How should we greet aliens? Neil deGrasse Tyson has the answer
In his new book, Take Me to Your Leader, Neil deGrasse Tyson examines what we can anticipate from first contact and how to react
Neil deGrasse Tyson has had a lifelong fantasy of being abducted by aliens. That’s right: he actually wants to be taken.
“I even picture the scenario in my head: I’m sitting out there alone, and a beam of light comes down,” he says. “It’s not a spacecraft that’s hovering over me. It’s just a beam of light from space. And I just get lifted up into that beam of light, and I appear in a new place.”
“Even if it doesn’t actually happen, there’s value to going through the thought experiment of what could happen,” says Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. “Maybe there’s some takeaways that offer insights into how you think about the world, how we think about each other and the future of our civilisation.”
The book is a unique road map into the brain of Tyson, who has the ability to blend pop culture with quantum physics.
Take Me to Your Leader references evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould and Cartoon Network’s Rick and Morty and weaves ideas from both the French philosopher Voltaire and lyrics by Katy Perry.