Cosmic Queries – Take Me To Your Leader

Introduction to Confidence

0:00Confidence. It's listening to your gut. It's moving forward, even when the path ahead is unclear. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has helped people keep their promises, building confidence for generations. Whether you're confident in your financial future, or just beginning to envision it, we're here to help. Ask a financial professional how. Pacific Life. The power of a promise. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska. And in New York, Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona.

0:30Fidelity Crypto is built on 80 years of investing experience with the same discipline we apply to everything we do. So you can trade crypto and stocks together at Fidelity, while getting industry-leading security for all your investments. That's crypto without compromise. Visit fidelity.com slash crypto to get started. That's fidelity.com slash crypto. Crypto is offered by Fidelity Digital Assets NA, is not insured by FDIC or SIPC, and includes risk of significant loss. Securities are offered by Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSC, SIPC.

Star Talk Radio Introduction

1:00Star Talk Radio is presented by Pluto TV. It's a universal truth. Pluto is not a planet. Pluto TV, on the other hand, holds a universe of free entertainment we can stream from our own planet. Check out the ever-expanding list of supernatural favorites, including Fringe, The X-Files, Battlestar Galactica, and a full fleet of Star Trek series you can stream for free. No payment, just pure discovery.

1:31See what's landing on Pluto TV. Stream now. Pay never. Paul, love me some aliens. That was a good episode. Oh my God, we've been talking about that all day. But why are you trying to convince us that you are one? Sorry I asked. Coming up, the alien edition of Star Talk.

Welcome to Star Talk

1:52Welcome to Star Talk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. Star Talk begins right now. This is Star Talk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. We've got a Cosmic Aquarius edition, one I'm very much looking forward to. And to help me out here, we got Paul Mercurio. How you doing, man? I'm good, buddy. Good to see you again. All right, all right.

2:23Comedian Paul Mercurio. And sometimes we cannot do a show without our geek-in-chief. That would be Chuck Lew. Charles Lew. Doing very well. Thank you so much, Neil. Hi, Paul. It's a pleasure to be back. Old-time friend and colleague, Charles Lew. That's not what you were saying about him. It was a lot of like, Charles. So you are the baron. And remind me of your title. Baron? Yeah, he's a baron. I've been knighted as a baron. Oh, congratulations, sir. Please genuflect. Oh.

2:52In your chair. No, don't have a stroke. Just genuflect. Okay. Yes, I'm a baron now. I was knighted by my man. Do you have a title? I don't remember. That means you don't, if you're trying to think. No, I don't think I do. I will work on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really okay.

Discussing Quantum Physics

3:07It's really okay. All right.

Discussing Quantum Physics

3:07Let me remind people. Oh, my gosh. The handy quantum physics answer book. Now, that's a book. Not that thing you got. Oh, no. Come on. Well, my book, don't you just talk smack about my little book? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. But Charles Liu, this is not your first rodeo with the Handy Answer franchise, right? It is not. What were your other handy answers? Handy Astronomy and Handy Physics. Handy Answer Book in Astronomy Physics and Quantum Physics.

3:38Yeah, we were able to dig really deeply into a lot of the mysteries that we couldn't cover in a big encyclopedic book like that. And there's nothing like mysteries in quantum physics. I want you to sign it for me. It would be my pleasure. Thank you so much. For me, it's a significant contribution to the literature of science that's trying to reach the general public. Thank you. Because everyone loves quantum physics, and no one knows how to talk about it. There it is. I have a book. Did I ask you? It's the 2000 Best Fart Jokes, and it's really good.

Aliens Discussion

4:07Wow. Today's topic is aliens. Love it. Love it. How could that not be the topic of every possible conversation everyone ever has? Exactly. Aliens. But before I begin, we are recording this on your birthday. That is correct. That is my birthday. And I told my office. Frankly, I forgot it was your birthday. So I said, I scramble, what can I get him? And so I went deep in my archives, into my drawing, and I have... What is this? It looks pretty cool. It is a blank piece of paper.

4:38It is a pocket protector called Nerd Pride. I love it. Because you're a co-host on a science show. I'm officially a nerd. And we're turning you into a nerd. Yes. Yes. So let me see if that fits in that pocket. All right. There we go. Unzip it. There you go. There we go. Hang on a second. Let me put my... Oh, oh, oh, oh. Okay. Let's go. Lady. Hey, hi. That's a Jerry Lewis. That was Jerry Lewis. That's a Jerry. Well, in that role, he's a nerd.

5:08Yeah, in that role. That was the thing that broke him out. That's true. Hey, lady. Dave. Okay, hang on. Let me load it up. Wait a minute. I got to load it up now. Yeah, there you go. You got to have your red. You got to have your blue. You got to put it all in. There you go. And you got the thing. And then we got the green. RGB. RGB. There you go. And then this is my regular use pen right there. There you go. All right. All right. I am already 10 IQs point smarter.

Cosmic Query

5:30Thank you. Thank you. All right. This is Cosmic Query. So people wrote in. They know that the topic is aliens. When I was a kid, I wanted to be abducted. Oh, wow. All the time I spent out alone as an astronomer, you know, with your telescope alone in the dark sky looking up at the stars. Did you want to be probed, too? No, that's not... Did I say that? No, I'm just saying. I do.

5:54Come on. I spent a lot of effort exploring what that first encounter would, should, or could be like. And I put it in a book. Take me to your leader. It's what should you do when an alien walks up to you and says, take me to your leader. How do you know that they're not already here, though? In a form. We talk about that as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In a form. There's very little you're going to think of about aliens that I have not addressed in this book. Oh, I think I'll... I'm just saying.

6:24Because if you're a fly-by-night alien thinker, I'm a total alien thinker. Are you challenging my alien thinking? I totally am. All right, here we go. Now it's a throwdown. So clearly, I'm not the only one in the universe thinking about aliens. No, this is a big topic. Congress was thinking about aliens. Yes. All right. And what we care about is not what I think. I want to know what our Patreon supporters think. We've got some really great questions on this. And this is the entry-level membership in the Patreon club. I understand that 10% of those people are aliens from another planet. I'm not authorized to comment on that. Ah, here we go. Okay. All right.

6:55Hello, 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 launch is producing an acceleration of 3G. Would something going from zero miles an hour to full speed of light just be obliterated? What would the power time curve look like for acceleration? In that book, I talk about this.

7:25Because one of the wow factors of flying saucers is that they're there hovering, and then they instantly hit 1,000 miles an hour. But they have mass, so they can't reach speed of light. I'm not even talking about the speed of light. I'm just talking about what people see. Like interstellar speeds. Like, if you go from zero to 1,000 miles an hour in one second, you can calculate how many Gs that is. That's 50 Gs. If you're made of anything with molecules, you're a pile of goo at the end of that. Okay. So, but plus, Charles, people speak of this happening with no sound.

8:03That's right. Now, we've made great progress over the decades with making loud things less loud. That's right. But I think there's something we cannot overcome, and that's if you break the sound barrier. Yeah. It's always a challenge because when you are moving faster than sound or go from slower than sound to faster than sound, you create a shock wave in the medium that you're traveling. And that's what we hear. And that's the sonic boom. Yeah. Right. So being able to go from below sonic to supersonic, you have to be careful so as not to cause that kind of boom or to control it in a way that will not show you.

8:36How are you going to do that and not make a boom? Well. I don't think that's possible. You think there's a way you can make it? 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've 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 through the speed of sound.

9:10What you just said presupposes, are you slowing down a little bit as you get closer to it? No, you're trying to speed up more and more and more and more. Reduce the time it takes before you cross that barrier. Right. So that speed, it makes a big difference. Now, when we're talking about the speed of light, that's a whole different dynamic because 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.

9:46But at least they thought about that so that it's a thing to compensate for. Well, they thought about it after the fandom told them, hey, you know what? You have to take account of this. And were you at the top signature on that letter? Oh, no, no. I was too young to be allowed to do that. But you would have had you been. If I had the chance. But 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.

10:17If you accelerate at 1G, when do you get to half the speed of light? It's pretty quick. It's like six months or something. It's not that long. So you can get very, very close. Because you're constantly increasing your speed and you're just living in 1G as though you're on Earth on your spaceship. But to bring this back to the alien, if they can't reach the speed of light through acceleration, is there any known physics that would bypass that limit? You can if you do it steadily enough. Right. You do it slowly. Is that the physics that allow them to bypass that limit?

10:47That's right. You don't bypass the speed of light. What you do is you approach the speed of light gently and gradually. Much like a relationship. One hopes. One hopes. Yes. Some things go through the rest. The speed of light is not just a good idea. It's the law.

11:04Okay. Stay true. But this idea of speeding up slowly and then slowing down slowly keeps our bodies from being plastered against the back of the wall. Right. It's a pile of goo. It also gives us an automatic free gravity. But is the barrier to interstellar travel like speed or the energy required to sustain acceleration close to light speed? For me, it's speed. Once you get to any sustained speed, if you're traveling at, say, 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.

11:43By the way, no one knew that until Galileo did experiments. That's right. Everyone before that said, everything in motion comes to rest. That was very Aristotelian. Without knowing that if you make it really smooth and you reduce the friction, it'll just continue forever. 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.

12:15So you just have to be patient. Does distance shrink for them if time slows enough during their light speed? 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 are- Me, the observer. Right. When you, the observer, are watching them, they don't seem like that they're doing 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.

12:48And when they are sharing your frame of reference, then their distance has returned to the size that you see because they see it at the same speed. But the consequence of this is that they will not age the four years. Correct. That the time that you see would have occupied. And they did this famously in, with the gargantuan planet in Interstellar. Yep. 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?

13:19Right. And you have the energy to sustain that acceleration to reach the high speeds that you want. 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? Yeah, well, empty space, that's not usually a problem. Yeah. Well, you never know. There might be stuff to check out. The space gremlins pulling you back. 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.

13:51But 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 he 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.

14:27And that's like a shield that prevents the spacecraft. My understanding was he had a cooler beer and he needed ice.

Alien Encounters

14:32Only 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.

15:05Because 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 audio book now, wherever books are sold. You should probably get the book sooner rather than later. You don't want to have a first alien encounter and not be ready for it. I'm just saying.

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17:43After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. So please support our show and tell them that Chuck sent you. And by that, I mean STARTALK. Confidence. It's listening to your gut. It's moving forward even when the path ahead is unclear. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has helped people keep their promises, building confidence for generations. Whether you're confident in your financial future or just beginning to envision it, we're here to help. Ask a financial professional how.

18:14Pacific Life. The power of a promise. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska. And in New York, Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. Yeah.

18:31Charles. Yeah. This is an advanced future thing. Yes. And his force field is a hunk of ice. Exactly. That's the best thing to come up with. That's the best thing to come up with. That's the best thing. Really? It was a fascinating irony. Obviously, it was a plot device. Yeah. 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. Hello, Dr. Tyson. My name is Daniel and I'm in Madeira, California.

19:03Love it. 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 are something we can't even see or sense. Thank you. Yeah. So. So, Ian, take me to your leader. I talk about ideas that people have had about non-traditional aliens.

19:34But let's just first start with the blob. Yeah. Love me some blob. All right. 1958, Stephen McQueen, how he was credited in that film. It was a non-vertebrate thing. Did we bother to explain what comprises the blob? No, because it's alien and it wants to just eat you. Okay. Just imagine a big amoeba. What we have now on microscopic level, but it's just big. Yeah, it's big. It's macroscopic. And it just, it kind of, and it just, there it is.

20:05Could you keep doing that? That feels good. So, but the other ideas have come before this. Like Fred Hoyle. Yes. 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. The Big Bang has started, so, and the name stuck. But, so he's. 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.

20:37That's the best we can figure out. Okay. Yeah. But except that the blob ate you. So, the blob was not seeking inter-species communication. Okay, why are we always assuming the alien either wants to probe us or eat us? Well, I'm getting there. Why aren't they coming and they're just like, you know what? I heard you got some nice stuff in sacks. Here's the thing. I heard that too. From childhood, we know that it's way worse to be eaten than it is to just die.

21:03Versus like. Okay, all of those childhood nursery. Not the nursery rhyme. What do you call them? Because it's a slow dance. The fairy tales. The fairy tales. The fairy tales. There's Goldilocks. Is she going to be eaten by the bear? Yeah. 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 leftover from childhood. Yeah, but killing and eating, it's the same thing. It is, intellectually, but emotionally. This is why Jurassic Park is so devastating.

21:33It's just a form of death. I know, but emotionally. Do you want to be bitten in half? You know? No. So, here's my point. I would. Fred, can I get back to Fred Hoyle? If you must. Okay, so Fred Hoyle imagined a life form. Yes. In the form of a cloud. Yes, he did. An interstellar cloud. Yeah. There was a sort of electric, it was electrical synapses within the cloud that constituted its intelligence. Think of the human brain, but just now on the scale of something larger than a solar system. That's right. It came in, and it blocked the sunlight.

22:05And 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. It's big. It can't wrap its head. It's cloud around us. Okay, but it realized. But the cloud doesn't have a jiffy lube. So how sophisticated can it be? So, but the scientists figure out how to communicate.

22:35Yes. 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. Yeah. And so the scientists warn the cloud, which is like treason. Yes. Right? That's, that's. Yeah. Nukes coming up your ass. That's the road. That's right. And so the cloud, in response, says, all right, you know, we could snuff you out like

23:09this, but let me just, we'll just teach you a lesson. So all the nukes get launched, and the cloud redirects them back to earth. Yeah. And they all explode on earth and kill thousands of, not millions, but thousands of people. Yeah. So, so this is a life form that is hardly shown in Hollywood, because it's not an actor donning a costume. Well, but. And it's not a vertebrate thing with a face and shoulders and arms and fingers and legs. But here's the supposition I always have a problem with, which is that we talk about aliens on earth, and there's a, there's the, it's sort of a black and white sort of discussion,

23:40which is, if I don't see them or experiencing them, they don't exist. How do we know this is not an alien, right? How do I know my Wi-Fi isn't an alien named? Hello? Hello? Are you an alien? Hello? Hello? Okay. This is. No, no, no. This is why all your colleagues don't like you. You've got to be used to this. The IMDB, the Internet Movie Database, lists, what is it? It's 3,000 movies, TV shows, products, games that have alien in the title or alien in the

24:14description. Wow. Like thousands. And so. Amazing. And some of them are fun titles, like My Stepmother's an Alien. Yeah. My favorite is Cowboys and Aliens. Yes. I saw that movie. You do. I did not. Yeah, yeah. That had Daniel Craig in it. Harrison Ford. Was he in it too? I believe so. Really? Okay. So people have been thinking about this. I'm just saying, let's go back to the, if it walks like a duck, acts like a duck, it looks like a duck, it's a duck. Okay? If your alien looks human, has human organs, and behaves human, it's not useful to think

24:47of it as alien anymore. Okay, exactly. See, that's my point. Like, if an alien shows up and it looks like you or you, I'm going to be bummed out because I'm thinking, oh, this is going to be a sophisticated, how sophisticated can they be if this is the best they can do? Did you ever watch reruns of My Favorite Martian? Yes. That was an alien that was just kind of hanging out and was just like your funny, cheerful uncle, right? Wait, I have to laugh because I'm old enough that I watched My Favorite Martian. You didn't have to say, did I watch reruns? Okay.

25:18Well, you know. My Favorite Martian. So, what passed for an alien in the 60s, in the early 60s, was he just had, like, he went into Martian mode. Yeah. He looked human in every other way, but he had two antennae. Right, but let's talk about E.T. for a minute. So, Steven Spielberg is a brilliant director, right? And he surrounds himself with brilliant people that make movies. Mm-hmm. And they still had to give it a head and eyes and a finger. This is my issue. So, you know, and it's like, really, really? They're all vertebrate. Right. And, you know, vertebrates in the tree of life are kind of the only ones that have faces,

25:52as we think of as faces. In vertebrates, like, you know, octopus has eyes, but we don't think of it as a face in the way we normally. Right. We owe our faces to fish, okay, as our vertebrate ancestors. So, that's our bias. It's a powerful bias. Okay, but they might evolve with, like, no faces at all, which basically puts them one step ahead of people on Zoom. 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. This is Sam Couch. Mm-hmm. Hello, Dr. Tyson.

26:24Sam here from Boulder, Colorado. All right. If an alien species visits our planet, it likely means they found a way to not destroy themselves. Oh. 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? I got it in my book. I go to work. I do that in my book. My first question would be, how did you not destroy yourselves? Yes. Right? I would ask a different question. How the hell did you get here? That's what I would ask.

26:56And they turn out, I bet you, to be quite related. Because it is well known that if you take a system that you can travel some fraction of the speed of light, it is much easier to use it as a weapon than as a mode of transportation. Yes. Yeah. And any things advanced such as that. That's right. And humans are really good at making weapons out of new discoveries. That's true. My question would be, did your civilization go through a phase like where the smartest technology you came up with, like a cell phone, was used exclusively to watch cat videos?

27:27That would be my question. And then they would immediately leave the plan. That would never happen. Do they look like cats? Do they look like cats? They're adorable. Well, they're alien cats. See, that's the thing. Alien cats. There you go. You've got three heads. That'd be even worse. And a probe. How about, are there any questions you discovered that can't be answered, no matter how advanced? Yeah, I would. So here's what I do. Those kind of things. I'd like to see what they think their limits are. Here it is. Oh, that's a great idea. I have a section in here called Alien Intelligence, and I explore what we could share with them to convince them that we have some intelligence.

27:58Oh. And one- Well, don't tell them we pay $80 to watch Sweaty Men fight on pay-per-view. Don't tell them that. I won't tell them that. I promise. That definitely takes us off the list of intelligence. I would share the prime numbers. Prime numbers should be in there. However, I got a better thing. They don't need prime numbers. They're more sophisticated. Carl Frederick Gauss. Yes. Okay. Is that a hack? Yes.

28:19Gauss. Brilliant top five mathematicians ever. Would you agree? Top 10. Top 10. Carl Friedrich Gauss was an astronomer as well. Yes. He did some astronomical discoveries also. In fact, the method of least squares was invented by him to predict the position of an asteroid after it disappeared behind the sun. He took these data and said, where will it be when it comes out the other side? Well, that's not that hard, is it? No. If no one has ever done it before, it's hard.

28:52Okay? You have to know that that was something you could do. Yes. And he figured there was a guy with Gauss who did that. I believe so. Okay. So, he said, here's what you do. Let's go into the tundra where there are no trees and then bring in trees and create a huge triangle. Three, four, five triangles? Yes. Well, any triangle. It wouldn't matter. Okay? Create a right triangle.

29:23Mm-hmm. Then, create wheat fields and make squares coming off of each side of the triangle. Do you remember your Pythagorean theorem? Yes. Tell me. I can't remember either. But I remember. Okay. A squared plus B squared equals C squared. Okay? These are the sides of the triangle. Remember the hypotenuse? Mm-hmm. Okay. Since A squared plus B squared, what is A squared? That's the area of a square coming off the side of the triangle. Mm-hmm. So, draw a square. Draw a square here.

29:53Draw a square there. And then, you can, at night, set at a fire. And then, aliens on other planets would see this and know, that's not random. This is, people know math. Yeah. People, 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. Oh. And now, the prime number thing, Carl Sagan had prime numbers in the original contact novel. Mm-hmm. That's right. Where they were embedded in the signals.

30:25Yeah. Two, three, five, seven. However, that's counting in base 10. If you just have dots, you could count in base 100. Just put dots. Two dots. We're presuming they count in base 10, and we don't know that. However you count them, that's what it is. However you count them, that's what they are. You don't have to put numerals. Yeah, that's right. Well, I'd like to know how they think about consciousness and purpose. Like, do they see intelligence as purely biological or something, like, more fundamental to the universe? For that, they'd probably want to read, like, our tort law. Yes. Right?

30:55They want to see what our statutes are. Yeah, exactly. Even the aliens to try to learn about us. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think that's what you would see, and then you would see all the different variations. But, no, I'm still going to start with science and math. Math is the language of the universe. Yeah, but there's also, why are we assuming they don't have consciousness and purpose like we do? That's later. I'll figure that out later. I want to know if we have any common language at all, and that's not going to happen by reading tort law to them. I don't know. Maybe. What? 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-

31:25And a classicist, too. Yes, she is a classicist and a religious studies person and speaks Italian, blah, blah, blah. She's pretty awesome. But never mind that. Says dad. Yeah. Exactly. No question. I'm Italian. Let me talk to her and see- But she has told me many times, and including just recently, we're talking about the movie Arrival. The way that they attempted to show intelligence was to share a language. And the translation of the language was the thing that allowed the greatest connection. Eventually, the protagonist, played by Amy Adams in the movie, learned so much-

31:56As 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. Time as they perceive it and experience it. Yeah. Well, let's talk about music for a minute and E.T. and sort of do, do, do, do, do. Oh, that's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Close Encounters, I'm sorry. Close Encounters. You're my co-host on this show. Don't confuse Close Encounters and E.T. Yeah, it's all that Spielberg guy. The theme from Close Encounters was also used as a joke.

32:29Yeah, the five musical notes. Which is based in math. Yes. Right? It was also based, it was also used in the movie Moonraker, a James Bond movie, as a key code to enter a special secret door. I did not know that. Well, that was for fun. That was a joke. Charles, how do you know that? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

Confidence and Moving Forward

33:01Confidence. It's listening to your gut. It's moving forward, even when the path ahead is unclear. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has helped people keep their promises. Building confidence for generations. Whether you're confident in your financial future or just beginning to envision it, we're here to help. Ask a financial professional how. Pacific Life, the power of a promise. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska. And in New York, Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio.

33:36I'm here with my son, Ernie, because we listen to StarTalk every night and support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Hello, Dr. Tyson. This is Jonathan Lott from AlotofIdeas.com in Wiley, Texas. Okay. A longtime listener and recent Patreon supporter.

34:07This 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

34:41more unified cultures and fewer conflicts? Thanks for helping us. Well, there's a lot going on there. There is. 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

35:13because we'd come together to fight the common enemy. Or would they? See, what I would do is I would sell out a country and then I'd partner with the aliens and I would coexist like that. Who invited you on the show? So I think he's largely correct because that plays out in politics every day. It's there's the enemy and they're our enemy. So we all bet it happened in Nazi Germany. It happened almost too easily.

35:43So to the point where if everyone is identical in one island, I think we will still find ways to kill one another. And I wrote about that in a different book, in my Starry Messenger book on conflict and resolution, where you can talk about, well, we don't like you because your skin is dark or because you pray to a different God or because you sleep with different people or because you speak with a different accent. There are all these reasons you can give. Okay. What was World War I and II about? Those are white Christians slaughtering other white Christians.

36:15If they can find reasons to do that, then all these other reasons, it's just you're going to come up with reasons to want to tribalize and kill. That is my absence of confidence in our species. On the other hand, Star Trek does provide an alternative explanation for unification. It is a peaceful visit from the Vulcans in 2063, April the 5th, that convinces humans

36:47who 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. Wait, this happened, what year was this? April 5th, 2063 was First Contact. That's when I check out. That's when I'm checking in. But the problem with that is that there's- April 5th. April 5th. Like, you know the day of the- Just watch Star Trek First Contact.

37:18It's right there. Well, it had to be April 5th. The Vulcans had to get their tax returns in on the 15th, so they had to go back, their accounts we're working on there. So the issue for me is you're never going to get there. Are we enlightened enough to do that? No, because- I don't think so. The flip side of that question is there will always be part of the species where cohesion is not their main agenda. It's dominance. Right. We see it in the animal kingdom. So I don't think that that ever gets bred out of a species.

37:50We are the animal kingdom. Okay, just great. We humans have a choice to decide whether or not we want to act on impulse A or impulse B. But there are some humans that make that choice consciously, that it is more important to them to be dominant than to coexist and get along. When you see it in other animals, it's kind of in their nature. We don't believe they necessarily have the choice. It's in the nature of human beings now. Does the new top lion who comes in, who displaced the other one, really have a choice to not kill all the lion cubs of the previous lion?

38:22What world are you two guys living in that you don't see it in our day-to-day life now that there are people that are just so clearly that cohesion, coexistence is not in their agenda and it's to sort of dominate? It's very tribal, yeah. But are they the majority? Do they hold policymaking power or military power? At any given time, there's always a give and take in humans. And I don't see why it wouldn't be true for aliens too. To be there is give and take because there are times they are the majority and that's the problem. Yes, that's right. That's how we have World War I and World War II.

38:52Right. So one could imagine that after, for example, the Vulcans visit Star Trek on again, April 5th, 2063. Okay. I got that marked in my calendar. The humans basically decided that the majority of humans decided that they will live in this peaceful coexistence unification. And then the rest of them were living still, had those impulses, but lived within that society in which the unification was appropriate. My daughter's essay for college was about the United Federation of Planets and how they

39:23all came. Because she was active in, what do you call it, the UN? Model UN. She was active in Model UN in high school. And that all came together when she saw what happened in Star Trek. And then she imagined this future inspired by the Star Trek model. Isn't that awesome? Model UN. Right. Then she got older and was crushed by reality.

39:43We're moving on. All right. Keep it going. Hello, Dr. Tyson. My name is Abdul from San Diego. My question, if a non-human intelligence wanted to watch a young civilization without interfering, what would a scientifically plausible observation strategy look like? And would we even recognize it if it were already happening? This is exactly what I was talking about earlier. So here's the thing. We have already displayed ourselves to the universe by leaked radio waves that have been

40:15leaving Earth ever since the Hitler rallies of the 1930s. If you're approaching Earth, you're going to see our leaked radio waves first. And it will be that Hitler waves and the story contact made hay out of that. That's right. All right. So the aliens first saw Nazis. Right. And then the early radio broadcasts. You have like Howdy Doody and Amos and Andy. All right. And then you have the first TV broadcasts because TV goes straight out.

40:46That's why they try to keep it down, but it's escaped. And they saw the Kardashians and stopped watching it. Early TV. Kardashians are mostly cable. That's not broadcasting. That's my point. Yeah. That's true. Because they don't pay for 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, you have. But what about Hulu, which goes over Wi-Fi, which is internet? They probably get that. Well, yeah. I don't, yeah. We'll have to think about that. 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.

41:21Now, 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 they can get close enough without penetrating our three dimensions.

41:55Yeah, if they come into our three dimensions, we'll know. That's right. But if they stay out of it, that, so a four-dimensional alien has got this. But is them staying out of our three dimensions, does that limit what they can know? If you have something inside a box, no one in that two-dimensional world can see inside that box unless you pry it open. And 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.

42:26They can see inside any 3D enclosure. So they would know everything. In order to see, though, they would have to receive some sort of electromagnetic radiation or other kinds of signals. They would need a receiver, just like we have our eyes to be able to look on the surface of the table. Something would have to be transmitting to them. That transmission has to happen. Right. And so there is some exchange of energy or subatomic particles of some kind or another. So the detection issue is actually important to know whether or not we can see somebody, whether it's in three dimensions or in four.

42:57Well, in that transmission, couldn't we then become conscious that something is detecting that transmission? Unless it just leaks out and you don't even know or care. Right. So we have an alien that's far away and they see our I Love Lucy and My Favorite Martian reruns, right? They could have these wonderful radio antennae or something and they could watch with their radio eyes and then we wouldn't know. We wouldn't know. It's already been admitted. 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.

43:28Okay. We should move on. Keep it going. Brian Rall, hello, Dr. Tyson. Brian from San Antonio. Is it possible that the universe itself behaves like a form of intelligence with patterns, self-correcting systems rather than intelligence being something that only emerges within it? Are you serious? I've got everything in the book. 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,

44:02there's a limit to how quickly or efficiently it can move decision-making thoughts across itself. Okay. 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 you count co-moving or not co-moving coordinates. So, today's diameter of the universe- About 92 billion light years. Yeah, 92 billion light years. So, if you're an entity that size and you have the proverbial bald head and you have

44:32an itch, you have to tell your fingernail, which is over here, to scratch it, how long is that going to 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. But then how do we distinguish between a universe that actually has some form of intelligence and one that's just following consistent physical laws?

45:02Well, that depends on your definition of intelligence, right? If following a physical law is intelligence, then you're Spinoza's god. That's right. Right there. Yeah, the rationalists had a different opinion compared with the 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? Now, if-

45:33When you say the Earth itself, you mean literally the Earth itself. Like the Earth, from the core out to the mantle, and the living organism, obviously, as a living organism. Just to back up a bit, especially on the surface, the idea was, which I thought was kind of thin and weak in its scientific foundations, but it was a nice New Age thought that Earth somehow is self-regulating. If you're self-regulating, maybe there's some intelligence going on in there. Right, we're self-regulating, too. Yeah, we keep our body temperature, you get hot, you sweat, it cools you off. Right.

46:03It's an automatic response. And the thing is, that's nothing that we think about.