Welcome to Purple Psychedelia; enjoy your stay.
“If you look at our closest genetic relative to human beings, it would be the chimpanzee. We share like ninety-eight plus percent identical DNA. We are smarter than a chimpanzee. So lets invent a measure of intelligence that make humans unique, lets say intelligence if your ability to like compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science lets say. Lets make that as the arbitrary definition of the measure of intelligence. Chimps can’t do any of that, yet we share ninety-eight, ninety-nine percent identical DNA. The most brilliant chimp there ever was, maybe can do a little bit of sign language. Well our toddlers can do that. Toddlers. So here’s what concerns me deeply, deeply. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one percent difference in DNA. It has to, because that’s the difference. The Hubble Telescope, these grand, that’s in that one percent. Maybe, everything that we are that is not the chimp, is not as smart compared to the chimp as we tell ourselves it is. Maybe the difference between constructing and launching a Hubble Telescope and a chimp combining two finger motions as sign language, maybe that difference is not all that great. We tell ourselves it is, just the same way we label our books optical illusions. We tell ourselves it’s a lie, maybe its almost nothing. How would we decide that? Imagine another life form that’s one percent different from us, in the direction that we are different from the chimp. Think about that. We got one percent different and we are building the Hubble Telescope, go another one percent. What are we to they? We would be drooling blithering idiots in their presence, that’s what would be. They would take Stephen Hawking and roll him in front of their primate researchers and say, ‘well this one is like the most brilliant among them because he can sorta do astrophysics in his head.’ ‘Oh isn’t that so cute, little Johnny can do that too, oh that’s so nice. In fact Johnny just did that, lemme get that, its on the refrigerator door, here he is, he did that in his elementary school class.’ Think about how smart they would be. Quantum mechanics would be intuitive to their toddlers. Whole symphonies would be written by their children and like I said just put up on their refrigerator doors the way our pasta collages are on our refrigerator doors. So the notion that we are gonna find some intelligent life, and have a conversation with it? When was the last time you stopped to have a conversation with a worm? Or a bird? You might have had a conversation but I don’t think you expected an answer alright. So we don’t have conversations with any other species on Earth with whom we have DNA in common. To believe that some intelligent other species is going to be interested in us, enough to have a conversation. They’ll look at our Hubble Telescope and say ‘oh isn’t that quaint, look at what they’re doing.’ So I lay awake at nights wondering whether simply we as a species are simply too stupid to figure out the universe that we are investigating. And maybe we need some other species one percent, one percent smarter than we are for which string theory would be intuitive. For which all the greatest mysteries of the universe, from dark matter, dark energy, the origins of life and all the frontiers of our thought would be something they just self intuit. I’m jealous of that possibility, because I want to be around for those discoveries.”
— Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson
