It seems that Neil Degrasse Tyson, aka The Greatest Genius In The World ® is speculating that maybe aliens have already been here and didn't recognize any intelligent life on Earth. That would be Neil Degrasse Tyson, The World's Greatest Genius ® WHO IS A PARTNER WITH SETH MACFARLANE, AKA THE MAN WHO IS MAKING PEOPLE STUPIDER EVERY SINGLE DAY ON THE NETWORKS DEDICATED TO MAKING PEOPLE STUPIDER, ON THE MEDIUM THAT HAS DONE MORE THAN ANY OTHER TO MAKE PEOPLE STUPIDER.
This should probably be on my other blog, the one with the rude name, but it's too ironic to isolate there.
Does The World's Greatest Genius not disqualify himself by saying something so massively and cluelessly ironic?
My thanks to The Daily Grail for alerting me to this irony.
Actually I'm still trying to figure out why Tyson's response to climate change deniers ("Lincoln would turn over in his grave!") is supposed to be so powerful.
ReplyDeleteThis bit prompted some funny comments at Raw Deal, but mostly I thought "How the hell would aliens interpret anything in radio waves emanating from earth?" Is there an alien Rosetta Stone sent out in those radiations? I mean, it's a cute idea, aliens learning about earth from "The Honeymooners," but how would they even begin to interpret the language, much less get an idea of human relationships from it?
Anymore than we could translate what they have to say, if they have anything to say.
If nothing else, watching the Honeymooners would give them some rather odd ideas about how rockets to the moon are launched and what those mean.
ReplyDeleteTyson should decide if he's going to be a scientists and talk about stuff he actually knows about or if he's going to be a celebrity who Asimovishly gasses on about junk he doesn't know anything about.
The usual excuse in sci-fi circles is that aliens "monitor" our communications and so learn our language (usually English, oddly enough). Which apparently is possible because they are so superior in their intelligence, or something.
ReplyDeleteOr their just space-wandering anthropologists. Which is the first thing I'd do with interstellar space travel capability.....