Neil deGrasse Tyson: Ask The Aliens This ONE Question

One question to ask an alien upon first contact, what would you say from Nestor here on the internet somewhere? What I would do is I would lay out some of our science and figure out a way to show this to the alien, because the alien presumably doesn't know English, but this is really smart and it can figure it out quickly. I would say, what are we missing? You know, I wouldn't know. He's got some fancy spaceship, that's fine. What are we missing in our understanding of the universe? That's what I wanted. I'd show him the periodic table, show him the Pythagorean theorem, show him some devices that we've made and built, and just, I want to know what they know. Because if they got here, they're more advanced than we are, because we haven't left low Earth orbit in 52 years. So that's what I'd ask. What do you think we're missing? I mean, just, is it technology? Well, we're missing, we don't know what went on before the Big Bang. We don't know how you went from organic molecules to self-replicating life. We don't know what dark energy is. We don't know what dark matter is. We don't know if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. Of course, if an alien visits, that's answered in that moment. But plenty of questions we don't know. That's not what I meant. I meant, what are we missing from ourselves as a species? I mean, right now there's nuclear potential, nuclear conflicts, there's sectarian violence, there's all sorts of crazy stuff going on inside and outside of America. Is it possible that we can get to that future? Is there a great filter, but that great filter is us and the way that we treat each other? It might be. However, there's a little bit of a generational delusion that afflicts many people. I'm Baby Boomer, and before me, what do they call them? I guess that was the Greatest Generation, maybe. The Greatest Generation, I don't know who named that, but they're citing the fact that they defeated fascism, okay? So that takes a lot of resources to do so. I get that. So I don't want to take that away. However, in that generation was the rise of Jim Crow. My father fought in a segregated army. Oh, because people with light skin didn't want to kill Germans standing next to people with dark skin. That's weird, okay? So it's hard for me, as a black man in America, to view that period and the people who were in charge at the time as the Greatest Generation. It's just hard, okay? It doesn't mean I don't know how to respect and value the good thing that came of it. Exactly. Okay? All right. So, but that's not even my point. My point is, if there are protesters, let's say, and a van, an angry van plows into them and kills a dozen people, let's say, that's headlines for a month. In the country in which it occurs, headlines for, no, no, it's headlines for a month in the state. Headlines for a week in the country. Headlines for a day worldwide. It's, my gosh, how are we treating each other? Will we ever survive ourselves? One might ask. However, if you go back to the Greatest Generation, from 1939 to 1945, 1,000 people were killed per hour in the service of that war. We are reacting to a dozen people dying from a hate crime. 1,000 people died per hour, and no one talks about that, because the war wasn't reported that way. It was, well, we've taken this beachfront, or this island, or this town. We've liberated France. It's in conquering terms. It's not in the toll of human life. So, when I look at the history of the world and the amount of bloodshed that precedes us, we don't hold a candle to how much bloodshed there was in the Second World War, in the First World War, all the European wars that preceded that. All the war, just, you know, take a look at how many people were guillotined. Tens of thousands of people were beheaded and guillotined over short periods of time. It's like, what? What are you doing? Like, what? And so, I am glad I'm living in the present for how peaceful it is, relative to how violent we've been as a species in the past. Not to diminish the very real, tragic violence that's going on today. The senseless violence, right? Just, you know, I'm pro-civilian, okay? People just trying to live, and feed, and raise a family, caught up in whatever is the political unrest of people who don't have their safety in mind when you end up putting them at risk in the ways that you do. So, yeah, I think we can survive ourselves, especially compared to what we've already been through. I sure hope so. And in this holiday season, nothing makes a greater companion to the mysteries of the cosmos than this wonderful book. I think it's a fun book. But that's just me. It's super fun. I want to recite one more poem, and then we'll call it a day. Yeah, let's do it. Okay. I won't turn that down. All right. Someone wanted to know if red stars are red because they're hotter than blue stars or other colored stars, because we think of red hot. And I could have just said no, but it's Merlin answering, so Merlin's got to have fun. So, here it goes. On canvas with paint in the artist's school, it is red that is hot and blue that is cool. But in science we show, as the heat gets higher, a star will glow red like the coals of a fire. Raise the heat some more, and what is in sight? Behold! The star has turned bright white, but the hottest of all, Merlin says unto you, is neither red nor white, and the star has turned blue.