Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter by Neil deGrasse Tyson - 9
If I ever go missing during a night of observing with my telescope, don’t look for me on Earth. Look up to the stars, because that’s where I’ll be. With the Aliens. In their dimension. They’ll probably confiscate my smartphone. I won’t try to harm them, so they may be kind. Or they might make me the...
If I ever go missing during a night of observing with my telescope, don’t look for me on Earth. Look up to the stars, because that’s where I’ll be. With the Aliens. In their dimension. They’ll probably confiscate my smartphone. I won’t try to harm them, so they may be kind. Or they might make me their pet. Sounds scary. But on Earth we treat needy pets better than we treat needy humans. In the United States alone we spend more than $150 billion a year on our dogs and cats, 1 while the federal government spends less than 7 percent of that to alleviate homelessness nationwide. 2 So our priorities are clear.
The Aliens might enjoy my stories as I regale them of life as an Earthling, in my sector of the Galaxy. Or they might be entertained and intrigued as I speak of all the ways human emotion, when unchecked, has the power to both build and unravel civilization.
The Aliens might be intrigued to learn that some of my fellow humans who ingest the hallucinogenic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT), see Aliens. And there’s an associated movement to establish two-way communication and see what we might learn. 3
The Aliens might invite me to join their Science Academy. If so, I would delight in comparing notes about what objects, phenomena, and theories our respective civilizations have discovered in the universe. But after a while, perhaps a long while, I’d tell them I want to go back to my loved ones, in my own dimension, in my own star system, on planet Earth. Upon return, whether or not I successfully describe my experience to fellow humans, I will have joined countless other abductees, with no evidence of my journey other than impassioned eyewitness testimony. But I might also have gleaned from the Aliens some knowledge, wisdom, and insight that we all want—that we all need—for civilization to survive its own forces of self-extinction. If so, then one day, in the not-so-distant future, it may be we who rocket to faraway, inhabited planets, becoming the Aliens their legends are made of.