Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Alien Visits, UFOs, and Other Conspiracies

[Music] chuck them back in your face yes you are in your face [Laughter] okay i got nothing for this week anything bugging you all right well good i'm glad i'm i'm sure you have something but here's the deal it's impossible for you to have nothing but that's true that is true but i you know i just want to break right from having to get this stuff so here's the thing an inordinate and an inordinate number of people online want to know about ufos which to me i'm like how does a scientist talk about ufos because just to be clear could you could you quantify inordinate yeah well isn't there an inordinate number of people online that believe anything uh you know what if you we are talking the internet so yes you're right yeah it doesn't make a difference cause they find each other yes they do they create communities they get together and they breed and as a result the world suffers so that's it's unfortunate but that's what happens but you're absolutely right so uh that's a perfect example of what i'm talking about you see the same thing happen with conspiracy theories you see the same thing happening with you know uh vaxxers or i should say anti-vaxxers and with the ufos the thing is no matter what they have already made up their mind we have been visited there is life outside of our solar system um aliens are among us uh crop circles all this stuff and my thing is like if it weren't from movies none of this crap would exist all of this crap comes out of movies it's hollywood hollywood has fueled our obsession with ufos and alien life and i really believe that but you being a scientist i'm interested what do you guys in your community looking out into space for your entire life how do you view ufos first of all i love me some aliens nobody doesn't love the aliens okay right that would be a discovery of of all of civilization if aliens showed up and we sat down and had tea with them actually if they showed up and we did anything with them right whether or not we served tea so most likely they would serve tea while they eat us see see the movies i'm telling you the movies it's all movies so let me offer just a couple of uh perspectives just so we can let me orbit it first with perspectives and then i'll land in the middle by the end okay so first of all notice how frequently aliens are hostile to us as portrayed in movies uh and that goes back to the twilight zone and before of course one of the more famous episodes they had aliens in many episodes by the way but this is back in the 1960s late 50s that uh an episode called to serve man where aliens came and they helped us grow crops and they gave us secrets to our energy needs and they there was peace all over the earth and they invited us to go back and visit them and uh they accidentally left behind a book called to serve man within their own sort of hieroglyphic kind of text and so they got all the best cryptographers looking at it and after everyone has already decided yeah let's go visit their planet because they're obviously superior to us and we're all very well fed because the crops are bounty all over the earth and then they find out that to serve man it is a cookbook that's awesome it's a cookbook that's so great now it is rumored i've not studied this but i've i've read studies that to a child it is far worse to be eaten than to just die so of all the ways to die they're not even afraid of other ways to die but the idea of being eaten is particularly horrifying i think to anybody that's what well okay especially children but and that's why the fairy tales are always involved brothers the witch eats you the ogre eats you the truth they don't just stab you right right they don't shoot you they don't throw you off a cliff they each and this is terrifying and i think this is why we as children um deeply respect t-rex ask any kid who their favorite animal is it's t-rex because you respect anything that can eat you right and then you bring them over to astrophysics and say what's your favorite object in astrophysics it's black holes because they can each okay okay all right so here's the thing so the this evil alien concept i it feels like we are basing this on actual evidence of how we treat each other rather than on any notion of how aliens would actually treat us so so in other words we we are projecting onto aliens what we already know we do to each other because in the history of civilization there i even use that word in these examples you have a highly technologically able culture descends upon a less technologically able culture particularly in the era of colonization of the world and it never boded well for the culture that had less technology whoever whoever was getting visited visited and we do this to our own species so i think our fear of aliens derives not from knowledge of how they would behave but from knowledge of how we would behave not with each other and probably how we would treat other aliens as well so so i think that's what's going on there that's my first point second all the aliens portray nearly all the aliens portrayed they're they're they walk they talk they have two arms legs nose eyes mouth head and look at e.t look at the aliens in close encounters of the third kind look at um even in the movie series alien an alien followed by aliens and that right that alienated while it didn't specifically have legs it it was it was vertebrate right it had like a face a face is a very vertebrate thing to have yeah all right if you're not a vertebrate in this world you don't have much of a face however having two mouths a mouth within a mouth that was not a bad touch well that's the that's the getting eaten part that's a little more terrifying okay so so uh think about amoebas don't have mouths trees don't have mouths uh we just keep going down the list and like i said the the traditional face that we think of it tends to be a vertebrate phenomenon and so we are then making aliens vertebrates okay right uh the movie arrival that was not a vertebrate that was a septipod yeah so that was so i like it when they try to go a little uh they step outside of the comfort box of how we think aliens should be and it means yeah an actor's not getting a payday that day because they're not donning an alien costume in order to do this um in the movie a rival which i recommend you know it has some it has some strong points in it it's cool movie yeah the the aliens come and they have these pods positioned all around the world by the way the hubris of us to imagine that aliens would care about us or be curious about us that's hubris it's like we're so interesting that another species that can travel across the galaxy is going to study our behavior when you're walking down the sidewalk and you see a worm do you pause and say gee i wonder what that worm is thinking gee let me let me let me figure out how this works no no you put it on a hook and you go get dinner so so just to believe that we are so interesting that something as advanced as a civilization with flying saucers to cross the galaxy would sit there and want to analyze us so so that's hubris okay uh so there's that but also consider uh how many photographs are taken every day everybody's got a smartphone right almost everybody high resolution uh and if you're not taking a photo you're taking a video and so you if there's something unusual and interesting you're taking a video of that we have video of stuff you never got videos of before like cops beating up black folk okay i grew up that's happened all the time nobody had video to have video live cop's word against the black person's word we now have video of everything that was once rare and it still makes no difference editorializing i'm sorry during the explainer video i'm just stating i'm just staying in the situation so you'd think an alien encounter would be rare but you've got a smartphone and you can stream it in the old days when people said did you take pictures of the alien that abducted you yeah but they stole the film or i got the film home and the whole roll was blank because the alien zapped it or whatever so so it's a recording device but a streaming device is not a recording device so you can live stream whatever is happening all right so so you would expect given how many reports of abductions there were right of decades past that somebody would have that on you know that be posted by now and it hasn't been so this leads me to think strongly that people's imaginations got the better side of their life experience when they came back to report on having been abducted okay so there's that so so so that's aliens that's just aliens but how about ufos so you see something flying and it's something you don't know what it is and let me just say i was gonna tweet this too maybe i should i was going to say the fact that you don't know what it is is not evidence that you know what it is okay that's actually that's pretty profound because that's exactly what people do so there's lights in the sky moving in a peculiar way and you can't explain it it's unidentified and it's flying and it's an object so it's a ufo it must be alien and then p so i don't know what it is therefore it must be a b c d elemental p alien and i'm thinking you just admitted you don't know what it is what it is that's kind of where that stops we're done here okay it's time to get more and better data okay so now in science do you know why science exists because the human sensory system sucks that's why science exists makes sense all right we can see bands of light that your retina cannot we can see things dimmer than the sensitivity of your cones can pick up the cones in your in your eye we can uh the rods and cones right for detecting color and for but and and brightness we um those fail when you're trying to see things that are dim and outside of the range of what we call visible light and this is this is stuff we didn't even know existed until scientists discovered it we discovered x-rays and ultraviolet and gamma rays and radio waves and and microwaves that's all light okay we have telescopes honed into those windows to the universe and we drink in these phenomena and then convert them to ways that our senses can then detect them we make a photo we have chart recorders this sort of thing point is the advance of science and civilization with it came about primarily because we invented machines to replace our sensory system because it fails so badly and look why do we have whole books on what do you call them optical illusions right right those are fun nobody doesn't love and opt a good optical illusion and and what is an optical illusion it's oh there's a line and it's it's simple right it's simple line drawing on a white page oh is that line bigger than the other one i don't know or they're the same size oh my gosh look how easy it is to fool you and this is just a simple line drawing now i'm going to have something complicated in in in twilight with in a in a sky with you've never seen but and and now you're i'm expecting you to give me an accurate account of what just happened no so in science eyewitness testimony is the lowest form of evidence there is in fact is so low we don't even we basically don't accept it wow so when you see people say this was a navy pilot who's trained and he's a credible witness for what he saw uh you're saying species you're saying that guy is just as much a dumbass as anybody standing on the ground that navy pilot or not being a human being he's susceptible to the same perception bias that anybody else perception bites and that's not purposeful you know right they're not trying to it's just the consequence of the human being trying to make sense of their world and when things don't make sense we have the urge to make it make sense so that we can think about it in some way that's consistent with our life experience so i've had people say uh oh i saw this this bright light in the sky it was huge so no they meant it was just bright because the vocabulary is i saw this light and it was a few inches above marty's deli what do you mean a few inches was it an angle it was in the sky you know so even our capacity to retell things is compromised because we're human all right so all i'm asking for is among the six billion images and videos uplifted to the internet every day that are high resolution uh it'd be nice if a few of them had an alien getting out of their spacecraft or you going up to greet the give me some footage of that some high-res videos but you don't have that what you have is lately fuzzy navy video monochromatic and so you're telling me that the aliens are only revealing themselves to the navy well that's not a bad place to start they do have the best uniforms plus if the aliens are everywhere but do you know how many planes when we're in full flying mode you know how many planes are crisscrossing this planet every minute all right if we were if there were aliens all over the place this would be like a major hazard for airplanes okay and we'd be seeing them all the time all right so we take this one case out of tens or hundreds of thousands and it's a weird thing and nobody can explain it and all of a sudden everybody can explain it so that's the i don't know what it is therefore i know what it is so by the way we as scientists we'd love to meet the aliens i have no problems with this we just need better evidence than your credible witness i just need better evidence than your fuzzy video but anyhow i'm ready for them bring them on and just it just seems to me if we'd be visited more than the navy would notice it that's all i'm saying and you think the government is keeping secrets first you think the government is competent enough to keep such a if we were stockpiling you don't think a cell phone image is going to get out of area 51. something will get out you know really really do you really think the government is that competent really anyone whose work for the government knows differently and of course the government tries to keep secrets of course they try but anything as juicy as an alien plus if aliens are on their way do you know how many telescopes we have pointing up to the night sky do you realize how that's how much the night guy's being monitored by people other than human beings also do you realize we have cameras pointing downward you know google earth are down with pointing cameras okay all right if aliens are landing and taking off we would have footage so instead of asking how come scientists don't agree that what you can't identify is alien try to think differently about it and ask if they were aliens visiting earth what would that be like somebody would see it somebody would have photographed it would it ended up in google earth it would show up in many many many many many many more airplanes given how many airplanes fly around the earth every single hour or just think that through the absence of that level of supportive evidence for me is very strong against the alien interpretation of something you can't identify in the night sky so and by by the way keep keep get bring a net grab one you'll be rich and famous overnight more power to you i'm not going to get in your way but your what you present as what you think is evidence is insufficient in our scientific court of law this has been a star talk explainer neil degrasse tyson signing off by bidding you to keep looking up [Music]

Channel: StarTalk

Views: 381,900

Rating: 4.5777693 out of 5

Keywords: startalk, star talk, startalk radio, neil degrasse tyson, neil tyson, science, space, astrophysics, astronomy, podcast, space podcast, science podcast, astronomy podcast, niel degrasse tyson, physics

Id: O2jJ3wjEyZk

Length: 19min 20sec (1160 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Davlawstr]

Never heard a man so in love with his own ego as much as Tyson.

[u/capitalismisokiguess]

He always immediately dismisses UFOs as nothing but eyewitness testimony, conveniently ignoring radar signatures, radiation readings, physical imprints on the ground and official government documents saying the phenomenon is "real and not visionary or fictitious". I feel like he stubbornly keeps his head in the sand whenever UFOs are brought up. He is the embodiment of the negative stigma around the subject that permeates the scientific community and culture in general.

[u/Enkidoe87]

Around 7 years ago or so, I really liked him when I started to watch a lot of things on YouTube from him. After a while I started to see a lot of repetition in the things he says, standpoints he has, popping up in multiple occasions. He has a way of explaining things, and he is really good at it but it increasingly seemed to me he was really sort of regid in his believes. And finally watched a lot of his podcast, but at that time he really became more image/persona then a scientist in my eyes. Don't really want to watch these opinion videos from him anymore. Although he did a great job at Cosmos, that was a good one.

[u/thezoneby]

He should try to explain all of the #me too and sexual misconduct stories first. I don't take science advise from a sex predator. Google him, his reputation is shit.

[u/little_evil6]

Neil deGrasse Tyson speaking about Aliens, UFOs etc. Just wanted to get everyone's thoughts on this video.

[u/Equivalent_Move8267]

Michio Kaku>