"What keeps me awake at night: wondering whether human species is just too stupid to figure out the Universe. I just wonder. I lose sleep over that. Because we define ourselves as intelligent— because we made up the test to say that. And we sit alone at the top of the intelligence chart because we invented the exam, and all the other species of life on Earth are not. So who's to say that the first species (us) to be intelligent (us) has just enough intelligence to actually decode everything that's decodable in the Cosmos? [...] Think of the next closest thing to us, the bonobo chimp— 98½% identical DNA, yet you cannot teach them trigonometry, they have no concept of it. So if that's only 1½% difference in our DNA— and so imagine 1½% beyond us, rather than below us, in intelligence. [...] Their toddlers would be talking about things that would completely confound us."
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Academics from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesCosmologistsPhysicists from the United StatesAstronomers from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
Nerdist podcast, Episode #489 (2014-04)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson
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Neil deGrasse Tyson
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