Cosmic Queries – Take Me To Your Leader

Summary

StarTalk Radio: Cosmic Queries – Take Me To Your Leader

Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Co-hosts: Paul Mercurio (Comedian), Charles Liu (Astronomer/Physicist)
Date: April 28, 2026
Episode Summary by AI Podcast Summarizer

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Episode Overview

This Cosmic Queries edition of StarTalk dives headfirst into humanity's perennial fascination with aliens. Bringing together astrophysics, pop culture, speculative science, and humor, Neil deGrasse Tyson is joined by comedian Paul Mercurio and scientist Charles Liu. The trio field questions from listeners about the realities and possibilities of extraterrestrial life: how aliens might travel, what they could look like, what humanity might learn from contact, and why our visions of visitors from space say as much about us as about the cosmos.

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Key Topics & Discussion Points

1. Alien Spacecraft, Acceleration & Physics

Timestamps: 06:07–13:45

• Question: How could an intelligent civilization travel at or near the speed of light—and what would acceleration feel like to them?
• Neil: If you accelerate too quickly (e.g., from 0 to 1,000 mph in 1 sec = 50Gs), “you're a pile of goo at the end.”
  (06:44)
• Charles: “There’s no known physics to bypass the speed-of-light limit. You have to approach it gently and gradually—like a relationship!”
  (10:07)
• **Explains fictional workarounds (e.g., Star Trek’s inertial dampeners) and compares to real-world physics, citing how sound barriers produce sonic booms, and in space, acceleration is the limit—not necessarily environment (since space is mostly empty).
• Neil: The nearest star system is over four years’ travel away, even at the speed of light; patience and energy are major constraints.

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2. What Might Aliens Look Like? Hollywood vs. Science

Timestamps: 16:50–24:12

• Listener Q: Why are aliens in movies so humanoid? What might real aliens be like?
• Neil: “If your alien looks human, has human organs, and behaves human, it’s not useful to think of it as alien anymore.”
  (22:39)
• Charles: References Hollywood creatures (the Blob, 1958) and Fred Hoyle’s “interstellar cloud” lifeform—imaginative non-humanoid aliens.
  • Discusses bias toward “faces” due to our own vertebrate evolution.
• Paul: “If an alien shows up and it looks like you or you, I’m gonna be bummed out. How sophisticated can they be if this is the best they can do?”
  (22:51)
• Neil: Advocates for thinking beyond anthropomorphic forms and considers aliens as plasma, liquid, or even cloud-like intelligences.

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3. Alien Contact: First Questions

Timestamps: 24:12–29:25

• Listener Q: If aliens visit, what’s the first thing we should ask?
• Charles: “How did you not destroy yourselves?”
  (24:37)
• Neil: “How the hell did you get here?”
  (24:42)
• Discussion points: Surmises that any civilization reaching us must have overcome self-destruction. Neil explores communicative strategies (sharing math, e.g., prime numbers or the Pythagorean theorem, using ancient ideas from Gauss and Sagan).

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4. Communication, Intelligence, and Understanding Aliens

Timestamps: 29:27–32:07

• Charles: References the movie Arrival—linguistics as a first pathway to understanding. “The protagonist learned so much about their language, she actually started to understand the nature of time itself.”
  (29:57)
• Neil: “Math is the language of the Universe.”
• Explores music as communication, referencing Close Encounters of the Third Kind (movie).

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5. Would Alien Contact Unite Humanity?

Timestamps: 32:43–38:31

• Listener Q: Would an alien threat make humans set aside differences and unite?
• Neil: Cites Ronald Reagan’s 1980s speech to the UN: “Imagine how together we would be if we faced a threat from outer space… I think he’s largely correct, because that plays out in politics every day.”
  (33:32)
• Points out humans always find reasons to divide/tribalize—even if skin color, language, or religion were the same, conflict would arise.
• Charles: Offers Star Trek’s optimistic vision—first contact leads to peaceful unity (April 5, 2063, Star Trek canon).

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6. Observing Earth: How Would Aliens Watch Us?

Timestamps: 38:31–42:14

• Listener Q: How would an advanced intelligence observe us undetected?
• Neil: Earth has been emitting “leaked” radio and TV since the 1930s; earliest signals are “Hitler waves.” Aliens watching might first see Earth history in this order.
• Charles/Neil: Speculate about four-dimensional aliens observing us much like we could observe a two-dimensional world—could see “inside” everything in 3D, undetectable unless they interact via energy/subatomic particles.

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7. Is the Universe Itself Intelligent? Gaia Hypothesis & Limits

Timestamps: 42:16–47:22

• Listener Q: Might the universe itself be a form of intelligence?
• Neil: “The bigger you are, you’re still limited by the speed of light. At a universe scale, intelligence isn’t practical because your ‘metabolism’ would be too slow.”
• Charles: Introduces Gaia hypothesis—Earth as a self-regulating system, possibly a form of intelligence (though scientifically thin).
• Paul/Charles/Neil: Debates about subconscious biological intelligence vs. conscious thought, using amoebas and cockroaches as examples.

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8. The Dark Forest Theory and Fermi Paradox

Timestamps: 49:08–54:13

• Listener Q: Thoughts on the “Dark Forest” response to the Fermi Paradox (from The Three-Body Problem)?
• Charles: The idea is “if you get any kind of advantage, you must be smacked down,” leading to universal silence to avoid detection/eradication.
• Neil: “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.”
  (53:06)
• Other explanations: “Another is interstellar space is just really hard to travel… Someone wrote a book with 75 explanations to account for the Fermi paradox.”
• Neil: Shares Steven Soter’s Mayflower/colony model; colonization leads to resource competition—resulting in collapse under its own greed, paralleling human history.
  (55:14)

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9. Cosmic Perspective & Reflecting on Ourselves

Timestamps: 59:00–61:01

• Neil (Final Reflection):
  “Some of the most successful stories that involve aliens involve aliens that want to harm us… 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. But really… 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. … all the worst things humans have ever done to one another have manifested when there was a mismatch in technological prowess… 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.”
  (59:00–60:38)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “Speed of light is not just a good idea. It’s the law.”
  — Neil deGrasse Tyson, (10:11)
• “If your alien looks human… it’s not useful to think of it as alien anymore.”
  — Neil deGrasse Tyson, (22:39)
• “How did you not destroy yourselves?”
  — Charles Liu, (24:37)
• “Math is the language of the universe.”
  — Neil deGrasse Tyson, (28:57)
• “If the Dark Forest hypothesis is accurate, nothing prevents the galaxy from being teeming with life, yet no one knowing anything…”
  — Neil deGrasse Tyson, (53:06)
• “All the worst things humans have ever done… have manifested when there was a mismatch in the technological prowess of one civilization encountering another.”
  — Neil deGrasse Tyson, (60:00)

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Timestamps & Segment Highlights

| Topic | Speakers | Timestamps | |------------------------------------------------|----------------------|----------------| | Opening/Banter & Aliens Theme | All | 00:45–03:24 | | Acceleration, Physics of Alien Ships | Neil, Charles, Paul | 06:07–13:45 | | What Might Aliens Look Like? | Neil, Charles, Paul | 16:50–24:12 | | First Questions to Aliens | Neil, Charles, Paul | 24:12–29:25 | | Communicating with Aliens: Math & Language | Neil, Charles, Paul | 29:27–32:07 | | Alien Contact = Human Unity? | Neil, Charles | 32:43–38:31 | | How Would Aliens Observe Us? | Neil, Charles, Paul | 38:31–42:14 | | Gaia Hypothesis & Universe Intelligence | Neil, Charles, Paul | 42:16–47:22 | | Dark Forest, Fermi Paradox, Colonization | Neil, Charles, Paul | 49:08–57:32 | | Cosmic Perspective | Neil | 59:00–61:01 |

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Episode Tone & Style

• Fast-paced, witty, often irreverent, blending serious scientific ideas with pop culture references and playful humor.
• Strong focus on audience questions, maintaining natural curiosity, humility, and skepticism.

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Summary Takeaways

• Physics puts real barriers on interstellar travel—no easy way around the speed of light.
• Alien life is likely much stranger than Hollywood imagines. Thinking too anthropocentrically hampers creativity and realism.
• First contact would pose major challenges in communication; sharing math or basic scientific ideas may be our best bet.
• Humanity’s response to contact might not be the instant unity we hope for; tribalism and conflict seem deeply rooted.
• The “Dark Forest” theory is one of many explanations for the Fermi Paradox—why we haven’t encountered other life.
• Our expectations of aliens often reflect our own history and fears: technological mismatches between civilizations rarely bode well for the less advanced group.
• Ultimately, pondering extraterrestrial life holds a mirror up to human nature itself.

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This StarTalk episode fires the imagination and sharpens cosmic humility, reminding us that when we look for aliens, we’re often learning about ourselves.

Transcript

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Hey, sweetie. Your mother showed me this Carvana thing for selling the car. I'm gonna give it a try. Wish me luck. Me again. I put in the license plate. It gave me an offer. Unbelievable. Okay, I accepted the offer. They're picking it up Tuesday from the driveway. I haven't even left my chair. It's done. The car is gone. I'm holding a check anyway. Carvana, give it a whirl. Love ya.

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[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Avoiding your unfinished home because you're not

[Paul Mercurio]

sure where to start. Thumbtack knows homes, so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin or what that clunking

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

sound from your dryer is? With thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro.

[Paul Mercurio]

You just have to hire one.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You can hire top rated pros, see price estimates and read reviews all on the app. Download today. Paul. Love me some aliens. That was a good episode.

[Paul Mercurio]

Oh, my God. We could talk about that all day.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Why are you trying to convince us that you're one? Sorry I asked. Coming up, the alien edition of StarTalk. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Neil DeGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. We've got a cosmic queries edition 1 I'm very much looking forward to. And to help me out here, we got Paul Mercurio. How you doing, man?

[Paul Mercurio]

I'm good, buddy. Good to see you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right, all right. Comedian Paul Mercurio. And sometimes we cannot do a show without our geek in chief. That would be Chuck Liu. Charles Liu.

[Paul Mercurio]

How you doing? Come on.

[Charles Liu]

Doing very well. Thank you so much, Neil. Hi, Paul.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Legendary colleague Charles Liu.

[Paul Mercurio]

That's not what you were saying about him. It was a lot of like.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Charles. So you on the Baron and remind me of your title.

[Charles Liu]

Baron.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. We haven't. He's a baron.

[Charles Liu]

Congratulations.

[Paul Mercurio]

Please. Genuine. In your chair. No, don't have a stroke. Just genuinely. Yes, I'm a baron now. I was knighted by my man.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Do you have a title? I don't remember. That means you don't. If you're trying to think.

[Charles Liu]

No, I don't think I will work on that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Charles Liu]

It's really okay. It's really okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Let me remind people. Oh, my gosh. The handy quantum physics answer book.

[Paul Mercurio]

Now that's a book. Not that Thing you got. Come on.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, my book. Just talking smack about my little book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true.

[Paul Mercurio]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

By Charles Liu. This is not your first rodeo with the Handy Answer franchise, Right? It is not what we are. The Handy Answer.

[Charles Liu]

Astronomy and Handy Physics.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Handy Answer Book. Astronomy, Physics and Quantum Physics.

[Charles Liu]

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.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And there's nothing like a mystery in quantum physics.

[Paul Mercurio]

I want one, and I want you to sign it for me.

[Charles Liu]

It would be my pleasure. Thank you so much.

[Neil 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.

[Charles Liu]

There it is. I have a book.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Did I ask you?

[Paul Mercurio]

It's the 2000 Best Fart Jokes. And it's really good.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Today's topic is aliens.

[Charles Liu]

Love it.

[Paul Mercurio]

Love it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Paul Mercurio]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Paul Mercurio]

That is correct. That is my birthday.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I called my office. Frankly, I forgot it was your birthday. So I said I scrambled. What can I get him? And so I went into my. Deep in my archives, into my drawing, and I have.

[Paul Mercurio]

What is this? Looks pretty. It looks pretty cool.

[Charles Liu]

It is a blank piece of paper.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It is a pocket protector. Nerd pride. I love it because you're a co host on a science show.

[Paul Mercurio]

Officially a nerd.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We're turning you into a nerd.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So let me see if this fits in that pocket.

[Paul Mercurio]

All right. There we go. Unzip it. There we go. Hang on a second. Let me put my. Okay, let's go, lady. Hey, that's a Jerry Lewis.

[Charles Liu]

Jerry Lewis. A nerd.

[Paul Mercurio]

Well, that was in that role. He was in that role. That was the thing that broke him out. Hey, lady. David, how are you? Okay, hang on.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Let me load it up. Wait a minute.

[Paul Mercurio]

I gotta load it up now.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, there we go.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Put it all the way in.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Charles Liu]

Rgb.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Rgb.

[Charles Liu]

There you go.

[Paul Mercurio]

This is my regular use pen right there.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There you go. All right.

[Paul Mercurio]

All right. I am already 10 IQs points smarter.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Thank you. Thank you. All right. This is Cosmic Queries. So people wrote in, they know that the topic is aliens.

[Charles Liu]

Wonderful.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Paul Mercurio]

Oh, wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Charles Liu]

Did you want to be probed to.

[Paul Mercurio]

Did I say that I do?

[Charles Liu]

Come on.

[Neil 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?

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We talk about that as well.

[Charles Liu]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Mercurio]

Uniform.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There's very little you're going to think of about aliens that I have not addressed in this. Oh, I think I'm just saying, because if you're a fly by night alien thinker. I'm a total alien.

[Paul Mercurio]

Are you challenging my alien?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm totally am.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Paul Mercurio]

No, this is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Congress was thinking about aliens.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Paul Mercurio]

We got some really great questions on this.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And this is the entry level membership in the Patreon Club.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm not authorized to comment on that.

[Paul Mercurio]

Ah, here we go.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay.

[Paul Mercurio]

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. With 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?

[Neil 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.

[Charles Liu]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Hit 1,000 miles an hour.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm not even talking about the speed of light. I'm just talking about what people see, like interstellar speeds. If you go from zero to a thousand miles an hour in one second, you can calculate how many 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. So. But plus, Charles, people speak of this happening with no sound. That's right. Now we've made great progress over the decades.

[Charles Liu]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

With making loud things less loud.

[Charles Liu]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Charles 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 shockwave in the medium that you're traveling.

[Paul Mercurio]

And that's what we hear.

[Charles Liu]

And that's the sonic boom.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Charles 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.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

How are you going to do that and not make a boom? I don't think that's possible. You think there's a way you can make there?

[Charles Liu]

People have been working on it for a really long time, 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 1, as you get closer and closer to the speed of sound, your vibration increases, your shaking gets worse and worse and worse. You got to just pop right through it in a quick motion in order to reduce the amount of damage that your vehicle is getting when it's going to.

[Paul Mercurio]

You just said presupposes. Are you slowing down a little bit as you get closer?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No.

[Charles Liu]

You're trying to speed up more and more and more and more.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But if you reduce the time it takes before you cross that barrier, so

[Charles Liu]

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 in real life.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But at least they thought about that so that it's a thing to compensate for it.

[Charles Liu]

They thought about it after the fandom told them, hey, you know what you have to take into account?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes. And were you at the front, the top signature?

[Charles Liu]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But you would have had you been.

[Charles Liu]

If I had the ch. The story with that travel is that we slowly accelerate and go, go, go until we get faster and faster and faster until about halfway, then you turn the spaceship around and start slowing it down.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

If you accelerate at 1G.

[Charles Liu]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Charles Liu]

It's not that long. So you can get very, very close.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Because you're constantly increasing your speed. And you're just living in one G. As though you're on Earth on your spaceship.

[Paul Mercurio]

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?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

If you do it steadily enough, you do it slowly.

[Paul Mercurio]

You have the physics that allow them to bypass that limit.

[Charles Liu]

You don't bypass the speed of light. What you do is you approach the speed of light gently and gradually that way.

[Paul Mercurio]

You don't like a relationship?

[Charles Liu]

One hopes.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yes. Hold my hand.

[Charles Liu]

Some things.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Charles Liu]

Okay.

[Paul Mercurio]

Stay true.

[Charles Liu]

Right. But this idea of speeding up slowly. And then slowing down slowly. Keeps our bodies from being plastered against the back of the wall.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Charles Liu]

But it also gives us an automatic free gravity.

[Paul Mercurio]

But is the barrier to interstellar travel. Like speed or the energy required to sustain acceleration close to light speed?

[Charles Liu]

For me, it's speed. Once you get to any sustained speed. If you're traveling at, say, 99% of the 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.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Charles Liu]

That's right.

[Neil 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.

[Charles 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.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Charles 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.

[Paul Mercurio]

Me, the observer.

[Charles Liu]

Right. When you, the observer, are watching them. They don't seem like that they're going less when they are moving very fast compared to you. It 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.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But a consequence of this is that they will not age the four years that the time that you see would have occupied. And they did this famously with the gargantuan planet in interstellar, 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? And you have the energy to sustain that acceleration to reach the high speeds.

[Paul Mercurio]

But it's not just the energy. But the environment has to be right to sustain that. Right. There can't be any friction, any of that. Right?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah, well, you never know, There might

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

be stuff, the space gremlins pulling you back.

[Charles 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 we wanted with unlimited amounts of propulsion. But they just had to bring ice up and create a big shield in front of the spacecraft. So that when micrometeoroids and things like that, the interstellar space stuff, as small as it is, will keep hitting this ice. And that's like a shield that prevents the spacecraft from being there.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Only one. What would you do if an alien actually showed up? Would you shake its hand or run? Does it even have a hand to shake? In my latest book, Take me to your Leader, I explore not only how they might have gotten here, but what they might want and how you should respond. Because the real question is not are we alone? It's are we ready? By the way, I also narrated Take me to your Leader. And I'm duly informed that you can get a copy of that book or the audiobook now. Wherever books are sold, you should probably get the book sooner rather than later. You don't want to have a first alien encounter and not be ready for it.

[Paul Mercurio]

It.

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[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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[Charles Liu]

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mom, can you tell me a story? Sure. Once upon a time, a mom needed a new car.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Was she brave?

[Commercial/Announcer Voice]

She was tired mostly. But she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required.

[Paul Mercurio]

Did you have to find a dragon?

[Charles Liu]

Nope.

[Commercial/Announcer Voice]

She bought it 100% online from her bed, actually.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Was it scary?

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Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be. Did the car have a sunroof? It did, actually. Okay, good story. Car buying. You'll want to tell stories about. Buy your car today on delivery fees may apply.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Charles?

[Charles Liu]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

This is an advanced future thing. And he had. And his force field is a hunk of ice.

[Paul Mercurio]

Really?

[Charles Liu]

It was a fascinating irony. Obviously it was a plot point 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.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Love it.

[Paul Mercurio]

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.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. 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.

[Charles Liu]

Yeah.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Love me some blob. All right. 1958. Steven McQueen. How he was credited in that film. It was a non vertebrate.

[Paul Mercurio]

Did we bother to explain what comprises the blob?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No. Cause it's alien and it wants to just eat You.

[Paul Mercurio]

It's okay.

[Charles Liu]

Just imagine a big amoeba. What we have now on microscopic level. But it's just big.

[Paul Mercurio]

Big.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, it's big. It's macroscopic. And it just kind of. And it just. There it is.

[Paul Mercurio]

If you keep doing that, that feels good.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So, wait, but. So. But the other ideas have come before this. Like Fred Hoyle. Imagine, 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. But. So he's.

[Paul Mercurio]

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. Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, but.

[Charles Liu]

Except that the blob. Blob ate you. So the blob was not seeking.

[Paul Mercurio]

Okay. Why are we always alien? Either wants to probe us or eat us?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, I'm getting there.

[Paul Mercurio]

Why aren't they coming? And they just, like. You know what? I heard you got some nice stuff in stacks.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Here's the thing.

[Charles Liu]

I heard that too.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

From childhood, we know that it's way worse to be eaten than it is to just die.

[Paul Mercurio]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All of those childhood nursery. Not the nursery rhyme. The. What do you call them.

[Charles Liu]

Is it sustainable? Fairy tales.

[Neil 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 this is left over from childhood.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah, but killing and eating, it's the same thing.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It is intellectually, but emotionally. This is why Jurassic park is so devastating. I know, but emotionally. Do you want to be bitten in half? You know. No. So here's my point.

[Charles Liu]

I would.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Fred. Can I get back to Fred Hoyle?

[Charles Liu]

If you must.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay. So Fred Hoyle imagined a life form.

[Charles Liu]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

In the form of a cloud. Yes, he did. An interstellar cloud.

[Charles Liu]

Yeah.

[Neil 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.

[Charles Liu]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It came in and it blocked sunlight. And the scientists. Because all it had. No. It didn't want to harm us. It was just being alive. And the scientists 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, right? It can't wrap its head. It's cloud around us, okay. But it realizes.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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. And so the scientists warn the cloud. Which is like treason.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right. That's.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah, nukes coming up your ass up the road.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And so the cloud in response says, all right, you know, we could snuff you out like this, but let me just. We'll just teach you a lesson. So all the nukes get launched and the cloud redirects them back to Earth, 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. Cause it's not an actor donning a costume. And it's not a vertebrate thing with a face and shoulders and arms, shoulders and legs.

[Paul Mercurio]

But here's the position 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 wifi isn't an alien?

[Charles Liu]

Namely, hello, are you an alien? Hello?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Hello? Okay. No, no.

[Paul Mercurio]

This is why a lot of your colleagues don't like you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The IMDb Internet movie database lists. What is it? It's 3000 movies, TV shows, products, games that have Alien in the title or Alien in the description. Like thousands and so. And some of them are fun titles, like My Stepmother's an alien. My favorite is Cowboys and Aliens. Yes, I saw that movie.

[Charles Liu]

You do? I did not.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah, that had Daniel Craig in it.

[Charles Liu]

Harrison Ford.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Was he in it too?

[Charles Liu]

I believe so.

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

[Paul Mercurio]

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?

[Charles Liu]

Did you ever watch reruns of My Favorite Martian?

[Paul Mercurio]

Yes.

[Charles Liu]

That was an alien that was just kind of hanging out and was just like your funny, cheerful uncle. Right.

[Neil 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?

[Charles Liu]

Okay, well, you know, My Favorite Martian.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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.

[Paul Mercurio]

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, you know? And it's like, really, they're all vertebrate.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And, you know, vertebrates in the tree of life are kind of the only ones that have faces as we think of as faces. Invertebrates, like, you know, octopus has eyes, but we don't think of it as a face in the way we normally. We owe our faces to fish, okay. As our vertebrate ancestors. So that's our bias. It's a powerful bias.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil 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.

[Paul Mercurio]

This is Sam Couch. Hello, Dr. Tyson. Sam here from Boulder, Colorado.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right.

[Paul Mercurio]

If an alien species visits our planet, it likely means they found a way to not destroy themselves. What would be most excited to learn from this alien species? What would be the first question you would ask, assuming we have a way to communicate?

[Charles Liu]

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

[Paul Mercurio]

Yes.

[Charles Liu]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I would ask a different question. How the hell did you get here? That's what I would ask.

[Charles Liu]

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.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah. Anything advanced such as that.

[Charles Liu]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Paul Mercurio]

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.

[Charles Liu]

Do they look like cats? No, do they look like cats?

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Charles Liu]

There you go.

[Paul Mercurio]

You've got three heads.

[Charles Liu]

That'd be even worse.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

How about.

[Paul Mercurio]

Are there any questions you discovered that can't be answered? No matter how advanced things, I'd like to see what they think their limits are. Here it is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So 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.

[Paul Mercurio]

Oh, and one, don't tell them we pay $80 to shirt watch sweaty men fight on Pay per View. Don't tell them that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I won't tell them that. I promise you.

[Paul Mercurio]

That definitely takes us off the list of intelligence.

[Charles Liu]

I would share the prime numbers.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Paul Mercurio]

They don't need prime numbers. They're more sophisticated.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Carl Frederick Gauss. Yes, yes, gauss. Brilliant. Top five mathematicians ever, would you agree

[Charles Liu]

with top 10, top 10th. Carl Friedrich gauss was an astronomer as well. Yes. He did some astronomical discoveries also.

[Neil 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?

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No one has ever done it before before. It's hard, okay. You have to know that that was something you could do. And he figured there was Guy Kraus who did that, right?

[Charles Liu]

I believe so.

[Neil 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.

[Charles Liu]

Oh, three, four, five triangles.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes. Well, any triangle wouldn't matter. Okay, Create a right triangle. Then create wheat fields and make squares coming off of each side of the triangle. Do you remember your Pythagorean theorem?

[Paul Mercurio]

Yes.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Tell me.

[Paul Mercurio]

I can't remember either, can I remember?

[Neil 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 it a fire. And then aliens on other planets would see this and know that's not random. This is. People know math. And so it's a way to broadcast in a day when there was no, you know, 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.

[Charles Liu]

2, 3, 5, 7.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

However, that's counting in base 10.

[Charles Liu]

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

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Charles Liu]

You don't have to put numerals.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, that's right.

[Paul Mercurio]

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?

[Charles Liu]

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

[Paul Mercurio]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You mean the aliens to try to learn about us.

[Charles Liu]

I think that's what you would see, and then you would see all the variations.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I'm going to start with science and math. Math is the language of the universe.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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.

[Charles 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.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And a classicist, too, As a classicist

[Charles Liu]

and a religious studies person. And speaks Italian, blah, blah, blah. She's pretty awesome. But never mind me.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

She says, dad.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah, exactly. No question I'm Italian. Let me talk to her.

[Charles Liu]

But she has told 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 started to understand it. Began to understand the nature of time itself.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Time as they perceive it and experience it.

[Paul Mercurio]

But let's talk about music for a minute. And ET and sort of do. Do.

[Charles Liu]

That's Close Encounters of the thirteen.

[Paul Mercurio]

Close Encounter. I'm sorry, Close Encounters.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Get your movie straight.

[Paul Mercurio]

Okay, well, it's all.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You're my co host on this show. Don't confuse close encounters and E.T.

[Paul Mercurio]

yeah, it's all that Spielberg guy.

[Charles Liu]

The theme from Close Encounters was also used. The five musical which is based in math. Yes, it was also based on was also used in the movie Moonraker 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.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Charles how do you know that.

[Charles Liu]

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[Paul Mercurio]

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[Charles Liu]

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[Paul Mercurio]

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[Charles Liu]

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[Paul Mercurio]

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[Charles Liu]

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[Paul Mercurio]

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[Paul Mercurio]

hi, I'm Ernie

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Carducci from Columbus, Ohio.

[Paul Mercurio]

I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to StarTalk every night and

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

support StarTalk on Patreon.

[Commercial/Announcer Voice]

This is StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tys.

[Paul Mercurio]

Hello Dr. Tyson, this is Jonathan Lott from A Lot of Ideas.com in Wiley, Texas. Okay, a longtime listener and recent Patreon supporter, this is my first of many future questions. Sci fi films like Arrival Interstellar and Independence Day suggest humanity unites when faced with a larger external threat. That's a good point. In reality, do you think lasting global unification is possible? What kind of threat, if any, could sustain it for centuries? Would a more severe pandemic or even an alien encounter override our divisions? This guy's depressing. Also if humans had evolved together on a single landmass like Pangea, might we have developed more unified cultures and fewer conflicts? Thanks for having me.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, there's a lot going on there.

[Paul Mercurio]

There is.

[Neil 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?

[Paul Mercurio]

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. I was.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So who invited you on the show? So I think he's largely correct because that plays out in politics every day. There's the enemy and they're our enemy. So we all bet it happened in Nazi Germany. Very easy. It happened almost too easily. So to the point where if everyone is identical in one island. And 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 cause 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 2 about? Those were white Christians slaughtering other white Christians. If they can find reasons to do that, then all these other reasons. It says you're gonna come up with reasons to wanna tribalize and kill. That is my absence of confidence in our species.

[Charles Liu]

On the other hand, I need it.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

On the other hand. So thank you.

[Charles 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 5, 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.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Wait, this happened? What year was this?

[Charles Liu]

April 5th, 2063 was first contact.

[Paul Mercurio]

That's when I check out.

[Charles Liu]

That's when I'm checking out.

[Paul Mercurio]

The problem with that is that.

[Charles Liu]

April 5th, April 5th. Just watch Star Trek. First Contact. It's right there.

[Paul Mercurio]

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 accountants were working on their. So the issue for me is you're never going to.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Are we enlightened enough to do that?

[Paul Mercurio]

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.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Right.

[Paul Mercurio]

We see it in the animal kingdom. So I don't think that that ever gets bred out of a species.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

We are the animal kingdom.

[Paul Mercurio]

Okay, just great.

[Charles Liu]

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

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Paul Mercurio]

It's in the nature of human beings.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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?

[Paul Mercurio]

I don't know. What 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 cohesion, coexistence is not in their agenda and it's to sort of dominate.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's very tribal.

[Charles Liu]

But are they the majority? Do they hold policy making power or military power? At any given time there's always a give and take in humans. And I don't see why it wouldn't be true for aliens.

[Paul Mercurio]

I see 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.

[Charles Liu]

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

[Paul Mercurio]

Okay, I got that marked in my calendar.

[Charles Liu]

The humans basically decided that the majority 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.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

My daughter's essay for college was about the United Federation of Planets and how they all came. Cause she was active in. What do you call the un?

[Charles Liu]

Model un.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

All right. Keep it going.

[Paul Mercurio]

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? And would we even recognize it if it were already happening? This is exactly what I was talking about earlier.

[Neil 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. 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 escaped.

[Paul Mercurio]

Then they saw the Kardashians stopped watching early tv.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Kardashians are mostly cable. That's not broadcasting. That's my point. Cable, right, Like Beavis and Butthead is mostly contained on Earth because it's cable tv. So it's the broadcast tv. So you have.

[Paul Mercurio]

But what about Hulu, which goes over WI fi, which is Internet? They probably get that.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well, yeah, I don't. Yeah, we'll have to 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. 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

[Charles Liu]

they can get close enough without penetrating our three dimensions.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Charles Liu]

That's right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

But if they stay out of it. So a four dimensional alien has got

[Paul Mercurio]

this, them staying alien, but it's them staying out of our dimension. Three dimensions. Does that limit what they can know?

[Neil 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.

[Charles 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 earth.

[Paul Mercurio]

Something would have to be transmitting to them.

[Charles Liu]

That transmission has to happen. And so there is some exchange of energy or subatomic particles of some kind of. So the detection issue is actually important to know whether or not we can see somebody, whether it's in three dimensions

[Paul Mercurio]

or in four in that transmission. Couldn't we then become conscious that something is detecting that transmission unless it just

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Charles Liu]

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.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's already been admitted.

[Charles Liu]

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

[Paul Mercurio]

Okay, we should move on.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Keep it going.

[Paul Mercurio]

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?

[Charles Liu]

Are you serious?

[Neil 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.

[Paul Mercurio]

Okay?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, 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

[Charles Liu]

you count CO moving or not.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Today's diameter of the universe about 92, 92 billion light years. So if you're an entity that size and you have the proverbial bald head and you have an inch, 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.

[Paul Mercurio]

Then how do we distinguish between a universe that actually, actually has some form of intelligence or one that's just following consistent physical laws?

[Charles Liu]

Well, that depends on your definition of intelligence.

[Paul Mercurio]

Right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

If following is intelligence, then you're Spinoza's God. That's right, Right there.

[Charles 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. 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.

[Paul Mercurio]

Now if when you say the Earth itself, you mean literally the Earth itself,

[Charles Liu]

like the Earth from the core out to the mantle,

[Neil 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 there.

[Paul Mercurio]

Right.

[Charles Liu]

We're self regulating too.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Charles 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 thoughts.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So check this out.

[Paul Mercurio]

So, meaning your body is its separate own intelligent organism, separate from your mind.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

It's how you use the word intelligence.

[Charles Liu]

There you go.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Charles Liu]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes. It's a matter whether you're conscious of it or not. Your body's doing it all by itself. Yes, maybe you need the brain, but if you're not conscious of it.

[Paul Mercurio]

But the brain could be feeding it through subconscious.

[Neil 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 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

[Paul Mercurio]

and it'll put itself out, hence self regulate.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Well then, okay, then forests pick up again and what do trees give off?

[Paul Mercurio]

Oxygen.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Oxygen. Okay, so it's self. So if the oxygen level gets too high, all the forests would burn and we 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, you want to call that intelligence?

[Charles Liu]

Okay, that's an interesting Point, Right. So Paul was leading, in my opinion, toward a very good point. Do you need the intelligence that exists there in order for us to have such a good self regulating system? 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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

a lot of the other life forms. Yeah, look at all the other life forms, example.

[Charles Liu]

So let's just pick the amoeba, right? The little microscopic blob it regulates, it has little organelles inside it, it gloms around a little bit.

[Paul Mercurio]

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. 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 certitude?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I think that's on that level. It's semantic.

[Charles 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, right?

[Neil 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.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah, I did too in law school

[Neil 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. 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 go. Cause it feels the air coming down the thing and you miss it. You will never squash it anywhere.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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'm sorry, their feet. Their legs have air sensors that immediately trigger to the leg and don't go through the roach's brain.

[Charles 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.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I thought it did that with worms.

[Paul Mercurio]

You are freaking me out already.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I thought it did that with worms.

[Charles Liu]

Oh, they do it with everything.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah.

[Charles Liu]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And they have to eat away in such a way that the organism is still alive. So it keeps the nervous system intact. Okay, tell me one more.

[Paul Mercurio]

Okay. Hello, Dr. Tyson. I am Ayikya, a regular listener from India, living here 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. Wow.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, so this is. She's referring to the novel which, of course, became the TV series the Three Body Problem, which is still. They're waiting for the next season to drop.

[Charles Liu]

Yes, absolutely.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yeah, yeah. So what do you take us there?

[Charles 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.

[Paul Mercurio]

Right.

[Charles Liu]

That is one interpretation.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

She's from mainland China.

[Charles Liu]

That's correct.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

The original author. 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.

[Charles 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. Now, the opposite is like the Vulcans in First Contact, what we were talking about. Right. Which happens again April 5, 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.

[Paul Mercurio]

But this question is written in absolutes. 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

[Charles Liu]

Put it, anyone who doesn't stay silent is smackdown.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Charles Liu]

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

[Paul Mercurio]

it becomes learned again.

[Charles Liu]

Because they've learned that as soon as a spacecraft comes up from some. 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, or you take

[Paul Mercurio]

a preemptive strike, or you take a

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

preemptive strike is playing whack a mole on anybody who rises up.

[Charles Liu]

You become the one that smacks anybody else down the chest.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Inevitably, they in principle could take over everybody.

[Paul Mercurio]

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 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.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

By someone that's more dominant.

[Paul Mercurio]

By someone that's more dominant. But we don't know if that's.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So I think the taking out, if

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Charles Liu]

I would never try, Paul.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

You gave me that deadly look with the heart explosion.

[Paul Mercurio]

Exactly.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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.

[Paul Mercurio]

Right. Knowing anything about each other.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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. The Dark Forest hypothesis.

[Paul Mercurio]

I can't see.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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's teeming with life. Someone wrote a book with 75 explanations really? To account for the Fermi paradox. And no one haven't visited yet.

[Paul Mercurio]

Wow.

[Charles Liu]

So where are they? Can be answered 75.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

At least 75. My favorite answer, let's call it 76 is from our colleague Steven Soder. Ah, works up here on the sixth floor. I'm on the fifth floor of the Hayden Planetarium. He's on the floor. I remember this. Okay, Steve, knot this out. Steve Soder co wrote the original cosmos with Carl Sagan and the first of the two cosmos that I hosted. Brilliant guy, knows everything about everything. Okay. He offered an hypothesis. And you know what it is? It's if your 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. So go from 1 to 2 to 4 to 8 to 16, propagate. If you do this 37 of these trips, you will have enough civilizations to populate every habitable planet in the galaxy. Okay, you can run the math. 37, that's not very many.

[Paul Mercurio]

No.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And if it takes you, so what if it takes you 100,000 years to travel to the next planet?

[Paul Mercurio]

Okay.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

37 of those is well within the lifetime of the galaxy.

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil 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, not because you

[Paul Mercurio]

run out of knowledge, science.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, no, no, no. We're running out of planets. And then I'm saying I want that planet. But you already have that planet.

[Paul Mercurio]

Here we go. Now they got the civilization.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

There we go. Okay, you already have that planet or the other planet's too far away and

[Paul Mercurio]

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

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Okay, 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

[Paul Mercurio]

that that going west and what the Native Americans experienced, this is Forget the name.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah, that's called Russia and the Ukraine.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Yes, yes, it's Spain and it's Spain and Portugal. It's England. And how long did England and France fight each other?

[Charles Liu]

A hundred years?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

100. Okay, all right. So we've already seen that because the real estate on Earth is finite in the same way the planets in the galaxy are finite.

[Paul Mercurio]

So this is.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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

[Charles Liu]

No, there's just one problem.

[Paul Mercurio]

There's actually been decolonization.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

What's that? That's right, decolonizing.

[Charles Liu]

If a decolonization catastrophe happened like that, we should see the results by now.

[Paul Mercurio]

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 the Brits, let's

[Charles Liu]

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.

[Paul Mercurio]

This presupposes that we were sophisticated enough to see it. Maybe we're not sophisticated enough to see it.

[Charles 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 cause that problem, then we will know it happened.

[Paul Mercurio]

I 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.

[Charles Liu]

80 bucks.

[Paul Mercurio]

That's money right there.

[Charles Liu]

There.

[Paul Mercurio]

You talking about.

[Charles Liu]

All right.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

No, the octagon. I like the octagon.

[Charles Liu]

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

[Paul Mercurio]

There you go.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

I think we gotta. We gotta get a rep. Now this is.

[Paul Mercurio]

This is an endlessly feeling a cosmic perspective though.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

Will you give me a. I'm feeling one.

[Paul Mercurio]

Yeah, absolutely feeling one.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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, 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. 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 cosmiquaries. Charles, always good to have you.

[Charles Liu]

Thank you.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And we'll look for your quantum physics book.

[Charles Liu]

Thank you so much.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

And you're on stage. Yeah.

[Paul Mercurio]

Turn the country paulmicurio.com so that website

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

has all your got all my tour

[Paul Mercurio]

dates coming out for my stand up show and my off Broadway show. Permission to speak.

[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

So yeah, all right. All right, you got it. This has been another installment of Star Talk Cosmic queries. Alien edition. We gotta do this again. Gentlemen, Neil Degrasse Tyson here as always, bidding you to keep looking up.

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[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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[Charles Liu]

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[Neil deGrasse Tyson]

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