I was expecting “Take Me To Your Leader: Perspectives On Your First Alien Encounter” to offer lots of insightful tips from famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on how to behave, what to say, and what questions to ask if a space alien were to come knocking at my front door.
In fact, the back blurb depicts “Take Me” as “a book of etiquette” and “a scientifically infused user’s manual with helpful hints” about extraterrestrial contact.
If that’s your motive for picking up this book, you may be disappointed.
Yes there are a few tips. You should, for example, carry a copy of the periodic table around with you to show you’re part of an intelligent species. A proof of the Pythagorean theorem might be helpful as well. But such tips are sparse and seem impractical. (Wouldn’t my cell phone alone demonstrate that humans have some intellect?)
To enjoy “Take Me” it’s best to regard it, not as a “How to” manual, but more of a guide to what to expect during your closest encounter.
It starts off well, advising you not to try to shake the alien’s hand because you have no way of knowing what that signifies in ET’s culture.
But throughout its 229 pages, Tyson wanders widely as he offers his perspectives on alien creatures, invoking lots of pop culture depictions to make his points.
The first chapter, “Alien To Us,” looks at how we might see them if they came a-knockin’.
The second, “Alien To Them,” offers some fascinating perspectives on how the extraterrestrials might view us. We’d like to think of ourselves as the most interesting species on the planet, but Tyson notes that other animals might be regarded as far more interesting to other-worlders. Plant-based aliens, for example, might be horrified by what humans eat. A different intelligent species might marvel at the fact that humans have seven thousand different languages while whales and dolphins of the same species only speak one.
It’s a light, easy read that doesn’t require a science degree, with short tidbits about nature, how we struggle to imagine what forms of intelligent life might be spawned on distant planets, and the misconceptions we have of time and space. Such misconceptions allow many humans to believe that the aliens are already actively visiting Earth.
Tyson offers valuable insights on why all those UFO sightings probably aren’t alien spacecraft, and ends with a chapter that should have been titled “Why That Close Encounter Will Never Come.”
It’s not that there’s no other intelligent life out there. There are countless stars and planets, and life has had billions of years to develop and evolve throughout the universe. The problem is timing.
Because advanced civilizations probably blink in and out of existence, the odds that a technologically-advanced species is looking for signals from us at the same time we are looking for signals from them is exceptionally remote.
In that regard, Tyson winds up “Take Me” by reporting an analysis done with colleagues at Princeton University. “We get about a hundred extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy that are capable of transmitting and receiving radio signals through space” right now, and “that gives the average distance between such civilizations of about five thousand light-years,” he says.
That’s a slow conversation and a long way to travel in hopes that the civilization you hope to encounter hasn’t self-destructed or deteriorated into oblivion.
Personally, if a big-eyed hyper-brained creature came to Cranston to ring my doorbell and said, “Take me to your leader,” my first question would be “Which leader?”
“We have so many, most of the time they can’t agree on anything, too many are completely ill-equipped to help you, and they may make things worse,” I’d say.
“Choose wisely.”
