Take Me to Your Leader Quotes

“The twentieth-century Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi thought about this problem (after creating the world’s first artificial nuclear reactor). He performed a simple “back of the envelope” calculation to assess whether Aliens should have visited us by now. We know the age of the Milky Way Galaxy—at least 13 billion years. We know how big it is—about 100,000 light-years across. We know approximately how many stars populate it—hundreds of billions. And let’s imagine that every star has at least one habitable planet. If Aliens are hell-bent on colonizing the Galaxy, and they’re technologically proficient, then, from their home planet, they might send a Mayflower-style mission to a nearby planet. The pilgrim Aliens would arrive, build a rocket factory, and send two more Mayflower-style missions to other nearby planets. If every mission creates two more missions then the number of Galactic colonies will grow exponentially. By this method you could populate 100 percent of the Galaxy’s habitable planets in a mere thirty-seven steps.fn5 What about the travel time? If humans straddled our fastest-ever rocket out of the solar system—NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto at ten miles per secondfn6—to reach the Alpha Centauri system, a mere 4.2 light-years away, would take eighty thousand years. That duration is somewhat longer than our life expectancy, requiring us to send a generational ship, populated by a batch of fertile astronauts, while condemning the unborn to complete the mission set forth by the first generation that started it all. Two thousand generations later the ship arrives at a new planet. To cross the entire Galaxy, planet by planet, would take billions of years. But we’re not talking about humans here. We’re talking about high-tech Aliens. Let’s say they figured out how to travel a modest 20 percent the speed of light. They could move among the stars in years, not billennia. At those speeds, the entire Galaxy could be populated within a few million years, rather than a few billion years. Still sounds like a long time, however a few million years is a mere 0.02 percent the age of the Galaxy. By this measure, the Aliens should have colonized every planet by now, including Earth. But all life on Earth has common DNA and common origin. No outsiders among us. Soooo, where are the Aliens? That is the essence of Fermi’s argument, which has come to be known as Fermi’s Paradox. Since we already have the answer—they’re not here—it’s easy to invent all manner of excuses for why.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter

“During the early universe, when everything was a seething cauldron of energy, matter and antimatter would spontaneously pop in and out of existence, transforming back and forth into photons—light energy. But as the universe expanded and cooled, there would be one last time that a photon became a matter-antimatter particle pair. Except that one in a hundred million of the photons mysteriously created a lone particle without an annihilation partner, which would evermore remain adrift in space with an empty dance card. The rest would find partners and annihilate, becoming photons one last time. That one-in-a-hundred-million particle was made of matter, with no antimatter particle to match it. Nobody knows how or why that happened. But it did, leaving us with a universe of a hundred million photons for every particle of matter. And no antimatter. Without that tiny asymmetry, the universe would contain only photons and no matter, and we wouldn’t exist. So we’re glad for the asymmetry, but the question remains, what caused it? Where did the antimatter particles go, if in fact they were created at all? And most importantly, did Aliens gather them up and create an anti-universe of their own? On the off chance that your first encounter is with an Alien made entirely of antimatter, always carry something in your pocket that you can toss. A coin will do. If, upon catching it, the Alien spontaneously explodes with the power of two hundred million sticks of dynamite, then it was made of antimatter. Otherwise, you’re good to go.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter

“more terrifying than an Alien who threatens to kill you with a ray gun might be an Alien who instead threatens to eat you.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter

“Our accelerations are quite noisy”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter

“sympathetic to dogs whose paws and forearms physiologically prevent them from turning a doorknob.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter

“Being smart and technologically proficient are not the same thing.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter

“human-created AI can never ascend to the level of smart Aliens,”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter

“Instead of asking”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter

“On the off chance that your first encounter is with an Alien made entirely of antimatter”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter