Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter by Neil deGrasse Tyson - 4

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. 1

—ISAAC NEWTON, 1727

Those words, uttered by the greatest mind there ever was, offer a humble check on our collective ego as humans.

Earth’s tree of life sprouted nearly 4 billion years ago, with single-celled organisms, and of course continues today. Throughout, we presume that modern humans— Homo sapiens —are the smartest creatures of them all, ever. Although as many as two dozen other, now extinct, species of Homo manifest in fossil records of the past few million years, including Homo habilis, Homo erectus , and Homo neanderthalensis , to name a few. Significantly, Homo sapiens are the only surviving species of the genus Homo . Were we the smartest? Or just the luckiest? Being all of the same genus, we could mate with most, if not all of them. Bring any other Homo into modern times, and we don’t really know if they would outperform us on the various tests of intelligence that we administer to ourselves. The evolutionary clarion call of “survival of the fittest” is not synonymous with survival of the smartest. Otherwise, modern cockroaches, who trace from Earth’s Cretaceous period 100 million years ago, 2 would be among the smartest creatures on Earth.

The question remains: Who declared that humans are intelligent? Answer: Humans did. There’s that hubris again, an ego boosting itself. We further assert that we’re vastly more intelligent than our closest genetic relative on Earth, the chimpanzee, yet we share 98+ percent identical DNA. With every bone and muscle duplicated in our anatomies, we’re forced to proclaim, “What a difference in intelligence that two percent makes!” Humans have poetry and philosophy and art and space telescopes. What can the smartest chimp do? It might stack boxes to reach a bunch of bananas suspended from above. It might learn rudimentary sign language. Or it might select the right kind of twig to extract tasty termites from a mound. All things human toddlers could easily do. So how can that tiny 2 percent difference in DNA account for what we declare to be our vast intelligence relative to chimps?

Things that make you go, “Hmmm.”

Maybe the difference in our respective intelligences is as small as that 2 percent would suggest. Maybe stacking boxes is not much different from conceiving, designing, building, launching, and deploying the James Webb Space Telescope. We don’t think that way because of how highly we value our intelligence relative to other species. But let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine a species with 2 percent DNA beyond us, in just the same way we’re 2 percent DNA beyond the chimp. What would we look like to them? They’d have to be Aliens, of course. Their toddlers would accomplish more than the smartest human there ever was. They might roll Stephen Hawking forward at one of their anthropology conferences where they study the genus Homo and declare of him: “This human is slightly smarter than all the rest because he can do astrophysics calculations in his head, like toddler Zork Jr. over there in Alien preschool.” Zork excitedly brings home his completed assignments for that day: “Mommy, Daddy, look, I just derived the principles of calculus and completed my analysis of quantum entanglement.” The parents reply, “Awww. That’s cute.” And proceed to display the work on their refrigerator door with a magnet.

We’re not done here. Other than, perhaps, the late chimp-whisperer Jane Goodall, no human has ever conducted a content-rich chat with any other animal on Earth. Here’s the best conversation you’ll ever have with a chimpanzee: I

What you say:

Hey. I’m buying some organic bananas, but only if they’re ripe. How many bananas do you want?

What the chimp hears:

Blah. Blah blah blah blah BANANAS, blah blah blah blah, blah. Blah blah BANANAS blah blah blah?

It’s probably also true that no matter how hard you try, and no matter how long you take, no matter how patient you may be, you will never teach long division to a chimp. By direct analogy, we’re left with the inescapable conclusion that the simplest thoughts of an Alien species, a mere 2 percent smarter, would be incomprehensible to us. And those same Aliens may find it impossible to make sense of the noises coming from the front-facing hole in our heads. Not because they haven’t learned our language, but because our thoughts are too trivial and stupid for them to comprehend.

So, the desire to search for and communicate with “other” intelligent life in the universe may be a fool’s errand. A sentiment that would have resonated with the eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope. Fresh off Isaac Newton’s myriad discoveries about light, gravity, planetary orbits, and the math and physics of the universe, he penned in 1734:

Superior beings, when of late they saw

A mortal Man unfold all Nature’s law,

Admir’d such wisdom in an earthly shape,

And showed a Newton as we shew an Ape. 3

Now imagine, if you can, Aliens 5 percent, 10 percent, or even 25 percent more intelligent, along the same vector that places us 2 percent above chimps. For all we know, they created Earth as a literal aquarium-terrarium for their own amusement. We do the same with fish and turtles and pet snakes. We even do it with ants. Ants in ant farms always look busy as they move dirt through plastic tubes we’ve connected for them. Do they know we’ve built their domicile? Do they know we are looking in on them through transparent walls? Do they care?

If the superintelligent Aliens created our world, are we obliviously living in a simulation? Two books make a convincing case that the entire universe is mathematically describable. One, Is God a Mathematician? (2009), 4 and another, Our Mathematical Universe (2015). 5 If every phenomenon in the cosmos, no matter how large or small, follows a mathematically expressible physical principle, then it can all be programmed into a computer. If it can all be programmed into a computer, then who is to say that our world is not a supercomputer model created by an Alien nerd in its parents’ basement.

In the now-classic 1999 film The Matrix , starring Keanu Reeves, all of human existence unfolds not in a computer but in the minds of living humans controlled by computers, and whose inanimate bodies exist in nurtured pods. That world was created by an artificial intelligence that humans invented, having planted the seeds of our own demise. But it’s nothing a smart Alien couldn’t accomplish in an afternoon. We created AI. Humans are AI’s taproots. So human-created AI can never ascend to the level of smart Aliens, who exist outside any traceable links to human stupidity, and who could trivially create us at will, with a few lines of their computer code. In this context of smart Aliens, the fear that “One day, AI will become smarter than humans!” is a low bar.

These arguments for our nonmaterial existence are slightly different from the traditional ones, in which we presume advanced civilizations would want to make video games with simulated people, places, and things, designed to keep us and the programmer amused. Given enough time, and the perception of free will by the world’s inhabitants, everyone in the simulation would want to play video games too. The simulated beings then program a world inside their own computers for their own amusement. And it’s simulations all the way down. Throw a dart and ask which of these universes are you likely to hit, the lone original universe, or any of the countless others that are simulated? The Alien scenario does not require the statistics of nested simulations. It just requires one round of really smart Aliens.

In every case imagined here, the Aliens become our overlords. You might hope, or pray, that they take protective interest in us, simply out of curiosity. For reference, who other than vermeologists has ever paused and wondered what a worm was thinking? Or what any life-form was thinking that can be easily squished beneath your shoe? Right about now would be a good time to alert the Alien that you know a thing or two about the universe—something chimps have never done for humans.

In a first encounter with an Alien, different people will likely ask them different things. You can be sure, however, that scientists will want to compare and contrast the Alien’s understanding of the universe with ours.

Mathematics would be a first and obvious point of comparison. It is, after all, how the universe talks to itself, and is not anchored (mired?) in culture the way languages tend to be. Our symbols would surely differ from theirs, but the concepts and goals would be the same. A clever idea, proposed in the early nineteenth century by German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and others, 6 was to erect a huge right triangle out of pine trees in the Siberian tundra. Off the side of each leg of the triangle would be huge squares made of wheat fields, to offer color contrast with the trees. That would make it easier for any Aliens on the Moon or planets to view with their telescopes.

This idea is simply brilliant. We might remember the Pythagorean theorem from middle school, where the lengths of the three legs in a right triangle relate to one another as:

A 2 + B 2 = C 2

Notice that by drawing squares off the sides of the triangle, each with areas of A 2 , B 2 , and C 2 , the Pythagorean theorem simultaneously announces that the area of the two smaller squares, when added together, equals the area of the larger square.

Behold: an illustration made with no invented symbols, just geometric shapes. If Aliens saw that pattern on Earth’s surface, they would know immediately we were mathematically fluent, granting them first evidence that we might be intelligent. At night, you could imagine setting the triangle ablaze, rendering it especially visible to Aliens viewing Earth’s darkened side. So, a handy, pocket-sized Pythagorean diagram would make a most excellent olive branch in a first encounter. And just in case the Alien’s vision cannot detect your line drawing on paper, also bring a physical model of the shapes for the Alien to touch.

The next best thing to the Pythagorean theorem ablaze at night might be the famous HOLLYWOOD sign, perched in the Hollywood Hills overlooking Beachwood Canyon, with a clear sightline from a dozen miles away. Each letter stands forty-eight feet tall, nearly the height of five basketball rims. Fully illuminated at night, it’s more than twice as tall as the Great Wall of China is wide, and is visible from space. Upon spotting it, the Aliens won’t know what the letters mean, but they might otherwise think that the letters are for them—an invitation to visit the city. Knowing parts of LA, it’s not hard to imagine they’ve already landed.

That example is only incidentally visible from space. Two other notable, oversized etchings, conceived and constructed to be space-visible, include an 87,500-square-foot color emblem for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Painted in November 2006 along Extraterrestrial Highway (Nevada state route 375) near Area 51, the company declared, “If there are extraterrestrials in outer space, KFC wants to become their restaurant of choice.” It would be removed six months later, which means there’s only a six-month-wide spherical shell of KFC’s image moving through the universe. For any Earth-observing Aliens on exoplanets, they’d have to be looking while that six months of light washes over their location. We also find huge letters that spell LUECKE, each thousands of feet in length marked by trees, along a stretch of Texas between Houston and Austin—the egocentric brainchild of Texas landowner and former state trooper Jimmie Luecke in the 1990s.

Know what else says Earth is inhabited by intelligence? Our fully lit cities at night, visible not just from orbit but from deep space as well. Although Aliens might find it odd that our streetlights, intended to illuminate the street, leak any light upward. Somebody’s paying for that. When you think about it, properly lit cities at night should not be visible from space at all.

In a pinch, of all things visible from space, I’m sticking with the Pythagorean triangle, showing that we are not only intelligent but clever.

Another symbol to explore is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its own diameter. No matter the size of the circle, that ratio equals Pi—the most famous (and useful) number in all of mathematics. Whatever the Alien did to reach Earth in a spaceship, somewhere in there will be the number Pi. The universality of the number was captured in Carl Sagan’s original 1985 novel, Contact , on which the 1997 film was based. When Aliens first made contact with us, they did so via digits of Pi embedded in their radio signals, on the assumption we’d be smart enough to figure it out—revealing the Alien’s intelligence to us and our intelligence to them. By the time the novel became a film, twelve years later, the Alien message was instead embedded in the digits of prime numbers. That works too. Although in both cases, the numbers were all communicated in base ten.

Remember that we count in base ten—using ten numerals for all our arithmetic—0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9—entirely because we have ten fingers. You might check how many fingers the Alien has, and then, as a first guess, offer to count in that base. Remarkably, nearly all animated characters in America have four fingers on each hand, not five. This includes everyone on The Flintstones , every character on Family Guy and The Simpsons , the wall-busting Kool-Aid man, Mickey Mouse, and the McDonald’s Hamburglar. At whatever may be their annual convention in the cartooniverse, we can reasonably expect them all to be counting in base eight. Add to this, from the film series Avatar , the (fictional) four-fingered native peoples of the habitable moon Pandora in the nearby (actual) Alpha Centauri star system. In the third film of the franchise, the screenwriters could not resist having two of the natives, in a celebratory gesture, slap each other’s hand in the air after verbally calling for a “high four.”

On Earth, octopuses have long intrigued marine biologists as well as everybody else. We can barely pat our heads and rub our bellies at the same time, whereas they maintain full independent control and dexterity via brain matter distributed into each of their eight arms. They can open jars and unlock childproof latches. And while dogs and cats can’t even twist open a doorknob, that’s an octopus specialty. After the 2020 documentary My Octopus Teacher won an Academy Award, some people were ready to grant them citizenship.

In the 2016 film Arrival , starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, the US Army selects a physicist and a linguist to be our emissaries in a first encounter with Alien octopus visitors. For a social media post that I probably should have left in my Forbidden Twitter File, I commented that the government would have been better served sending an astrobiologist and a cryptographer instead. Seems obvious that we’d first want to know what kind of creature it is, and then we’d want to crack whatever code of symbols they might use to communicate. With that post I cast shade on linguists, who hardly ever appear in movies. Meanwhile, astrophysicists are everywhere in space-based science fiction. That film was their brief time in the limelight and I should have remained quiet.

The Aliens in Arrival exist in a transparent tank within their spaceships. They each resemble a seven-armed octopus, which we might instead call a septapus, and they communicated with us via flocculent, circular ink patterns drawn on the inside of the tank’s walls.

Curiously, nobody wondered whether these patterns were backward to us, drawn correctly for the Aliens. Regardless, our hero linguist derived all manner of meaning and culture from the flocculence. What should impress us is not that the septapus represents intelligent life, but that it presumably also built the ship and traveled to Earth across interstellar space. Being smart and technologically proficient are not the same thing.

Another film where the Aliens resembled octopuses was 2013’s Europa Report , which chronicled the first crewed mission in search of life in the waters beneath the icy crust of Europa, one of Jupiter’s largest moons. But in that case, astronauts were the aliens, visiting them.

Octopus morphology continues to haunt us. Myself included. I remain mildly spooked by octopus Aliens carrying me away to an unlocked prison cell from which I cannot escape simply because it has three doorknobs. While I can turn two doorknobs because I have two hands, three knobs essentially “locks” me into the room. All this leaves me, and perhaps others, sympathetic to dogs whose paws and forearms physiologically prevent them from turning a doorknob. Combine that with being smarter than dogs, and it’s trivial for us to contain them.

In ways yet imagined, how trivial would it be for smarter Aliens to contain us?

Perhaps the largest Alien life-form ever conceived appeared in a 1957 novel written by the twentieth-century British astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle. A lifelong critic of the Big Bang, Hoyle is credited with inventing the term pejoratively in an interview when comparing it with the alternative “Steady State” hypothesis, in which the universe has always existed, with no beginning. His novel, titled The Black Cloud , describes an enormous dark gas cloud in the Milky Way that is a superorganism with an intelligence far exceeding that of Earthlings. Not the kind of life-form that will ask you to take it to your leader. If human intelligence somehow correlates with the total number of synaptic connections within our brains, then a thinking organism the size of an interstellar gas cloud, with electromagnetic connections throughout, would be the smartest creature to ever live.

Picking up the action, scientists discover that the cosmic gas cloud is headed straight toward the Sun. If it were an ordinary gas cloud, it would just pass us by on its gravitational trajectory within the Galaxy. But this Black Cloud mysteriously begins to slow down on approach as it engulfs and cloaks the Sun, blocking sunlight from all life on Earth that depends on it. The scientists figure out that the Cloud has agency and discover how to reason with it. In response, the Cloud opens a hole in itself between the Sun and Earth, allowing Earth life to survive. All the while, the Cloud is astonished to discover that non-cloud-based life could exist on such a tiny, solid planet as Earth.

World governments grow suspicious of the superorganism, in spite of scientists having the situation under control. In response, nations launch a full-scale nuclear attack. The scientists had warned the Cloud of this military plan in advance, risking treason. The Cloud, not wanting to obliterate all life on Earth, which it could trivially do, decides instead to redirect the nukes back to Earth, where they explode, killing thousands. The Cloud moves on only when its curiosity takes it to another cloud that it thinks may be more intelligent than itself. The moral to that story? There are many. Top of my list would be “Trust your scientists.”

What about Aliens with marginal sensibilities? Or simply dumbass Aliens?

Ever since the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico, incident, reports abound of Alien artifacts from crashed flying saucers secretly recovered by the US government. Crashed flying saucers? Odd that these Aliens, who are clearly smarter and more advanced than humans, would build a ship that can traverse and navigate interstellar space, yet somehow crash-land on Earth. Why would Aliens recruit such incompetent pilots?

The Aliens in the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind , starring Richard Dreyfuss, were oddly opaque with their landing plans. Computers at a secret government base, established to decode the first communiqué from the Mother Ship, received a repeated sequence of digits—two sets of three pairs of numbers.

40 36 10  104 44 30

40 36 10  104 44 30

40 36 10  104 44 30

40 36 10  104 44 30

40 36 10  104 44 30

In the film, a cartographer correctly identified these numbers as longitude and latitude, each in degrees, minutes, and seconds. The Aliens were transmitting the location on Earth where they will land and greet the humans, yet neglected to indicate the northern or southern latitudes, nor east or west longitudes. As a result, the location could just as easily have been interpreted as a spot in north-central China. The intended location was Devils Tower National Monument, Wyoming. Even so, the film identified the wrong coordinates—a spot 276 miles due south of Devils Tower, but that’s just a film flub that I’m happy to overlook. Devils Tower remains a stunning, photogenic location to meet Aliens for the first time. We would also learn that these Aliens have ten fingers, just like us, so base-ten digits would be a point in common.

Seeing the film on release and watching those sets of numbers flash across their computer screen, I immediately thought of longitude and latitude, but then, just as quickly, I discounted the hypothesis for practical reasons. I was wrong to do so, but let me tell you why:

When coming upon Earth from space, you see no grid lines. From Earth’s rotation, you could easily identify the Equator and the two poles, but after that, you’re on your own. Which is north and which is south? The Aliens would further need to hack into our culture and figure out that we measure angles in something called degrees. And that between the Equator and the poles, degrees increase from zero to ninety. Not to ten, not to a hundred, not to a thousand. And each degree divides into sixty equal parts we call minutes. And each minute divides into sixty equal parts called seconds. And just to confuse things further, these minutes and seconds have nothing whatever to do with time. The fact that minutes and seconds count only up to sixty reveals a form of base sixty, where numerals repeat once you’ve gotten to sixty.

That would be hard enough for Aliens to extract from our culture, but what about longitude? The starting point—the Prime Meridian—is completely arbitrary. In 1883 the International Geodetic Association recommended that it pass (from pole to pole) directly through the Greenwich Observatory, eight miles outside of London. By 1884, the recommendation was formally adopted by twenty-five countries during the International Meridian Conference, held in Washington, DC. Meanwhile, France wanted the Prime Meridian to go through the Paris Observatory. They abstained from the vote, and for decades to come, French cartographers would use their own French meridian on their own French maps.

Of course, longitude is also measured in degrees, minutes, and seconds, but this time counting from zero up to 180 degrees going east and zero up to 180 degrees going west. They meet in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to create the International Date Line. All those reasons are why I discounted the numbers on sight as longitude and latitude. For the Aliens in Close Encounters to figure all that out—the odd metrics, which way east and west and north and south go on the globe, and the geopolitics of it all—seems to me it would have been way easier for them to just learn some English, and instead alert Earth computers with this message on repeat:

“Hey! Devils Tower, 7:30 p.m. tomorrow. Be there.”

“Hey! Devils Tower, 7:30 p.m. tomorrow. Be there.”

“Hey! Devils Tower, 7:30 p.m. tomorrow. Be there.”

“Hey! Devils Tower, 7:30 p.m. tomorrow. Be there.”

“Hey! Devils Tower, 7:30 p.m. tomorrow. Be there.”

We might call these Aliens “needlessly obtuse.”

In the popular 2024 Netflix sci-fi series 3 Body Problem , based on the 2008 novel of the same name, humans make contact and exchange radio signals with Aliens on planet Trisolaris, which orbits a triple “Trisolaran” star system four light-years away. Anybody who’s taken Orbital Physics 101 knows that three-body systems are chaotically unstable. That’s precisely why it’s called the three-body problem . You can use a computer to calculate through the chaos at any given moment, but you cannot predict with precision what the future configuration of the three objects will be.

Two cosmic objects will stably orbit each other indefinitely, but three objects create no end of compromised orbital allegiance as their mutual distances and corresponding gravitational forces continuously vary within the system. Meanwhile, a planet orbiting these three stars will experience catastrophic shifts in climate as its distance from each of the stars changes. The Trisolaris Aliens have survived many hundred cycles of their civilization’s rise and fall, induced by these periodic forces of change. Apparently, the highly advanced Alien civilization on Trisolaris has never before looked for another, more stable planet to inhabit. Earth orbits a single star. Upon learning from our radio signals that life thrives here, they target Earth to colonize, conquering all Earthlings in the process. Seems to me, they should’ve started looking for new planets hundreds of civilization cycles ago, because the three-body problem is basic physics that should not be taking them by surprise—hundreds of times. Worse yet, the ultimate fate of three-body systems will see two of the stars crash into each other or one star get ejected from the system altogether. Something that would have happened many rounds of civilization ago.

We might label these Aliens as “oddly ignorant.”

One of the dumbest creatures of all time must go to the Alien from the original 1979 film Star Trek: The Motion Picture . V-ger, as it called itself (pronounced vee-jur), was an ancient mechanical space probe on a mission to explore and discover and report back its findings. The probe was “rescued” from the depths of space by a civilization of mechanical Aliens and reconfigured so that it could actually accomplish this mission for the entire universe. Eventually, the probe did acquire all knowledge and, in so doing, achieved consciousness. The Star Trek crew come upon this now-sprawling monstrous collection of cosmic information at a time when the Alien was searching for its original creator to duly report back its findings. The stenciled letters on the side of the original probe revealed the characters V and ger . Shortly thereafter, Captain Kirk discovers that the probe was actually Voyager 6 , which had been launched by humans on Earth in the late twentieth century. The missing letters between the V and the ger had been badly tarnished until the good Captain rubbed it clean. Okay. But how could V-ger have acquired all knowledge of the universe and achieved consciousness yet not know that its real name was Voyager ?

We might call this life-form “curiously stupid.”

The most clueless Alien I ever encountered was in a radio play during a four-hour car trip in 1979 from Boston to New York City. The storyline was clear: Aliens were coming to Earth to suck dry our planet’s water supply. Oceans and all. Why? Because they thrive on hydrogen and of course the chemical symbol for water is H 2 O. So the hydrogen is just waiting to be stolen, putting all life on Earth at risk. The problem here is that nine out of ten atoms across the universe are hydrogen. Find them in stars, interstellar gas clouds, and all gaseous planets such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

So these Aliens were clueless idiots, but it’s not their fault. They’re simply the victims of a playwright who, in school, stopped at Chemistry and never took Astronomy 101.

Aliens have also arrived on stage. A special shout-out goes to the 1968 opera Help, Help, the Globolinks! by Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti. In some performances these Aliens resemble those creepy, flippy-floppy balloon-men at used car lots. They come to Earth with the intent to terrorize school children, but this time they pick the wrong kids. These children are all musical, and the comically evil Globolinks happen to be allergic to the sound of music, with an inability to tolerate melody. An operatic setup if there ever was one.