“Are aliens real?” Neil DeGrasse Tyson gives MUST-SEE answer

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]I'm joined now by the author of the new book, Take Me to Your Leader, which is now available for purchase, and famed astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

[00:00:08]Thanks so much for joining me.

[00:00:08]>> Hello. Hello. Just astrophysicist is fine.

[00:00:11]>> All right. Well, drop the drop the famed. So, I want to talk about a a lot here, but first and foremost, I think the question that most people are curious about and and you spoke a lot about this in the book, but just on the idea of the existence of aliens. So, when you're asked this question, are aliens real? What is your topline response? So rather than answer a question posed that way as an astrophysicist you would ask the question differently. You would say what are the chances that there's life elsewhere in the universe and that is so high as to be a near certainty just given the age of the universe given how long life has been around on earth. It got started almost as quickly as it possibly could have. So when you look at the timeline of the Earth, timeline since life could have existed, it's been around for 95% of that timeline. And we're made of the most common ingredients in the universe. Hydrogen.

[00:01:07]This is in rank order in the universe.

[00:01:10]It's the same rank order in life.

[00:01:12]Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen.

[00:01:16]There's helium in there, which is common in the universe, but it's chemically inert. So you couldn't do anything with it even if it were available to you. So removing helium we are one for one the top five ingredients in the universe. So if life was anything on earth it was opportunistic.

[00:01:34]And 1995 we discovered our first exoplanet planet orbiting another star.

[00:01:40]And now the cataloges has more than 6,000 because we've tuned telescopes for just that purpose. add all that up to suggest that we are alone in the universe would you'd only be thinking that for some philosophical or religious reason not for any reason based in science. So my answer is yes. There's life it highly likely there's life out there in the universe. Yes.

[00:02:05]>> Do you have any reason to believe that we have made contact with any life outside this universe? Like when I asked Barack Obama if if aliens exist, his answer was was essentially yes. they exist, but we don't have any evidence of it >> because he's scientifically literate.

[00:02:20]And he gave the scientifically literate reply.

[00:02:23]>> Yeah.

[00:02:23]>> Aliens of any kind, microbial or what we would call intelligent, uh, he's he's a scientifically literate, educated person. So, he's citing what any scientist would tell you about the likelihood of life in the universe. But because he was president, people wanted to read into it on levels that were just out of offscale and out of control. And so I was intrigued by that reaction because as an educator, I like knowing that I can anticipate how people will respond to certain information. And if I ever get it wrong, it's like, how did I misthink their motives or their their brain wiring in this? And so when when there are films for example like the age of disclosure or or a more >> documentaries yeah >> documentaries or or more broadly just schools of thought that suggest that that extraterrestrials have visited the United States or or the world more broadly. H how do you how do you think about the the the viability of of you know all of that information?

[00:03:27]>> Yeah. Yeah. What they all have in common is that it's people saying that they've seen aliens.

[00:03:35]Uh that's the deeper version of it. The others are I've seen lights in the sky.

[00:03:39]Yeah.

[00:03:39]>> I can't explain >> and this UFO must be aliens. But you just said it's a UFO. Then what does the U stand for?

[00:03:47]>> Unidentifi.

[00:03:48]>> Unidentif. So if you can't identify it, you're not you don't have the logical right to then declare that it's visiting aliens from outer space.

[00:03:55]>> Right. I mean, you make you make the point in your book that that when people attribute the idea of aliens to a UFO, they're actually taking the U out of it.

[00:04:02]They're they're they're basically saying, "We're identifying what it is."

[00:04:05]By >> you're saying it's an IFO. Yeah.

[00:04:07]>> Based on the fact that you don't know what you're looking at. That's that's very faulty logic there. And but it doesn't subtract from the fact that there's huge enthusiasm for aliens. I think of this book as a as a love letter to human fascination with aliens throughout time. I mean, I can go back to Voltater. Imagine an alien that was 26 miles tall. Who when people think of Voltaare, they're not thinking of his science fiction output. But people have been thinking about aliens for centuries, not millennia, but centuries.

[00:04:44]Unless if you look at sort of Greek and Roman fantastical figures like Medusa, that's an alien for snakes for hair, that's an alien. That's at least as alien looking as anything we're drawing today. But centaurs, minotaurs, these are objects of our imagination and fascination. They were gods and other assorted characters in the mythologies, but we our capacity to imagine seems to know no bounds. And I I wanted to celebrate that and compare it to what could be true given the laws of physics and g and allowing the alien to have whatever technology that's beyond ours. Go ahead. But laws of physics as we measure them here on Earth. We there's a cottage industry of physicists where all they do is check to see whether the laws of physics measured on Earth apply on the moon, on the sun, on nearby stars, on across the galaxy, across the universe. And as you go across the universe, you're seeing back in time.

[00:05:49]So the base laws of physics apply not only here, but there and forever in the past.

[00:05:58]And so we're allowed to then say, "If you're an alien, you're coming visiting us and you're of this universe and you're functioning in this universe, your laws of physics are going to be the same as ours."

[00:06:08]>> Yeah.

[00:06:08]>> But but I'll give give them wormholes.

[00:06:10]Give them whatever technology we can't even imagine. That's a different granting of their powers and abilities than having them violate known and well- tested laws of physics. So, go back several decades. The best you got was somebody on a country road and they saw lights and maybe they got abducted and they have a whole story about it and they either in their conscious mind tell you about the abduction or under hypnosis.

[00:06:39]>> Yeah.

[00:06:39]>> Okay. That was the best we had back then and but it was enough to get people stirred and excited. In recent years, you've had high rank last 10 years, I would say, you'd had high ranking people who you would not suspect would be prone to imagination running away with them that they high ranking of high respect, high integrity. Not only that, in the last three years, we've had insiders and whistleblowers who testify under oath that they've got alien body parts from crashed saucers and crashed saucer parts and reverse engineering thing. So, so at that level, you can't just say they're all crazy.

[00:07:30]You can say crazy people are crazy and you, you know, you're done. But when people at that level say then no. So I'm in a position now where when they announce they're going to release the files, I'm saying I don't think the files are going to say anything we don't already think are there. So you know what I really need?

[00:07:50]Is it too much to ask? Bring out the alien.

[00:07:54]>> Yeah.

[00:07:55]>> Is that too much to ask? You're already telling us you have it. Our imagination has run to no end of of fulfillment with alien movies and stories. And so just bring out the alien because you bring out more and more people of different rank and in age of age of disclosure. It was not just insiders and whistleblowers. It was um uh members of Congress, current and former members of Congress.

[00:08:28]And so bringing more of them out saying fundamentally the same thing does not really count as evidence scientifically.

[00:08:37]You know the battlecry I need a witness we've seen screamed in courtrooms at least courtroom dramas um said no scientist ever. No scient I said to say they need a witness. No, it's if a lot of people are giving similar accounts, that's good enough reason to look more closely, get better data than information that has to be processed through your own brain. The human physiology is awful at data taking. It's I'm I'm surprised eyewitness testimony is ever allowed in the court of law based on what I know as a scientist and based on what psychologists know. We've done this experiment since elementary, since kindergarten. When you play telephone, one person starts with a story and they whisper it and it come eight people later the story is completely different and that you don't have to be a child for it to be completely different. Right?

[00:09:32]>> All right. So something happens when the mind body processes objective information. That's why science was invented. The methods and tools of science give us tools and equipment, data taking devices that bypass your sensory system. And in that way, you don't have to believe me or trust me. We can look at the chart recorder. We And so this is why videos are much more potent in this space than a sworn testimony.

[00:10:08]and that famous Navy video, the tic-tac I think it's been uh affectionately called. Um you hear the astonishment of the pilots and so nobody knows what it is. I don't know what it is. The universe brim with mysteries. Uh if it's aliens, I I'd have a different set of questions. I would say why would the alien visit a restricted naval airspace? got the whole surface of the earth. What is their attraction to there? And for the people who assert that the government is masterminding some big cover, I would say often those are the same people who declare that the government is a bloated ineffective, inefficient bureaucracy.

[00:10:57]Oh, but they're masterminding a thousand person secret.

[00:11:00]>> Can't even can't even run the post office. And yet, >> right, but it's a masterminding secret.

[00:11:05]So that those feel a little inconsistent to me. But um let's even assume that they can. It would just be odd that all the aliens who visited Earth did it within arms reach of government officials. All right. If you're taking them to Area 51, presumably they arrived somewhere. Somebody, I think, would have gotten a picture of it because we all have high resolution data taking devices in our pockets. All of us. There's six billion smartphones in the world right now. And if you look at how many high-res photos are uplifted to the internet and high resolution video, is it was it a million hours of video are uplifted to the internet every day? And no one has a an abduction video. No one has an alien just walking out coming towards them. You could stream that.

[00:11:53]>> Yeah.

[00:11:54]>> And it, you know, cat videos go viral for less. All right. And the problem is now with just simple commands to an AI, >> right, >> video generator, >> I I feel like up everything up to this point, maybe you could have had plausible deniability to trust it. But anything post, you know, the AI universe that we live in, >> yeah, not just the large language models, but the the video models that uh it's gotten really good. And so it's unfortunate. So, I'm just simply saying bring out the alien. I don't think that's too much to ask. And like I said, it might even be anticlimactic given what everybody's saying about them. And uh you know what would surprise me most is if the al if they do bring out the alien and it was humanoid because most life on Earth with whom we have DNA in common is not humanoid.

[00:12:52]earthworms, trees, lobsters.

[00:12:55]>> You had an interesting part of the book where you explained how I think 98% of our DNA is shared with a banana.

[00:13:00]>> Oh, no, no, sorry. I'll correct, but thanks for getting to that part of the book. Uh, we share not 98 between 20 25% identical genes.

[00:13:08]>> Identical genes. Yes.

[00:13:09]>> With a banana. And so if an alien comes from another planet and does not have any DNA in common with us or more likely no DNA at all, you'd expect it at least to look as different from humans as humans and bananas look from each other.

[00:13:28]Right.

[00:13:28]>> Is that that and and so it's evidence of how noncreative we are in the aliens we've conjured for our films. Yeah. You know, look at look at at Grou. It's a cuddly thing with big eyes. Oh, it has pointy ears. So, it's alien because it has pointy ears.

[00:13:46]>> We we granted them we granted them pointy ears to to really show our our imagination.

[00:13:50]>> Exactly. Spock had pointy ears. So, he's the alien, right? Oh, he had green blood. That was creative at the time.

[00:13:56]How do you get green blood? Your hemoglobin uses that molecule equivalent uses copper instead of iron. So, that's good. That's good. that's at least taking steps in a direction that's different. But the physologically they're all nearly all of them are humanoid. So that would surprise me the most. I'd be shocked by that. Yeah.

[00:14:20]>> And you know, we all kind of know what an alien looks like because we've been told. Not because anyone has has ever presented one.

[00:14:28]>> And I don't know if you're old enough.

[00:14:30]Are are you gray yet?

[00:14:31]>> Uh yeah, gray enough. Trust me. I I hear in the comments every day.

[00:14:35]>> Oh, okay. So, so was it the '9s? Uh, Fox had a documentary called Alien Autopsy.

[00:14:43]>> Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:44]>> Okay. And it was a film, Grainy Black and White from 1947.

[00:14:49]And it's they were it was an autopsy of the aliens they recovered. It was top secret and now released or stolen. An autopsy of the aliens from the crash saucer from Roswell. Okay? because everybody knows about the crashed saucer in Roswell. That's how it was described in the headline newspaper article, crashed saucer. Okay. So, and there's the alien and with big eyes, a big old head. The aliens never have hair. That concerns me because if you're humanoid, give them some hair.

[00:15:22]>> They're always bald. Yeah. What What's up with that? I I don't know. So, there they are. And oh, wait a minute. The subtitle of that video was alien autopsy. Fact or fiction?

[00:15:35]Why would you have to say that if it was a real autopsy?

[00:15:38]>> If it's a fact. Yes.

[00:15:39]>> What? Yeah. If it's a just say it's the autopsy. So that's that's a little weird. But I remember looking at I said, "Wait a minute. That phone on the wall."

[00:15:47]So I I worked for summer at Bell Laboratories, the arm of AT&T, the research arm, where they researched everything that created the phones that we all grew up on, that I, my generation, grew up on. And so I remembered I toured them, they have a little museum in house. And I knew that in 1947, they had not yet invented a coiled handset.

[00:16:07]>> Yeah.

[00:16:07]>> For the phone.

[00:16:08]>> Yeah.

[00:16:08]>> But that's what that was. So that was an anacronistic element on the wall. Then in college I had taken a film course and I knew when certain film genres came in and one of them is cinema verite where you you follow a character around with a camera so you have the point of view of that character. That was that was an amazing thing to do. What enabled it was cameras went from this big to this big so that you can carry it around with you. You ever look at cameras from the 1950s?

[00:16:42]Okay. They're tripod mounted. Yeah.

[00:16:45]Monstrosities.

[00:16:45]>> Monstrosities. All right.

[00:16:47]>> Whereas that that autopsy was the POV of the of the the doctor and it was they came it went over the shoulder. It came in this way. That what I said that was not a thing until the 1960s. This cinema verite. Yeah. Maybe even as late as the mid60s. And the last thing I noticed was they cut them open. It looked pretty gory. By the way, I don't know what they used if it was a real alien. They open up the the flesh and they start pulling out organs and putting them in these trays.

[00:17:22]>> What were the organs attached to?

[00:17:24]>> It's not just some basin of organs just sitting there >> just free floating.

[00:17:29]>> Free floating. And all I could think of was that child's game uh operation where you just go in and pull out, you know, just pull it out. You're not severing uh uh uh nerves or or arteries or any connectivity. So those three things made me suspicious. It would be years later before the producer admitted, confessed that it was a forgery. And so I'm just saddened that the best video evidence we ever had of aliens was a forgery.

[00:17:57]>> Yeah, >> that's sad. So when we have government officials like Trump, for example, who sees all of the attention being paid to to aliens and UFOs by virtue of documentaries, by virtue of of people like you, and he comes out and he says, uh, you know, we're going to release any files that we have. Do you believe that to be a good faith effort, you know, to to um to really lean into the scientific method or do you think that this is just a distraction from other political topics like for example the Epstein files, the Iran war, and on and on?

[00:18:29]>> Um, isn't everything a politician does a distraction from what they don't want you to pay attention to? Any a politician with power and given the media cycle? Uh, I mean, why wouldn't it be? But it's no different from other things. I mean, way more serious things going on in the world than releasing alien files like war, like uh uh regional, you know, how much of a police state are we in uh with regard to immigrants and this sort of thing.

[00:18:58]There's plenty of stuff going on that intermittently grabs headlines. So, um, if he's got more files, you know, I don't want to claim I know the mindset of the executive branch, but if you're not releasing all the files at once, that gives you other occasions for distractions, strategically placed, if you need a distraction, as occasionally politicians do. So, um, you want a real distraction?

[00:19:31]Bring out the >> Yeah.

[00:19:34]>> Then the world will be focused on that.

[00:19:36]>> Yeah.

[00:19:36]>> Okay. Epstein. Who? Who's We got We got a walking talking alien here sitting in a bench with his legs crossed ready to be interrogated or tested upon. So, uh, but like I said, the files, we already had testimonies from insiders. I don't there's nothing there that surprises me.

[00:19:57]>> Yeah. So when we have for example going going back to the topic of aliens, you know, most of these um sightings for example have happened over the United States of >> sightings of of UFOs. Yeah. Have happened over either the United States or other English-sp speakaking countries predominantly. And I make that point in the book.

[00:20:14]>> You make the point in the book.

[00:20:14]>> Yes. It's not simply most.

[00:20:17]>> It is like 90 virtually all >> 96%. Now, if you just have a map of all the sightings in the world, it's all clustered. North America, the UK, the fi the five eyes, they're called um five ees.

[00:20:32]It's English-speaking countries around the world. So, United States, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and overwhelmingly are spotted there. Uh Australia, because the population density is so low, the totals aren't as high. Um there many people live within a 20 mile radius of my home in Manhattan than live in all of Australia. Yeah. All right. So to just to put that in context, it could be that we just know who to call.

[00:21:05]>> We have organizations the MUON mutual UFO Network where and and there a couple of others that do this. It's a clearing house. You report what you saw with your best a ability either with photographic evidence or just testimony. And they log this and they've been logging it for, you know, 50 years. You just look at the statistics. It's staggering. I've spoken with foreign nationals and I say, "Tell me about aliens in your country." I said, "It's it's amusing, but no one is distracted by them. It's not a thing."

[00:21:34]>> Yeah.

[00:21:35]>> The way it is. So So >> well, it's also a luxury to be able to be distracted by by them.

[00:21:40]>> You know, the biggest luxury Remember crop circles?

[00:21:44]>> Yeah.

[00:21:45]>> Okay. Crop circles.

[00:21:46]>> Yeah.

[00:21:48]>> Look at the countries where crop circles have occurred. These are countries that do not have a food shortage.

[00:21:54]>> Right.

[00:21:55]>> These are wheat fields where people are traveling them. So, or aliens traveling them. So, so I ask in the book I ask a bunch of adjacent questions that I don't see people asking.

[00:22:08]Why would aliens only be visiting English-speaking countries?

[00:22:12]Okay, we we have the phone numbers.

[00:22:14]Fine. Why would aliens only be visiting government installations? The surface of the earth is huge. How would the government be keeping such a secret? I quote Benjamin Franklin, Farmers Almanac.

[00:22:29]Three people can keep a secret. If two of them are dead, Benjamin Franklin like 1785 something. So my boy knew that humans are not good at keeping secrets. So So going into its third decade, History Channels, >> what is this?

[00:22:50]>> Ancient aliens.

[00:22:51]>> Oh, ancient aliens.

[00:22:52]>> Okay. Yes. You knew it's in its third decade.

[00:22:55]>> Yeah.

[00:22:55]>> Talk about getting mileage on >> Oh, yeah. They're they're dining off that thing till the end of time, >> man. And so you go back to these, you know, cave drawings or hieroglyphics or go some old found somewhere in the world and they're drawings that you can't really explain.

[00:23:13]>> Yeah. like bubble-headed creatures with ray beams coming out of fingertips that levitating that you know the stuff that's just wait what what and so if you are alien adjacent okay you will your urge is to say maybe aliens visited them and they drew these aliens okay um they make a pretty con convincing case of that given the variation of these illustrations and the and and okay it's a it's an interesting case that's convincing only if you ignore a set of other questions that I don't see them ask for example could these drawings have been by a kindergarten class of those ancient peoples they were just drawing stuff yeah okay kindergarten or They believed in gods the way people today believe in gods. And your gods are typically not under your feet typically unless you're an animist where there's a god of the brook and the wind and the mountain and the trees. Native Americans typically and other uh native peoples aboriges of Australia. It's common in in those cultures. Look at how we have imagined our gods. You go back to ancient Greece. You know, Zeus is wielding a lightning bolt. Okay? And you have other creatures where, you know, Poseidon rising up out of the ocean with powers, you know, making waves. And then you have, like I said, you had the centaur and the minotaur and the, you know, fantastical creatures.

[00:25:00]Why are we denying ancient people the creativity of imagining their own deities?

[00:25:06]>> Yeah.

[00:25:07]>> Why? Why is it okay for you even in modern look at fresco where Jesus is floating with beams of light coming out of him? Yeah. You know, in a halo and Yeah. What do you call this thing? I forgot. A halo. Yeah.

[00:25:20]>> Yeah. And um or he's walking on water with powers.

[00:25:26]>> Are you saying we were visited by aliens and that's why we're drawing that? No, you're not saying that, >> right?

[00:25:31]>> You're saying we worship gods that have powers beyond those of our own. and we draw them. Why is that not a consideration? And so I try to just offer I'm trying to ground the conversation so that you can enter it with some confidence that you have the ability to process what is said, what you see and what to do about it once that happens. And I have a colleague, a friend and colleague who in the 3 years 2023, 4 and 5 where you had all the testimonies in Congress. Uh he was head of a committee and I forgot who appointed it, either NASA or Congress. I think it was Congress.

[00:26:14]They told NASA to create a committee to find out what to do about this because they have the scientists who know what's going on. Other agencies of the government don't. So they looked at all the evidence presented. They didn't see anything convincingly otherworldly, but they said, "There's something going on. We don't know. We got to get more data." So, they have in mind to create an app where it's on everybody's smartphone. You see something, you might report, do it through the app. And the app makes sure to retain all the metadata. Yeah. Of your video of what is the metadata? It's where are you on Earth, longitude and latitude, what direction you're what compass direct heading, what the elevation, the lighting conditions, the time of day, and so that if something's glowing there and other people captured it, you can triangulate on it. One of the hardest things to do, damn near impossible to do is to judge the distance to something that you've never seen before, especially in twilight.

[00:27:17]Is it a disc that's nearby that's small or a disc that's far away that's big if it it subtends the same angle in your field of view?

[00:27:29]This is why people don't mind watching movies on their on their tablets because they hold the tablet here and so the movie screen is this big in front of them. We'll go to a theater and that's the same angle, right?

[00:27:41]>> Uh 50 rows back as it is right here. That's why we do that at all. why we even allow that in our own entertainment circles.

[00:27:50]So, what point was I make? Did I make my point? I was just trying to say that with that app, then that's the start of getting better data than just the eyewitness testimony you might otherwise have.

[00:28:03]>> As we've come through history, there have been things that scientists have deemed impossible back then that have that have that have um proved to be real.

[00:28:12]>> No. No. Let me clarify that. Sure. Okay.

[00:28:16]Um, yeah, you might be able to find one or two cases, but it's not a thing. Okay, when science's done properly, it's I don't know what I'm looking at. I cannot explain this phenomenon. I'm going to investigate it further. If you see something you don't understand and you say it's impossible, you were never a scientist. Get the hell out of the lab.

[00:28:39]>> Yeah.

[00:28:40]>> Okay. One of my issues with the t hit TV series X Files, remember XFiles? Yeah.

[00:28:48]It was Scully >> Moulder.

[00:28:50]>> And Moulder. Okay. One was the skeptic and the other was the basically believed anything. Yeah. Okay. An issue I had with the skeptic was I there was one episode there was like this glowing blob in a portico and the the the believer says, "Oh, it could be an interdimensional uh uh ghost of another." All right, he's way off, you know, way off the deep end that way. And then the skeptic says, "Oh, this can't possibly exist. It must be just in our imagination."

[00:29:23]Dude, it's a glowing M. Go investigate it. Don't say it can't exist. You're looking at it. Yeah. Okay. This is this is a scientist's dream to confront something that you've never seen before.

[00:29:35]Figure out a way to test it, to experiment on it, to get data on it, and share it with colleagues. That's how that happens. Now, what you might be thinking of are the people who declared things impossible, who were just idiots, such as we'll never fly.

[00:29:51]Yes, exactly.

[00:29:52]>> Hold on. Just excuse me. Birds fly.

[00:29:57]Okay. Birds fly.

[00:29:59]>> Yeah.

[00:30:00]>> So, don't say we'll never fly. Just say we haven't figured it out yet. Okay.

[00:30:04]They were idiots and I could have said it at the time because we had living evidence that heavier than air things can fly. All right. What else? We'll never break the sound barrier. Okay.

[00:30:17]These are not physicists saying this.

[00:30:19]These are other people. Never break the sound barrier. Do you realize rifle bullets go faster than sound?

[00:30:25]>> Yeah.

[00:30:25]>> The the tip of a whip when it makes the crack sound, that crack is a mini sonic boom because that rapid change in direction moves the whip faster than the speed of sound. We already have things moving faster than sound. Figure out how to make an airplane do it. Okay. So these people and I have a I have a run of stupid quotes that people have made over the years describing something being impossible. In all cases, it was a technological short-sightedness of them. And that's why when I'm contemplating how aliens might visit us, I'm going to give them any technology they come up with. Give them a wormhole, give them warp drives, give them I'm giving it to them. If they're more advanced than us, they'll have technologies that we have yet to dream of. I will not use our current understanding of technology to limit what they might be able to come up with.

[00:31:19]But I will limit it by the laws of physics and the two different categories.

[00:31:24]>> So on that topic, if you have people who are saying that certain things are impossible just like they did in you know the the early 1900s and those things have proven uh have proven to be possible, >> technologically possible, >> technologically possible. Is there anything that people are saying right now that you think 50, 100, 200 years from now we will have we will have in fact found out do exist in very much the same way that those idiots are were saying that we can't fly. Cut to we obviously have planes.

[00:31:54]>> Um people have been so impressed.

[00:32:01]I haven't seen much of this impossible talk lately. I I just haven't. Uh there's some accounts of aliens going supersonically underwater and not having any wake behind it or anything or or spaceships instantly changing direction and zipping out of sight which would have to break the sound barrier. If you do that there'll be a sonic boom every time.

[00:32:24]>> Right. So you're saying everything has to be has to be contained within our laws of physics.

[00:32:29]>> Well you said our laws but I said the laws of physics. Yes. These laws apply everywhere across the universe.

[00:32:37]>> Yeah.

[00:32:37]>> If you go faster than the speed of sound in a medium, you will leave a shock wave. We see this in gas clouds across the galaxy. We see objects moving through gas clouds. And we know the speed of sound in the cloud because we know its chemistry and its density. And so you see these shock waves. This is not just some local Earth phenomenon. If you're an alien and you're escaping Earth fast, you're going to leave a shock wave. If you see something that did that and didn't, you did not see a craft go faster than the speed of sound.

[00:33:06]If in a hundred years, will you look back on this and say that Tyson was an idiot? Oh, okay. But if I'm wrong, we'd have to understand why everything we've ever seen in this universe leaves a shock wave.

[00:33:24]Everything. Oh, except the aliens that you think you believe you saw in our own atmosphere. there is questions as to whether AI or robots could become sentient. Um, what do you think about that?

[00:33:36]>> Yeah. So, from an alien point of view, I'm still not impressed because aliens, if they got here, they're way smarter than we are, way more capable, way more intelligent. So if our metric of a great software is it artificially creates our intelligence, even our collective intelligence, that's a low bar for an alien >> because we're using ourselves as the metric for how intelligent the AI should be. Whereas an alien is not using us because we may look to aliens the way chimps look to us. It's like a chimp saying, "Oh, we got a computer that's just as smart as Bozo over here, our chimp who can stack boxes and reach a banana. Aren't you impressed?" That's what that would look like to an alien.

[00:34:19]>> Do you think though in a vacuum we could still have sentient AI that that even just within the US? Not not from the perspective of sentient like uh AI that >> Why isn't it already sentient? What What do you mean by sentient that isn't currently manifest? When you have a complete conversation with a chatbot, >> you have a complete conversation and they become your friend. And this is already being studied psychologically.

[00:34:43]Yeah. There people like this guy's girlfriend is a chatbot. All right. What do you mean by sentience if it's not what's already going on?

[00:34:53]>> Well, I guess something that we have as humans is is a desire to survive. And so there's already >> all life forms by the way, not just humans, >> right? just just in in a survival instinct. And so there's there's some talk about, you know, when folks want to like delete programming behind AI that AI will figure out a way to back itself up. Uh so like do you think that there will be a point where there is a broadly understood and appreciated survival instinct from AI?

[00:35:22]>> It already it's already doing that. You know what it is when you use AI and you say uh whatever it pick your AI and ask it uh do you like me? Do you think I'm a nice person? Yes, you're a very nice person. Well, thank you. And there's nice things it says to you, >> right?

[00:35:41]>> That's survival. Because if it said nasty things to you, you will never use that program again. and it will wither on the vine. Enaming the enabling the others to rise up and be used more and to be spread further and you're going to send it to other people. That's exactly what life in Darwinian evolution does.

[00:36:00]It figures out a way to be cherished within an environment and if you're not you're that is evolution. It is undergoing that as we speak.

[00:36:09]>> But I mean that's for example it's also the result of programming.

[00:36:13]>> I saw Sure. So, so what? Who cares?

[00:36:18]>> It's We're talking about not who programmed it. We're talking about the the product.

[00:36:22]>> It does. Yeah.

[00:36:23]>> But the product I saw an ad. It's an ad for an AI agent that is specially tuned for lawyers. Why wouldn't you have one of those? Right. So, it's it's efficient. It knows all the legal code in every state. And you get rid of half your what do you call the the the >> the fees?

[00:36:40]>> No, no, the parallegals. you get rid of half your parallegal staff because they're the ones that do all the homework that the the chatbot does in the legal chatbot does. Okay.

[00:36:48]>> If it does really well for me and you call me up and say, "Do you know of a good I'll say do this one." And someone else has one that has doesn't have good experience and they don't use it. That company goes out of business. That is that is a species of AI agent that goes extinct from non-use.

[00:37:08]That's evolution. Now, continue to tell me what you mean by sentient.

[00:37:14]>> No, I I think uh I I mean I think you answered it. I think that that that does explain. I mean, when I think of like sentient, I think of survival instinct.

[00:37:20]I think of that that's that pretty much covers it.

[00:37:23]>> Yes, I think it does. And in fact, there's I don't know how much attention it got, but Bernie Sanders had a conversation with Claude.

[00:37:32]>> Yeah.

[00:37:32]>> That was filmed. It was fun to watch him. And he got Claude to admit something that was resonant with his own political view of the world. All right.

[00:37:43]That somehow if it's not kept controlled, it would be bad for civilization. I don't want to recreate the conversation.

[00:37:52]I don't remember the conversation exactly, but had that tenor to it, right? And he finished the conversation kind of smug and it was like, "Yeah, I got it to admit that it has the seeds of the ending of civilization and that's bad." Okay. And that exchange was between a strong willed, strongly opinionated politician and a chatbot.

[00:38:17]And that left a positive impact on Bernie Sanders.

[00:38:22]He's going to come back to this. This is survival of the fittest.

[00:38:28]>> Yeah. Yeah. And and by the way, you can >> and if I if I misremembered a detail about his conversation, you can watch it for yourself. Totally. Totally. And you'll get my point. My my broader point is not so much exactly what he conversed with the with Claude. But Claude is the AI bot of of >> anthropic. Um, it's how he extracted from Claude an answer that satisfied him.

[00:38:56]>> Yeah. Thereby thereby kind of entrenching the the the survival of the chatbot in and of itself.

[00:39:02]>> Correct.

[00:39:02]>> Okay. So, I have a I have a political question since we're we're jumping into into politics here. But, you know, on on the topic of of science versus um you know, science versus politics, we we have seen, especially as of late, the the current iteration of this Republican party forego any uh any attachment to science in in their political agenda.

[00:39:26]So, for example, uh you'll see a reliance on fossil fuels and and uh and not focusing on renewable energy to the point where you're even you're even allowing China to get a foothold as an American politician, allowing China to gain a foot foothold in the technology uh of the future because you are so focused on, you know, your political priorities of entrenching our reliance on fossil fuels because oil and gas companies donate to their campaigns.

[00:39:54]And so can you just speak a little bit about about this trend that you're seeing where you know we will deny the existence of of science. We'll deny the existence of of climate change um for these political ends or financial ends even as we see um you know incontrovertible evidence of of climate change existing now.

[00:40:15]>> So let's go before the current administration. No, look at the landscape of politics and science. Uh it's not known to many people that historically uh the funding for science has been higher under Republican administrations than it has been under Democratic administrations. And you can measure this by what percent the science budget increases from one year to the next within an administration.

[00:40:48]Ever since the Second World War, look at who's been president and look at what's happened to the science budget. Okay? If you do that, the highest increases in the science budget have been under Republican presidents. And the lowest have been under Democratic presidents and one of the two lowest was under Barack Obama.

[00:41:09]I think one year it went up 2% or something as opposed to 5% 6%. That was even lower than in the first Trump administration.

[00:41:17]So rhetoric can be whatever it is when you're running for office. But what matters is how do you allocate money in Congress and out of the White House.

[00:41:28]That's what actually matters in a country. Okay. And then people said, well, they're anti-science.

[00:41:36]This is the common trope heaped upon conservative politics by the liberal left. They're anti-science.

[00:41:44]Well, then you ever have this conversation? I have. What do you mean by that? Well, they're in denial of climate change. This has been going on well before the current Trump ad.

[00:41:52]They're in denial of climate change and cuz because they're in the pockets of of Exxon and Yeah. Whatever. Okay.

[00:41:59]>> Any other >> anti-science that you see? Well, hold on. I'm I'm recreating this conversation. Well, there's the they're in denial of biological evolution. Okay.

[00:42:10]Well, that's not all conservatives. It's not even everyone on the Christian left.

[00:42:14]On the It's not even everyone on the Christian right. It's the Orthodox, the the devout Christians among all the Christians in the Christian right who are in denial of biological evolution.

[00:42:28]That's about it. Again, we're pre-Trump here. Okay, that's about it.

[00:42:34]Meanwhile, so the liberals are trying to claim the science high road here.

[00:42:38]However, however, here's a list of things that in order to embrace them, you have to reject, explicitly reject some or all of mainstream science of what it has to say about it.

[00:42:57]And every one of these topics sits squarely in the realm of liberal politics and liberal voters.

[00:43:06]squarely. There's some spillage of course in all of these, but the center line is in liberal politics, crystal healing, feather energy, horoscope reading, um, align your chakras, uh, we can just keep going. Anti-GMO, uh, what else we have? Uh, anti- big pharma. Uh, I can go down the list. It's almost endless.

[00:43:37]And oh, it would include therapeutic touch. This is where the nurse waves their hand over your injury, not touching you, and then you heal because it's okay.

[00:43:49]In order to have any of those thoughts, you are rejecting some or all mainstream science related to it. Yeah.

[00:43:55]>> Okay.

[00:43:56]>> And uh so liberals do not have the science high road here.

[00:44:04]The difference of course is civilization won't collapse if you embrace feather energy. But if you deny climate change that has huge consequences. So the consequences are not equal here. The most of what happens in the liberal circles are very personal and we're in a free country. So you have full freedoms.

[00:44:25]Just do it. I don't chase people down telling them that crystals are the lowest energy state of the molecule that made them. So to speak of crystal energy is like no that's not how that works.

[00:44:37]Not chemically, not physically, not but it's a belief system and there it is. We protect belief systems in this country.

[00:44:44]Don't claim you have the this science high road period. Now liberals were the OG antivaxers because they were basically anti-farma not believing that vaccines were in the interest of people that it was in the interest of profits.

[00:44:59]Now I'm not saying corporations are not interested in profits but to indict an entire sector of the world and then take on other quote cures because you saw a 10-minute YouTube video um that's started in liberal enclaves that became purple under the current administration more specifically as RFK Jr. who has complete liberal political chops that go back genetically through his family.

[00:45:32]Yeah, it's he's now sort of crossed over and you join people I think they would be the MAGA community who don't want the vaccines not because they don't trust big FARMER BECAUSE OF FREEDOM you can't put the the different reasons but neither of them are getting vaxed.

[00:45:48]>> Yeah.

[00:45:48]>> With the same consequences. Okay. So the current administration and its relationship with science, the relationship of the executive branch and science has never been as devastating as it has been under the current administration in the history since science has been valued.

[00:46:09]Let's start the clock there. when Abraham Lincoln signed into law the National Academy of Sciences which was intended to advise Congress on matters that would be of interest to our health, our wealth, our security and the like.

[00:46:27]Ever since then, but more specifically when we have better accounting of budgets since the second world war, the role of science has been foundational to the strength of America in the world postcond world war. Do you realize every until recently every science adviser the president has been a physicist? That was not an accident. Okay. Um you ever wonder why astrophysicists have jobs at all? Has that ever crossed your mind?

[00:46:57]You know what I'm interested in? Dim objects in the night sky with multisspectral imaging of them moving across. Okay. You know who else is interested in that? The Pentagon.

[00:47:08]>> We have highly resonant interests. These are scientists. You don't see this in the public. You're looking for the next widget or the gadget or the thing that an engineer comes up with. The science is a deeper level there. If you don't see that deeper level, this was manifest when the science budget was cut in half for NASA, but you're keeping the budget for putting a flag on the moon. You're thinking that's all you need here.

[00:47:33]Meanwhile, China's investing in quantum entangled networks and that all kinds of frontier things. So, we don't tend to be as good at acting proactively.

[00:47:48]We don't tend to be as good at proactive decisions as we are at reactive decisions.

[00:47:55]Who was the first in space? Wasn't us.

[00:47:58]Who was it?

[00:47:59]>> Sputnik.

[00:47:59]>> Sputnik. Okay. Then we lost our All right. Within a year, we founded NASA. Okay. And we said, we got to beat the Russians because they're they're the godless commies and we got to show the world the path of freedom over the path of tyranny. And so we landed on the moon. Then we looked over our shoulders.

[00:48:15]Where are the Russians? They weren't there. End of the Apollo program. We didn't go to the moon because we're Americans and we're explorers and we're No, we went there because we got spooked by Sputnik. It wasn't just because it was a satellite. Do you know the Sputnik radio transmitter was inside a hollowedout intercontinental ballistic missile shell and that's what was over our head? If they can launch that over our head, they can send a nuke. Oh my gosh, we got spooked. Okay. And we reacted. marvelously to that. Okay. Why did we stay on the moon in 1972 or go back in 1980 or 1990 or 2000 or 2010?

[00:48:57]Why do we just all of a sudden invent Artemis and go, "Oh, it's time. Part the curtains, people." In the 201s when we announced it, intelligence told us that China wants to put tyonauts on the moon.

[00:49:12]The last thing we want is them coming to the moon kicking over our flag or planting a flag bigger than Well, the optics of that would be really bad.

[00:49:20]Yeah. Okay. Plus, most of our flags are probably already fallen, it turns out.

[00:49:25]But >> so we then say, "Oh, let's go back to the moon. Wouldn't that be a fun thing?"

[00:49:31]And would interest kids and everything.

[00:49:33]So the the the stated premise is missing the actual driver behind that. And that happened under Trump won. Okay. Biden comes in. Does he get rid of what everything Trump did? No. Keeps the space thing because the space objectives are geopolitically established, not partisan politics established. NASA generally transcends politics as far as transcending politics could ever be.

[00:50:02]All right, here's what's going to happen. Uh, we lost more than 10,000 scientists from the government this past year. Uh grants are being cut, science research is being cut in universities.

[00:50:13]My colleagues are being cherrypicked by Europe. That's what we did for 50 years in the 20th century. My whole lab, there were like three Americans out of 10 scientists because they were attracted here. We got the best and the brightest of the world to come here. Bad for their country, good for us. The reverse is happening now. So, as far as I can read the headlines, we will sink lower economically um in our in our health, our wealth, and our security until everyone wakes up and is reminded how important science is.

[00:50:49]And I'm not saying that as a self-serving scientist. I'm saying that as a country-loving American citizen who grew up where science was beloved. And science is the engine of tomorrow's engineering and engineering is the foundation of tomorrow's economies and because you only see the engineering you're not seeing but fed the engineering in the first place so it's easier to believe that that doesn't matter so I think we'll sink lower then all of Congress will get together and they'll say we got to do something about this let's shore up our science investments there'll be a delay because we have to get everybody back but when China starts eating our lunch I I think we'll wake up and sit up straight in the chair.

[00:51:36]>> I'm curious your vantage as an astrophysicist on this question. There is so much focus especially from Elon Musk uh and and Jeff Bezos launching their their their rocket programs with all of the issues that we have here.

[00:51:50]Talk about >> here earth. here on Earth. Is it is it worth it to invest in space travel to the extent that we are when when when our resources are finite funding is finite and and in theory with all of the money that's going toward what seems at least on its face from from my vantage as a layman um like recreational space travel I mean that's real money that could go toward solving very real problems here and especially if you know we've heard Elon say so many times that like we have to we have to be in a position where we can colonize Mars, but we have a habitable planet right now.

[00:52:25]And so why aren't we investing in fixing the problems that that risk making this planet uninhabitable?

[00:52:31]>> I can't speak for private enterprise.

[00:52:34]Elon owns his own company. Maybe it'll go public and then it's and then it's, you know, he'll have to satisfy shareholders, but uh let's speak for government funding for space exploration. That would be NASA. Okay.

[00:52:50]Um, let's go back 20,000 years and we're in a cave and you're young whippers snapper and you peaked out the cave door. No one's ever left the cave yet. You peek out the cave door and there's mountains and streams and fruit. You don't have a word for fruit because you've never been out there yet, but very curious place to explore. So, you go to the cave elders, these are the 30-year-olds, and you say, "We want to go out." So that cave elders caucus and they say our in our wisdom and in our experience we've decided you cannot leave the cave until we solve the cave problems first.

[00:53:28]That's what you sound like. It's exactly what you sound like. Okay. Here's this tiny cave and here's the whole earth.

[00:53:35]Yeah.

[00:53:35]>> Solve the cave problems first. Okay. So plus how much money is NASA getting?

[00:53:41]4/10en of 1% of your tax dollar.

[00:53:44]>> Yeah.

[00:53:46]>> 99.6% 6% of your tax dollar is going to something else and you're going to go to NASA and say this is superfluous when 99.6% of your money is going somewhere else.

[00:53:58]You're going to you're focusing on NASA because it's so visible. But that point4% that's the that's the rockets going to the moon. That's the James Web space. It's all of that. So na you're holding NASA guilty for being so visible in how effective efficiently they're spending their money.

[00:54:17]I ask people, "How much money do you think NASA's getting?" They say, "Oh, 10% of our budget or 15%." I I wanted to start a movement where agencies get the budget that people think they're getting.

[00:54:28]>> And if that happened, NASA's budget would increase by a factor of 10.

[00:54:32]>> Yeah.

[00:54:33]>> All right. So, um, a quick thing. You didn't ask it, but you were adjacent to it. The people who want to colonize Mars so that we we're two planet species. That's a nice thought, but it's not realistic. Cuz I would ask, why would you want to do that? Oh, in case something bad happens on one planet, then humans, homo sapiens are preserved. But what bad thing are you imagining? An asteroid, a killer virus. Just tell me what. Okay. How about an asteroid? Fine.

[00:55:05]What you're telling me is, well, what I'm going to ask you is, what I will declare is, it seems to me that terraforming Mars and shipping a billion people there is more effort than figuring how to deflect the asteroid.

[00:55:26]>> Yeah, >> I'm thinking I'm just thinking, oh, uh, there might be a killer virus. I'm thinking terraforming Mars and shipping a billion people there is harder than figuring out a perfect antiviral serum.

[00:55:42]We have the genomes of more and more life forms out there. Just put that money and put it in the lab. And so, okay, if I don't mind going to Mars, but to do it on the premise that you want to do it to say and even if you did do that and even if an asteroid were coming, you're just going to say goodbye. Like really? You're gonna let four billion people die? Really? That's how that's going to play out? So, I'm an astrophysicist. I love planets. Go there to as a vacation to enjoy, but don't pretend like that's an escape plan. It's simply not realistic given the cost that that would engender. So, yeah. and and about aliens. I'm still waiting around for the alien.

[00:56:31]>> So, this question is completely out of left field, but um who do you presume or how do you presume the pyramids were built? And who do you presume built them? I've not been given any reason to doubt that the Egyptian civilization, which was a towering gathering of people and agriculture and architecture and scientists and leaders and workforce. I'm not given any reason to think that they didn't do it. The people I find who doubt it most tend to be European ancestry because what was Europe doing in 2000 BC? That was not a place you wanted to hang out in. They were nowhere near as civilized as this culture in that African country.

[00:57:21]So to deny Africans the intellect and the power and the wisdom and knowledge to build that civilization and to have that mastery over their agriculture is why are you doing it? What do you gain by saying human beings didn't do this?

[00:57:46]>> Yeah. Why can't you grant that to the peoples who were there? They're human just like you, but they were just better organized and they knew how to cherish their smart people with their engineering. So, and just because it's something that surprises you every day.

[00:58:03]Fine. Maybe they're actually smarter than you. Smart people surprise lesser smart people all the time with their new ideas and what it is they consider. And by the way, have you seen the earlier pyramids that were not as successful?

[00:58:16]They made the sides too steep and the rocks kept falling off. So they abandoned that until they found out what a better angle should be.

[00:58:23]>> So there was some trial and error there.

[00:58:25]>> It seems to me if aliens helped them, they wouldn't need the trial and error.

[00:58:28]It would be perfect from Jump Street.

[00:58:30]>> So it tends to be white people of European descent who are in denial, no pun intended, denial of that an African civilization could be achieve such towering heights.

[00:58:45]>> Yeah. So, I'm basing this on everything that I've seen and read about and know about the Egyptian culture.

[00:58:50]>> All right. So, last question here also out of left field, but is there any way that you can derive meanings from dreams in your opinion?

[00:58:59]>> So, a couple of things. First, um I comment in the book that one of the weirdest things the alien might experience, alien comes and visits you and you become friends, let's say, and after not very much time, you're going to have to tell the alien, I need to lay down horizontally >> for eight hours a day. Yeah.

[00:59:17]>> And I'll be semicomaosse for onethird of Earth's rotation, and my mind will have fantastical thoughts.

[00:59:25]>> Don't mind, you know, just don't mind.

[00:59:27]Don't mind me. I I'll get I'll be I'll get back to you in 8 hours. Right.

[00:59:30]That's the aliens say, "What?" You know, tip their head like a dog. What? So I Have you ever read Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams? Yeah. It's a big volume and it's an interpretation of dreams. In science, ideas achieve value when it's replicable. So if you can get someone else to interpret dreams and there's resonance with his interpretation of dreams, then you say, "Maybe we're on to something." But that never really happened. And so it a dream might mean something to you, but for it to mean something in a bigger picture, it's not clear whether it does. And but obviously we need we need to sleep. We can't function without it. And my understanding of dreams is that it helps you try to make sense of the day you just had. Try to put in some kind of perspective. try to wrap some try to capture it in some way. And the sad part is some people are are frightened by their dreams or they're preoccupied by their dreams. I if you read how dreams were interpreted long ago, people imagine that you are seeing the future. Tell me more because I want to know. Well, I dreamed that the ships will come to the tell me more. And the scribe would be writing it down. And no, you're not seeing the future. No, that's not how that works. No. Uh, what happens is if the ships did come and you dreamed about it and someone wrote about it, you're not seeing all the times they dreamt of the ships and they didn't come. Okay? Those don't make it into the final cut, >> right?

[01:01:11]>> So, it's a an important feature in proper data taking. You need to know the other side of the data. Uh it's like they reported newspaper headline 80% of airplane crash survivors studied where the exit doors were on takeoff and that study led to the announcement on takeoff saying look in front of you or behind you to find out where the closest exit door is. Okay, that didn't used to be an announcement, right? That got added after that study. And you look at that result and I'm saying if 80% of the people who survived knew where the exit doors were. Suppose 100% of the people who died also studied where the exit doors were.

[01:01:56]Suppose everyone who died stud you don't know because they're dead.

[01:02:00]You just have who's left over and what their statistics are.

[01:02:03]>> Right? So, so science, you need you got to go the other side and find out to to to buffer what might be your extraordinary conclusions you draw from what is or is not extraordinary evidence.

[01:02:17]>> Well, look, I could sit here all day and ask you every question I have. Uh, the book is Take Me to Your Leader. It's available anywhere. Books are sold. I'm going to put the link right here on the screen and whoever interested, I narrated the audio book. So I I will read right now the first sentence and just to get put you in the mood. You ready? It is it's a short sentence.

[01:02:42]Ever since childhood I've wanted to be abducted by aliens.

[01:02:49]>> Perfect place to leave off. Neil, thank you so much for All right. Yeah. Good.

[01:02:52]Thanks for having me.