Garry Nolan: Neil deGrasse Tyson's Ludicrous Statement

Transcript

Conjure in your mind what the word alien means. Um, Ridley Scott. Ridley Scott, right? Hollywood. Almost always in, you know, the movies, the aliens are are here to pillillage our planet or, you know, are going to eat us. And so that's unfortunate, uh, for one, but alien also implies from another planet.

And so the moment you say that, you limit the possibilities of what it might be. And and so that's what allows someone like Neil Degrass Tyson to come in and say, "Well, it's not possible for them to get from there to here." Well, that's ridiculous. I mean, even he knows that. Um, you know, the universe is 14 billion years old. Even with a conventional rocket, I could get from one side of the galaxy to the other in a mere 500 million years, right? But you could do that step by step.

You could create something what's called a von Newman probe, which you send out one of them. It lands on a planet, it makes a 100 copies of itself, and it sends those out. And just with conventional uh rocketry, you could skip your way across the galaxy and get from any place to the other. Now, you're not the same person that got off the the ship on the far end as who got on or launched it in the first place. That doesn't matter.

you can do it. To say that they can't get here presumes that you're taking a bus ride or something. And so it's just on the face of it a ludicrous statement.