Your Prescribed Dose of Neil DeGrasse Tyson

This article is over 14 years old and may contain outdated information

Recommended Videos

Stephen Hawking was quoted last week on the possibility of alien life in the universe:

If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.

This Tuesday, CNN had Neil Degrasse Tyson on, to weigh in on Hawking’s bold pronouncement.  Professor Tyson’s responses are befitting of an arguable spiritual successor to Carl Sagan.

When asked whether Hawking’s statement was just speculation, he replied:

Yeah, but it’s not blind speculation.  I think it says more about what we fear about ourselves than any real expectation of what an alien would be like.  In other words, our biggest fear, I think, is that the aliens who visit us would treat us the way we treat each other here on Earth.  So, in a way, Hawking’s sort of apocalyptic, um, fear stories are just a mirror held up back to us.  That’s how we need to think about it…

No one knows how an alien will be have.  They’ll have different chemistry, different motives, different intentions.  Who are we to extrapolate what we are to them?  I’m just saying that any suspicion that they will be evil is more a reflection of our fear about how we would treat an alien species if we found them, than any actual knowledge about how an alien would treat us.

See Tyson’s interview below:

(via Reddit.)


The Mary Sue is supported by our audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Learn more about our Affiliate Policy
Author
Image of Susana Polo
Susana Polo
Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.