Starry Messenger 1: Imagine you're an alien.
Starry Messenger 1: Imagine you’re an alien
Today we begin with a new book just released on September 20, 2022 called Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization by the familiar astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tyson), whose Astrophysics for Busy People our column has previously told us about.
There are two allusions to the title of this book. Galileo published a book in 1610, just called “The Starry Messenger”, which brought a great intellectual shock to people, and was the first time mankind really understood the world beyond the Earth [1]. “The expression ‘cosmic perspective’ was also used by Tyson in Astrophysics for Busy People. At that time, we said that the most important effect of the cosmic perspective is to make people humble: if you can only see things on the ground, you are too ignorant and arrogant, you have to think about the universe more often [2].
This new book is Tyson’s latest insight, developed over several years of contemplation and reflection. I heard Tyson say in an interview that he couldn’t have written this book a few years ago. It takes a special kind of chance to write a book like this. Tyson is a physicist, a public figure with a popular science program, an advisor to the President of the United States, and has been involved in political debates in recent years – it’s with all of these insights that he’s able to offer insights that are not available to the general public.
Tyson expands on the ‘cosmic perspective’ in this book, revisiting some of the current hot topics in human society with a cosmic perspective.
How do you use the cosmic perspective? Imagine you are an alien visiting Earth for the first time and you take a closer look. You notice that the people of Earth are behaving strangely.
Here’s a famous chilling joke: after observing all the behavior of Earthlings, an alien reports to his superiors that there is no sign of intelligent life on Earth.
Why? Because there is so much illogic in human civilization.
The book Starry Messenger is an attempt to show what a logical civilization should look like. Tyson can be said to have derived a moral and cultural ceiling from first nature principles. You don’t necessarily agree with the ceiling, but we can approximately see what the trend in moral and cultural evolution is.
The first principle of a logical civilization is objectivity.
1. What does it mean to be “objective”
In daily life, because everyone is in a different environment and culture, most of our views are subjective. We will have ‘groupthink’ and ‘identity politics’ and will have different values.
But you have to put yourself in the shoes of the aliens, and you see those so-called differences between people as not important at all. You see that there are far more commonalities than differences among humans. You’d have a more objective perspective.
Are there values in the world that are shared by all human beings, that are objective? There are. For example, sunrises and sunsets, total solar eclipses, starry skies, waterfalls, it doesn’t matter what civilization you come from, it doesn’t matter what ethnicity you are, it doesn’t matter how educated you are, whether you’re rich or not, you’re going to think that’s very beautiful.
That is objective beauty. To be objective is to be the same for all people, for all things. Tyson used to famously say * “The nice thing about this science thing is that it’s right whether you believe in it or not.” *
That’s objectivity.
Objective truths are beautiful in themselves. Pi, for example, the circumference of any circle divided by its diameter is equal to 3.1415926 …… Anyone who thinks about this can appreciate the striking beauty of it. Einstein’s mass-energy equation E=mc² is beautiful when you look at it. One of the most beautiful things about the universe for physicists is that we can actually understand it to some degree – no matter what culture you come from, you think this thing is awesome.
Aliens would recognize these objective beauties and values as well.
But there are many other values that are not objective. There was a time in ancient China when fat was considered beautiful, and now we consider thin to be beautiful. What people in other countries see as beauty, we may not agree with.
What’s even more frightening is that some people believe that their race is inherently superior. For example, a German Aryan during WWII said he was not only superior to some Jew, but to all Jews. Is that even possible? What makes you think you are superior to all Jews when you don’t even know all of them? This kind of thinking is obviously not objective, but indoctrinated.
Aliens would find it strange to see such values.
In fact, aliens would find our behavior of “categorizing people into different types” strange.
2. Classification and continuum
It is often said that there are seven colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. But sunlight is a continuous spectrum, so how can you divide it into seven colors? In fact, colors can be classified arbitrarily and can be subdivided infinitely. If you’re in the business of decorating houses or something like that, you’ll have many, many different colors in your eyes. The categorization is subjective.
Meteorologists generally categorize hurricanes into five classes based on wind speed–
A hurricane reaching category three is one kind of newsworthy, reaching category four is a completely different kind of newsworthy. But when you think about it, there’s a problem. The dividing line between a Category 3 and a Category 4 is 130 miles per hour winds, a number that isn’t at all unusual, so how is it different after that line? There’s a bigger difference between a weak Class III and a strong Class III than there is between a strong Class III and a weak Class IV! The truth is that this categorization is just for convenience.
When you think about it that way, does it make sense to categorize people as ‘male’ and ‘female’? Tyson says that most of the differences between men and women are not innate, they are learned. Why is it that only women should paint their nails, wear lipstick, wear necklaces, and grow their hair long, but men can’t do the same? These are purely cultural, there is no law of physics that prohibits men from doing the same.
Even facial features are not intrinsic. Yes, men’s faces are usually a little squarer and women’s a little softer – but that’s not absolute. Some males just have facial features that resemble females, and some females look like males.
Tyson gives a most interesting example. Santa Claus brings a bunch of reindeer with him whenever he goes out, right? They all have antlers, and the general public assumes they’re male based on that, but they’re not. We know from science that reindeer have both male and female antlers. The male reindeer’s antlers fall off in late fall, and only the female’s antlers last until Christmas. So the scientific view is that Santa’s reindeer are all female!
The logic is that, in the aliens’ view, most of the differences between men and women are as continuously variable as the sunlight spectrum and the speed of hurricanes per hour. Then it doesn’t make sense that you have to categorize people as ‘male’ and ‘female’. Saying something like only men can have leg hair and women should have breast implants is pretty ridiculous to aliens.
From this point of view, is it not easier to understand the ‘LGBTQ+’ movement that is now flourishing in the West. The philosophy behind this movement is that a person’s gender should be a continuous spectrum that should include, but not be limited to, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, indeterminate orientation, and so on, in addition to the unusual male and female. A person who is physically one gender and appears and behaves as the other? That’s perfectly reasonable in the eyes of aliens.
If there is even a continuum of change between men and women, even more so between races.
3. Race.
The division of people into black, white, and yellow according to their skin color is obviously unreasonable, because the color of a person’s skin is a continuous spectrum. Skin color is actually the result of evolution. Aboriginal people are generally darker in lower latitudes where the sun’s rays are stronger. This is because melanin in the skin dissipates UV rays, which are harmful to humans and can easily lead to skin cancer. Higher latitudes don’t have this problem, and so can allow white-skinned races to persist for a long time. That’s all.
You might say, no, blacks don’t just have dark skin, they also have low IQs! That’s just prejudice. The low IQ of black Americans relative to other races is probably due to history, environment, and education; you can hardly say it’s innate. Tyson himself is a good example of a black man who has a higher IQ than almost all Americans.
It used to be said that blacks looked more like chimpanzees and therefore were unevolved. To which Tyson cites a list of facts that say whites are closer to chimps–
Chimpanzees are covered in hair, and the race with the most hair is white;
Chimpanzees have large ears, and the race with the largest ears is also white;
The extinct Neanderthals were a very savage race, with 1-3% Neanderthal genes in Europeans and none at all in Africans;
Parasites prefer to lay eggs in the hair of chimpanzees and whites, not blacks, and whites are more prone to lice than blacks ……
So who exactly is not evolving? So you say we don’t compare ourselves to chimpanzees, let’s just talk about racial superiority, and Tyson cites the following facts–
Whites are 25 times more likely to get skin cancer than blacks;
Whites are far more likely to get things like itchy skin, psoriasis, acne than blacks;
:: White skin ages faster than black skin;
As they age, white people’s bones become less calcium-dense and break easily; black people don’t have this problem;
The suicide rate for whites is 2.5 times higher than for blacks ……
In the face of these facts, can you still say that whites are superior to blacks?
And you don’t even know what it means to be ‘black’. There is not one, but many, many races of black people. All humans on earth today are homo sapiens who came out of Africa. And those of us who came out are the minority, and those who stayed in Africa and did not come out are the majority. This has resulted in more races remaining in Africa than coming out of Africa. In fact, the genetic diversity of those blacks on the African continent today is higher than in all other parts of the world.
Higher diversity means that they are more prone to extremes [3].
That’s why the world’s slowest race of runners, and the fastest race of runners, are both in Africa. That’s why all those running stars at the Olympics are black.
The shortest race of people in the world, and the tallest race of people, are also both in Africa. That’s right, the tallest people in the world are not the Dutch in Europe, but the Watussi, who live in Rwanda and Burundi in Africa.
And that means that the world’s dumbest and smartest people should both be in Africa.
Are there highly intelligent people in Africa? There are. The average rating of the top ten nationally in chess in Zambia is higher than in Luxembourg, Japan and South Korea. Immigrants of Nigerian descent in the United States earn significantly more than the average American. In particular, there is a tribe in Nigeria called the Igbo, whose children who immigrate to the UK have significantly higher test scores than white Britons.
Africa is just not good, not genetically bad. In the future, if Africa is developed, maybe the Nobel Prize winners will all be black.
But in the eyes of the aliens, none of this matters. In the eyes of the aliens, there are only “earthlings”, not this race or that race. We were all one family a hundred thousand years ago.
Tyson had a great quote. He said I don’t need to look at my family’s ancestors to motivate me – my role models are the people in the human race who have achieved great things. If they can, I can, because all men are related to all men.
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*The theme of this talk is to break your ‘I-ness’, which is to say, to go beyond identity thinking. View the world through a cosmic lens and your mind will be much wider. *
When Clinton was president, he borrowed a rock from the moon from NASA and put it in the Oval Office [4]. Whenever a politician argued with him, he would show the other person the rock and ask him to visualize what this matter of ours would be if he stood on the moon and looked at it.
Edgar Mitchell, the American astronaut who once walked on the moon for nine hours, also said something like this -
“From the moon, international politics is so trivial. You’d want to grab a politician by the neck, drag him a quarter of a million miles away, and say to him, “Look over there, you son of a bitch!””
That’s the magic of cosmic perspective. Once you have an experience like looking at the Earth from the Moon, you are in a completely different place in life.
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Finally I will tell another story related to China. in 2003, Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei went into space for the first time on the Shenzhou V spacecraft, and China overtook Japan in the field of spaceflight in one fell swoop. The Japanese had a bit of a sour taste in their mouths, feeling that the battle of national fortunes was being led by China.
There was a Japanese astronaut who had been on the space station with the Americans. A Japanese reporter interviewed him and said, “Would you be jealous of China? The astronaut’s answer was–
*”People on the ground will be jealous. But once you’re in space, everything on the ground is very small.” *
Annotation
[1] Elite Day Class Season 1, Galileo’s Reaction Speed.
[2] Elite Day Class Season 1, Perspectives on the Universe.
[3] Elite Daily Lessons Season 3, How to Increase Excellence.
Highlight
Put yourself in the shoes of an alien and you’ll see that there are far more commonalities than differences among humans. You will have a more objective perspective.
View the world through a cosmic lens and your mind will be much broader.