StarTalk Radio - Cosmic Queries – Take Me To Your Leader

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

What would you actually do if an alien showed up and asked to be taken to your leader? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Paul Mecurio, and astrophysicist Charles Liu explore fan questions about physics of near-light-speed travel, Dark Forest Theory from The Three Body Problem, and whether the universe itself might be conscious. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here:  https://startalkmedia.com/show/cosmic-queries-take-me-to-your-leader/ Thanks to our Patrons Zach Dixon, Bethanny Rodgers, Alan Albright, Pam J Lockhart, Victor Wu, Finch, Serenity Oh, Nick DiBartolomeo, Christopher Johnson, CodinThorFather, HarleyWayne, Glyn R. Buck, C.Avalos, Christopher Irwin, Andreas, Bob Pflugfelder, Brad Ryan, Michael House, Linda Resch, Bonny Matles, Amagerikaner, Titilebon, Jim Peterson, Charity Durio, James Runyon, Anthony Onofrio, [e-mail], Yuriko Coenen, Devon, Kathryn Karl, Toby, Daniel Boring, Lazeez K., Jenayalynn Riojas, M.S., Jim Conyngham, Rachel Miller, Robert Pokorski, Joseph Britto, Steve Lloyd, James, Souvik Biswas, Mtamanika Youngblood, Nirav Umaretiya, Scott Hinkelman, Charles Doaty, Fridthjoff, Nirav Shah, James Orazietti, Dejan Tomic, insigpilot, Michael Bentt, Dakota Rogers, Michael Baca, Michael Stoerzer, Justin Wells, Joshua Zimmer, Christopher Wystup, Patricia Stoll, George Alva, Melih Ozbek, Melih Ozbek, Twnzmama2, Candice Tripp, Gary Landry, Dan Baker, Greg Engelberg, DANIEL DAILY, Fluffybirb, Tamás Mihályi, Jason Vogel, For those who come after - title of my sex tape, Loreto Gonzalez Pizarro, ali, Rolen Yoshinaga, Isak Walther, Gwynn, Steven Roberts, Pete Carpenter, Paul Munn, Erik Martinez, Vishnu Kumar Kalidasan, tshimself, Jacob Tucker, Chasiti, Nick, Priscilla Brogren, Kitalahara, Kerry Gallagher, Frederico Gomes, Shane, Tom Myles, Kurt Geib, Carlos Guillen, Simon Plückebaum, [e-mail], Tim Wren, Patrick Kennedy, Chris Herrera, James McClure, and Alita Pappas for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early.Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Paul, love me some aliens. That was a good episode. Oh my God, we can talk about that all day. But why are you trying to convince us that you were 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 astrole. physicist. We've got a cosmic querious edition one I'm very much looking forward to and help me out here we got Paul McCurio, how you doing, ma'am? I'm good, buddy. Good to

see you again. All right, all right, comedian Paul McCurio and sometimes we cannot do a show without our geek and chief. That would be Chuck Lou, Charles Lou. Yeah, here we go, come on. Doing very well. Thank you so much, Neil. Hi, Paul. It's a pleasure to be there. A colleague, Charles Lou.

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? Barron? Yeah, he's a baron. Oh, congratulations, sir. Please, Jan, you play.

In your chair? No, don't have a stroke, just genuflect. 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. It's really okay. It's really okay. Let 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, you're just talking smack about my little book. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. Okay. But Charles Liu, this is not your first rodeo with the Handy Answer franchise, right? It is not. What were your other handy answers? And astronomy and handy physics.

Handy answer book, astronomy, physics, and quantum physics. Yeah, we were able to dig really deeply into a lot of the mysteries that we could cover in a big encyclopedic book like that. And there's nothing like mysteries in quantum physics.

I want one and want you to sign it for me. It would be my pleasure. Thank you so much. Yes, thanks. This is a,

for me, it's a significant contribution to the literature of science that's trying to reach the general public. Thank you.

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. Wow. Today's topic is aliens. 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. And I'm going to my birthday. Frankly, I forgot. It was your birthday. So I said, like, scramble, what can I get them? So I went into my, deep in my archives, into my drawing. And I have...

What is this? It looks pretty... It is a blank piece of paper. It is a pocket protector. Ah! nerd pride because you're a co-host on a science show I'm officially a nerd

we're turning you into a nerd so let me see that's in that pocket there we go unzip it there you go hang on a second let me put my oh oh oh oh okay let's go

lady hey I was a Jerry Lewis that was Jerry Lewis a nerd yeah well that was in that role yeah 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. You got to have your red. You got to have your blue. Put it all right in. There you go. And you get the thing.

And then we got the green. 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. Thank you.

Thank you. All right, this is cosmic queries. So people wrote in, they know that the topic is aliens. Wonderful. When I was a kid, I wanted to be abducted. Oh, wow. 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. Did you want to be probed to?

No, that's no. Can I say that? I do. Come 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. In a form? There's very little you're going to think of about aliens that I have not addressed in this book. I'm just saying. Because if you are 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 the 10% of those people are aliens from another planet. I'm not authorized to comment on that. Here we go. Okay.

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 three years.

With 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, because 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 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. But plus, Charles, you, the people speak of this happening with no sound. Now, we've made great progress over the decades.

That's right. With making loud things less loud. That's right. But I think there's something we cannot overcome, and that's if you hit, 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 or show it. How 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... People have been working on 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. What 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. But if you... Reduce the time it takes before you cross that barrier. Okay. 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 you're traveling in space, you don't have the atmosphere to worry about. Instead, you do have this acceleration issue, right? In fictional spaces, like, say, Star Trek, you have this thing called an inertial dampener, which makes it so that you can stand on the bridge and go to warp speed and not have to worry about falling over. But at least they thought about that, so that it's a thing to compensate for it.

They thought about it after the fandom told them, hey, you know what, you have to take your account. And were you at the front of the top signature on that letter? I was too young to be allowed to do that. But you would have had you been. If I had the chance. 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. If 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 a, 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?

That's right. You don't bypass the speed of light. What you do is you approach the speed of light gently and gradually. That way you don't get- A relationship. One hopes. Yes. Hold my hand.

Some things go- The speed of light is not just a good idea. It's the law. Okay. Stay true. Correct. 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.

But 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 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. By 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 aristotalian. 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. So 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... May 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, they does seem like to them that the distances are less, but then they slow down to match your universe again. And when they are sharing your frame of reference, then their distance has returned to the size that you see because they see at the same speed. But a 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 with the gargantuan planet in interstellar.

We 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?

Right. 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, right? Any of that, right? Yeah, well, empty space, usually a problem. Yeah. Well, you never know. There might be stuff.

Space Gremlin's pulling you back. There is a really good science fiction novel called The Songs of Distant Earth that Arthur C. Clark 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. It turned out that the energy produced by the engines was being drawn by the zero point.

energy that surrounds all of space. And so that fictional thing allowed that spacecraft to travel as far as you wanted with unlimited amounts of propulsion. But they just had to bring ice up and create a big shield in front of the spacecraft so that when micrometeoroids and things like 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. My understanding was he had a cooler beer and needed ice.

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. I'm just saying. Charles, this is an advanced future thing.

And his force field is a hunk of ice. Exactly. It was a fascinating irony. Obviously, it was a plot device, right? But that allowed Arthur C. Clark 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. I've heard you talk before about how aliens and 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 be. behavior, gas or liquid form, or something we can't even see or sense. Thank you. Yeah. So. So in?

Take me to your leader? I agree. I talk about ideas that people have had about non-traditional aliens. But let's just first start with the blob. Love me some blob. All right, 1958, Stephen McQueen, how it 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 just, there it is. Could you keep doing that? That feels good.

So right. But the other ideas have come before this. Like Fred Hoyle. He wrote a short story. Fred Hoyle is infamous for... The Big Bang. For naming the Big Bang, perjoratively, because he was into the steady state universe.

And he said, you got this Big Bang and started... And the name stuck. Maybe the aliens became... They turned themselves into what they think we can understand. They observed us and said, Blob is about as much as they could figure out. That's the best... But except that the blob ate to you.

So the blob was not seen. 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 up in sacks? I heard that too. From childhood, we know that it's way worse to be eaten than it is to just die. To, versus like... All of those childhood nursery, not the nursery rhyme, the, what do you call them?

Because it's a slow, those fairy tales. The fairy tales. The fairy tales. There's Goldilocks. Is she going to be eaten by the bear? There's Little Red Riding Hood. She'd be eaten by the wolf, the free pigs. Aliens that eat you is more terrifying than an alien that just kills you.

That's my only point. And this is left over 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. She's a form of death. I know, but emotionally, do you want to be bitten in half? You know? No. So here's my point.

I would. Can I get back to Fred Hoyle? If you must. Okay. So Fred Hoyle imagined a life form. Yes. In the form of a cloud. Yes, he did.

An interstellar cloud. Yeah. There was a sort of electrical synapses within the cloud that constituted its intelligence. Think of the human brain, but just now on the scale of something larger than a solar system. That's right. It came in and it blocked sunlight. And the scientist, because it had no, it didn't want to harm us. It was just being alive.

And the scientist figured out how to communicate with it. And they said, look, we're down here. And the cloud was incredulous that something so tiny as we could have any intelligence at all. Because it's a big cloud. It can't wrap its head. It's cloud around us. Okay, but it realizes. But the cloud doesn't have a jiffy loop.

So how sophisticated can it be? But the scientists figure out how to communicate. And the scientists reason with it. And so it opens a hole between the sun and earth. because it had blocked Earth. And then the humans are skeptical of this relationship that the scientists have put forth, and they want to send nukes at it.

And so the scientist warned the cloud, which is like treason. Yes. Right? Yeah, noot's coming up your ass. At the road. 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 lot. 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 this is a life form that is hardly shown in Hollywood because it's not an actor donning a costume. Well, but 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, it's sort of a black and white sort of discussion, which is,

if I don't see them or experiencing them, they don't exist. How do we know this is not an alien, right? How do I know my Wi-Fi isn't an alien name? Hello? Are you an alien? Hello? Okay. This is why a lot of your colleagues don't like you. The IMDB, the Internet movie database,

list, what is it? It's 3,000 movies, TV shows, products, games that have alien in the title or alien in the description. Wow. Like thousands. 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. You do. I did not. Yeah, that had Daniel Craig in it. Harrison Ford. Was he in it too? I believe so. Really?

Okay. So people have been thinking about this. I'm just saying, let's go back to the, if it walks like a duck, acts like a duck, it looks like a duck. It's a duck. Okay? If your alien looks human, has human organs, and behaves human, it's not useful to think of it as alien anymore. 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?

Right? I have to laugh because I'm old enough that I watch my favorite Martian. You didn't have to say, did I watch reruns? My favorite. 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 antenna in the camera. Right, but let's talk about ET for a minute. So Stephen Fieldwork is a brilliant director, right?

And he surrounds himself with brilliant people that make movies. and they still had to give it a head and eyes and a finger. This is my issue. And it's like really, really. They're all vertebrate. 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. Okay. But they might evolve with 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.

Hello, Dr. Tyson. Sam here from Boulder, Colorado. All right. If an alien species visits our planet, it likely means they found a way to not destroy themselves. 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? My first question would be,

how did you not destroy yourselves? Yes. Right? I would ask a different question. How the hell did you get here? That's what I would ask. And 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, 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? That would be my question. And then they would immediately leave the point. Do they look like cats? Do they look like cats? They're adorable. Well, they're alien cats.

Ali had you got three heads. That'd be even worse. How about are there any questions you discovered that can't be answered no matter how advanced? I would add. So here's what I do. I'd like to see what they think their limits are. Here it is. I have a section here called alien intelligence.

And I explore what we could share with them to convince them that we have some intelligence. Oh. And don't tell them we pay $80 a shirt watch, sweating 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. No, no, no. Carl Frederick Gauss. Yes. Okay. Is that hack?

Yes. Gouthe. Brilliant top five mathematicians ever. Would you agree? Top ten. Top ten. Carl Friedrich Gauss was an astronomer as well. Yes.

He did some astronomical discoveries also. In fact, the method of least. the method of Lee Squares was invented by him to predict the position of an asteroid after it disappeared behind the sun. He took these data and said, where will it be when it comes out the other side? Well, that's not that hard, isn't it?

If no one has ever done it before, it's hard. Okay? You have to know that that was something you could do. And he figured those guys were Krauss who did that. I believe so. Okay. So he said, here's what you do. Let's go into the tundra

Where there are no trees And then bring in trees And create a huge triangle Oh 3, 4, 5? 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? Yes. Tell me. I can't remember. Okay.

A square plus B squared equals C square. Okay, these are the sides of the triangle. Remember the hypotenuse? Okay. Since A square plus B, what is A square? That's the area of a square coming off the side of the triangle. So draw a square. Draw square here.

Draw a square there. And then you can at night set at a fire. And then aliens on other planets would see this. and no, that's not random. This is people know math. And so it's a way to broadcast in a day when there was no electromagnetic broadcast.

So that's one way to show that you're intelligent. And now the prime number thing, Carl Sagan had prime numbers in the original contact novel. That's right. Where they were embedded in the signals. Two, three, five, seven.

However, that's counting on base 10. If you just have died, You could count in base 100. Just put dots. But we're presuming they count in base 10, and we don't know that. However you count them, 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. Right? They want to see what our statutes are. Exactly. Even the aliens to try to learn about us.

I think that's what you would see. And then you would see all the different variations. But I'm still going to start with science and math. Math is the language of the universe. Why are we assuming they don't have consciousness and purpose like we do? That's later. I'll figure that out later. I want to know if we have any common language at all.

And that's not going to happen by reading tort law to them. I don't know, maybe. This is the point about language, right? You guys know my oldest daughter, Hannah, is trained as a linguist as well. Right. And she is commonly. And a classicist, too. Yes, she has a classicist and a religious studies person and speaks a,

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

Time as they perceive it and experience it. But let's talk about music for a minute and ET and sort of do, do, do, that's Close and Counters of the Third Kind. I'm sorry. Get your movie straight. You're my co-host on this show. Don't confuse Close Encounters and ET. Yeah, it's all that Spielberg guy.

The theme from Close Encounters was also used as a joke. Yeah, the five musical notes. Which is based in math. Yes. It was also based, it 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. Charles, how do you know that? Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son, Ernie, because we listen to StarTalk,

every night and support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Hello, Dr. Tyson. This is Jonathan. Lot 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... Pangaea? Might we have developed more unified cultures and fewer conflicts? 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.

It might have been 86, somewhere in the mid-80s. He's president. He's addressing the UN and says, imagine how together we would be, I'm paraphrasing here, if we faced a threat, an alien threat from outer space. And our differences would dissolve because we'd come together to fight the common enemy. Or would they? See, what I would do is I would sell out a country and then I'd partner with the aliens and I would coexist like that. Who invited you on the show? So I think he's largely correct because that plays out in politics every day. 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, 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 two about? Those are white Christians

slaughtering other white Christians. If they can find reasons to do that, then all these other reasons it says you're going to come up with reasons to want to tribalize and kill. That is my absence of confidence in our species. On the other hand...

I need it on another hand here, so thank you. On the other hand, Star Trek does provide an alternative explanation for unification. It is a peaceful visit from the Vulcans in 263, April the 5th, that convinces humans who at that time were still recovering from a world war

that we should unite and just be nice to each other. Instead of uniting against the Vulcans as a common enemy, they were like, hey, let's just, clearly we're not alone anymore, let's just get along. What year was this? April 5th, 263 was first contact. That's when I check out.

That's what I'm checking in. April 5th. April 5th. Like you know the day of the... Just watch Star Trek first contact. It's right there. Well, it had to be April 5th. The Vulcans had to get their tax returns in on the 15th,

so they had to go back, their accounts were working on there. So the issue for me is you're never going to get there. Are we enlightened enough to do that? 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. Right. We see it in the animal kingdom.

So, like, it's, I don't think that that ever gets bred out of a species. We are the animal kingdom. Okay. 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 line cubs of the previous lion what world are you two guys living in that you don't see it in our day-to-day life now that there are people that are just so clearly that cohesion coexistence is not in their agenda and it's to sort of dominate it's right tribal yes but are they the majority do they hold policy making power or military power. At any given time, there's always a given take in humans, and I don't see why it wouldn't be true for aliens, too. The key there is given 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. Right. So one could imagine that after, for example, the Vulcans visit Star Trek on again, April 5th,

263. 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 more appropriate. My daughter's essay for college was about the United Federation of Planets and how they all came. Because she was active in, what do you call the UN?

Model U.N. in high school. And that all came together when she saw what happened in Star Trek. And then she imagined this future. you're inspired by the Star Trek model. Right. Then she got older and was crushed by reality. We're moving on. All right.

Keep it going. Hello, Dr. Tyson. My name is Abdul from San Diego. My question, if a non-human intelligence wanted to watch a young civilization without interfering, what would a scientifically plausible observation strategy look like? And would we even recognize it if it were already happening? This is what exactly 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 leaving Earth ever since the Hitler rallies of the 1930s. If you're approaching Earth, you're going to see our leaked radio waves first. And it will be

Hitler waves and the story contact made hay out of that. That's right. So the aliens first saw Nazis. Right? And then the early radio broadcasts, you have like howdy-duty 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'll escape.

And they saw the Kardashians and stopped watching. Early TV. Kardashians are mostly cable. That's not broadcasting. That's my point. So it's got to be. Like Beavis and Butthead is mostly contained on Earth because it's cable TV. So it's the broadcast TV.

So you have... But what about Hulu, which goes over Wi-Fi, which is Internet? They probably get that. Well, yeah, I don't... Think about that. You'd 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 that. It's like we hovering over the surface of a desk, the two-dimensional surface of a desk, and the creatures in the desk, they can't see out of the desk because they're locked in the two dimensions, and I see and know everything they're doing. So give me some four-dimensional aliens, and they'll know everything.

As long as they can get close enough without penetrating our three dimensions. Yeah, if they come into our three dimensions, we'll know. That's right. But if they stay out of it, so a four-dimensional alien has got this. But as them saying 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. We three-dimensional people see right into that box because it has no roof because a roof needs a third dimension. So the four-dimensional aliens can see inside your body.

They can see inside any 3D enclosure. so they would know everything. In order to see, though, they would have to receive some sort of electromagnetic radiation or other kinds of signals. They would need a receiver, just like we have our eyes

to be able to look on the surface of the table. That transmission has to happen. And so there is some exchange of energy or subatomic particles of some kind or another. So the detection issue is actually important to know whether or not we can see somebody, whether it's in three dimensions or in four. In that transmission, couldn't we then become

unconscious that something is detecting that 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 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. We would know.

Because it's already been admitted. Right, but the moment that they tried to interact or send some sort of a beam or a radar signal or something, then we could detect it. Okay. we should move on. Keep it going. Yeah.

Brian Rall. Hello, Dr. Tyson, Brian from San Antonio. Is it possible that the universe itself behaves like a form of intelligence with patterns, self-correcting systems rather than intelligence being something that only emerges within it? Are you serious? Okay. So, here's a 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. Okay. Yeah. Because it's limited by the speed of light. And what's the diameter of the universe now?

It's 90 billion light years. Depends on whether you count co-moving or not co-moving coordinates. Today's diameter of the universe. About 92 billion light years. So if you're an entity that size, and you have the proverbial bald head and you have an itch, you have to tell your fingernail, which is over here to scratch it,

how long is that going to take to respond? The point is, above a certain size, what we think of as active functioning, intelligence, metabolism is just not realistic. Because you're limited by actual laws of physics that apply across the universe. But then how do we distinguish between, like, a universe that actually has some form of intelligence

is the one that's just following consistent physical laws. Well, that depends on your definition of intelligence, right? If following if the physical law is intelligence, then you're Spinoza's God. That's right. Right there. Yeah, the rationalists had a different opinion compared with the existentialist,

compared with anybody else. 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... When you say the Earth itself, you mean literally the Earth itself. Like the Earth from the core out to the mental and living organism of a living organism of as a living organism. But just to back up a bit, especially on the surface, the idea was, which I thought was kind of thin and weak in its scientific foundations, but it was a nice new age thought that Earth somehow is self-regulating.

If you're self-regulating, Maybe there's some intelligence going on in there. We're self-regulating too. Yeah, we keep our body temperature. You get hot, you sweat, it cools you off. It's an automatic response. And the thing is, that's nothing that we think about. I mean, I don't think about myself getting warm and then I warm up.

My whole body does it without my conscious thought. So check this out. Meaning your body is a separate own intelligent organism separate from your mind. It's one how you use the word intelligence. There you go. But how do you know it's not necessary to have your mind for your mind for your body to be self-regulating. Because there are plenty of people who self-regulate

and have no thoughts at all. Yeah, it's a matter whether you're conscious of it or not. Your body's doing it all by itself. Yes, maybe you need the brain, but if you're not conscious of it... But the brain could be feeding it through subconscious. Sure. I'm just saying that, in either case,

I'm just trying to get us up to the understanding 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 and it'll put itself out

and self-reguling. Then, okay, then forest pick up again. And what do trees give off? Oxygen. Okay, so it's 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 want to call that intelligence? 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 a biological systems yeah all the other life forms yeah all the other life forms example let's just pick the amoeba right the little microscopic block sure right it regulates it has a little organelles inside it it gloms around a little but how do we know it doesn't have a mind not as we define the mind this is what this is the this is the larger point that I'm making. 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, does it look like a mind, but can function in a way? So how can you say that with certainty? I think that's, on that level of semantic. From a scientific perspective, we cannot prove absolutely that it has it. But we can prove, and we've shown already, that it doesn't, exhibit it. It doesn't show it and no amoeba we've ever seen has ever held up a sign saying, hey, I'm here. And I'll show you something else. I used to live in a roach infested apartment, like when I was in graduate school. I did too in law school. I did in D.C. 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 roaches 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, because it feels the air coming down and you miss it. You will never squash it in the center. Where were you in law school? I had so many of them. So, my point is, I would read up on roaches. And apparently their reaction time is they have, if what I read is correct, their legs, I'll say their feet, their legs have air sensors that

immediately triggered to the leg and don't go through the roach's brain. Are you familiar with the parasitic wasps that will actually drill a hole into the brain of a cockroach until it follows it around like a zombie? Then you bury it into a little pit and then feed the eggs and the larvae of the parasites. You are freaking me out right now. I thought it did that with worms. Oh, they do it with everything. Yeah.

There are thousands of species of parasitic wasps. That's how they survive. And they have to eat away in such a lot of. a way that the organism is still alive. So it keeps the nervous system intact. Okay, one more. Okay, hello, Dr. Tyson. I am Aekea, a regular listener from India living in San Francisco.

I wanted to know your thoughts on the dark forest theory presented as a solution to the Fermi paradox in the three-body trilogy, spoiler warnings for others. The Dark Forest Principle says that when each civilization discovers the other, there exists no solution where they do not end up attacking each other so the universe is teeming with intelligent life but they are silent to avoid being attacked that book has raised the bar for first contact theme stories for me and i cannot uh enjoy other alien movies anymore wow okay so this is she's referring to the novel which of course became the the tv series which is still they're waiting for the next season to drive absolutely yeah yeah so what do you

Take us there. I usually think of the context in which the three-body problem was originally written. The author is from mainland China, who is under a pretty repressive regime, challenges to authority are routinely smacked down, right? That is one interpretation. That's correct. The original author. So some of these themes were, I didn't read the book, I'm sorry, but I saw the series. These themes are captured in the early stories.

storytelling in the series. 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 5th, 263. 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. But this question is written in absolute. So the universe is teeming with intelligent life, but they are silent to avoid being attacked. Now, that presumes, I assume in the question, that they don't choose to be silent, but they're smacked down, as you put it. Anyone who doesn't stay silent is smacked down.

But one civilization sort of dominates, is dominant over another? Why is that? How do we reach that conclusion? Who smacks down the dominant civilization? Why doesn't it just keep smacking everybody else down? Without overly, right, without overly spoiling the situation,

what basically happens is that other species observe more powerful species smacking down. other species. And it becomes learned behavior? Because they've learned that as soon as a spacecraft comes up from some civilization or some species, some other species shows up and wipes them out. And so if you've learned and you've seen that, you go, oh, we're not going to reveal our presence.

Or you take a preemptive strike. Or you take a preemptive strike. So someone is playing whack-a-mole on anybody who rises up. And you become the one that smacks anybody else down. But then ultimately, that person with the mac, who's who can't. controlling whackamol inevitably. They, in principle could take over everybody. But that's all in sort of our language, our culture,

in movies, in TV, and in books, there is a presumption, right? Because then the story peters out because there's nowhere to go. So that person that's dominant ultimately has to be taken down. But we don't know if that's true. By someone who's more dominant. By some of that's more dominant. But we don't know if that's true. So I think the takeaway.

The three of us, okay, and I'm the dominant one, you guys aren't taking me out because I got a pocket protector. And you ain't kicking my ass. Period. I would never try, Paul. Oh, see, the way you said that, that means you could kill me with two fingers. You gave me that deadly look. With the heart explosion of exploding heart.

I think the takeaway here is, if the dark forest hypothesis is accurate, nothing prevents the galaxy from being teeming with life, yet no one knowing anything about it for those reasons given. Right. Knowing anything about each other, let's put it down. 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. Another one is interstellar space is just really hard to travel. Okay? Another one is intelligent life as we think of it is rarer than we ever imagined and we could be unique in the galaxy, even if the galaxy is teeming with life.

Someone wrote a book with 75 explanations to account for the Fermi paradox and no one haven't visited yet. Wow. So where are they? Can be answered 75 different ways? At least 75. My favorite answer, let's call it 76, is from our country. colleague, Steven Soder. Ah.

Works up here in the sixth floor. I'm on the fifth floor of the Hayden Planetarium. He's on the sixth floor. Okay. He emailed this out. Steve Soda co-wrote the original cosmos with Carl Sagan and the first of the two cosmoses that I host. Brilliant guy knows everything about everything. Okay.

He offered an hypothesis. You know what it is? It's, hmm, if you're a species and you want to colonize the galaxy, you'll set up a Mayflower-style colony. They'll go find a planet. They'll build a rocket factory and send two rockets out, and they'll build a rocket factory, so go from one to two to four to eight to 16.

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

Okay. 37 of those is well within the lifetime of the galaxy. Okay, so in the context of discussion about aliens, where does that take? I'm getting you there. Okay, so what Steve Soder asked was, if you want to colonize planets that badly, and it's deep within you, then it is self-limiting because you start running out of planets.

not because you run out of knowledge, science, to engineer. We're running out of planets. And then I'm saying, I want that planet. But you already have that planet. There we go. Now we've got the civilization. Oh, yes, there we go, okay. You already have that planet.

Or the other place is too far away. And you come and I'm like, bring it. Bring it. I know you wrestled in high school and college, but you ain't that wrestling now, Tyson. Bring it. So what he's suggesting is, If you're that hungry for planets, that works at the beginning, but as that continues, you end up fighting each other over the more and more limited real estate.

And the entire operation collapses under its own greed. Okay. And we can say... But isn't that going west and what the Native Americans experience? No, this is... Forget the whole world experienced this. when you had your big colonizing powers, what was England and France and Portugal and Spain and the Netherlands.

And that's just Europe. And then you had the Japanese Empire and the Ottoman Empire. And everybody's carving up the world. That works until you want a piece of land that the other colonists already has. And then they fight each other. Yeah, that's called Russia and Ukraine. Yes, yes. It's Spain and Portugal.

It's England and France. How long did England and France fight each other? A hundred years. 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. So this is inevitable.

And the whole system imploded. There's not really any colonization going on anymore. No. There's just one problem with that high colonization. What's that? That's right. Decolonizing. If a decolonization catastrophe happened like that, we should see the results by now.

We are. It's been happening slowly over time. This woman is from India. This is the perfect appropriate. India was the underdominant of the Brits. Let's say in the alien civilization mentality, okay? We imagine the Milky Way galaxy and there was a British-style colonial situation going on and there was an Indian-style place happening. If that happened at any reasonable time,

we would have seen the results of them destroying each other. We would have seen a war. We would have seen flashes of this and that. We would have seen these things. We would have seen these things. Maybe we're not sophisticated enough to see it. In that case, we should watch and wait, and maybe we will. That hypothesis is one that can be tested through observation.

If we ever see the remnants of a civilization or of a society or a whole bunch of aliens that caused that problem, then we will know it happened. 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. 80 bucks? There's money right there.

There you're talking about. All right. No, the octagon. I'd like the octagon. As long as it has probes sticking out from the side. There you go. I think we got to, we got an end up there.

This is, this is like, this is an endlessly. I'm feeling a cosmic perspective, though. This is an end. You give me a con, I'm feeling one. Yeah, absolutely. Feeling one.

Some of the most successful stories that involve aliens, involve aliens that want to harm us, that want to skin us, alive, that want to eat us, that want to destroy civilization, that want to get rid of everything we care about and value. And I had to ask myself, where does that come from? Why are we thinking this? It's a 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. It has never boated 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 Cosmic Queries. Charles, always good to have you. Thank you so much.

And we'll look for your quantum physics book. Thank you so much. And you're on stage. Yeah. Turn the country, Paul McCurio.com. So that website has all your appearances. It's coming out for my stand-up show and my off-Broadway show permission to speak.

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