Subtitled: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter
(Simon & Schuster/Simon Six, May 2026, 226pp, including 28pp of acknowledgements, notes, index, and image credits)
This latest by Tyson casual, even lightweight, in the way Tyson’s books often are, though the topics addressed are weighty. It’s analogous to a book I wrote up here three months ago called DO ALIENS SPEAK PHYSICS? Whiteson and Warner, which also considered topics about aliens, and had several corresponding chapters. (Review here.)
It’s timely that this book came out a bit before the new Spielberg movie, which purports to reveal (yet again) the truth about aliens visiting the Earth. I wonder if Tyson will ever comment on it; I suspect he wouldn’t buy it for a moment.
This book got a rather negative review in the NY Times, from Alec Nevala-Lee, who mainly complained that Tyson talks a lot about movies and TV but hardly at all about science fiction novels or stories. But Tyson has always done this. He knows lots of ancient sci-fi movies, more than I’ve never seen. Nevala-Lee has a point, but Tyson would reach a far smaller audience if his examples were books, rather than movies, from 50 or 70 years ago.
Main Points
- Don’t assume aliens would be like us in any way, even though Hollywood movies usually do.
- Human ego knows no bounds; we imagine the universe revolves around us, but to faraway aliens we’re just one species on one planet among billions.
- It’s remarkable how confidently Tyson cites episodes of Star Trek, and Twilight Zone – 60-year-old series — that is, it’s remarkable that he can count on many people still recalling them.
- Alien intelligence need be only 2% smarter than us, as we are to chimps, to know things we could never comprehend. This chapter recalls the similar section in the Whiteson/Warner book. And the one SF book that Tyson mentions is Fred Hoyle’s THE BLACK CLOUD (which I reviewed at Black Gate here). Followed by contrasting examples of dumb aliens.
- How much would alien science and technology be like our own? They would use different units, but know the same fundamental constants, and the periodic table. When human groups with different levels of technology meet, it doesn’t go well for the less advanced.
- Could aliens have superpowers or supernatural powers? An expanded range of senses, perhaps. Maybe even telepathy, in a fashion, but not practically.
- People need answers more than true answers; they want to believe. Thus many people “believe” in aliens and UFOs despite virtually no evidence. We’re driven by biases in perception and conspiracy theories. (This section in particular aptly contrasts the presumptions of Disclosure Day.)
- Author, of course, has never been abducted by space aliens. But he has testified before Congress, trying to get SETI funded, before Proxmire knocked it down (just as MAGA and DOGE do today, defunding anything they don’t understand). Fox’s 1995 documentary about the Roswell crash was a hoax. Calls for evidence produce nothing. If aliens did exist, some humans would likely worship them.
Detailed Notes
Prologue, p1
Author says he’s always wanted to be abducted by aliens. As an astrophysicist he knows the odds that imply the universe is teaming with life. Any aliens that reach earth would be more advanced than we are. We would hide the flat-earthers and those who believe their God created the universe with humans, not aliens, created in his image. This is a book of etiquette for your next close encounter.
1, Alien to Us, p5
Don’t shake their tentacle; don’t rely on human norms. We know that we share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, 25% with bananas. We don’t know what aliens would be like. Movies typically depict them as human-like and usually hostile. Usually about our size. Could they be small, like insects? The forces of nature work differently at those scales. Square cube law. Whales are really big but live in water. Mega-sized aliens are problems; signals could take hours to cross their bodies. Consider the Burgess shale to see what’s possible on Earth. Soft tissues of aquatic animals were preserved. Aliens in Hollywood tend to group into 12 archetypes, p14, from ‘Grays’ to ‘little green men’ to ‘Lyrians’ with cat-eyes. Rick and Morty had the most creative aliens. Ancient cave paintings have included figures that might be seen as aliens. Despite the obvious alternative explanations. It’s easy to imitate those figures. Eight of the top 10 highest-grossing movies depict aliens or superheroes. Von Daniken started the trend of attributing ancient artwork to aliens. He presumes that ancient people simply weren’t smart enough to have done them. and if you can’t figure out how they were done, aliens must have done it. The Egyptian pyramids: I don’t believe humans could have built them, so aliens did it. The film Stargate. Crop circles: nobody saw anybody do it, so aliens did it. Later mutilated cattle.
HG Wells created the evil alien genre with The War of the Worlds. Via Percival Lowell and his perception of ‘canals.’ Which were never seen by anybody else. Orson Welles; a second film; Independence Day, with its computer virus. M/w beautiful aliens must be from Venus. Queen of Outer Space. Species, 1995. Katy Perry song in 2010. Demonic spirits that inhabit your body at night. (As excuses for immoral fantasies and dreams.) These became 20th century flying saucers and alien abductions. Cpt Kirk romanced many comely alien females. That was ok for audiences at the time, but kissing Uhura was not. 2025 TV series Pluribus. A descendant of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. TZ episodes: “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” Same year as Betty and Barney Hill. Consensus on what aliens looked like came in the 1970s: grey, bald, large eyes. Whitley Strieber. Roswell in 1947.
There are trillions of species on earth, all using the same DNA. Would this be true everywhere? Just as rocks form the same way. But genes wouldn’t necessarily be the same. The Blob, 1958. The Andromeda Strain, 1971. “The Devil in the Dark”. Silicon is plausible. But not necessary; carbon is far more common. Are we even dependent on liquid water? The Goldilocks Zone. 2026, Project Hail Mary. Then in 2001 there was no depiction of aliens at all, and in the film Contact.
What is the most different kind of alien we can imagine? Bruno thought about it, and the Catholic Church didn’t like it. They burned him at the stake. The worst kind of alien would be one made of antimatter.
2, Alien to Them, p37
“The level of ego and emotional centricity in the human species knows no bounds.”
That the sun, moon, and stars should all revolve around us? Astrology? How we say “when is sunrise”, 37b; we don’t take it literally. The creator of the universe cares what you eat and when? How National Review cautioned its readers that UFOs don’t cancel out Christianity, in 2021. Alien perspective, 38b:
Imagine a pair of Aliens, perched halfway across the Milky Way, staring at a dense star field, and one says to the other, “See that distant star? The one that’s indistinguishable from a billion other stars just like it? On its third rock in orbit, there’s a species that’s certain the whole universe was made just for them.
There’s no master plan for lifeforms on earth. We must unbridle our human hubris, before we can imagine what aliens would think of us.
P40. Voltaire, “Micromegas”, description. About an alien from Sirius, and how he can’t believe the kinds of creatures he finds on Saturn, then on Earth. Earthling’s view of the universe, p43.
P44, Frank Drake conceived of aliens living on the surface of a neutron star. …Inverting our perspective on what is normal. Predicting things called ‘atoms’. Then Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat.”
[[ This section is exactly about what sf does on many levels ]]
What if alien civilizations made movies that featured aliens? Are we the aliens? If they came to LA, they might think the aliens are cars. Car-haulers are pregnant. Or maybe they land in our waters. Whales have the largest brains. Actually ants have higher brain to body weight ratios. Would they be surprised that humans live by killing things? Perhaps they’re sentient plants. Examples from movies. Would they be surprised that we spend 1/3 of our lives asleep? That we make sounds? Including curse words? Surprised by our physiology?
P52, The Day the Earth Stood Still portrayed humans as potential threats to other planets. The 2008 remake was about concern for biodiversity.
Humans spend lots of time changing their appearance for each other. Do humans think they’re ugly? Earth has life everywhere—but not human life. 54b (a common theme). “Drop a naked human at a random longitude and latitude on Earth and chances are, you’re dead within hours, or sooner.” Earth is trying to kill us. Why do humans have so many languages? And that our guts are full of bacteria?
Episodes of TZ. The Invaders. Third from the Sun. The Pioneer 10 and 11 plaques. Showing 9 planets. Would they understand the invitation? Now Earth is surrounded by thousands of artificial satellites.
We’ve been sending message to them all along – radio and TV broadcasts. Hitler’s rallies. What would they think? Galaxy Quest portrayed it benignly. But most of the evidence they would see reveals only our rampant irrationality.
3, Alien Intelligence
The famous Newton quote, about the boy on the seashore.
Humans presume we are the smartest creatures ever. Hubris. Chimps have 98% of the same DNA, and have nowhere near the cognitive capabilities of humans. What if aliens were 2% smarter than us? Their toddlers might match our geniuses. Just as you can never teach long division to a chimp, there are things 2% smarter aliens know that we could never comprehend. So may communication with aliens could never happen. Alexander Pope quote from 1734. Maybe we’re pets in alien zoos. But some think our universe is mathematically describable – Livio and Tegmark. The Matrix. If everything is mathematical, maybe it’s just a program in some computer.
A first point of comparison with aliens might be math. Triangle and squares to show the Pythagorean theorem. No symbols. Then the Hollywood sign, which could be visible from space. Others. Cities at night indicate intelligence on Earth. Another symbol is the value of pi. In base 10. Cartoon characters for some reason have four, not five, fingers on each hand. Elsewhere, octopuses independently control eight limbs. Arrival depended on linguists; Tyson suggested astrobiologists instead. Europa Report. Then there’s Hoyle’s The Black Cloud. Trust the scientists.
Then there’s dumb aliens. Crashed flying saucers. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The aliens transmitted longitude and latitude, but not hemisphere. Anyway there’s no grid on the planet; how would the aliens get those numbers? Know about degrees, minutes, seconds? Then the series 3-Body Problem. The aliens waited too long to look for a stable star system. Catastrophe would have happened long ago. Then STTMP, dumbest creatures of all time. V-ger accumulated all this information but didn’t know its real name was Voyager. And the most clueless alien was in a radio play in which aliens come to steal all the water from earth, as if hydrogen wasn’t the most common element in the universe everywhere. Aliens were even in an opera by Gian Carlo Menotti.
4, Alien Science & Technology, p89
Quote about how science requires a system of measures. Humans have invented all sorts of measures with appropriate units. Examples of various units. Would there be common ground with aliens? Speed of light, Planck’s constant, constant of gravity. Just those three. From which we can derive units, 92t. These are all very small. Most depictions of aliens assume they must be just like us. Huygens: how aliens must have ships and navigation and… But of course in our own history many were sure we would never fly, etc. Examples.
“Universal” is misused on Earth. Ego again. But laws of physics are universal, and that sets limits on alien physiology. Details. Everything we see is in the past. Thus, spinning flying saucers are not a thing. Spaceships need not be aerodynamic. UFOs sometimes seem to accelerate rapidly across the sky. People feel acceleration, not speed. Examples. Dale Earnhardt. Now, how would aliens survive those accelerations? They’re described as silent too. Our own vehicles have gotten much quieter over the decades. But you can’t avoid a sonic boom. If there isn’t one, you’re probably misinterpreting what you see.
Consider distances of space, compared to a schoolroom globe. Fermi wondered why aliens haven’t visited us by now. Calculations for how long it would take to fill up the galaxy. A book by Stephen Webb proposed 75 solutions to the paradox. Examples p108: it’s too hard; they avoid intelligent life; they just stay home. Author’s favorite is the cosmic quarantine hypothesis: greedy aliens grab each other’s planets until war brings it all down. It’s what happened on Earth.
Recall the Periodic Table of the Elements. 1869, later quantum physics in the 1920s. Aliens would recognize the table; keep one to show it to them. Weapons, worries of getting eaten: “To Serve Man.” Our fear of evil aliens derives perhaps from how human groups with different levels of technology have dealt with each other. Slavery, genocide. Wells’ War of the Worlds. We’re our enemy.
5, Alien Powers, p115
Could aliens outrun or outjump us? Sure. Regrow a limb? Sure. That happens on earth. Examples. But humans have only the five senses. Aliens might have others. But huge alien eyes would leave less room for their brains. But hearing sounds from years ago on surfaces is impossible. To compensate for what humans may be missing, we invented science. Telescope and microscope. Other stimuli detected by science, p120.
Perhaps aliens could see any band of light. You’d have to be able to tune. Microwaves everywhere. Infrared. X-rays. Radio waves, from communication satellites, TV, radio, airplanes. STTNG’s visor. Before that, Superman. How sight is a passive phenomenon. More about Superman. If hearing, why not digestion? And deadly farts. And flammable. Is a fire-breathing dragon related?
P127. How about telepathy? Only by detecting the electromagnetic activity that create a field both inside and outside the skull. We managed to detect gravitation waves, so why not thoughts? Yet any kind of metal shield can block those fields. Tinfoil hats. How about disappearing and reappearing? But matter becomes energy. Maybe a wormhole? You have to know how to make one. Some comics use them. Invisibility; you divert the light around you. Suppose aliens occupy more spatial dimensions than we do. That way they might pass through our dimensions, as with Flatland. And seeing through any 3D enclosure, like a body. We can imagine a fish, jumping out of the sea, is transported into another dimension. It’s like people claiming to have seen Heaven.
One more TV alien, a sitcom in the 80s called Out of This World. The alien could stop time by holding two fingers together. Slowing time would work in a high gravitational field. Also telekinesis. There’s no biological reason such powers could exist. It’s possible in physics, e.g. with magnets. Black holes. But they are not practical.
6, Alien Evidence, p139
People need answers more than they want true answers. Religion; polytheism. Ptolemy. Newton. Laplace. No need for that hypothesis. These days ‘god of the gaps’ has morphed into ‘alien of the gaps.’ Or aliens of our ignorance. Saying “UFOs are real” makes no sense. Scientists are comfortable with the unknown; most people not so much. Conspiracy thinking too. Needing answers right now. Confirmation bias. There are 200 weather balloons launched in the US every day. Also, do sightings occur equally around the world? No. Tables of data, 146. Six ideas why. Example of a leopard escape from a zoo. Area 51. Close Encounters, the film. Eyewitness testimony is worth very little. Many photos from the 1950s and 60s. The era of hubcaps on cars. Amateur astronomers rarely report UFOs; they know the sky. Many reports by others of Venus, for reasons. Mexico City reports during an eclipse. Noctilucent clouds. Rocket launches. Orographic clouds. 156.
NASA’s photos of the Martian surface. Viking, 1976. One photo showed a face. Pareidolia. Rorschach tests. Jesus on tortillas. This is why eyewitnesses aren’t worth much. And why we’re persuaded much more by anecdotes than data. Science isn’t about “proof” in the way math and logic are; it’s about compelling evidence that’s repeatable. Examples.
July 2023, hearings about UAPs. A cover-up? Similar to other programs to probe UFOs. That never found any conclusive evidence. Why would the government cover-up? To secretly reverse-engineer alien ships for our own advantage. Or, we can’t handle the truth. Yet people seem not bothered. Documentaries continue. One in 2025. Testimonies. No evidence at all. If there was evidence, they would show it. Just as Spielberg’s movies do. Consider a list of rational perspectives about UFOs and aliens, p168ff. Where are the nonfuzzy images? Of fleeting aliens? Why aren’t our images as sharp as telescope images of the universe? Why has no one at a window seat on a plane captured a decent image? Do aliens visit government facilities exclusively? In an era of smartphones, reports of alien abductions have plummeted. What are “nonhuman biologics”? If governments are so bloated, how can they keep secret cover-ups? If aliens are being hidden somewhere, why hasn’t a night janitor ever smuggled a smartphone in and released a video? Maybe alien spacecraft actually *are* fuzzy? And… how many sworn testimonies are worth an actual alien?
Sometimes common sense does apply. Early 2024, New Jersey. The Pentagon said they weren’t a threat, while not identifying them.
7, Alien to Me, p175
But author has never been abducted by space aliens. Recalls an old Styx song. Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Captured into a zoo. But we can’t travel along our time dimension.
Discusses times he’s testified before Congress. Recalling Proxmire getting SETI defunded. His criterion was simple: if he couldn’t imagine why research was being conducted or what its benefits to society might be, it was ‘eligible’ for the award. [[ Just like MAGA and DOGE are happy to cut anything they don’t understand. ]] In a world where such people ruled, we would still be living in caves. And recalling the Drake equation. Drake listened to a couple stars (Project Ozma) and heard nothing. Sagan in 1966, then Project Cyclops suggested in 1971, but never funded. The only large radio telescope today is in China.
NASA still does research on exobiology. Astrobiologists. Pure biologists make too many assumptions based on life on Earth. Molecules in rocks from Mars. 1996, press conference at the White House.
Then a 1995 Fox documentary about the Roswell crash. It was a hoax. It was obvious, author could tell. There’s a want to believe. In 2023 author called for evidence, not sworn testimony. Contrasted with a Mexican display of Nazca mummies. Correspondence. Those mummies looked suspiciously fake, too. Recalls 2022 panel that to identify what data actually exists. And to identify a standardized system for making reports. Such efforts haven’t discovered aliens, but they did discover Sprites, rare atmospheric phenomena. Recalling Hume quote, written for aliens.
So if aliens came and were smart and powerful, would we worship them? Humans seem to have an inbuilt urge to worship power. There’s a UFO religion called Raelism, that believes aliens created humans and their prophets, with 100,000 believers.
Humans’ power of belief is also strong, even evidence is confounding. Aliens are still only a belief system.
Epilogue, p197
If author goes missing, look up at the stars. The US spends a lot on needy dogs and cats. People who ingest DMT see aliens. Author would be happy to exchange notes with aliens. But eventually he’d want to come back home.
