← Intelligence Squared
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- [00:01]
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- [00:54]
Mia Sorrenti
welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Are we alone in the universe? And if humanity were ever to make contact with alien life, what would that encounter reveal about us? On today's episode, Neil Degrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, author and science communicator, joins Dr. Radha Modgill to discuss his new book, Take Me to youo Leader and humanity's enduring fascination with UFOs, extraterrestrial life, and the possibility of first contact. Let's join our host, Dr. Radha Modgill, now with more.
- [01:30]
Dr. Radha Modgill
Hello and welcome to Intelligence squared with me, Dr. Radha Modgill. Our guest today is Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He's an astrophysicist and author of the number one best selling astrophysics for People in a Hurry, amongst lots of other books. He's also the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, where He served since 1996. He has a new book out and we're going to be discussing the themes of that today on this podcast and it's called Take Me to youo Perspectives on youn First Alien Encounter. Neil, it's a real pleasure to chat to you today.
- [02:06]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Thanks for having me. And I love what you guys do and your whole the whole franchise of Intelligence Squared is an important addition to the intellectual dialogue that there's not enough of in this world. So just congratulations to all that you guys do.
- [02:20]
Dr. Radha Modgill
Thank you so much. Well, talking of intellectual dialogue, that brings me to you because you do fantastic work. You are a huge educator. You try and bring universe down to earth so we can understand it and make it tangible. And I loved your book. I mean One of the things that really struck me, the first opening lines, I think, was you actually read the
- [02:41]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
book like they fake it, you know,
- [02:45]
Dr. Radha Modgill
and you know when they're faking it. No, you. I'm. I'm an honest person. Now, the, the first lines of the book really struck me because you said, ever since childhood I've wanted to be abducted by aliens. And you know what? That really sort of. That really resonated with me. I'm a doctor, I'm a scientist, but I also have an imagination, and I like creativity and I like mystery, and I like understanding things, but I also like not understanding things sometimes. But my first question to you, I suppose, is why did you want to be abducted by aliens? What do you think as a child? Kind of captured your imagination around that.
- [03:18]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Well, so it wasn't simply a childhood urgent. It was because Beginning at age 9, I was fascinated by the universe. After a first visit to my local planetarium, the Hayden Planetarium, where I now serve as director. But from age 9, looking at the night sky, by the way, I grew up in New York City in the Bronx. And so to see the sky show up on the dome in all of its splendor and majesty, I thought it was a hoax. I said, there aren't that many stars in the sky. I've seen them from the Bronx. There's like eight stars from the Bronx. And that's back when there was not only light pollution, there was much more air pollution back then. And in New York City, surely true with London and other big cities around the world, you don't really have a relationship with the night sky. You just don't. It doesn't talk to you. It's not visible. Especially in New York, where we have very. New York City, where we have very tall buildings. When you look up, you see a building, you see a streetlight, you might see the moon. So when I was nine, I was starstruck on a level where I would say the universe chose me. All right, I didn't go asking, what should I study today? How about go alphabetically in all the topics? Here's astronomy. Yeah. No, I just thought it A. And there it was, you know, anthropology, astronomy. So that was age. By the time I was 11, I knew I wanted to be an astrophysicist. And over those years, looking up became a very soothing and important part of my mental journey. And so doing so the. It was very natural to then wonder if we're alone in the universe. And so the urge to be abducted was not so much a childhood urge it was the urge of a budding astrophysicist. That's how I would parse that.
- [05:30]
Dr. Radha Modgill
Yeah, that kind of. That wonder, that curiosity of what if? Which I think sometimes we miss in the world today.
- [05:36]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
And I love what you said a moment ago. You said you also liked not knowing. Right. So when I was in the dome looking up, and the universe was so vast and so immense, I needed evidence that the actual night sky looked like the planetarium and it was not a hoax. So within the next two years, we would go to, like, central Pennsylvania, Caribbean. We have relatives there. And I would see the night sky as nature had intended. And even to this day, I'm a little embarrassed by this. But it's honest. When I see the night sky authentically, part of me says, that's so beautiful, it reminds me of the Hayden Planetarium.
- [06:20]
Dr. Radha Modgill
No, that's. Not to be embarrassed. But that's extraordinary, isn't it? And actually, in a world that is so busy with devices and distractions and noise, I think it's so important to kind of step back. Literally step back and look up quite literally, and realize what life is about or what life can. Could be and ask questions and be curious. I think it's so important.
- [06:41]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Right. So that's why I just want to clarify that it was not so much because I was a child. It was because I was cosmically curious. And, you know, I just. And if you're out, especially if you're alone, see, if you're with someone outside, then you're cool. But if I'm alone in the backyard with a telescope, it's just me, the telescope, and the universe. That's when I have that urge the most. Cause then I get abducted and no one would know.
- [07:11]
Dr. Radha Modgill
Well, you do say in your book, actually, you end. I started with the beginning, and I'm going to the end where you say, you know, if I ever went missing one night, don't look me on earth, you know, look up at the stars. Cause I'll be with the aliens all
- [07:22]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
the way to the end.
- [07:23]
Mia Sorrenti
I did.
- [07:24]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
That's how I ended. I say, yeah, if, you know, I went out with my telescope and then I don't come home. Yeah, the best place to be, don't even bother to look. I got abducted. Yeah.
- [07:38]
Dr. Radha Modgill
This book has lots of facts and has also a lot of fun in it as well. So maybe we'll touch on kind of some of the facts first of all. So, Neil, tell us. We all want to know, are we alone? Do aliens exist?
- [07:52]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yeah. So anyone who's Done, the calculation could not possibly be in denial of that likelihood. And if you can combine sort of five distinct bits of science together to arrive at that conclusion. So one of them is how old the universe is. So it's nearly 14 billion years. That's A, B. The chemical ingredients of the universe, in rank order, the chemically active ingredients in the universe are in the same order as life on Earth. So life on Earth was just simply being opportunistic. It had the hydrogen, the oxygen, the carbon, the nitrogen, the iron. These ingredients are everywhere in the universe. So that's a second fact. Number three. Life got started on Earth almost as soon as it possibly could have. So what do I mean by that? Earth? All geologic evidence and other evidence points to the birth of our solar system four and a half billion years ago. And the earliest signs of fossil Life are about 3.8. If you push it, you might get 3.9 billion years. So that sounds like life began over about a 600 million year span. However, we would later learn that the early Earth was heavily bombarded by, by leftovers of the solar system as planets continued to accrete material from the original nebula that made the sun and the planets. So while we were accreting these, the material, the surface of the Earth was very hot. So you can't start the timer then because complex molecules can't form under very hot conditions. So you want to, you know, give life a chance here. Okay, so you let Earth cool, and Earth would have cooled by around 4 billion years ago. 4.1. So that's when you start the clock, which means life got underway within 1 or 200 million years. That is small compared with the full timeline of Earth. It's less than 5% of Earth's timeline. So maybe I only needed three. Is that three or four? Maybe I don't need five. So the ingredients, how quickly life got here, how old the universe is, that's all you need. And then you realize what happened here on Earth couldn't possibly be rare. And now how might you think it's rare? Well, if we were made of, like, an isotope of bismuth, okay, that would be odd. You can say something special happened here on Earth, and then that could give you even more argument for divine meddling, because. All right, but, oh, by the way, carbon, we are based on carbon. It's one of the fundamental ingredients of organic chemistry. Carbon is the stickiest element on the periodic table. You can make more molecules using carbon than all other kinds of molecules combined. So life was completely opportunistic. Putting carbon right front and center, as you would expect on any other planet. So anyone who says we're alone in the universe, they have some religious or other philosophical blinders placed upon them to think that way. They have not looked at the problem the way an astrophysicist already have.
- [11:52]
Dr. Radha Modgill
That's fascinating and it's interesting, isn't it? Because again, obviously people have different perspectives on this. And I think you dedicate at the beginning of the book you say to believers and skeptics alike. Why did you include everyone? Yeah, absolutely. Why did you put those two groups together?
- [12:11]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yeah, because both groups exist when it comes to aliens. The skeptics movement is highly judgmental of eyewitness accounts of what people say, think and see. And there's good reason for that, because especially in the era of the smartphone, if you say you had an encounter with an alien, do you have a photo? Because if your account has to be processed through your senses, then it's at risk of being distorted. We're influenced by your mood, your expectations, your bias. It's an interesting fact, for example, that, you know, I don't know if it happens in the uk. It surely does. People see images of Jesus on tortillas or on toast, right? Well, only Christians see images of Muslims don't see Jesus on toast. Okay? So let's get real about this. So in a matter of what one should bring forth as evidence of their claim, eyewitness testimony alone does not count as evidence. It counts as a reason to investigate further, for sure, as we are doing, as we've had testimonies, we've had investigations of the whistleblowers and insiders who had access to records and to locked cabinets with crashed saucer parts and this sort of thing. There's no end of sworn testimonies of high ranking people giving very honest and sincere sounding accounts of their relationship to visiting aliens. So where the skepticism comes in is. All right, then show me something that's not simply eyewitness testimony. And then people bring up the fuzzy videos, okay? And so then the skeptic will their game and say, well, up the requirement and say, I need sharp video, I
- [14:23]
Dr. Radha Modgill
need that in high resolution.
- [14:24]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yeah, everyone's got a smartphone, you know, and there's 6 billion of them in the world last I checked. So that's sufficient to get a high resolution picture of your alien or your crashed flying saucer and the like. So, so when I say it's to skeptics, it's, I want skeptics to be a little more. I want skeptics to not just discount an eyewitness testimony because there's something there, by the way, if half of what's there is the emotional state of the person, that is also worthy of research by psychologists. By whatever. I mean, so just to just say they're all crazy. No, they're fellow human beings. So I want skeptics to just sort of roll with this for a bit. And also, someone wrote a note to me, a fellow skeptic, I count myself a member of that movement, if I call it that. Said, look what happened. The Pentagon has directed $10 million to study lights in the sky. What a waste of money. And I said, PA first of all, do you know how big the Pentagon budget is? $10 million. This is, as we say, budget dust. Okay? This is dust you can blow off the balance sheet, okay? A, B, the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, their job is to protect us. And if there's some light in the sky that might be something that could harm me, I want them to investigate it. So just chill out here. Just let them do their job. All right? And there was another what I do in the book, and I want to make sure I fully answer your question. But what I do in the book is offer other sets of questions that people don't tend to ask when they bring up sets of questions that lead them, that leave them as full believers that we've been visited. So one of them is just, for example, a few months ago, there were UFO sightings in northern New Jersey. With New Jersey, a state adjacent to New York City, is right there is New Jersey. And so northern New Jersey, all these sightings. And some were able to be identified as airplanes coming in for landing. New Jersey has two airports, a private airport for private jets and international airport. Okay? And some others were people flying drones. But there was still some unexplained lights. And it went to the level of members of Congress and it reached the Pentagon. And so official statements were getting made. And the Pentagon, they said, we don't know what all of them are, but we can assure you that. That they pose no danger. That's not comforting. You can't tell me you don't know what they all are and then tell me I'm safe. No, no, that's not how this works. Okay? But what I did say, again, these are questions that don't get asked. But I'd like asking is, I'm an Earthling, so I only know Earth priorities. But if I were an alien and I'm visiting Earth, of all the places to arrive, Northern New Jersey just is not a place. No offense to New Jersey residents, but no, I'm going to Tahiti. I'm gonna go to the pyramids. I'm gonna go to someplace not northern New Jersey. And so to somehow think that they're all clustering above your head. So those are questions that I don't see often asked adjacent to the rest of them. Of course, it's directed to believers just to put their claims in context, to try to up their game for how they would supply evidence in support of whatever it is they claim. And I gave another example because I've been following this for decades. There was a while where there were these roadside flying saucers, okay? People had photos of them. Now, I don't know how old you are, but if you go back far enough, nobody had cameras, okay? Two people had. Two kinds of people had cameras, tourists and journalists. You didn't otherwise carry a camera wherever you went. And for most of us, we were photographed once per year.
- [19:11]
Dr. Radha Modgill
That's the school photo on our birthdays, all. The school photo. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [19:17]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
The school photo, the birthday, and maybe when you were on vacation, that's it. All right? But now everyone's photographed 100 times a day. Billions of photos are uplifted to the Internet daily, and a million hours of video daily are uplifted to the Internet, uploaded to the Internet. All right? So the. So the. So at this time, with what I call roadside flying saucers, those photos went away when cars stopped using hubcaps on the wheels. There are no hubcaps anymore. In the old days, you have to hammer on the hubcap, and it was friction held, all right? There were these little clampy things that you'd hammer in. And if the road had potholes or anything, you're guaranteed to drop a hubcap and not know it. So the hubcaps would be along the roadside. And if you looked at a hubcap the right way, it was a flying saucer. So you would toss it like a Frisbee, photograph it, and there was your roadside flying saucer. You don't have photo. No photos of that anymore. So these are examples of people's urges to believe or urges to hoax others. And where pretty much, if any of them were real, it would be hard to demonstrate that given the availability of tossable hubcaps.
- [20:51]
Dr. Radha Modgill
Well, that's why another thing that has
- [20:53]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
gone away or greatly reduced are claims of alien abduction. Okay? In the 1960s and 70s, alien abductions, where they would come back under hypnosis or whatever, we all have Smartphones now. So if an alien is walking towards you, or if you're on a spaceship, take pictures and immediately stream them. You can do that. All right? You don't have to wait until you get home, so that way the alien can't interfere with your rhythms there. But now we know you could have that kind of proof, and no one does. And so the alien abduction claims have diminished. So these are the things I think one needs to pay attention to. If you're a believer, just look at these shifts in how the evidence has accumulated. And another one is if the government is in fact hiding alien information from us, here's a set of questions you can ask. Is this the same government that's masterminding a cover up where thousands of people are keeping a secret? Is this the same government that yesterday you complained was a big, bloated, inefficient bureaucracy? Is that the same government? Like, really? Okay, just saying. All right. And also, does this mean that aliens, when they visit Earth, they only arrive at government installations? That would be kind of odd. There's a lot of surface area out there, and so the government has all the data. When everyone has a smartphone, it seems to me the arrival of aliens would be crowdsourced and your best data would be from worldwide cameras that would be obtained. Now, addressing the skeptics again, there's a colleague of mine who was chair of a committee established by NASA to hear the testimonies of people who have seen aliens and to look at the data and see what they can or should do about it. And what they recommended was, was that somebody make an app that lives on all smartphones, and if you see something in the sky or something weird that has alien adjacency, then you pull out the app and you photograph it and film it with the app. And the app retains all the metadata of that photo. Your smartphone has huge amounts of data. It's not just the picture. It's what direction you were facing, what angle the camera is, what, what time of day, what time zone, all of this. So if you have multiple pictures of the same event, that helps. That way you're not hallucinating. Then the data, the metadata, can triangulate on it and get a sense of how far away it was, how bright it was. And it's a way to turn alien sightings into a scientific activity just to boost the integrity of the reports.
- [24:16]
Dr. Radha Modgill
I love that. And actually, that's one of the reasons I really enjoyed your book, is because you were taking the skeptics and the believers along with You. And actually just being curious. You know, we live in a.
- [24:26]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Well, thank you for noticing that. I mean, that was my intent, but you never know if it lands that way for the reader. Absolutely. I want both of them, one on each shoulder, and watch where we go together on this.
- [24:36]
Dr. Radha Modgill
And that is very much like I'm going back to my school days of science experiments and hypotheses and working things out and looking at a summary and conclusion. And I kind of almost felt like I was on a journey of this sort of, you know, this curiousness of. Okay, let's look at what, for example, you look at what aliens might look like to us, how we might look to them, how they might act, how they might travel here, and also kind of what they would think of us. So you kind of take us through this journey in the book of making us curious. Say, what if. What would it be like? Let's look at some of the evidence. Let's look at what's possible. And I'm just going to. I'm just going to open your mind. And I think in a world where we're very. There are lots of echo chambers everywhere. Just being curious and having an open mind, I think it was so refreshing for me, anyway.
- [25:20]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Well, thank you. And something I came up with in the book, which I didn't. It wasn't in my head when I started the book, but it was a. Yeah, I'm going to add this, too. There's so much chatter about ancient aliens, right? I mean, there was Erich Van Daniken, the late Erich Van Daniken. He died at age 90 just a few months ago. He wrote the book Chariots of the Gods, where he sees ancient ruins or ancient markings, and he sees things in them that are kind of mysterious. You know, drawings of people with bubble heads or they're levitating, or beams are coming out of their head or their fingers, and very fantastical illustrations. And he, without exception, attributes this to the sightings of aliens that have visited these ancient peoples. And so that I. So what I said was, you can believe this, provided you don't ask these other questions. Okay. Could these drawings have been the product of a kindergarten class? Do people just. Just children have. Draw something today? We've all seen child drawings that look pretty alien to us. Right. Or could they be their imaginings of their gods? Look what we have today in Renaissance drawings where there's Jesus floating with a halo and rays coming out of the halo. And. And that's just Christianity. You go to Hinduism and you got multiple arms and an elephant Head like. And go back to the religions of Greece and Rome. You have Medusa snakes for hair. The Gorgons. You've got. So we have fantastical illustrations representing our greatest epic stories. Why can't they. Why are you denying them the same imaginations and storytelling acumen that we have today? They were human, just like us. So I want to ask those questions at the same time. You're going to suggest that they were visited by aliens.
- [27:42]
Dr. Radha Modgill
Yes. I love that. Honestly, I think what you say is so true. That kind of what if question, it can either take people down a journey of fear and being frightened and maybe shutting down from even being open to it, or. Or that what if question can take us down the road of this kind of journey of imagination and curiosity and like, wow, what if? You know, is that kind of. It's interesting, isn't it, how we all react to what ifs in our life, including what goes on out there in the universe and of course, for survival.
- [28:09]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
For survival. The what if is typically involves a fear factor. That your assumption is that this thing you don't understand might want to harm you, and that's completely natural. Would have come evolutionarily. It keeps us alive. It's better to think something will harm you and it doesn't, than to not think that it harms you and then it eats you, removing you from the gene pool. Yeah. Anyone who thinks that everything is just Shangri La. Yeah. They were removed from the gene pool a long time ago. Let me pet that lion. I wonder if it'll be nice to me even though it ate you. Okay. No, you're gone. So the evil alien trope, which you haven't talked about explicitly, but it's a big part of the book. Like, where does this come from? And why do we assume this? And I was forced to arrive. Forced by logic to arrive at the conclusion that these. Since we don't really know how aliens would behave, it's how we suspect. It's what we. How we think they would behave. But what do we base that on? We base that on suppositions about the aliens or. Really? No, no, no, no. It's based on our actual knowledge of how we as humans have treated one another in the history of civilization. Those parts of civilization that higher science and technology than others. Especially in the era of colonization. It never boded well for the part of our species being colonized. They were either enslaved or killed or given diseases or they were. So I think the evil alien trope is a mirror that we are unwittingly holding up to ourselves, knowing that's precisely how we would behave if we came upon a technologically less advanced civilization than ourselves.
- [30:28]
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- [31:59]
Dr. Radha Modgill
This book for me also was not Sometimes books about, you know, aliens or other life forms are very human centric. What do we think of then? What would we do to them? Or but, but you really turned on his head and said well what would they think of us? And I really did feel like I got a sense of sort of standing back and an alien looking at the planet and saying what are these humans doing?
- [32:20]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yeah, just keep in mind we are aliens to them, right? Yeah, just pause and reflect on that. And suppose they are peace loving aliens and they came here and they looked around and they saw that we've made an eternal pastime out of killing each other. Look at resources devoted to all the different ways we can kill each other with the guns and knives and missiles and artillery and bombs and planes and how often that is engaged and the reasons we give each other for doing so. What side of a line in the sand you're born on? What is your skin color? Who do you pray to? Who do you sleep with? Who do you all of this? These are all what is your access to limited resources? We Kill each other for this. If the aliens looked at this on their first visit, I am certain they would fly back home as fast as they can and report there is no sign of intelligent life on Earth.
- [33:31]
Dr. Radha Modgill
I agree with you, unfortunately. But it is interesting, isn't it? Because by taking this spot, the universe, and thinking about space, it does for us sometimes we can get very stuck in our own ways. When we think about something bigger than us, outside of us, something that we don't quite know about. Sometimes we can get clearer about what's important for us here in the now and how we want to live and what we want to change.
- [33:53]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
There's a famous quote which I'll mangle. In fact, I'm not even gonna try to quote it. It's a quote where if you travel the world to see all these other places because you were excited to do so, only then upon returning home, do you get to see your home for the first time. To see and understand your home. A little bit of that. I think Robert Frost might have said that or somebody quotable said that, not me in that moment. But a little bit of that happened to us. We went to the moon back in 1968, the first time we left Earth. And we got to the moon, looked over our shoulder and discovered Earth for the first time. All of our greatest environmental legislation, the formation of our Environmental Protection Agency, the banning of leaded gas, the banning of ddt, our Clean Air act, our comprehensive Clean Water act, all of that happened between 1969 and 1973, while we were going to the moon. Actually, we stopped in 72, but there was some spillage that went beyond that. The energy was still there for us. So to discover home for the first time because you left it is evidence that there's so much we take for granted. Being born into a state of mind or a state of existence. And so the chapters of the book are self aware of this reality. So the first chapter, I think is alien to us, but the next chapter is alien to them, forcing us to think of ourselves as the alien. So that was a fun chapter to write.
- [35:40]
Dr. Radha Modgill
Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask you about that because you also talk a bit about kind of etiquette for your first kind of close encounter. And I wanted. I could talk to you all day, Neil, but before we end, I wanted to get your tips. So if ever I encounter an alien life form, I want you to give me some etiquette tips or on how I might deal with that.
- [35:59]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yes. Yeah. So, you know, a very common way of greeting one another is to extend your hand and shake hands. Right? But keep in mind that gesture itself is not even worldwide, right? In China, they don't shake each other's hand. There's a gentle bow and your own hands are touching each other. So in a way, like you're shaking your own hand, right? Your hands are together. So the handshake is not even worldwide. So don't presume the alien is going to know and understand that. Especially if the alien lands on the. And if there's some appendage sticking out of the alien, don't grab it and shake it. You don't know what part of the alien that is.
- [36:45]
Dr. Radha Modgill
Definitely don't do that.
- [36:47]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Totally don't do that. Don't do that. And maybe just try to not look threatening. And here's some. The most important advice, I think try to. Try to leave at home or shield the alien from your fellow humans who think Earth is flat, okay? I want to leave the best impression possible on the alien. And whoever is in denial of what's science is and why it works and who think Earth is flat, save them for later. But as a first impression, because you only have one chance to make a first impression, I want to leave the best impression we can on the alien. And then maybe as a first attempt, don't just say, oh, how's the wife and kids? Instead, plus, they might not even have a gender. Gender is a very Earth thing. Maybe on another planet there could be five genders or no gender. So don't even assume that. But what I would do is I would carry a model of the Pythagorean theorem in my pocket, okay? Because they're not going to speak English, all right? So let's just leave that home. But if they got here and they live in this universe, Math is the language of the universe. And what's cool about the Pythagorean theorem is that you don't need to represent it with math symbols. You can represent it with shapes. This is the coolest thing. So we remember the Pythagorean theorem from middle school. Maybe A squared plus B squared equals C squared. And there's the two legs of a right triangle. It was A and B. And then there's the hypotenuse C. And if you square each of those, then you add A squared, B squared, it equals C squared, all right? That requires they understand symbols. If you wrote it that way, and that the little two means square, who would know that from another planet? Nobody. All right? However, if I have a square and one side of it is A, then the area of that squared is A times A A squared. And if I have a square, then one side is B, its area is B squared, and C, it'd be C squared. So here's what you do. You have just a device the alien can touch because you don't know if they can see, but they can surely touch. All right? So you have a right triangle. And off of each side of the triangle is a square. And you just have them reckon that that is A squared plus B squared equals C squared. You have three squares representing what you did to each of those measures. So that's all you need. And then your pals for life. We will not enslave you. You have some intelligence that we're going to respect. And one other thing I think at the top of the list is be ready to explain in advance because you become friends and you hang out with the alien, right? But then the moment comes, you have to tell the alien, I have to lay down horizontally semi comatose for one third of Earth's rotation. I'll get back to you in eight hours, okay? Maybe the alien sleeps. I don't know. I'm thinking probably not. So this would be really weird to the alien. And what you might do is get a friend of yours to pick up the conversation while you go sleep. Little things like this, shifts, take shifts. Take your first encounter with him, eight hour shifts.
- [40:47]
Dr. Radha Modgill
I love that for many reasons. Lots of life lessons in there around how we, how we should behave when we first meet a new human being, for example, lots of resonance with that, but also that idea of difference and understanding and yet that commonality, what you were talking about in terms of squares. Yeah.
- [41:02]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
And there are other things you just don't know. I put this in the book. It's a little crass, but real. If the alien has a little bit of dog in it, just a little bit, whatever, that would mean. Dog DNA. Or they probably don't have any DNA at all. But if any of their habits resemble that of dogs, then their first attempt will be to go around back and sniff your butt. Okay? And you might think, don't wait. You might think that's weird, but we watch dogs do that and we know that that's normal for them. And I have one last one. This is very fantastical, but it's worth reporting. Okay? If the aliens are chickens, okay, literal chickens, be careful, especially if they land in the United States, because the United states eats. Eats 1 million chickens per hour.
- [42:10]
Dr. Radha Modgill
Oh, my God.
- [42:12]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Okay, no, just, just think of what that means. It means we. The eggs are hatched, they're laid, they're hatched, they're raised, they are slaughtered, they are brought to market, they are purchased, put in a refrigerator and cooked, or go to a restaurant and cooked and eaten. One million per hour. So if the aliens are chicken in a. In a. In a spaceship, that's certainly the end of America.
- [42:45]
Dr. Radha Modgill
Well, you know what I mean. These podcasts for Intelligence Square get a lot of listens. If there is an alien species out there that's listening to this podcast, that is. Encourage them, don't come. Don't come to planet Earth.
- [42:58]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
One other thing. I got another one. If the alien. This is all in the book. It was fun to write the book.
- [43:04]
Dr. Radha Modgill
Yeah, really fun.
- [43:05]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
If the alien is plant based. Okay, so a sentient plant. We've imagined some of those in our own fiction. Like the Ents of the Ents. Ents of Lord of the Rings. Those are contemplative, sentient trees, basically. And they can walk, but they're trees. The trees in the wizard of Oz were sentient. Do you remember? They got angry because who was it plucked, Dorothy, plucked an apple from the tree. Tree teacher. That's my apples. And then it's. That was really scary to me when I first saw that. Yeah. And there's Groot in the lovable piece of driftwood in Guardians of the Galaxy. We've had. Also, ET Was a. I don't know if you knew that ET in the film. ET Was a plant based. And the reason why I know that, because it's not in the movie, is Steven Spielberg told me that sitting in my office. And that's. Remember, ET could take its finger and repair plants. It can make dying plants just come back to life. That's part of his ability as being plant based. Anyhow, if the aliens are plant based, then hide all your vegetarians, because vegetarians eat plants. If they learn, because they probably knew about the biodiversity on Earth, there's a little tour guide of the galaxy say, let's go to Earth and see other plants and how they thrive on this Earth. And then there's a sum of a species of humans that target plants. And they target even the reproductive organs of plants, the seeds, the berries, the nuts, the thing. And. And they specially target the baby versions of. You know, you go into the grocery store. Baby carrots, baby spinach, baby artichokes.
- [45:02]
Dr. Radha Modgill
Much sweeter, much more tender. Yes, yes. When you feel like that, that is pretty scary.
- [45:08]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
And we don't hesitate using the word baby. Just think about that. So the alien plants, they would just. Oh, my gosh. This is very dangerous for us. We could end up in someone's salad. Let's get the hell out of here.
- [45:25]
Dr. Radha Modgill
Neil, you. Honestly, I thought I already had an open mind and imagination, but the last, like half an hour, you have exploded my mind in so many good ways.
- [45:34]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yeah, I hope it's in a good way.
- [45:35]
Dr. Radha Modgill
In a very good way. With science, with facts, with fun, with curiosity. Absolutely. It's been such a pleasure. I could talk to you all day, literally talk to you all day. But I want to say thank you. Thank you for such a great conversation and thank you for such a wonderful, wonderful book. I cannot recommend it highly enough, so thank you for joining us today.
- [45:54]
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Thank you. Because it's. I mean, it's. I'm just surfing what is already a very popular topic. But I'm just trying to put a little. As a scientist, I'm duty bound to anchor everybody's conversations in ways that you can still have fun thinking about it and talking about it. So thanks for noticing that about it.
- [46:11]
Progressive/Shopify Advertiser
You've done an incredible job.
- [46:13]
Dr. Radha Modgill
The book again is Take Me to youo Leader and it's available now at your local bookshop. Please go out and buy a copy. It's absolutely fantastic. I'm Dr. Arad Mogul and you've been listening to Intelligence Squared.
- [46:25]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Conor Boyle and it was edited by Mark Roberts for ad free episodes and full length recordings. You can become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and to join us at future live events. You can find our full program and buy tickets over@intelligencesquared.com attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.