already here though? In a form. We talk about that as well. Yeah, yeah. In a form. There's very little you're gonna think of about aliens that I have not addressed. Oh, I think I'm just saying. Because if you're a fly by night alien thinker, I'm a total alien. Are you challenging my alien talking? Totally alien. All right, here we go. Now it's a throwdown. So clearly I'm not the only one in the universe thinking about aliens. No, this is the case. Yes. And what we care about is not what I think. I want to know what our We got some really great questions out there. This is this is the entry level membership in the Patreon club. I understand that ten percent of those people are aliens from another planet. I'm not authorized to comment on that. Ah, here we go. Hello, Dr. Tyson. Assuming an intelligent extraterrestrial society has learned to travel at the speed of light, what would acceleration look like for them? For instance, my car accelerates and I feel it. The space shuttle launches producing an acceleration of 3G. Would something going from zero miles an hour to full speed of light just be obliterated? What would the power time curve look like Aaron Powell In that book I talk about this because one of the wow factors of flying saucers is that they're there hovering and then they instantly hit a thousand miles an hour. But they have mass can't reach speed of light. I'm just talking about what people see. Like interstellar speeds. If you go from zero to a thousand miles an hour in one second, you can calculate how many G's that is. That's 50 Gs. If you made of anything with molecules, you're a pile of goo at the end of that. So but plus Charles, you the people speak of this happening with no sound. That's right. Now, we've made great progress over the decades. That's right. With making loud things less loud. That's right. But that I think there's something we cannot overcome, and that's if you hit if you break the sound barrier. Yeah. It's always a challenge because when you are moving faster than sound or go from slower than sound to faster than sound, you create a shockwave in the medium that you're traveling And that's what we hear. And that's the sonic boom. Yeah. Right. So being able to go from below sonic to supersonic, you have to be careful so as not to cause that kind of boom or to control it in a way that will not make a bigger. How are you gonna do that and not make a boom? I don't think that's possible. You think there's a way you can make it? But one of the things that we tried to figure out when we've made the first aircraft go to Mach 1, as you get closer and closer to the speed of sound, your vibration increases, your shaking gets worse and worse and worse. You gotta just pop right through it in a quick motion in order to reduce the amount of damage that your vehicle is getting when it's going through the speed of the sort of thing you just said presupposes are you slowing down a little bit as you get closer to the you're trying to speed up more and more and more and more. But if you reduce the time it takes before you cross that bord that barrier. Right. Right. So that speed it makes a big difference. Now when we're talking about the speed of light, that's a whole different dynamic. Because we're traveling in space, you don't have the atmosphere to worry about. Instead, you do have this acceleration issue, right? In fictional spaces, like say Star Trek, you have this thing called an inertial dampener, which makes it so that you can stand on the bridge and go to warp speed and not have to worry about falling over. But in real life, but at least they thought about that so that it's a thing to compensate for it. Hey, you know what, you have to take into account of this. And were you at the front, the top signatory? No, no, no. I was too young to be allowed to do that. But you would have, had you been. If I had the chance. Accelerate and go, go, go until we get faster and faster and faster, until about halfway. Then you turn the spaceship around and start slowing it down. If you accelerate at one G, when do you get to half the speed of light? It's pretty quickly. It's like six months or something. It's not that long. Yeah. So you can get very, very close. But you're constantly increasing your speed and and and and you're just living in one G as though you're on Earth s cor. On your spaceship. But to bring this back to the alien, if they can't reach the speed of light through acceleration, is there any known physics that would bypass that limit? Right. Is that the physics that allow them to bypass that limit? That's r uh you don't bypass the speed of light. What you do is you approach the speed of light gently and gradually. That way you don't get a relationship. What hopes? Yes. Some some things go for the feet of white is not just a good idea. It's the law. Okay. this idea of speeding up slowly and then slowing down slowly keeps our bodies from being plastered against the back of the wall. Right. But it also gives us an automatic free gravity. But is the barrier to interstellar travel like speed or the energy required to sustain acceleration close to light speed. For me it's speed. Once you get to any sustained speed, if you're traveling at say ninety nine percent of the speed of light compared to me, you can turn off your engines and you'll just keep going. By the way, no one knew that until Galileo did experiments. That's right. Everyone before that said everything in motion comes to rest. That was very Aristotelian Fast will you get to the next spot, or how long will it take for you to get to the next destination? And even at the speed of light, the nearest star system other than our solar system is more than four years worth of travel away. So you just have to be patient. Does distance shrink for them if they're sl time slows enough during their lights? That's a great question. It turns out that space in front of them does shrink for them, but it doesn't shrink for you. So that when you uh the observer right when you the observer are watching them, they don't seem like that they're growing less. When they are moving very fast compared to you, they does seem like to them that the distances are less, but then they slow down to match your universe again. And when they are sharing your frame of reference, then their distance has returned to the size that you see because they see that. But a consequence of this is that they will not age the four years that the time that you see would have occupied. And they did this famously in with the gargantuan planet in Interstellar. Yeah. Where you have the the different uh uh experiences of time. So so there's a do you live long enough to go the distance you need to go to arrive at your destination before you die? Right. And do you have the energy to sustain that acceleration to reach the high speeds that you're doing. But it's not just the energy, but the environment has to be right for to sustain that, right? There can't be any friction, uh any of that, right? Yeah, well, empty space that's not usually a problem.. Well you never know There might be stuff like that. There is a really good uh science fiction novel called The Songs of Distant Earth that Arthur C. Clarke wrote. Uh where he created an idea where there was a spaceship that could move very, very close to the speed of light, but every once in a while had to stop and pick up ice. Turned out that the energy produced by the engines was being drawn by the zero point energy that surrounds all of space. And so that fictional thing allowed that spacecraft to travel as far as you wanted with unlimited amounts of propulsion. But they just had to bring ice up and create a big shield in front of the spacecraft so that when micrometeoroids and things like that, the interstellar space stuff, as small as it is, will keep hitting this ice and that's like shield that prevents the spacecraft from being a little bit ice. Only one. What would you do if an alien actually showed up? Would you shake its hand or run? Does it even have a hand to shake? In my latest book, Take Me to Your Leader, I explore not only how they might have gotten here, but what they might want and how you should respond. Because the real question is not are we alone? It's are we ready? By the way, I also narrated Take Me to Your Leader. And I'm duly informed that you can get a copy of that book or the audiobook now, wherever books are sold. You should probably get the book sooner rather than later. You don't want to have a first alien encounter and not be ready for it. I'm just saying Make Mother's Day even more special at Whole Foods Market. Kick off brunch or dinner with quality cheese and charcuterie with no synthetic nitrates. Then go seafood. There's an abundance on sale at Whole Foods Market, where it's all sustainable while caught or responsibly farmed. At the bakery, grab seasonal treats like their strawberry pretzel cream pie, and you can't go wrong with a ready-to-heat quiche Lorraine, Deviled Eggs, and Fresh Cut Fruits to Go. Celebrate Mom with Whole Foods Market. This is the table, the one with the view. This is how you reserve exclusive tables with Chase Sapphire Reserve. This is your name on the list. This is the chef sending you something he didn't put on the menu. This is three times points on dining with Chase Sapphire Reserve and a $300 dining credit that covered the citrus pavlova and drinks and the thing you didn't think you liked until you tasted it. Chase Sapphire Reserve. Now even more rewarding. Learn more at Chase.com slash Sapphire Reserve. Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC, subject to credit approval. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities, so do like I did and have one of your assistants' assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at Mint Mobile Upfront payment of forty-five dollars for three-month plan equivalent to fifteen dollars per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. Default terms at Mintmobile.com Charles This is an advanced future thing. Yes. And he had and his force field is a hunk of ice. Really? It was a fascinating irony. Obviously, it was a plot device. Right. But um that allowed Arthur C. Clarke to imagine a connection with humans that had gone uh before the spacecraft went. And so almost like another alien civilization, but they were all human biologically speaking, was very, very interesting. Hello, uh Dr. Tyson. My name is Daniel and I'm in Madeira, California. Excellent. I've heard you talk before about how aliens in movies are too humanoid and that they would likely take a different form. I'm wondering what you think they would really look like or how they'd behave. Gas or liquid form or something we can't even see or sense. Thank you. Yeah. So uh so in In Take Me to your leader. I talk about um ideas that people have had about non-traditional aliens. But let's just first start with the blob. Yep. Love me some blob. All right. 1958. Uh Stephen McQueen, how it was credited in that film. Uh it's it was a non-vertebrate. Did we bother to explain what is comprises the blob? No, cause it's alien and it wants to just eat you. It's okay. Just imagine a big amoeba. What we have now on microscopic level, but it's just big. Yeah, it's big. It's it's macroscopic. And it just it kinda and it just But the other ideas have come before this. Like Fred Hoyle, he wrote a short story. Fred Hoyle is f infamous for The Big Bang. Because he was into the steady state universe. And he said, You got this big bang. It started so the and the name stuck. But so he's not. Mabey the aliens became did they turn themselves into what they think we can understand. They observed us and said blob is about as much as they can figure out. Okay. Yeah. But except that the blob ate you. So the blob was not seeking the same. Okay, why are we always assuming the alien either wants to probe us or eat us? Why aren't they coming and they just like, you know what? I heard you got some nice stuff and sacks. I heard that too. From childhood, we know that it's way worse to be eaten than it is to just die . Okay, all of those childhood nursery, uh the not the nursery run, the what do you call it? The fairy tales. The fairy tales. There's Goldilocks. Is she gonna be eaten by the bear? There's little red riding hood. She'd be eaten by the wolf. But three pigs. Aliens that eat you is more terrifying than an alien that just kills you. That's my only point. And we then this is this is left over from childhood. Yeah, but killing and eating is the same thing. It is, intellectually, but emotionally. This is why Jurassic Park is so devastating. I know, but emotionally, if do you want to be bitten in half? You know, no. So here's my point. I would. Can I get back to Fred Hoyle? If you must. Okay. So Fred Hoyle imagined a life form in the form of a cloud. Yes he did. An interstellar cloud. Yeah. There was a sort of electric it was electrical synapses within the cloud that constituted its intelligence. Think of the human brain, but just now on the scale of something larger than a solar system. That's right. It came in and it blocked sunlight. And the scientists, because all it it had no harm it didn't harm us. It was just be it was just being alive. And the scientists figured out how to communicate with it. And they said, look, we're down here. And and the cloud was incredulous that something so tiny as we could have any intelligence at all. Because it's a big cloud. It can't wrap it reason with it and so it opens a hole between the sun and earth because it had blocked earth and then the humans are skeptical of this relationship that the scientists have put forth and they want to send nukes at it. And so the scientists warn the cloud, which is like treason. Yes. Right? That's that's Yeah, nukes coming up your ass. And so the cloud in response says, all right, you know, we could snuff you out like this, but let me just we'll just teach you a lesson. So all the nukes get launched, and the cloud redirects them back to Earth. Yeah. And they all explode on Earth and kill thousands of not millions, but thousands of people. So th so this is a life form that is hardly shown in Hollywood because it's not an actor donning a costume. Well, but it's not a vertebrate thing with a face and shoulders and arms and fingers and things. Sort of discussion, which is if I don't see them or experiencing them, they don't exist. How do we know this is not an alien? Right? How do I know my Wi-Fi isn't an alien name? Hello? Are you an alien? Hello? Hello ? Okay. This is idea. This is why a lot of your colleagues don't like you. The IMDB in the internet movie database list what is it? It's three thousand movies, TV shows , products, games that have alien in the title or alien in the description. By thousands . And so amazing. And some of them are fun titles like my stepmother's an ali Yeah, yeah, that had uh Daniel Craig in it. Harrison Ford. I believe so. Really? Okay. So people have been thinking about this. I'm just saying , let's go back to the if it walks like a duck, acts like a duck, it looks like a duck, it's a duck. Okay? If your alien looks human, has human organs and behaves human, it's not useful to think of it as alien anymore. Okay, exactly. See that's my point. Like if an alien shows up and it looks like you or you, I'm gonna be bummed out because I'm thinking, oh this is gonna be a sophisticated how sophisticated can they be if this is the best they can do. Did you ever watch reruns of my favorite Martian? Yes. That was an alien that was just kind of hanging out and was just like your your funny cheerful uncle, right? But I have to laugh because I'm old enough that I watched my favorite margin. And you didn't say, did I watch reruns? Okay . Well, you know. My favorite margin. So what what's what passed for an alien in the 60s, in the early 60s, was he just had like he went into Martian mode. He looked human in every other way, but he had two antenna that could be. Right, but let's talk about ET for a minute. So Steven Fieldberg is a brilliant director, right? And he surrounds himself with brilliant people that make movies. And the they still had to give it a head and eyes and a finger. I I they're all vertebrate. Right. And you know vertebrates in the tree of life are kind of the only ones that have faces as we think of as faces. Invertebrates, like you know, octopus has eyes, but we don't think of it as a face in the way we normally owe our faces to fish, okay? As our vertebrate ancestors. So that's our bias. It's a powerful bias. Okay, but they might evolve with n no faces at all, which basically puts them one step ahead of people on Zoom. Exact Exactly. So that's why I spent half a chapter just talking about aliens that do not match anything Hollywood has ever thought of. This is Sam Couch. Mm-hmm. Hello, Dr. Tyson. Sam here from Boulder, Colorado. All right. If an alien species visits our planet, it likely means they found a way to not destroy themselves. What would be most excited to learn from this alien species? What would be the first question you would ask, assuming we have a way to communicate. My first my first question would be how did you not destroy yourselves? Yes. Right? I would ask a different question. How the hell did you get That's what I would ask. And and they turn out I bet you to be quite related because it is well known that if you take a system though you can travel some fraction of the speed of light, it is much easier to use it as a weapon than as a mode of transportation. Yes. Yeah, and any things advanced such as that. That's right. And humans are really good at making weapons out of new discoveries. Phase like where the smartest technology you came up with, like a cell phone, was used exclusively to watch cat videos. That would be my question. And then they would immediately leave the brain. Do they look like cats though? Do they look like cats? They're adorable. Oh no well, they're alien cats. You've got three heads and a probe. How about are there any questions you discovered you can't that can't be answered, no matter how advanced? I'd like to see what they think their limits are. Here it is. So I have a section here called Alien Intelligence. And I and I explore what we could share with them to convince them that we have some intelligence. Oh. And one don't tell them we pay eighty dollars to shirt watch sweaty men fight on pay-per-view. Don't tell them that. I won't tell them that, I promise you. That definitely takes us off the list of intelligence. I would share the prime numbers. Prime numbers should be in there. However, we got a better thing. They don't need prime numbers. They're more symbolistic. Carl Frederick Gauss. Yes. Yes. Gauss. Brilliant top five mathematicians ever. Would you agree? Top ten. Top ten. Carl Friedrich Gauss was an astronomer as well. Hmm. Yes. He did some astronomical discoveries also. In fact, the method of Least Squares was invented by him to predict the position of an asteroid Before, it's hard. Okay. Yes. And he figured it was guys Krauss who did that, right? I believe so. Okay. So he said, here's what you do. Let's go into the tundra where there are no trees and then bring in trees and create a huge triang le. Oh . Three, four, five triangles? Yes. Well any triangle any triangle wouldn't matter. Okay. Create a right triangle. Then create wheat fields and make squares coming off of each side of the triangle. Do you remember your Pythagorean theorem? Yes. Tell me. I can't remember exactly. Okay. A squared plus B squared equals C squared. Okay, these are the sides of the triangle. Remember the hypotenuse? Okay. Since a square plus b what is a square? That's the area of a square coming off the side of the triangle. So draw a square. Draw a square here. Draw a square there. And then you can at night set it a fire. And then aliens on other planets would see this and know that's not random. This is people know math. People and so it's a way to broadcast in a day when there was no, you know, electromagnetic broadcast. So so that's one way to show that you're intelligent. And now the prime number thing, Carl Sagan had prime numbers in the original contact novel. That's right. Where they would embed it in the signals. However, that's counting in base ten. If you just have dots, you could count in base a hundred, just put dots. But we're presuming they count in base 10 and we don't know that. However you count them. That's why you count them. You don't have to put numerals on the chair. That's right. Well I'd like to know how they think about consciousness and purpose. Like do they see intelligence as purely biological or something like more fundamental to the universe? Aaron Powell For that, they'd probably want to read like our tort law. Right? They they want to see what our statutes are and it's to try to learn about us. I think that's what what you would see and then you would see all the people who are. Why are we assuming they don't have consciousness and purpose like we do? I'll figure that out later. I wanna know if we have any common language at all I don't know, maybe. This is the point about language, right? Uh you guys know my oldest daughter Hannah is trained as a linguist as well, right? And she has commonly as a classicist and a religious studies person and speaks Italian, blah blah blah. She's pretty awesome. But never minding that. Exactly. No question. I'm Italian. She has told me many times, and including just recently, we're talking about the movie Arrival. The way that they attempted to show intelligence was to share a language. And the translation of the language was the thing that allowed the greatest connection. Eventually, the protagonist, played by Amy Adams in the movie, learned so much about their language, actually trying to start to understand it, began to understand the nature of time. itself Time as they perceive it and experience it. Well let's talk about music for a minute and E.T. and sort of do . That's close encounters of the third thing. Close encounter. I'.s a movie straight Okay. Well, it's all like you're my co-host on this show. Don't confuse close encounters and ET. Yeah, it's all that uh Spielberg guy. The theme from Close Encounters was also used as a joke. The music the five musical based in math. Yes. Right. Was also based well was also used in the movie Moonraker, uh James Bond movie, as a key code to enter a special secret door. I did not know that. That was for fun. Charles, how do you know that? The day begins at the Chase Sapphire Lounge by the club at Boston Logan Airport. You get the clam chowder. In San Diego, it's Tostadas. New York Espresso Martini. It's 10 a.m., why not? It's the quiet before your next flight, the shower that resets your day, the menu that lets you know where you are. This is access to over 1,300 airport lounges and every sapphire lounge by the club. And one card that gets you in Chase Sapphire Reserve. Now even more rewarding. Learn more at Chase.com slash Sapphire Reserve. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC, subject to credit approval. I'm Kiana and I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything. Every day I'm thinking about some other new business. But Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use. It's like I can't stop. I'm addicted. com. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities, so do like I did and have one of your assistants' assistants switch you to Mint Mob ile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at Mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of forty-five dollars for three month plan equivalent to fifteen dollars per month required. Intro rate first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. Default terms at Mintmobile.com . Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to Star Talk every night and support Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Hello, Dr. Tyson. This is Jonathan Lott from uh a lot of ideas.com in Wiley, Texas. Okay. A longtime listener and recent Patreon supporter, this is my first of many future questions. Sci-fi films like Arrival, Interstellar, and Independence Day suggest humanity unites when faced with a larger external threat. That's a good point. In reality , do you think lasting global unification is possible? What kind of threat, if any, could sustain it for centuries? Would a more severe pandemic or even an alien encounter override our divisions. This guy's depressing. Also, if humans had evolved together on a single landmass like uh Pangea Pangia, might we have developed more unified cultures and fewer conflicts Thanks for having me. Let me lead off by saying that in 1987, uh Ronald Reagan addressed the UN. And it was still it was still the Cold War, remember? Might have been eighty-six, somewhere around somewhere in the mid-80s. He's president. He's addressing the UN and says, Um , imag ine how together we would be. I'm paraphrasing here, if we faced a threat, an alien threat from outer space. And our differences would dissolve because we'd come together to fight the common enemy. Trevor Burrus Or would they? See, what I would do is I would sell out uh uh the uh a country and then I'd partner with the aliens and I would coexist like that. I would say that who invited you on the show. So so I think he's largely correct because that work that plays out in politics every day. It's there's the enemy and they're our enemy. So we all bet it happened in Nazi Germany very easy. It happened almost too easily. So to the point where if everyone is identical in one island, I think we will still find ways to kill one another. And I wrote about that in a different book, in my Starry Messenger book on conflict and resolution, where you can talk about, well, we don't like you because your skin is dark, or because you're prey to a different god, or because you sleep with different people, or because you speak with a different accent. There are all these reasons you can give. Okay? What was World War I and II about? Those were white Christians slaughtering other white chistirans. If they can find reasons to do that, then all these other reasons, it's just you're gonna come up with reasons to wanna tribalize and kill. That is that is my absence of confidence in our species. On the other hand I need an on the other hand too. So thank you. On the other hand, Star Trek does provide an alternative explanation for unification. It is a peaceful visit from the Vulcans in 2063, April the 5th, that convinces humans who at that time were still recovering from a world war, that we should unite and just be nice to each other. Instead of uniting against the Vulcans as a common enemy, they were like, hey, let's just w clearly we're not alone anymore. Let's just get along. But this happened what year was this? April fifth, twenty sixty-three was first contact. That's when I check out that's when I'm checking out that is that it's April fifth. You know the day of the Just watch Star Trek First Contact. It's right there. Well it had to be April fifth. The Vulcans had to get their tax returns in on the fifteenth, so they had to go back. Their accountants were working on their So the issue for me is you're never going to get enlightened enough to do that. No, because well the there's flip side of that is quite that question is there will always be part of the species where cohesion is not their main agenda, it's dominance. Right. It's d we see it in the animal kingdom. We are the animal kingdom. We humans have a choice to decide whether or not we want to act on impulse A or impulse But there are some humans that make that choice consciously that it is more important to them to be dominant to coexist and get along. We don't believe they necessarily have the choice. It's in the nature of human beings now. Does the new uh top lion who comes in who displaced the other one really have a choice to not kill all the line cuts of the previous line? You two guys living in that you don't see it in our day-to-day life now that there are people that are just so clearly the cohesion, coexistence is not in their agenda and it's just sort of dominated . Yeah. But are they the majority ? Do they hold policy making power or military power? At any given time, there's always a give and take in humans, and I don't see why it wouldn't for Aaron. So one could imagine that after, for example, the Vulcans visit Star Trek on again April 5th, 2063, I got that marked in my cap the humans basically decided that the majority of humans decided that they will live in this peaceful coexistence unification. And then the rest of them were uh living still, had those impulses, but lived within that society in which the unification was appropriate. Essay for college was about the United Federation of Planets and how they all came because she was active in uh in what do you call the UN the model UN UN acted in model UN in high school and that all came together when she saw what happened in Star Trek and then she imagined this future inspired by the Star Trek model. Right, yeah. Then she got older and was crushed by reality. Oh , really? We're moving on. Keep it going. Hello, Dr. Tyson. My name is Abdul from San Diego. My question: if a non-human intelligence wanted to watch a young civilization And would we even recognize it if it were already happening? This is exactly what I was talking about earlier. So here's the thing. We have already displayed ourselves to the universe by leaked radio waves that have been leaving Earth ever since the Hitler rallies of the 1930s, if you're approaching Earth, you're gonna see our leaked radio waves first. And it will be the Hitler waves and the the story Contact made hay out of that. That's right. All right. So the aliens first saw Nazis. Right. And then the early radio broadcasts. You have like Howdy Doody and Amos and Andy. All right. And then you have the first TV broadcasts. Because TV goes straight out. That's why they try to keep it down, but it'll it's it's getting a lot of people. And they saw the Kardashians and stopped watching. Early TV. Kardashians are mostly cable. That's not broadcasting. That's my point. That's true. So it's got to be cable, right? Right. Like Beavis and Butthead is mostly So it's the broadcast TV. So you have you have to But what about Hulu which goes over Wi-Fi, which is internet, they probably get that. Well, yeah, I don't yeah., we'll have to think about that Let's take off the gloves and just take on the aliens in the most exotic way possible. Here's my favorite alien. The one who lives in four dimensions. And they just hover over us in their fourth dimension. We won't even know they're there. It's like we hovering over the surface of a desk, the two-dimensional surface of a des k and the creatures in the desk, they can't see out of the desk because they're locked in the two dimensions, and I see and know everything they're doing. So I give me some four-dimensional aliens, and they'll they'll know everything. Trevor Burrus As long as they can get close enough without penetrating our three dimensional aliens. That's right. But if they stay out of it, that so a four-dimensional alien has got this. Staying out of our dimension third three dimensions, does that limit what they can know? If you have something inside a box, no one in that two-dimensional uh world no can see inside that box unless you pry it open. We three-dimensional people see right into that box because it has no roof. Because a roof needs a third dimension. So the four-dimensional aliens can see inside your body. They can see inside any 3D enclosure. So they would know everything. In order to see though, they would have to receive some sort of electromagnetic radiation or other kinds of signals. They would need a receiver. Just like we have our eyes to be able to look on the surface of things. That transmission has to happen. Right. And so there is some exchange of energy or subatomic particles of some kind or another. So the detection issue is actually important to know whether or not we can see somebody, whether it's in three dimensions or in four. Or in that transmission, couldn't we then become conscious that we're something is detecting that transmission? Unless it just leaks out and you don't even know or care. So we have an alien that's far away and they see our I Lu Lovecy in my favorite Martian reruns, right? They could have these wonderful radio antennae or something, and they could watch with their radio eyes, and then we wouldn't know. But the moment it's been admitted, right? Right. But the moment Hello, Dr. Tyson Bryan from San Antonio. Is it possible that the universe itself behaves like a form of intelligence with patterns, self-correcting systems, rather than intelligence being something that only emerges within the case? Okay, so here's the thing: the bigger you are, okay, you're still limited by the speed of light. So if you have something the size of the universe and you wanted to act as an intelligence , there's a limit to how quickly or efficiently it can move decision-making thoughts across itself. Because it's limited by the speed of light. And what's the diameter of the universe now? Is ninety billion light years? It depends on whether you count co-moving or not. Today's diameter of the universe. About ninety two billion or ninety-two billion light years. So so if you're an an entity that size and you and it you have the proverbial bald head and you have an itch, you have to tell your fingernail, which is over here to scratch it, how long is that gonna take to respond? The point is, above a certain size, what we think of as active functioning intelligence metabolism is just not realistic. Because you're limited by actual laws of physics that apply across the universe. Then how do we distinguish between like a universe that actually has some form of intelligence and one that's just following consistent physical laws? Well, that depends on your definition of intelligence. Right? Aaron Ross Powell If following physical law is intelligence, then you then your Spinoza's God. That's right. Right there. Trevor Burrus. Uh the rationalists had a different opinion uh compared with the existentialist, compared with anybody else. But I think it would be illustrative to think about Earth as a possible intelligence, right? The Gaia hypothesis suggests that in fact Earth is alive in its own way, but in a way that we can't understand it, just like an ant cannot understand human intelligence. Right? Now if When you say the earth itself, you mean literally the earth itself. Like the earth from the core out to the mantle and living organism as a living organism. Especially on the surface, the idea was, which I thought was kind of thin and weak in its scientific foundations, but it was a nice new age thought that Earth somehow is self-regulating. That's nothing that we think about. I mean, I don't think about myself getting warm and then I warm up. My whole body does it without my consciousness. So so so check this out. So meaning your body is its separate own intelligent organism separate from yourin, you're how it's wondering how you use the word intelligence. But how do you know it's not necessary to have your mind for your body to be self-regulating? Because there are plenty of people who self-regulate and have no thoughts at all. It's a matter whether you're conscious of it or not. Your body's doing it all by itself. Yes, maybe you need the brain, but if you're but the brain could be feeding it through subconscious. Sure. I'm just saying that in either case, I'm just trying to get us up to the understanding of the Gaia hypothesis. So here's here's a here's an interesting feature of the Gaia hypothesis. Forest fires burn because there's oxygen in the air. There's a limit to how much the forest will burn because at one point there's not enough oxygen to sustain it. And it'll put itself out. And self-regulate. Then, okay, then forest pick up again. And what what do what do trees give off? Oxygen. Oxygen. Okay. So it's self . So if the oxygen level gets too high, all the forest would burn and have nothing left to replace the oxygen. So it's self-regulating in that way. That's one example of a guy a hypothesis. One thing feeding that hypothesis. So so you you want to call that intelligence? Okay. That's an interesting point. Right. So Paul was leading, in my opinion, toward a very good point. Do you need the intelligence that exists there in order for us to have such a good self-regulating system? Right. In other words, if we were not intelligent, does that mean also we would not be as well regulating of ourselves? The answer seems to be no on a lot of all the other life forms. Let's just pick the amoeba, right? The little microscopic block. Sure. Right. It regulates. It has uh little organelles inside it. It gloms around a little bit. But how do we know it doesn't have a mind, not as we define the mind. This is what this is the this is the larger point that I'm making. Right. We have all of these terms and rules and things that we've figured out on Earth up to this point in 2026. How do we know that the amoeba doesn't have something that's comparable to a human mind , but it's not called a mind, doesn't look like a mind, but can function in a way. So how can you say that with certainty? I think that's on that level of semantic. From a scientific perspective, we cannot prove absolutely that it has it. But we can prove, and we've shown already, that it doesn't exhibit it. It doesn't show it. And no amoeba we've ever seen has ever held up a sign saying, hey, I'm here, right? And I'll show you something else. I used to live in a roach infested apartment like when I was in graduate school. Yeah, I did too in law school. Okay. And I study roaches, and it's fascinating. Okay. So they will respond to air current . So if an air current comes in here, it immediately goes this way. So this is how you do it. So the roach is there. If you blow air to its left and just get the thing to its right and you can smell it runs right into your thing . Otherwise you go to where you where you go because it feels the air coming down and it's and you miss it. You will never squash it. Where were you in law school? I had so many of them. So my point is I I would read up on Roach es, and apparently their reaction time is they have if if what I read is correct, their legs, I've said their feet, their legs have air sensors that Are you familiar with the parasitic wasps that will actually drill a hole into the brain of a cockroach until it follows it around like a zombie? Then you bury it I thought it did a large thing. I thought he did that with worms. You are freaking me out. I thought it did that with worms. Oh, they do with everything. Yeah. There are thousands and thousands of species of parasitic wasps. That's how they survive. And they have to eat away in such a way that the organism is still alive. That's right. So it keeps the nervous system intact. Okay, more. Okay. Hello, Dr. Tyson. I am Ayikia, a regular listener from India I wanted to know your thoughts on the dark forest theory presented as a solution to the Fermi paradox in the three-body trilogy, spoiler warnings for others. The Dark Forest principle says that when each civilization discovers the other, there exists no solution where they do not end up attacking each other. So the universe is teeming with intelligent life, but they are silent to avoid being attacked. That book has raised the bar for first contact themed stories for me, and I cannot uh enjoy other alien movies anymore. Wow. Okay. So this is she's referring to the novel, which of course became the TV's. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you t take us there? Aaron Powell I usually think of the context in which the three-odyb problem was originally written. The author is from mainland China, who is under a pretty repressive regime. Challenges to authority are routinely smacked down, right? That is one interpretation. She's from mainland China. That's correct. Trevor Burrus Some of these themes were I I didn't saw the the series. These themes are are are captured in the early storytelling in the in the U.S. And this is why, for example, the Dark Forest idea is so strong in this series, right? The three body problem is indeed that the assumption is that if you get any kind of advantage you must be smacked down Now the opposite is like the Vulcans in first contact we were talking about, right? Which happens again april fifth, twenty sixty three. Okay. Now when that happened, instead it was a benevolent reaction. Everybody got along and everybody enjoyed each other's company. And so the Dark Forest idea doesn't have to be the only way, but it is a very interesting way in the story because the story unfolds with that as a key plot point. This question is written in absolute. So the universe is teeming with intelligent life, but they are silent to avoid being attacked. Now that presumes, I assume, in the question that they don't choose to be silent, but they're smacked down, as you put it. Anyone who doesn't stay silent is smacked down. But why one civilization sort of c dominates uh is dominant over another? Why is that? How do we reach that conclusion? How do you think that's who smacks down the dominant civilization? Why doesn't it just keep smacking everybody else down? Right. Right. Without overly spoiling the situation, what basically happens is that other species observe more powerful species smacking down other species. And it becomes because they've learned that as soon as a spacecraft comes up from some um civilization or some species, some other species shows up and wipes them out. And so you if you've learned and you've seen that, you go, oh, we're not gonna reveal our presence. Or you take a preemptive strike. Or you take a preemptive strike. So you become whack-a-mole on anybody who rises up. You become the one that smacks anybody else down the street. But then ultimately that person with the ma who's controlling whack-a-mole inevitably. They in principle could take over everybody. But but that's all in sort of our language, our culture, in in movies and TV and in books, there is a presumption, right? Because then then the story peters out because there's nowhere to go. So that person that's dominant ultimately has to be taken down. But we don't know if that's true by someone that's more dominant. By someone that's more dominant. But we don't know if that's actually. Dominant one. You guys aren't taking me out. 'Cause I got a pocket protector. And you ain't kicking my ass. Period. I would never try, Paul. Oh see the way you said that, that means you could kill me with two fingers. You gave me that deadly look. Exploding heart I think the takeaway here is if the dark forest hypothesis is accurate . Nothing prevents the galaxy from being teeming with life, yet no one knowing anything about it. For those reasons given. Right. And so each other , because it's one of I g I I give a list of a dozen several dozen r reasons why we might not have been visited by aliens, and that's one of them. If you don't believe we have actually been visited yet , then you already have the answer. We haven't been visited. So you you can make up anything as long as at the end, nobody's visited us. And that's one of them, the dark forest hypothesis. Another one is interstellar space is just really hard to travel. Okay? Another one is uh intelligent life as we think of it is rarer than we ever imagined, and we could be unique in the galaxy, even if the galaxy is teeming with life. Someone wrote a book with 75 ex planations to account for the Fermi paradox and no one haven't visited yet. Wow. So where are they? Can be answered 75 or 15. 75, at least 75. My favorite answer, let's call it 76 is. It's from our colleague, Steven Soder. Ah. Works up here on the sixth floor. I'm the fifth floor of the Hayden Planetarium. He's on the floor. Okay. Steve Soder co-wrote the original Cosmos with Carl Sagan and the first of the two cosmoses that I hosted. Brilliant guy knows everything about everything. Okay. He offered an hypothesis. And you know what it is? It's, hmm, if you're a species and you want to colonize the galaxy , you'll set up a Mayflower style colony. They'll go find a planet. They'll build a rocket factory and send two rockets out. And they'll build a rocket factory and say two. So go from one to two to four to eight to sixteen. Propagate. If you do this, 37 of these trips , you will have enough civilizations to popul ate every habitable planet in the galaxy. Okay? You can run the math. Thirty-seven. That's not very many. No. And if it takes you so what if it takes you a hundred thousand years to travel to the next planet? Okay. Thirty-seven of those is well within the lifetime of the galaxy. Okay, so in the context of this good discussion about aliens, what where does that take us? I'm getting you there. Okay. So what Steve Soder asked was: if you want to colonize planets that badly , and it's deep within you, then it is self-limiting because you start running out of planets . Not because you run out of knowledge, science, and then. No, no, no, no. We're running out of planets. And then and then I'm saying, I want that plan et. But you already have that planet. Here we go. Now they got the civilization. Oh, yes, there we go. Okay. You already have that planet. Or the other planet's too far away. And you come and I'm like, bring it. Bring it. I know you I know you wrestled in high school and college, but you ain't that wrestling now, Tyson. Bring it. So what he's suggesting is if you're that hungry for planets, that works at the beginning, but as that continues, you end up fighting each other over the more and more limited real estate and the entire operation collapses under its own greed. Okay. And and and we can say But isn't that m going west and what the Native Americans experience. This is the whole world experienced this when you had your big colonizing powers, what was England and France and uh Portugal and Spain and the Netherlands. And that that's just Europe. And then you had the Japanese Empire and the Ottoman Empire, and everybody's carving up the world. That works until you want a piece of land that the other colonists already has, and then they fight each other. Yeah, that's called Russia and the Ukraine. A hundred years. Okay. All right. So we've already seen that. Because the real estate on Earth is finite in the same way the planets in the galaxy are finite. So this is the and the whole system imploded. There's not really any colonization going on anymore. No. There's just one problem . What's that? That's right. Decolonization. If a decolonization catastrophe happened like that, we should see the results by We are. It's been happening slowly over time. This woman is from India. This is the perfect appropriate. Let's say in the alien civilization mentality, okay? We imagine the Milky Way galaxy and there was a