Neil deGrasse Tyson: Ask The Aliens This ONE Question

Neil deGrasse Tyson sat down with me to discuss themes in his new book "Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter" (out now from Simon & Schuster). In this clip, I ask him the question at the heart of the book: if you had one question to ask an alien on first contact, what would it be?

Watch the full 2 hour conversation: https://youtu.be/aUnkkHuorto?sub_confirmation=1

His answer caught me off guard. He wouldn't ask where they're from, or how they got here, or what their propulsion system looks like. He'd hand them the periodic table, the Pythagorean theorem, a sampling of human-built devices, and ask: What are we missing?

The reasoning is asymmetric: humans haven't left low Earth orbit in 52 years. Anyone who crossed interstellar distance to reach us has resolved questions we haven't, possibly including what dark matter is, what dark energy is, what came before the Big Bang, and how organic chemistry became self-replicating life. First contact is, by this framing, less an introduction than a debugging session for human physics.

📕 Get "Take Me to Your Leader" by Neil deGrasse Tyson: https://a.co/d/02hcwxUh

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⏱ Chapters
0:00 Take me to your leader! The one question I'd ask an alien
1:15 Why the asymmetry matters: 52 years since LEO
2:00 The great filter and the WWII baseline
3:30 Reframing the "Greatest Generation"
4:30 Will we survive ourselves?

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