Cosmic Queries – Take Me To Your Leader

What would you actually do if an alien showed up and asked to be taken to your leader? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Paul Mecurio, and astrophysicist Charles Liu explore fan questions about physics of near-light-speed travel, Dark Forest Theory from The Three Body Problem, and whether the universe itself might be conscious.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Paul, love me some aliens. Oh my god, we talk about that all day. Why are you trying to convince us that you're one?

• 0:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry I asked. Coming up, the alien edition of StarTalk.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. 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 Mecurio. How you doing, man? I'm good, buddy. Good to see you again. All right, comedian Paul Mecurio, and sometimes we cannot do a show without our geek in chief. That would be Chuck Lou, Charles Liu.

• 0:55Charles Liu?

  Yeah, there we go. Come on. Doing very well. Thank you so much, Neil. Hi, Paul.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Both times friends and colleagues, Charles Liu. That's not what you were saying about him.

• 1:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was a lot of like, ugh, Charles. So you are the Baron, and remind me of your title?

• 1:08Charles Liu?

  Baron?

• 1:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we have, he's a Baron.

• 1:10Charles Liu?

  Oh, congratulations, sir.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Please genuflect in your chair. No, don't have a stroke, just genuflect.

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I'm a Baron now. I was knighted by my man. Did you have a title? I don't remember. That means you don't, if you're trying to think.

• 1:26Charles Liu?

  No, I don't think I do.

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will work on that.

• 1:28Charles Liu?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really okay. It's really okay.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, let me remind people, oh my gosh, the Handy Quantum Physics Answer Book. Now that's a book, not that thing you got.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come on. Well, my book, you're just talking smack about my little book. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. Okay. By Charles Liu. This is not your first rodeo with the Handy Answer franchise, right?

• 1:54Charles Liu?

  It is not.

• 1:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What we are the Handy Answers?

• 1:55Charles Liu?

  Astronomy and Handy Physics.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Handy Answer Book, Astronomy, Physics?

• 1:59Charles Liu?

  And Quantum Physics. 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.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's nothing like mysteries in quantum physics. I want you to sign it for me.

• 2:11Charles Liu?

  It would be my pleasure. Thank you so much.

• 2:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, thanks. This is, for me, it's a significant contribution to the literature of science that's trying to reach the general public. Because everyone loves quantum physics and no one knows how to talk about it. I have a book. Did I ask you?

• 2:26Paul Mecurio?

  It's the 2000 best fart jokes and it's really good. Wow.

• 2:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Today's topic is aliens.

• 2:33Paul Mecurio?

  Love it.

• 2:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How could that not be the topic of every possible conversation everyone ever has?

• 2:38Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly.

• 2:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Aliens. But before I begin, we are recording this on your birthday.

• 2:44Paul Mecurio?

  That is correct.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  Happy Birthday.

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thankfully, I forgot it was your birthday. So I scrambled, what can I get him? And so I went deep in my archives and I have.

• 2:56Paul Mecurio?

  What is this? It looks pretty cool.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  It is a blank piece of paper.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is a pocket protector. Nerd pride.

• 3:06Paul Mecurio?

  I love it.

• 3:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause you're a co-host on a science show.

• 3:09Paul Mecurio?

  I'm officially a nerd.

• 3:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're turning you into a nerd.

• 3:12Paul Mecurio?

  Yes.

• 3:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me see if this fits in that pocket.

• 3:14Paul Mecurio?

  Alright, there we go. Unzip it.

• 3:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 3:17Paul Mecurio?

  Hang on a second, let me put my.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 3:20Paul Mecurio?

  Oh.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Okay, let's go. Lady, hello.

• 3:26Paul Mecurio?

  That's Jerry Lewis.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  Was Jerry Lewis a nerd?

• 3:29Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, well that was.

• 3:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In that role, he's a nerd.

• 3:31Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, in that role, that was the thing that broke him out.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Hey, lady, David.

• 3:35Paul Mecurio?

  Okay, hang on, let me load it up. Wait a minute, they gotta load it up now.

• 3:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 3:39Paul Mecurio?

  You gotta have your red, you gotta have your blue.

• 3:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put it all in.

• 3:41Paul Mecurio?

  There you go. And you got the thing and then we got the green.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  RGB.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  RGB, there you go.

• 3:46Paul Mecurio?

  And then this is my regular use pen right there.

• 3:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go, alright.

• 3:49Paul Mecurio?

  Alright, I am already 10 IQs point smarter. Thank you, thank you.

• 3:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, this is cosmic queries, so people wrote in. Uh, they know that the topic is aliens.

• 4:00Speaker 03

  Wonderful.

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I was a kid, I wanted to be abducted.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 4:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the time I spend out alone as an astronomer, you know, you're with your telescope alone in the dark sky looking up at the stars.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Did you want to be probed?

• 4:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's no, did I say that?

• 4:14Paul Mecurio?

  I do.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Come on.

• 4:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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?

• 4:35Paul Mecurio?

  How do you know that they're not already here, though? In a form?

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that, we talk about that as well.

• 4:40Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's very little you're gonna think of about aliens that I have not addressed in this book.

• 4:45Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, I think I'll.

• 4:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying, cuz if you're a fly-by-night alien thinker, I'm a total alien thinker.

• 4:50Paul Mecurio?

  Are you challenging my alien thinking?

• 4:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I totally am.

• 4:53Paul Mecurio?

  All right, here we go. Now it's a throwdown.

• 4:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So clearly, I'm not the only one in the universe thinking about aliens.

• 4:58Paul Mecurio?

  No, this is a big topic.

• 4:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Congress was thinking about aliens.

• 5:00Paul Mecurio?

  Yes.

• 5:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. And what we care about is not what I think. I wanna know what our Patreon supporters think.

• 5:05Paul Mecurio?

  Absolutely, we got some really great questions on this.

• 5:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is, this is the entry-level membership in the Patreon club.

• 5:10Paul Mecurio?

  I understand that 10% of those people are aliens from another planet.

• 5:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not authorized to comment on that.

• 5:16Paul Mecurio?

  Ah, here we go.

• 5:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 5:17Paul Mecurio?

  All right. Hello, Dr. Tyson. This is Adam Jones. 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 0 miles an hour to full speed of light just be obliterated? What would the power-time curve look like for acceleration?

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a, 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.

• 5:53Paul Mecurio?

  That's right.

• 5:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hit 1,000 miles an hour.

• 5:55Paul Mecurio?

  But they have maps, so they can't reach speed of light because they have maps.

• 5:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not, I'm not even talking about the speed of light. I'm just talking about what people see.

• 6:01Paul Mecurio?

  Like interstellar speeds.

• 6:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, like, like, if you go from 0 to 1,000 miles an hour in one second, you can calculate how many Gs that is. That's 50 Gs. If you're made of anything with molecules, you're a pile of goo at the end of that.

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but plus, Charles, you, the people speak of this happening with no sound.

• 6:25Paul Mecurio?

  That's right.

• 6:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, we've made great progress over the decades.

• 6:29Paul Mecurio?

  That's right.

• 6:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With. Making loud things less loud.

• 6:32Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 6:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I think there's something we cannot overcome. And that's if you hit, if you break the sound barrier.

• 6:37Charles Liu?

  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 shock wave in the medium that you're traveling.

• 6:47Paul Mecurio?

  And that's what we hear.

• 6:48Charles Liu?

  And that's the sonic boom.

• 6:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 6:49Charles Liu?

  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.

• 6:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 7:04Charles Liu?

  There, people have been working on it for a really long time. And, and our astronautic and aeronautic engineering colleagues have much better ways of doing it. But one of the things that we tried to figure out when we've made the first aircraft go to Mach one, 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's getting when it's going through the speed of sound.

• 7:32Paul Mecurio?

  Well, you just said presupposes, are you slowing down a little bit as you get closer to it?

• 7:36Charles Liu?

  No, you're trying to speed up more and more and more and more. But if you keep.

• 7:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Reduce the time it takes before you cross that, that barrier.

• 7:42Paul Mecurio?

  Okay.

• 7:43Charles Liu?

  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.

• 8:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But at least they thought about that.

• 8:10Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 8:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that it's a thing to compensate for.

• 8:13Charles Liu?

  Well, they thought about it after the fandom told them, hey, you know what, you have to take into account this.

• 8:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And were you at the front, the top signature on that letter?

• 8:20Charles Liu?

  Oh, no, no, I was too young to be allowed to do that.

• 8:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you would have, had you been.

• 8:23Charles Liu?

  If I had the chance. Uh, but the story with that travel is that we slowly accelerate.

• 8:30Charles Liu?

  And go, go, go till we get faster and faster and faster. Until about halfway. Then you turn the spaceship around and start slowing it down.

• 8:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you accelerated 1G.

• 8:41Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 8:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When do you get to half the speed of light? It's pretty quick. It's like six months or something?

• 8:45Charles Liu?

  It's not that long.

• 8:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Charles Liu?

  So you can get very, very close.

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're constantly increasing your speed. And, and, and you're just living in 1G as though you're on Earth.

• 8:54Charles Liu?

  That's correct.

• 8:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On your spaceship.

• 8:55Paul Mecurio?

  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?

• 9:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can if you do it steadily enough.

• 9:06Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 9:06Paul Mecurio?

  Is that the physics that allow them to bypass that limit?

• 9:09Charles Liu?

  That's, uh, you don't bypass the speed of light. What you do is you approach the speed of light gently and gradually.

• 9:16Paul Mecurio?

  Much like a relationship.

• 9:18Charles Liu?

  What hopes.

• 9:19Paul Mecurio?

  Yes. Hold my hand.

• 9:20Charles Liu?

  Some things go.

• 9:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The speed of light is not just a good idea. It's the law.

• 9:26Charles Liu?

  Okay. Stay true. But this idea of speeding up slowly and then slowing down slowly keeps our bodies from being plastered against the back of the wall.

• 9:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 9:37Charles Liu?

  But it also gives us an automatic free gravity.

• 9:41Paul Mecurio?

  But is the barrier to interstellar travel like speed? Or the energy required to sustain acceleration close to light speed?

• 9:49Charles Liu?

  For me, it's speed. Once you get to any sustained speed. If you're traveling at, say, 99% of speed of light compared to me, you can turn off your engines and you'll just keep going at that speed as long as you're not speeding up and you're not things slowing you down like you're hitting asteroids or things like that.

• 10:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, no one knew that until Galileo did experiments.

• 10:09Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 10:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everyone before that said, everything in motion comes to rest. That was very Aristotelian. Without knowing that if you make it really smooth and you reduce the friction, it'll just continue forever.

• 10:18Charles Liu?

  So it's not a matter of being able to get to that speed. It's a matter of how 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.

• 10:40Paul Mecurio?

  Does distance shrink for them? If they're, if time slows enough during their light speed?

• 10:46Charles Liu?

  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

• 10:54Paul Mecurio?

  Me, the observer.

• 10:56Charles Liu?

  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, that 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 at the same speed.

• 11:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But a consequence of this is that they will not age the four years

• 11:23Charles Liu?

  Correct.

• 11:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That the time that you see would have occupied. And they did this famously in, with the Gargantuan planet in Interstellar.

• 11:31Charles Liu?

  Yep.

• 11:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where you have the different experiences of time. 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?

• 11:42Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 11:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you have the energy to sustain that acceleration to reach the high speeds that you want.

• 11:47Paul Mecurio?

  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, any of that, right?

• 11:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, well, empty space, that's not usually a problem.

• 11:56Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah. Well, you never know, there might be stuff to check on.

• 11:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space gremlins pulling you back.

• 11:59Charles Liu?

  There is a really good science fiction novel called The Songs of Distant Earth that Arthur C. Clarke wrote, 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. Turns 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

• 12:44Charles Liu?

  that, the interstellar space stuff, as small as it is, will keep hitting this ice, and that's like a shield that prevents the spacecraft from being damaged.

• 12:52Paul Mecurio?

  My understanding was he had a cooler beer and he needed ice.

• 12:55Charles Liu?

  Only one.

• 13:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 14:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles?

• 14:05Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 14:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is an advanced future thing.

• 14:07Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 14:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he had, and his force field is a hunk of ice.

• 14:10Charles Liu?

  Exactly.

• 14:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the best thing to come up with.

• 14:12Charles Liu?

  Really? It was a fascinating irony. Obviously, it was a plot device, right? But that allowed Arthur C. Clarke to imagine a connection with humans that had gone before the spacecraft went. And so, almost like another alien civilization, but they were all human, biologically speaking. It was very, very interesting.

• 14:31Paul Mecurio?

  Hello, Dr. Tyson. My name is Daniel and I'm in Madeira, California.

• 14:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love it.

• 14:36Paul Mecurio?

  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.

• 14:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So, uh, so in?

• 14:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Take me to your leader.

• 15:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I talk about ideas that people have had about non-traditional aliens. But let's just first start with the blob.

• 15:09Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 15:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love me some blob. All right, 1958, Stephen McQueen, how he was credited in that film. It's a non-veritable.

• 15:18Paul Mecurio?

  Did we bother to explain what is comprises the blob?

• 15:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, because it's alien and it wants to just eat you.

• 15:26Charles Liu?

  Just imagine a big amoeba, what we have now on microscopic level, but it's just big.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's big. It's macroscopic and it just, and it just.

• 15:37Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah. If you keep doing that, that feels good.

• 15:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but so, but the other ideas have come before this, like Fred Hoyle. Imagine, he wrote a short story. Fred Hoyle is infamous for.

• 15:50Charles Liu?

  The Big Bang.

• 15:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For naming the Big Bang pejoratively, because he was into the steady state universe. And he said, you got this big bang, it started, so, and the name stuck, but, so.

• 16:01Paul Mecurio?

  Well, maybe the aliens became, they turned themselves into what they think we can understand. They observed us and said blob is about as much as they could figure out.

• 16:11Charles Liu?

  Yeah, but except that the blob ate you. So the blob was not seeking.

• 16:16Paul Mecurio?

  Okay, why are we always assuming an alien either wants to probe us or eat us?

• 16:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I'm getting there.

• 16:20Paul Mecurio?

  Why aren't they coming and they're just like, you know what, I heard you got some nice up its sacks?

• 16:24Charles Liu?

  I heard that too.

• 16:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From childhood, we know that it's way worse to be eaten than it is to just die. Okay, all of those childhood nursery, not the nursery, what do you call that?

• 16:40Paul Mecurio?

  It's a slow death.

• 16:41Charles Liu?

  Fairy tales.

• 16:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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, the three pigs. Aliens that eat you is more terrifying than an alien that just kills you. That's my only point. And we, this is leftover from childhood.

• 16:59Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, but killing and eating is the same thing.

• 17:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is intellectually, but emotionally, this is why Jurassic Park is so devastating.

• 17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, but emotionally, if, do you wanna be bitten in half? You know, no. So here's my point.

• 17:13Paul Mecurio?

  I would.

• 17:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fred, can I get back to Fred Hoyle?

• 17:16Paul Mecurio?

  If you must.

• 17:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Fred Hoyle imagined a life form.

• 17:19Paul Mecurio?

  Yes.

• 17:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the form of a cloud.

• 17:20Paul Mecurio?

  Yes, he did.

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An interstellar cloud.

• 17:22Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 17:34Paul Mecurio?

  That's right.

• 17:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It came in and it blocked sunlight. And the scientist, because all, it, it had no, it didn't wanna harm us. It was just be, it was just being alive. And the scientist 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, right? It can't wrap its head. It's cloud around us. What if, okay, but it realizes.

• 18:01Paul Mecurio?

  But the, the cloud doesn't have a Jiffy Lube. So how sophisticated can it be?

• 18:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but the scientists figured out how to communicate.

• 18:08Paul Mecurio?

  Yes.

• 18:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the scientists reason with it. And so it opens a hole between the sun and Earth. Cause it had blocked Earth. And then

• 18:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  the humans are skeptical of this relationship that the scientists have put forth. And they wanna send nukes at it.

• 18:25Paul Mecurio?

  Yep.

• 18:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so the scientists warn the cloud, which is like treason.

• 18:30Paul Mecurio?

  Yes.

• 18:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, that's, that's.

• 18:31Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, nukes coming up your ass.

• 18:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so the cloud in response says, alright, 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.

• 18:48Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 18:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they all explode on Earth and kill thousands, not millions, but thousands of people.

• 18:52Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 18:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so this is a life form that is hardly shown in Hollywood because it's not an actor donning a costume. And it's not a vertebrate thing with a face and shoulders and arms and fingers and legs.

• 19:04Paul Mecurio?

  Here's the supposition I always have a problem with, which is that we talk about aliens on Earth. And there's, there's the, it's sort of a black and white 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 wifi isn't an alien named? Hello, hello, are you an alien? Hello, hello? Okay. This is why a lot of your colleagues don't like you.

• 19:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The IMDb, Internet Movie Database, lists.

• 19:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is it? It's 3,000 movies, TV shows, products, games.

• 19:43Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That have alien in the title or alien in the description.

• 19:47Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 19:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By thousands. And so.

• 19:51Charles Liu?

  Amazing.

• 19:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And some of them are fun titles, like My Stepmother's an Alien.

• 19:54Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 19:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My favorite's Cowboys and Aliens.

• 19:56Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 19:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw that movie.

• 19:57Charles Liu?

  You do. I did not.

• 19:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, that had Daniel Craig in it.

• 20:00Charles Liu?

  Harrison Ford.

• 20:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And was he in it too?

• 20:02Charles Liu?

  I believe so.

• 20:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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?

• 20:12Charles Liu?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If your alien looks human, has human organs and behaves human. It's not useful to think of it as alien anymore.

• 20:20Paul Mecurio?

  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?

• 20:33Charles Liu?

  Did you ever watch reruns of My Favorite Martian?

• 20:36Paul Mecurio?

  Yes.

• 20:37Charles Liu?

  That was an alien that was just kinda hanging out and was just like your funny cheerful uncle, right?

• 20:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I have to laugh because I'm old enough that I watch My Favorite Martian. You didn't have to say, did I watch reruns?

• 20:51Charles Liu?

  Well, you know.

• 20:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My favorite Martian. So what passed for an alien in the 60s, in the early 60s, was he just had like, he went into Martian mode.

• 21:01Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He looked human in every other way, but he had two antennas.

• 21:04Paul Mecurio?

  Right, but let's talk about E.T. for a minute. So Steven Fieldwork is a brilliant director, right? And he surrounds himself with brilliant people that make movies.

• 21:10Charles Liu?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:11Paul Mecurio?

  And they still had to give it a head and eyes and a finger.

• 21:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is my issue.

• 21:16Paul Mecurio?

  You know, and it's like, really, really.

• 21:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're all vertebrate.

• 21:20Paul Mecurio?

  Right.

• 21:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you know, vertebrates in the tree of life are kinda 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. We owe our faces to fish, okay? As our vertebrate ancestors. So that's our bias. It's a powerful bias.

• 21:39Paul Mecurio?

  Okay, but they might evolve with like no faces at all, which basically puts them one step ahead of people on Zoom.

• 21:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. Exactly. So that's why I spent half a chapter just talking about aliens that do not match anything Hollywood has ever thought of.

• 21:53Paul Mecurio?

  This is Sam Couch.

• 21:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm.

• 21:55Paul Mecurio?

  Hello, Dr. Tyson. Sam here from Boulder, Colorado.

• 21:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 21:58Paul Mecurio?

  If an alien species visits our planet, it likely means they found a way to not destroy themselves.

• 22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 22:05Paul Mecurio?

  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?

• 22:15Charles Liu?

  My first.

• 22:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My book.

• 22:18Charles Liu?

  My first question would be, how did you not destroy yourselves?

• 22:22Paul Mecurio?

  Yes.

• 22:22Charles Liu?

  Right?

• 22:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would ask a different question. How the hell did you get here?

• 22:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I would ask.

• 22:28Charles Liu?

  And, and they turn out, I bet you to be quite related. Because it is well known that if you take a system that 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.

• 22:43Paul Mecurio?

  Yes.

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and any things advanced such as that.

• 22:46Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And humans are really good at making weapons out of new discoveries.

• 22:49Paul Mecurio?

  That's true. My question would be, did your civilization go through a 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.

• 23:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would never happen.

• 23:03Charles Liu?

  Do they look like cats though? Do they look like cats?

• 23:05Paul Mecurio?

  They're adorable. Well, they're alien cats.

• 23:08Charles Liu?

  There you go.

• 23:08Paul Mecurio?

  You've got three heads.

• 23:09Charles Liu?

  That'd be even worse.

• 23:10Paul Mecurio?

  How about, are there any questions you discovered you can't, that can't be answered, no matter how advanced?

• 23:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I would add.

• 23:16Paul Mecurio?

  Those kinds of things. I'd like to see what they think their limits are.

• 23:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 23:30Paul Mecurio?

  Oh.

• 23:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And one.

• 23:31Paul Mecurio?

  Well, don't tell them we pay $80 to share, watch sweaty men fight on pay-per-view. Don't tell them that.

• 23:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I won't tell them that. I promise.

• 23:38Paul Mecurio?

  That definitely takes us off the list of intelligence.

• 23:40Charles Liu?

  I would share.

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eighty?

• 23:42Charles Liu?

  The prime numbers.

• 23:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Prime numbers should be in there. However, I got a better thing.

• 23:45Paul Mecurio?

  They don't need prime numbers or more sophisticated.

• 23:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Carl Friedrich Gauss.

• 23:48Paul Mecurio?

  Yes.

• 23:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 23:49Paul Mecurio?

  That hack.

• 23:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 23:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gauss, brilliant, top five mathematicians ever. Would you agree?

• 23:57Charles Liu?

  Top 10.

• 23:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Top 10.

• 23:58Charles Liu?

  Carl Friedrich Gauss was an astronomer as well.

• 24:02Paul Mecurio?

  Hmm.

• 24:02Charles Liu?

  Yes. He did some astronomical discoveries also.

• 24:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, the method of Lee Squares was invented by him to predict the position of an asteroid after it disappeared behind the sun. He took these data and said, where will it be when it comes out the other side?

• 24:18Paul Mecurio?

  Well, that's not that hard, is it?

• 24:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No. If no one has ever done it before, it's hard. Okay? You have to know that that was something you could do.

• 24:27Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 24:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he figured those guys who did that.

• 24:29Charles Liu?

  I believe so.

• 24:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 triangle.

• 24:47Charles Liu?

  Oh. Three, four, five?

• 24:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. Well, any triangle, it 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?

• 25:06Paul Mecurio?

  Yes.

• 25:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me.

• 25:08Paul Mecurio?

  I can't remember.

• 25:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. A squared plus B squared equals C squared. Okay? These are the sides of the triangle. Remember the hypotenuse? Okay. Since A squared plus B, what is A squared? 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 at 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.

• 25:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And now the prime number thing, Carl Sagan had prime numbers in the original Contact novel.

• 25:54Charles Liu?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where they were embedded in the signals.

• 25:57Charles Liu?

  Two, three, five, seven?

• 25:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  However, that's counting in base 10.

• 26:01Charles Liu?

  If you just have dots, you could count in base 100. Just put dots.

• 26:05Paul Mecurio?

  But we're presuming they count in base 10 and we don't know that.

• 26:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  However you count them, that's what it is.

• 26:10Charles Liu?

  However you count them, that's what they are. You don't have to put numerals.

• 26:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 26:13Paul Mecurio?

  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?

• 26:22Charles Liu?

  For that, they'd probably want to read like our tort law. Right? They want to see what our statutes are.

• 26:29Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the aliens to try to learn about us.

• 26:32Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah.

• 26:32Charles Liu?

  I think that's what you would see. And then you would see all the different variations.

• 26:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But no, I'm still gonna start with science and math. Math is the language of the universe.

• 26:38Paul Mecurio?

  Why are we assuming they don't have consciousness and purpose like we do?

• 26:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's later. I'll figure that out later. I want to know if we have any common language at all. And it's not going to happen by reading tort law to them.

• 26:49Charles Liu?

  I don't know. Maybe. This is the point about language, right? You guys know my oldest daughter Hannah is trained as a linguist as well, right? And she is commonly-

• 26:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a classicist too.

• 26:59Charles Liu?

  Yes, she is a classicist and a religious studies person and speaks Italian, blah, blah, blah. She's pretty awesome. But never mind that.

• 27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Says dad.

• 27:05Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 27:06Paul Mecurio?

  Exactly.

• 27:07Charles Liu?

  No question.

• 27:07Paul Mecurio?

  I'm Italian. Let me talk to her and see.

• 27:09Charles Liu?

  But 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-

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As the linguist.

• 27:29Charles Liu?

  Yes, as the linguist, learned so much about their language, actually trying, started to understand it, began to understand the nature of time itself.

• 27:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Time as they perceive it and experience it.

• 27:42Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah. Well, let's talk about music for a minute and ET and sort of do, do, do.

• 27:46Charles Liu?

  Oh, that's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

• 27:48Paul Mecurio?

  I'm sorry.

• 27:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get your movie straight.

• 27:49Paul Mecurio?

  Okay.

• 27:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're my co-host on this show. Don't confuse Close Encounters and ET.

• 27:54Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, it's all that Spielberg guy.

• 27:57Charles Liu?

  The theme from Close Encounters was also used as a joke. Yeah, the musical, the musical.

• 28:02Paul Mecurio?

  Which is based in math.

• 28:04Charles Liu?

  Yes. It was also based, it was also used in the movie Moonraker, a James Bond movie, as a key code to enter a special secret door.

• 28:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did not know that.

• 28:15Charles Liu?

  That was for fun. That was a joke.

• 28:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles, how do you know that?

• 28:35Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to StarTalk every night and support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 28:59Paul Mecurio?

  Hello, Dr. Tyson. This is Jonathan Lott from A Lot of Ideas dot com in Wiley, Texas. Okay, a longtime listener and recent Patreon supporter.

• 29:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice.

• 29:10Paul Mecurio?

  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 Pangaea, might we have developed more unified cultures and fewer conflicts?

• 29:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a lot going on there. Let me lead off by saying that in 1987, Ronald Reagan addressed the UN, and it was still the Cold War, remember? Might have been 86, somewhere in the mid 80s. He's president, he's addressing the UN and says, "Imagine 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."

• 30:18Paul Mecurio?

  Or would they? See, what I would do is I would sell out... A country and then I partner with the aliens and I would coexist like that.

• 30:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who invited you on the show?

• 30:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I think he's largely correct because that work that plays out in politics every day. It's there's the enemy.

• 30:39Paul Mecurio?

  Yes.

• 30:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 pray 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 One and Two about? Those were white Christians slaughtering other white Christians. If they can find reasons to do that, then all these other reasons that this, it's you're

• 31:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  gonna come up with reasons to wanna tribalize and kill. That is, that is my absence of confidence in our species.

• 31:32Charles Liu?

  On the other hand.

• 31:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I need it on another hand here, so thank you.

• 31:35Charles Liu?

  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, clearly we're not alone anymore. Let's just get along.

• 32:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, this happened, what year, what year was this?

• 32:08Charles Liu?

  April 5th, 2063 was First Contact.

• 32:11Paul Mecurio?

  That's when I check out.

• 32:13Charles Liu?

  That's when I'm checking in.

• 32:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  April 5th?

• 32:15Charles Liu?

  April 5th.

• 32:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know the day of the.

• 32:17Charles Liu?

  Just watch Star Trek: First Contact. It's right there.

• 32:21Paul Mecurio?

  Well, it had to be April 5th. The Vulcans had to get their tax returns in on the 15th, so they had to go back. Their accounts were working on their. So the issue for me is you're never gonna get there.

• 32:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are we enlightened enough to do that?

• 32:33Paul Mecurio?

  No, because, well, the flip side of that is, that question is, there will always be part of the species where cohesion is not their main agenda. It's dominance.

• 32:45Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 32:45Paul Mecurio?

  It's, we see it in the animal kingdom. So like, it's, I don't think that that ever gets bred out of a species.

• 32:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are the animal kingdom.

• 32:53Paul Mecurio?

  Okay, great.

• 32:54Charles Liu?

  We humans have a choice to decide whether or not we want to act on impulse A or impulse B.

• 33:01Paul Mecurio?

  But there are some humans that make that choice consciously, that it is more important to them to be dominant than to coexist and get along.

• 33:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you see it in other animals, it's kinda in their nature. We don't believe they necessarily have the choice.

• 33:14Paul Mecurio?

  It's in the nature of human beings now.

• 33:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does the new top lion who comes in, who displaced the other one, really have a choice to not kill all the lion cubs of the previous lion?

• 33:24Paul Mecurio?

  What world are 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, that cohesion, coexistence is not in their agenda? And it's to sort of dominate?

• 33:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's right, tribal, yeah.

• 33:37Charles Liu?

  But are they the majority? Do they hold policymaking 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 be true for aliens too.

• 33:50Paul Mecurio?

  Well, the key there is give and take because there are times they are the majority. And that's the problem. That's how we had World War I and World War II.

• 33:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, okay.

• 33:55Charles Liu?

  So one could imagine that after, for example, the Vulcans visit Star Trek, on again, April 5th, 2063, okay?

• 34:03Paul Mecurio?

  I got that marked in my calendar.

• 34:04Charles Liu?

  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 more appropriate.

• 34:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My daughter's 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 it, the UN?

• 34:29Charles Liu?

  Model United.

• 34:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She acted 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.

• 34:40Charles Liu?

  Isn't that awesome?

• 34:41Paul Mecurio?

  Then she got older and was crushed by reality. We're moving on.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, keep it going.

• 34:47Paul Mecurio?

  Hello, Dr. Tyson. My name is Abdul from San Diego. My question, if a non-human intelligence wanted to watch a young civilization without interfering...

• 34:58Paul Mecurio?

  What would a scientifically plausible observation strategy look like? And would we even recognize it if it were already happening? This is exactly what I was talking about earlier.

• 35:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 Hitler waves and the story Contact made hay out of that.

• 35:33Paul Mecurio?

  That's right.

• 35:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the aliens first saw Nazis, right? And then the early radio broadcasts. You have like Howdy Doody and Amos and Andy. And then you have the first TV broadcasts. Because TV goes straight out. That's why they try to keep it down, but it's escaped.

• 35:51Paul Mecurio?

  And they saw the Kardashians and stopped watching.

• 35:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Early TV. Kardashians are mostly cable. That's not broadcasting. That's my point.

• 35:57Paul Mecurio?

  That's true.

• 35:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's gotta be. Like Beavis and Butthead is mostly contained on Earth. Because it's cable TV. So it's the broadcast TV. So you have, you have.

• 36:08Paul Mecurio?

  What about Hulu, which goes over Wi-Fi, which is internet? They probably get that.

• 36:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, yeah, I don't, yeah, let's think about that.

• 36:14Paul Mecurio?

  You'd get some percentage.

• 36:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'd get some of 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 desk. 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 give me some four-dimensional aliens and they'll know everything.

• 36:53Charles Liu?

  As long as they can get close enough without penetrating our three dimensions.

• 36:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if they come into our three dimensions, we'll know.

• 36:59Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 36:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if they stay out of it, that, so a four dimensional alien has got this.

• 37:03Paul Mecurio?

  But is them staying, but is them staying out of our dimension, their three dimensions, does that limit what they can know?

• 37:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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. Cause it has no roof, cause 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.

• 37:34Charles Liu?

  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 the table.

• 37:46Paul Mecurio?

  Something to have to be transmitting to them.

• 37:47Charles Liu?

  Right, that transmission has to happen.

• 37:48Paul Mecurio?

  Right.

• 37:49Charles Liu?

  And so there is some exchange of energy or subatomic particles of some kind or other. 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.

• 38:00Paul Mecurio?

  Well, in that transmission, couldn't we then become conscious that we're, something is detecting that transmission?

• 38:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unless it just leaks out and you don't even know or care.

• 38:06Charles Liu?

  Right, right. So we have an alien that's far away and they see our I love Lucy 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.

• 38:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We wouldn't know, cause it's already been admitted.

• 38:22Charles Liu?

  Right, but the moment that they tried to interact or like, uh, send some sort of a, a beam or radar signal or something, then we could detect them.

• 38:30Paul Mecurio?

  Okay, we should move on.

• 38:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep it going.

• 38:32Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah. Brian Rawl, hello, Dr. Tyson, Brian 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 it?

• 38:46Speaker 03

  I got everything in the book.

• 38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 want it to act as an intelligence, there's a limit to how quickly or efficiently it can move decision-making thoughts across itself.

• 39:14Paul Mecurio?

  Okay.

• 39:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's limited by the speed of light. And what's the diameter of the universe now? It's 90 billion light-years?

• 39:20Charles Liu?

  Depends on whether you count co-moving or not co-moving.

• 39:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Today's diameter of the universe.

• 39:24Charles Liu?

  About 92 billion light-years.

• 39:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  92 billion light-years. So, so if you're an entity that size and you, and 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.

• 39:57Paul Mecurio?

  But 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?

• 40:05Charles Liu?

  Well, that depends on your definition of intelligence, right?

• 40:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If following a physical law is intelligence, then you're Spinoza's god.

• 40:11Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 40:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right there.

• 40:13Charles Liu?

  Yeah, the rationalists had a different opinion compared with the existentialists, compared with anybody else. But I think it would be illustrative to think about Earth as a possible intelligence, right?

• 40:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gaia.

• 40:25Charles Liu?

  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...

• 40:36Paul Mecurio?

  When you say the Earth itself, you mean literally the Earth itself.

• 40:39Charles Liu?

  Like the Earth from the core out to the mantle.

• 40:42Paul Mecurio?

  That's a living organism, obviously.

• 40:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to back up a bit, 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. If you're self-regulating, maybe there's some intelligence going on in there.

• 41:00Charles Liu?

  We're self-regulating too.

• 41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we keep our body temperature. You get hot, you sweat, it cools you off. It's an automatic response.

• 41:07Charles Liu?

  And the thing is, 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 conscious thought.

• 41:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So check this out. So.

• 41:18Paul Mecurio?

  Meaning your body is a separate, own intelligent organism separate from your mind?

• 41:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's one how you use the word intelligence.

• 41:24Charles Liu?

  There you go.

• 41:25Paul Mecurio?

  But how do you know it's not necessary to have your mind for your body to be self-regulating?

• 41:30Charles Liu?

  Because there are plenty of people who self-regulate and have no thoughts at all.

• 41:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it's a matter of 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 not conscious of it.

• 41:39Paul Mecurio?

  But the brain could be feeding it through subconscious.

• 41:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 42:08Paul Mecurio?

  Hence self-regulation.

• 42:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then, okay, then forests pick up again. And what did, what do, what do trees give off? Oxygen. Okay. So it's, so if the oxygen level gets too high, all the forests would burn and even have nothing left to replace the oxygen. So it's self-regulating in that way. That's one example of a Gaia hypothesis. One thing feeding that hypothesis. So, so you want to call that intelligence? Okay.

• 42:38Charles Liu?

  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? In other words. If we were not intelligent, does that mean also we would not be as well regulating of ourselves? Right? The answer seems to be no on a biological system.

• 43:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, look at all the other life forms.

• 43:02Paul Mecurio?

  Example.

• 43:03Charles Liu?

  Let's just pick the amoeba, right? The little microscopic blob, right? It regulates, it has little organelles inside it, it gloms around a little helpless paracysia.

• 43:14Paul Mecurio?

  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.

• 43:20Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 43:20Paul Mecurio?

  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?

• 43:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think that's, on that level is semantic.

• 43:40Charles Liu?

  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."

• 43:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'll show you something else. I used to live in a roach-infested apartment, like when I was in graduate school.

• 44:01Paul Mecurio?

  I did too in law school.

• 44:02Charles Liu?

  I did in DC.

• 44:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I studied roaches, and it's fascinating, okay? So they will respond to air currents. So if an air current comes in here, it immediately goes this way, which is, 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, it runs right into your thing. Otherwise, you go to where you, where you go, because it feels the air coming down on the thing. And you miss it, you will never squash it in the center.

• 44:32Paul Mecurio?

  Where were you in law school? I had so many of them.

• 44:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, my point is, I would read up on roaches, and apparently, their reaction time is, they have, if, if what I read is correct, their legs, I said their feet, their legs have air sensors. That immediately trigger to the leg and don't go through the roach's brain.

• 44:52Charles Liu?

  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 into a little pit and then feed the eggs. I thought it did that with worms.

• 45:07Paul Mecurio?

  You are freaking me out right now.

• 45:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought it did that with worms.

• 45:11Charles Liu?

  Oh, they do with everything.

• 45:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 45:12Charles Liu?

  There are thousands and thousands of species of parasitic wasps. That's how they survive.

• 45:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they have to eat away in such a way that the organism is still alive.

• 45:21Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 45:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it keeps the nervous system intact.

• 45:23Paul Mecurio?

  Okay, one more. Okay. Hello, Dr. Tyson. I am Aikia, a regular listener from India, living in San Francisco. 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 enjoy other alien movies anymore.

• 46:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Okay, so this is, she's referring to the novel, which of course became the TV series.

• 46:10Charles Liu?

  The Three Body Problem.

• 46:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is still, they're waiting for the next season to drop.

• 46:13Charles Liu?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 46:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, so what do you, take us there.

• 46:16Charles Liu?

  I usually think of the context in which the Three Body 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.

• 46:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And she's from mainland China.

• 46:36Charles Liu?

  That's correct. The original author.

• 46:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So some of these themes were, I didn't read the book, I'm sorry, but I saw the series. These themes are captured in the early storytelling in the series.

• 46:46Charles Liu?

  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. The opposite is like the Vulcans in First Contact, what we were talking about, right? Which happens again, April 5th, 2063. 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.

• 47:26Paul Mecurio?

  But 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.

• 47:40Charles Liu?

  Anyone who doesn't stay silent is smacked down.

• 47:43Paul Mecurio?

  But why one civilization sort of dominates, is dominant over another? Why is that? How do we reach that conclusion?

• 47:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who smacks down the dominant civilization? Why doesn't it just keep smacking everybody else down?

• 47:55Charles Liu?

  Without overly, right, without overly spoiling the situation, what basically happens is that other species observe more powerful species smacking down other species.

• 48:09Paul Mecurio?

  And it becomes learned behavior?

• 48:11Charles Liu?

  Because they've learned that as soon as a spacecraft comes up from some civilization or some species, some other species shows up and wipes them out. And so, if you've learned and you've seen that, you go, oh, we're not gonna reveal our presence.

• 48:26Paul Mecurio?

  Or you take a preemptive strike.

• 48:27Charles Liu?

  Or you take a preemptive strike.

• 48:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So someone is playing whack-a-mole on anybody who rises up.

• 48:32Charles Liu?

  And you become the one that smacks anybody else down.

• 48:35Paul Mecurio?

  But then ultimately, that person with the map, who's controlling whack-a-mole, inevitably.

• 48:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They, in principle, could take over everybody.

• 48:42Paul Mecurio?

  But that's all in sort of our language, our culture, 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.

• 48:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By someone who's more dominant.

• 48:59Paul Mecurio?

  By someone that's more dominant, but we don't know if that's true.

• 49:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I think the takeaway.

• 49:03Paul Mecurio?

  If the three of us, okay, and I'm the dominant one, you guys aren't taking me out. Because I got a pocket protector, and you ain't kicking my ass. Period.

• 49:11Charles Liu?

  I would never try, Paul.

• 49:13Paul Mecurio?

  Oh, see, the way you said that, that means you could kill me with two fingers.

• 49:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gave me that deadly look. With the heart explosive, exploding heart.

• 49:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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. Knowing anything about each other. Because it's one of, I give a list of a dozen, several dozen

• 49:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 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 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 explanations. Really? To account for the Fermi paradox and no one haven't visited yet. Wow. So where are they can be answered 75 different ways?

• 50:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At least 75. My favorite answer, let's call it 76, is from our colleague, Steven Soder. Ah. Works up here in the sixth floor. I'm on the fifth floor of the Hayden Planetarium. I remember this. Okay. He emailed this out. Steve Soder, Carl wrote the original Cosmos with Carl Sagan and the first of the two Cosmoses that I host. Brilliant guy knows everything about everything. Okay? He offered an hypothesis. 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, say two, so go from one to two to four to eight to 16. Propagate.

• 51:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you do this, 37 of these trips, you will have enough civilizations to populate every habitable planet in the galaxy.

• 51:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you can run the math. Thirty-seven, that's not very many.

• 51:30Paul Mecurio?

  No.

• 51:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if it takes you, so what if it takes you a hundred thousand years to travel to the next planet?

• 51:36Paul Mecurio?

  Okay.

• 51:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thirty-seven of those is well within the lifetime of the galaxy.

• 51:40Paul Mecurio?

  Okay, so in the context of this discussion about aliens, what, where does that take us?

• 51:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 52:04Paul Mecurio?

  Not because you ran out of knowledge, science, engineering.

• 52:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're running out of planets, and then, and then, I'm saying, I want that planet, but you already have that planet.

• 52:16Paul Mecurio?

  There we go. Now they get the civilization.

• 52:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There we go, okay. You already have that planet, or the other planet's too far away.

• 52:23Paul Mecurio?

  And you come, and I'm like, bring it. I know you, I know you wrestled in high school and college, but you ain't that wrestler now, Tyson, bring it.

• 52:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 52:50Paul Mecurio?

  Okay.

• 52:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, and we can say-

• 52:52Paul Mecurio?

  But isn't that going west, and what the Native Americans experienced?

• 52:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look, this is, forget it, the whole world experienced this, when you had your big colonizing powers, uh, what was England and France, and 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 colonizers already has, and then they fight each other.

• 53:23Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, that's called Russia and Ukraine.

• 53:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yes, yes, it was, it's, it's, it's Spain, and it's, it's, uh, Spain and Portugal. It's, it's England and, how long did England and France fight each other?

• 53:33Paul Mecurio?

  A hundred years.

• 53:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hundred, a hundred, okay, all right, so we've- You've seen that because the real estate on earth is finite. In the same way, the planets in the galaxy are finite.

• 53:43Paul Mecurio?

  So this is.

• 53:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So and the whole system imploded. There's not really any colonization going on anymore.

• 53:48Charles Liu?

  No, there's just one problem.

• 53:50Paul Mecurio?

  There's actually been.

• 53:51Charles Liu?

  Decolonization.

• 53:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's that? That's right. Decolonizing.

• 53:54Charles Liu?

  If a decolonization catastrophe happened like that. We should see the results.

• 54:00Paul Mecurio?

  We are, it's been happening slowly over time. This woman is from India. This is the perfect appropriate like India was under dominant of.

• 54:08Charles Liu?

  Let's say, let's say in the alien civilization mentality. Okay, we imagine the Milky Way galaxy and there was a British style colonial situation. Going on and there was an Indian style place happening. If that happened at any reasonable time, we would have seen the results of them destroying each other. We would have seen a war, we would have seen flashes of this.

• 54:31Paul Mecurio?

  That just presupposes that we're sophisticated enough to see it. Maybe we're not sophisticated enough to see it.

• 54:36Charles Liu?

  Well, in that case, we should watch and wait, and maybe we will. That hypothesis is one that can be tested through observation. If we ever see the remnants of a civilization or of a society or a whole bunch of aliens that caused that problem. Then we will know it happened.

• 54:54Paul Mecurio?

  I know we have to rap. Good point. I want to bring full circle. If that happens, we should put it on pay per view and charge for it.

• 55:00Charles Liu?

  Eighty bucks.

• 55:01Paul Mecurio?

  That's money right there.

• 55:02Charles Liu?

  There you go.

• 55:03Paul Mecurio?

  You know what I'm talking about?

• 55:03Charles Liu?

  All right.

• 55:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, the octagon. I'd like the octagon.

• 55:05Charles Liu?

  As long as it has probes sticking out from the side.

• 55:08Paul Mecurio?

  There you go.

• 55:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think we gotta, we gotta end it there.

• 55:11Paul Mecurio?

  No, this is, this is like, this is an endlessly.

• 55:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm feeling a cosmic perspective though. Will you give me, will you give me a comment? I'm feeling one.

• 55:18Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 55:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm feeling one. Some of the most successful stories that involve aliens. Involve aliens that want to harm us. That want to skin us alive, that want to eat us, that want to destroy civilization. That want to get rid of everything we care about and value. And I had to ask myself. Where does that come from? Why are we thinking this? Is it, it's our worst nightmare that something more powerful than us descends on earth. And has its way with us. Then I thought.

• 55:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's it based on? It's based on what we think the aliens will do. It's based on what we suspect they think of us on arrival. But really, when you part the curtains, it's not what we think the aliens will do to us. It's what we know we will do to ourselves in exactly that situation. When a higher technological civilization confronts one of lesser technological prowess, it has never boded well for the lesser technologically advanced civilization, ever.

• 56:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They've been slaughtered, enslaved, imprisoned, genocide. All the worst things humans have ever done to one another have manifested when there was a mismatch in the technological prowess of one civilization encountering another. And so, we look up at aliens and we want to think the aliens are going to be evil when all we're doing is holding up a mirror to ourselves. And that is a cosmic perspective. This has been StarTalk, the Alien Edition of Cosmic Queries. Charles, always good to have you.

• 57:17Paul Mecurio?

  Thank you so much.

• 57:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we'll look for your quantum physics book.

• 57:19Paul Mecurio?

  Thank you so much.

• 57:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're on stage.

• 57:22Paul Mecurio?

  Yeah. Tour in the country, palmycurio.com.

• 57:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that website has all your appearances.

• 57:28Paul Mecurio?

  Got all my tour dates coming out for my stand-up show and my Off-Broadway show Permission to Speak, so yeah.

• 57:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, all right, you got it. This has been another installment of StarTalk, Cosmic Queries, Alien Edition. We got to do this again, gentlemen. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.