NEW YORK (AP) — 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,” he says. “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 civilization.”
The book, out Tuesday, is a unique road map into the prodigious brain of Tyson, who has an ability to blend pop culture with quantum physics. Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
“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. It mixes the physics of invisibility with “Star Trek” and has digressions into multispectral vision, how Superman — an alien, remember? — could kill us all just by farting and why supersonic planes “look badass.”
They’re going to be smart
Tyson concludes that if aliens were to arrive on Earth, they are likely to be much more advanced than humans. He writes it would be like trying to teach a chimp long division.
“They’ll not only be brilliant, but they’ll be way more powerful than us in practically any way that matters, which is why it’s so laughable when you see in Hollywood movies some mothership arrives and people pull out their pistols and start shooting guns at it. Like, ‘Really? Have you thought this through?’”
During first contact, he advises against trying to shake hands or raising a hand in a sign of hello. “Leave all your habits at home, until you learn a thing or two about theirs,” he writes.
Tyson decided to write his book after watching recent congressional hearings on UFOs, noting that both Republicans and Democrats seemed unified in finding the truth.
“They had a common subject that they’re both interested in,” he says. “When I saw it hit that level, I realized I have something to contribute.”
It is the first book under Simon & Schuster’s new Simon Six imprint led by Jonathan Karp, Tyson’s editor, who called the scientist “the Bruce Springsteen of astrophysicists.”
“You name a respected scientist who has ever written a book of etiquette on how to meet aliens. It hasn’t been done. This is truly terra incognita,” Karp says.
The aliens will, of course, not speak any Earth languages, but Tyson thinks we can still communicate via science — universal constants like the speed of light, Newton’s laws of motion and gravity and Einstein’s relativity. The aliens may even recognize our periodic table — not the names or symbols — but the simple organization, which they may likely also have done.
He also concludes that they won’t be tiny or enormous, citing brain-to-body-weight ratios. Too big and they collapse under their own body weight. Too small and they couldn’t construct a spaceworthy vehicle. “The laws of physics greatly restrict the likelihood of Earth being visited by, much less invaded by tiny aliens,” he writes.
If they’re monitoring us, though, there’s a good chance they’ll want to be taken to our apparent leader — Taylor Swift. Instead, Karp says Tyson should be the point man for the human race and the book is his calling card.
“I think this is the funniest factual book that anyone will ever read on aliens and that’s quite a statement,” says Karp. “There’s so much chaos and conflict in the world, and it’s a book on aliens that has the potential to bring us all together. He’s clearly been thinking about aliens his entire life, and he’s managed to write about them with the acuity of a scientist and the appeal of an entertainer. That’s a powerful combination.”
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