Cosmic Queries – Take Me To Your Leader

21:20I'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.

21:32Neil deGrasse Tyson:So, Ian, take me to your leader. I talk about ideas that people have had about non-traditional aliens. But let's just first start with the blob. Love me some blob. All right, 1958, Stephen McQueen, how he was credited in that film. It was a non-vertebrate thing. Did we bother to explain what comprises the blob? No, because it's alien and it wants to just eat you. Okay. Just imagine a big amoeba, what we have now on microscopic level, but it's just big. Yeah, it's big. It's macroscopic. And it just, there it is. Could you keep doing that? That feels good. But the other ideas have come before this.

22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson:Like Fred Hoyle, he wrote a short story. Fred Hoyle is infamous for. The big bang. For naming the Big Bang pejoratively, because he was into the steady state universe. And he said, you got this Big Bang? And the name stuck. 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 can figure out. That's the best we can do. Okay. But except that the blob ate you. So the blob was not seeking interspecies communication. Okay, why are we always assuming the alien either wants to probe us or eat us? Well, I'm getting there.

22:57Why aren't they coming and they're just like, you know what, I heard you got some nice stuff in sacks. Here's the thing. I heard that too.

23:02Neil 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 nurseries, not the nursery rhyme, the, what do you call them? Because it's a fable. Fairy tales. The fairy tales. The fairy tales. There's Goldilocks. Is she going to be eaten by the bear? There's Little Red Riding Hood. She'd be eaten by the wolf. The free pigs? Aliens that eat you is more terrifying than an alien that just kills you. That's my only point. And this is leftover from childhood. Yeah, but killing and eating, it's the same thing. It is, intellectually, but emotionally. This is why Jurassic Park is so devastating.

23:43Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's just a form of death. I know, but emotionally, 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 scientist, because it had no, it didn't want to harm us. It was just being alive.

24:20Neil deGrasse Tyson:And the scientist figured out how to communicate with it. And they said, look, we're down here. 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 its head. It's cloud around us. But it realizes— But the cloud doesn't have a jiffy lube, so how sophisticated can it be? But the scientists figure out how to communicate, and the scientists 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.

25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson:And so the scientists warn the cloud, which is like treason. Yes. Right? That's - Yeah, nukes coming up your ass. Get the road. I know. And so the cloud in response says, all right, we could snuff you out like this, but we'll just teach you a lesson. So all the nukes get launched, and the cloud redirects them back to Earth. And they all explode on Earth and kill thousands, not millions, but thousands of people. 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.

25:41But here's the supposition I always have a problem with, which is that we talk about aliens on Earth, and 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 Wi-Fi 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.

26:08Neil deGrasse Tyson:The IMDB, the Internet Movie Database, lists, what is it? It's 3 ,000 movies, TV shows, products, games that have Alien in the title or Alien in the description. Wow. Like thousands. Amazing. And some of them are fun titles, like My Stepmother's an Alien. Yeah. My favorite is Cowboys and Aliens. Yes. I saw that movie. You do. I did not. Yeah, that had Daniel Craig in it. Harrison Ford. Was he in it too? 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.

26:57Okay, exactly. See, that's my point. Like, if an alien shows up and it looks like you or you, I'm going to be bummed out because I'm thinking, oh, this is going to 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 like your funny, cheerful uncle, right?

27:19Neil deGrasse Tyson: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? 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. He looked human in every other way, but he had two antennae. Right, but let's talk about E.T. for a minute. So Steven Spielberg is a brilliant director, right? And he surrounds himself with brilliant people that make movies. And they still had to give it a head and eyes and a finger. This is my issue. And it's like, really? They're all vertebrate. Vertebrates in the Tree of Life are kind of the only ones that have faces, as we think of as faces.

28:04Neil deGrasse Tyson: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. Okay, but they might evolve with no faces at all, which basically puts them one step ahead of people on Zoom. 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. 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.

28:41what would be most excited to learn from this alien species what would be the first question

28:48Neil deGrasse Tyson:you would ask assuming we have a way to communicate 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 here 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 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. Yes. Yeah, and any things advanced such as that. That's right. And humans are really good at making weapons out of new discoveries. 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?

29:36That would be my question. and then they would immediately leave the plane. That would never happen. Do they look like cats though? Do they look like cats? They're adorable. Well, they're alien cats. See, that's the thing. Alien cats. There you go. They've got three heads and a probe. How about are there any questions you discovered that can't be answered no matter how advanced? Yeah, I would. So here's what I do. Those kind of things. I'd like to see what they think their limits are. Here it is. Oh, that's a great idea.

29:57Neil deGrasse Tyson:I have a section here called alien intelligence 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$80 to watch sweaty men fight on pay-per-view don't tell them that I won't tell them that I promise that definitely takes us off the list of intelligence I would share the prime numbers prime numbers should be in there however I got a better thing they don't need prime numbers they're more sophisticated Carl Friedrich Gauss yes okay yes brilliant top five mathematicians ever would you agree top ten top ten Carl Friedrich Gauss was an astronomer as well.

30:39Yes. He did some astronomical discoveries also.

30:42Neil deGrasse Tyson:In fact, the method of least 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? Well, that's not that hard, is it? No! If no one has ever done it before, it's hard, okay? You have to know that that was something you could do. Yes. And he figured, it was Krauss who did that. 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 triangle. Oh. Three, four, five triangles? Yes. Any triangle.

31:29Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 yes tell me i can't remember 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 afire. And then aliens on other planets would see this and know that's not random. This is people know math.

32:15Neil deGrasse Tyson:And so it's a way to broadcast in a day when there was no electromagnetic broadcast. 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 were embedded in the signals 2, 3, 5, 7 however that's counting in base 10 if you just have dots you could count in base 100 just put dots but we're presuming they count in base 10 and we don't know that however you count them however you count them that's what they are you don't have to put numerals yeah 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?

32:59For that, they'd probably want to read like our tort law. Right? They want to see what our statutes are. You mean the aliens to try to learn about us. I think that's what you would see. And then you would see all the different variations.

33:12Neil deGrasse Tyson:But no, I'm still going to start with science and math. Math is the language of the universe. Why are we assuming they don't have consciousness and purpose like we do? That's later. I'll figure that out later. I want to know if we have any common language at all. And that's not going to happen by reading tort law to them. 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. And a classicist too. Yes. As a classicist and a religious studies person and speaks Italian, blah, blah, blah.

33:39She's pretty awesome. But never mind that. Says dad. Yeah. Exactly. No question. I'm Italian. Let me talk to her and see. 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. As the linguist. Yes, as the linguist, learned so much about their language, actually starting to understand it, began to understand the nature of time itself.

34:15Time as they perceive it and experience it. But let's talk about music for a minute and E.T. and sort of... Oh, that's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I'm sorry, Close Encounters. Get your movie straight. You're my co-host on this show. Don't confuse Close Encounters and E.T. Yeah, it's all that Spielberg guy. The theme from Close Encounters was also used as a joke. The five musical notes. Which is based in math. Yes. It was also used in the movie Moonraker, a James Bond movie, as a key code to enter a special secret door. I did not know that. That was for fun. That was a joke. Charles, how do you know that?

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38:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

38:21Hello, Dr. Tyson. This is Jonathan Lott from alottofideas.com in Wiley, Texas. Okay. A longtime listener and recent Patreon supporter. Nice. 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 Pangea, might we have developed more unified cultures and fewer conflicts?

39:10Thanks for helping us. Well, there's a lot going on there.

39:11Neil deGrasse Tyson: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. Or would they? See, what I would do is I would sell out a country and then I'd partner with the aliens and I would coexist like that. Who invited you on the show? So I think he's largely correct because that plays out in politics every day.

39:59Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's there's the enemy and they're our enemy. So we all bet it happened in Nazi Germany. 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 I and II about?

40:35Neil deGrasse Tyson:Those are white Christians slaughtering other white Christians. If they can find reasons to do that, then all these other reasons, it's just you're going to come up with reasons to want to tribalize and kill. That is my absence of confidence in our species. On the other hand— I need an on the other hand here, 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.

41:19Instead 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. What year was this? April 5th, 2063 was First Contact. That's when I check out. That's when I'm checking in. But the problem with that is that there's... April 5th. April 5th. Like, you know the day of the... Just watch Star Trek First Contact. It's right there. 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 going to get there.

41:53Are we enlightened enough

41:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:to do that? No, because... I don't think so. 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. Right. We see it in the animal kingdom. So I don't think that that ever gets bred out of a species. We are the animal kingdom. Okay, great. We humans have a choice to decide whether or not we want to act on impulse A or impulse B. But there are some humans that make that choice consciously that it is more important to them to be dominant that can coexist and get along. When you see it in other animals, it's kind of in their nature.

42:33Neil deGrasse Tyson:We don't believe they necessarily have the choice. It's in the nature of human beings now. 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? What world are you two guys living in that you don't see 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. It's very tribal. 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.

43:12Because there are times they are the majority and that's the problem. Yes, that's right. That's how we have World War I and World War II. Right, yeah, okay. So one could imagine that after, for example, the Vulcans visit Star Trek on again, April 5th, 2063. Okay. I got that marked in my calendar. 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 living still, had those impulses, but lived within that society in which the unification was appropriate.

43:43Neil 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, what do you call it, the UN? Model UN. She was active 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. Then she got older and was crushed by reality. We're moving on. All right, 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 without interfering, what would a scientifically plausible observation strategy look like?

44:25And would we even recognize it if it were already happening? This is exactly what I was talking about earlier. So here's the thing.

44:32Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 going to see our leaked radio waves first. and it will be that Hitler waves and 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's... Then they saw the Kardashians and stopped watching it.

45:15Neil deGrasse Tyson:Early TV. Kardashians are mostly cable. That's not broadcasting. That's my point. So it's got to be. Beavis and Butthead is mostly contained on Earth because it's cable TV. So it's the broadcast TV. So you have— But what about Hulu, which goes over Wi-Fi, which is Internet? They probably get that. Well, yeah, I don't—yeah, I don't think about that. You get some percentage. You 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.

45:55Neil deGrasse Tyson: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. As long as they can get close enough without penetrating our three dimensions. Yeah, if they come into our three dimensions, we'll know. That's right. But if they stay out of it, so a four-dimensional alien has got this. But is them staying out of our three dimensions, does that limit what they can know?

46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson:If you have something inside a box, no one in that two-dimensional world 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 the table. Something would have to be transmitting to them.

47:09That transmission has to happen. 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. Well, in that transmission, couldn't we then become conscious that something is detecting that transmission? Unless it just leaks out and you don't even know or care. Right, right. So we have an alien that's far away and they see our I Love Lucy and 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.

47:42We wouldn't know. It's already been admitted. Right, but the moment that they tried to interact or send some sort of a beam or radar signal or something, then we could detect it. Okay, we should move on. Keep it going. Yeah, Brian Rall. 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? Are you serious? I've got everything in the book.

48:10Neil 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 because it's limited by the speed of light. And what's the diameter of the universe now? Is 90 billion light years? Depends on whether you count co-moving or not co-moving coordinates. Today's diameter of the universe. About 92 billion light years. Yeah, 92 billion light years. So if you're an entity that size, 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 going to take to respond?

49:03Neil deGrasse Tyson: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. 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? Well, that depends on your definition of intelligence, right? If following a physical law is intelligence, then you're Spinoza's God. That's right. Right there. Yeah, the rationalists had a different opinion compared with the existentialist, compared with anybody else.

49:39but 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 like the earth from the core out to the mantle

50:05Neil 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. We're self-regulating too. Yeah, we keep our body temperature. You get hot, you sweat, it cools you off. It's an automatic response. 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. So check this out.

50:40Meaning your body is its own intelligent organism separate from your mind.

50:45Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's how you use the word intelligence. There you go. 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. Yeah, 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. 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 an interesting feature of the Gaia hypothesis.

51:14Forest fires burn because there's oxygen in the air.

51:18Neil deGrasse Tyson: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. Hence self-regulate. Then, okay, then forests pick up again. And what do trees give off? Oxygen. Oxygen, okay? So if the oxygen level gets too high, all the forests would burn and you'd 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 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.

52:05Do 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, right? The answer seems to be no on a biological system. Yeah, look at all the other life forms. Example. Let's just pick the amoeba, right? The little microscopic blob, right? But it regulates, it has little organelles inside it. It gloms around a little helpless paranesia. But how do we know it doesn't have a mind, not as we define the mind? This is the larger point that I'm making.

52:42Right. 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, it's 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.

53:18Neil deGrasse Tyson:And I'll show you something else. I used to live in a roach-infested apartment when I was in graduate school. I did too in law school. I did in DC. 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 the thing and you miss it you will never squash it in the center.

53:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:Where were you in law school? I had so many of them. So my point is, I would read up on roaches and apparently their reaction time is, they have, if what I read is correct, their legs, I would say their feet, their legs have air sensors that immediately trigger to the leg and don't go through the roach's brain. Are you familiar with the parasitic wasps that will actually drill a hole into the brain of a until it follows it around like a zombie. Then you bury it into a little pit and then feed the eggs and larvae of the parasites. I thought it did that with worms. You are freaking me out right now.

54:31I thought it did that with worms. Oh, they do it with everything. Yeah. There are thousands and thousands of species of parasitic wasps. That's how they survive.

54:38Neil deGrasse Tyson: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, one more. Okay, hello, Dr. Tyson. and I am Ayikia, 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.

55:18That book has raised the bar for first contact-themed stories for me, and I cannot enjoy other alien movies anymore. Wow.

55:27Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay, so this is, she's referring to the novel, which of course became the TV series. Yes, the three-body problem. Which is still, they're waiting for the next season to drop. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, so take us there. 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. And she's from mainland China. That's correct. The original author. So some of these themes were, I didn't read the book, I'm sorry, but I saw the series.

56:03Neil deGrasse Tyson:These themes are captured in the early storytelling. That's right. 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 where 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.

56:48But 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. One civilization sort of dominates, is dominant over another. Why is that? How do we reach that conclusion? How do you know that?

57:13Neil deGrasse Tyson:Who smacks down the dominant civilization? Why doesn't it just keep smacking everybody else down? Without overly - If it's dominant. Right, without overly spoiling the situation, what basically happens is that other species observe more powerful species smacking down other species. And it becomes learned behavior. 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 going to reveal our presence. Or you take a preemptive strike. Or you take a preemptive strike.

57:51Neil deGrasse Tyson:So someone is playing whack-a-mole on anybody who rises up. And you become the one that smacks anybody else down. But then ultimately that person who's controlling whack-a-mole inevitably Probably. In principle, it could take over everybody. But that's all in sort of our language, our culture, in movies, in TV, and in books, there is a presumption, right? Because 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 who's more dominant. By someone that's more dominant. But we don't know if that's true.

58:23So I think the takeaway. 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. I would never try, Paul. Oh, see, the way you said that, that means you could kill me with two fingers.

58:40Neil deGrasse Tyson:You gave me that deadly look. With the heart explosion. Yes, exactly. 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. Knowing anything about each other, let's put it that way. Because it's one of, I give a list of several dozen 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.

59:28Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 to account for the Fermi paradox, and no one haven't visited yet. Wow. So where are they? Can be answered 75 different ways? At least 75. My favorite answer, let's call it 76. It's from our colleague, Stephen Soder. Ah. Works up here in the sixth floor. I'm on the fifth floor of the Hayden Planetarium.

1:00:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:He's on the sixth floor. I remember this. Okay. He emailed this out. Steve Soder co-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 and send two. So they'll go from one to two to four to eight to 16. Propagate. If you do this, 37 of these trips, you will have enough civilizations to populate every habitable planet in the galaxy.

1:00:49Okay?

1:00:50Neil deGrasse Tyson:You can run the math. 37. That's not very many. No. And if it takes you, so what if it takes you 100 ,000 years to travel to the next planet. Okay. 37 of those is well within the lifetime of the galaxy. Okay, so in the context of discussion about aliens, 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, engineering. No, no, no, no. We're running out of planets. And then I'm saying, I want that planet.

1:01:37Neil deGrasse Tyson:But you already have that planet. Here we go. Now we've 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 wrestled in high school and college, but you ain't that wrestler 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 we can say. But isn't that going west and what the Native Americans experience?

1:02:19Neil deGrasse Tyson:No, this is, forget the name, the whole world experienced this when you had your big colonizing powers, what was England and France and Portugal and Spain and the Netherlands, and 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 Ukraine. Yes, yes. It's Spain and Portugal. It's England and France. How long did England and France fight each other? A hundred years. A hundred, okay. All right.

1:02:58Neil deGrasse Tyson: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 inevitable. And the whole system imploded. There's not really any colonization going on anymore. No. There's just one problem with that hypothesis. There's actually been decolonization. What's that? That's right. Decolonizing. If a decolonization catastrophe happened like that, we should see the results by now. We are. It's been happening slowly over time. This woman is from India. This is the perfect appropriate. India was the under dominant of the British. Let's say in the alien civilization mentality, okay?

1:03:35We 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 and that. We're sophisticated enough to see it. Maybe we're not sophisticated enough to see it. 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.

1:04:16I know we have to wrap. Good point. I want to bring full circle. If that happens, we should put it on pay-per-view and charge for it. 80 bucks? That's money right there. There you go. You know what I'm talking about? All right.

1:04:26Neil deGrasse Tyson:No, the octagon. I like the octagon. As long as it has probes sticking out from the side. There you go. I think we got to end it there. We got to wrap? No. This is an endlessly - I'm feeling a cosmic perspective, though. This is - Will you give me a con? I'm feeling one. Yeah, absolutely. 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?

1:05:06Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's our worst nightmare that something more powerful than us descends on Earth and has its way with us. Then I thought, 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 park 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. They've been slaughtered, enslaved, imprisoned, genocide.

1:06:06Neil deGrasse Tyson: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. That is a cosmic perspective. This has been StarTalk, the alien edition of Cosmic Queries. Charles, always good to have you. Thank you so much. And we'll look for your quantum physics book. Thank you so much. And you're on stage. Yeah. Turn the country, paulmccurio.com. So that website has all your appearances.

1:06:51Neil deGrasse Tyson:Got all my tour dates coming out for my stand-up show and my off-Broadway show, Permission to Speak. So yeah. 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.

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1:08:23Neil deGrasse Tyson:Prime Day is June 23rd through the 26th. These deals are so appealing, like portable steamers for steaming. Whoa, did I just sing soprano? I think I'm breaking into song. Epic deals on air fryers, vacuums, and skincare. I can't stop singing. Shop Epic deals this Prime Day, June 23rd through the 26th. I think that's it. Nope, there's more. Luggage, smart glasses.