Neil deGrasse Tyson is a smart and interesting guy. He is this generation’s Carl Sagan, somebody who is smart enough to understand physics but down-to-earth enough to explain it in plain English to people, like me, who aren’t as smart as he is. He is like a Richard Feynmann for people who don’t read. He is far more intellectually accessible than Steven Pinker and much, much easier to listen to than Stephen Hawking.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
I like listening to Morgan Freeman on Through the Wormhole as well, but I know that Freeman’s not really a scientist.
So, when Neil deGrasse Tyson speaks, I listen. And what he says in this article is that maybe aliens aren’t contacting us because they think we are too dumb to bother with. Maybe. At least they are not planning to bulldoze the Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Or take human specimens away to a space zoo (although that may have actually happened and we wouldn’t even know – like those 4 old homeless guys who were imprisoned in some guy’s garage in Texas for about 10 years , or Shelly Miscavige – we don’t always keep close track of all human beings). Or eat us.
It wouldn’t be too surprising. Out of the Earth’s 4.5 billion year history or whatever it is, human beings have existed for maybe, at a stretch, the last million years of that, and for the first 950 thousand or so of that million, we were living in caves and grunting a lot. Now that we are technologically advanced, if we don’t blow ourselves up or poison our planet, we will remain a technologically civilized species for the next 4 billion years, maybe forever if we figure out how to live off planet.
Assuming that the aliens’ history has parallelled our own, and they are a billion years further along in their timeline than we are in ours, that means they are 1 BILLION YEARS more advanced than us, scientifically.
Still, I fantasize that when Voyager I gets totally clear of the magnetic field at the edge of our solar system, we will suddenly become visible, and get a message back. Maybe that’s the threshold, the point where we pass the test, the point at which we are invited to join the Galactic Federation. Once we’re out there.
Or, maybe they are waiting for a manned ship. Whatever the criterion is, we are getting closer and closer to it.
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