Before I get into my thoughts on mankind and the possibility of life in the cosmos, allow me to geek-out for a minute and discuss what may be the world’s nerdiest man-crush.

Neil DeGrasee Tyson is the Director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium, an astrophysicist, an author, the host of the StarTalk Radio Podcast, and an all around snappy dresser. But beyond that, he is a learner, and a teacher. You can spend hours on YouTube watching his lectures, his debates, his Q&A sessions, his U.S. Senate testimonies, and what sticks out beyond everything else is the never-ending passion he has for science and learning. It’s almost as if every time he speaks he’s rediscovering the wonder in his words. And when you’re discussing everything in our universe, from the nooks and crannies to the great unknowns, there’s plenty of wonder to go around.

How do you not love a man with this veset?

It certainly doesn’t hurt that Tyson’s words are usually exquisitely chosen; that he has a gift for turning science into poetry. Take in a few of these lines from this 12-minute video that inspired this post:

“The elements of the periodic table, that which we are made of, derived from the action of stars that have manufactured the elements, exploded, [and] scattered their enriched guts across the galaxy.”

“Not only do we exist within the universe, it the universe itself that exists within us.”

“It would be inexcusably egocentric to suggest that we are alone in the cosmos. The chemistry is to rich to declare that, the universe, too vast. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand in all the beaches in the world. There are more stars in the universe than all the sounds and words ever uttered by all the humans who have ever lived.”

Beautiful. And it’s this last idea that leads into what Tyson calls a “fascinatingly disturbing thought” and that got me thinking about life outside of our own.

The first question you have to ask is, “is there other life in the universe?” Basic math tells us that yes, there is. It starts with our existence. That’s one count of life around one star (for these purposes, all life on Earth will be counted as one). Now, our star is one of somewhere between 200-400 billion in our galaxy, the Milky Way. And our galaxy is one of an estimated 100-200 billion galaxies in the universe (an estimate that falls on the conservative side, mind you). With this in hand, a conservative calculation of the number of stars in the universe lands somewhere around 10 sextillion (10 with 22 zeroes after it), and could be as high as 1 septillion (1 with 24 zeroes after it). ONE SEPTILLION! Never mind the near impossibility of even comprehending what that number truly represents; to think that we are somehow the only planet around the only star capable and currently of sustaining life in the universe would be obscene.

The deceptive simplicity of space

So now the question becomes, if there is life, is it as advanced, or more advanced, than we are? Again, basic math overwhelmingly says “yes.”

The universe, as best we can calculate, is 13.77 billion years old. Meanwhile, our first ancestors arose only 2.5 million years ago, and what we would consider to be anatomically modern humans came about only 200,000 years ago. This means in the 13.770 billion-year history of our universe (we’re so insignificant we have to add another decimal point here just to do this math), life had roughly a 13.768 billion year head start on us to take hold somewhere else.

13.768 billion years vs. 2.5 million years. I think it’s safe to say that as a planet, we’re playing catch-up here.

This brings us back to Tyson’s “fascinatingly disturbing thought.”

In short, Tyson notes that chimpanzees are our closest genetic relatives, sharing roughly 99% of our DNA, and that the most brilliant chimp there ever was could do a little bit of sign language, which our toddlers can also do. This means everything that we “are,” that makes us human – our poetry, our science, our philosophy; our Eiffel Tower, our Hubble Telescope, our Pyramids – is bound up in just that 1% of DNA chimps don’t share. So maybe, Tyson wonders, the difference between chimps and us isn’t really as great as we think it is.

So what would we be to another form of life 1% different from us in the way we’re 1% different from chimps? As Tyson puts it, we’d be “drooling, blithering idiots in their presence.” Every day we have brilliant scientist around the world, the highest representation of mankind’s intelligence, theorizing and debating all sorts of mind-bending ideas to sort out the truth behind our universe – string theory, anti-matter, dark matter, dark energy, multiverse scenarios – and we’re nowhere close to knowing the truth. But for life 1% ahead of us? “Quantum mechanics would be intuitive to their toddlers.”

So you ask, “If there’s life out there, why haven’t we detected it?” For that answer, I would refer you back to the number of stars in the number of galaxies in our universe, remind you that those are only estimates extrapolated from the minimal amount of the universe we’ve actually studied, and then drop the mic. Assuming that we should have detected life if it’s out there is just as “inexcusably egocentric” as assuming that we’re the only life to be found.

Then why hasn’t it contacted us? Assuming it even knew we existed, the answer surely lies in that that 1% difference (or, and how cool would this be, that 2%? 5%? 20%?) I’ll refer once more to Tyson, who puts my answer a little more bluntly: “When was the last time you stopped to have a conversation with a worm?”

So the way I see it, yes, there’s clearly life in the universe. And no, I don’t think little green men are watching us from afar. Again, they probably have no idea that we even exist. But the difference between them as us is, they know someone definitely exists. And that knowledge is just part of what makes them real 1%.

What are your thoughts? Are we alone in the universe? Is there life out there that we just have found yet? Or life that’s found us and decided we’re not worth it? Or is there another possibility I’ve overlooked? Share your thoughts!