Aliens have been in the news of late, as Congress held hearings on ‘UAPs’ in ’23 and ’24, and the Biden and Trump admins both began moving to release some of the government’s ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon’ or UFO files. Just in time comes Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book on aliens, and he should know a thing or to since he hails from the same city the Men in Black are headquartered in. The book is casually written and thus a light read, but still saturated with a range of science — chemistry, physics, astrophysics, etc. It opens by Tyson sharing his fascination with aliens as a kid, and from there roams far and wide. Tyson uses both pop-culture depictions and science to analyze our conceptions of aliens, and how anthropocentric they are: he invites us to consider how truly weird and mind-blowing aliens might be. Imagine how strange life on Earth — with whom we share part of the same DNA, the ‘part’ varying on species — is. How much more incredible must be life on other worlds? After reviewing reasons we may not have encountered alien life yet (namely, distance and rarity of life), Tyson wraps up with some good ol’ fashioned UFO debunking. This includes testimony from recent Congressional hearings, too — he is not impressed. I enjoyed this well enough, but it’s a light, fast read, and didn’t run into anything I was unfamiliar with aside from his specific criticism of some of the ’23/’24 testimony.

And with that, I’ve finally broken ground on the Science Survey for this year.

Quotations

In fact, we know more about the surfaces of both the Moon and Mars than about our own ocean bottom. Want evidence of that? In 2005 the nuclear submarine USS San Francisco collided with an uncharted sea mountain.

If Aliens landed in Los Angeles, their first impression might be that Earth’s dominant life-form is the automobile. An obvious conclusion. When one gets injured, another version of that life-form shows up to haul it away and get repaired. Some of the larger life-forms on the freeway carry multiple automobiles within them. To the Aliens, these car haulers are surely pregnant.

In science, there’s no such thing as a credible claim or a credible witness, only credible evidence. (Remember Percival Lowell claiming that Mars had canals?