Cosmic Queries – Take Me To Your Leader

About This Episode

What would you actually do if an alien showed up and asked to be taken to your leader? Neil deGrasse Tyson, comic co-host Paul Mecurio, and astrophysicist Charles Liu explore fan questions that range from the physics of near-light-speed travel to Dark Forest Theory from The Three Body Problem to whether the universe itself might be conscious.

What is the experience of travelling close to the speed of light? Is there a way to avoid being flattened against the wall? We explore what aliens might look like, if they will be anthropomorphic or something not entirely recognizable as life. Neil makes the case against humanoid aliens, pointing out that vertebrates are the only creatures with faces. We discuss Fred Hoyle’s short story about an intelligent electrical cloud, The Blob, and sixty years of Hollywood alien design.

Could a visiting alien civilization have survived its own technological adolescence? We discuss how if you can build a ship that travels at a fraction of light speed, you’ve also built a devastating weapon. The gang debates what humanity could offer as proof of our intelligence and whether language itself might reveal how differently aliens experience time, touching on the film Arrival along the way.

The questions keep escalating: Would humanity unite against an alien threat the way we failed to unite during covid? Would we even recognize if an advanced civilization was quietly watching us, especially one operating in four dimensions? Could the universe itself be a form of intelligence? And what about the Dark Forest hypothesis: the idea that the cosmos is teeming with life, and everyone is hiding from everyone else out of mutual terror? If any empire-building civilization had ever gone on a galaxy-wide colonization spree, we’d already see the evidence. Is the silence itself telling us something?

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