The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Snapshot · The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Neil deGrasse Tyson On Aliens, Simulation Theory, and What Happens Inside A Black Hole

Explore episode Jul 9, 2026

Where this was said

Why Intelligent Alien Life Could Exist

At 31:55 · chapter starts 29:03

Life on Earth emerged with startling speed — within 100 million years of the earliest it possibly could have, representing just 5% of Earth's 4.5-billion-year history. Whatever challenges scientists face replicating abiogenesis in the lab, Earth didn't seem to have the problem. Scale that ease across a galaxy where we've already catalogued 6,000 exoplanets in a tiny search radius (first discovered only in 1995, a year before Steven Bartlett was born), and across hundreds of billions of galaxies beyond that, and the non-existence of alien life becomes the far more extraordinary claim. Tyson also complicates the concept of 'intelligent': by raw brain mass, humans rank fourth on Earth behind whales, dolphins, and elephants. The brain-to-body-mass ratio that restores human supremacy only holds among mammals — mid-sized birds like magpies and parrots beat us on that metric too. Aliens prioritising cognitive capacity might skip straight to the whales.

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