This topic of the search for extraterrestrial life ranges widely, and it can spin off in a lot of crazy directions.

If you listen to the interview with Joe Scott, you heard us talk about the Rare Earth Hypothesis.

For this bonus episode of Wild Thing, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson shares a different take on the same idea.

We also talk about the difficulties we

humans have in grasping the enormity of the universe and spend a little time on movie aliens.

I imagine most of you know who Neil deGrasse Tyson is, but for those who don't, he's the director

of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and he's done a tremendous

job of making astrophysics, astronomy, and science more accessible to the general public.

I start by asking him how he got hooked on astronomy.

I think the immensity of it and the endless ignorance that it contained.

I enjoyed the prospect of participating in advancing a frontier that exists between what we know or what we think we know of the universe

and where we have yet to step or to observe or to visit.

And so, and I felt that way since I was nine years old.

So I've been at this my entire life.

Yeah.

And the immensity is an interesting point because for me, I find that very daunting.

Like, you know, you're on this ball of mud that is hurtling around the... There's some iron in

there, too. Yeah, there's some iron or some mud. It's zipping around this flaming ball of hydrogen.

There's some rocks, too. Some rocks. All right, fine. You're so picky. But, you know, we're whirling around this flaming ball of hydrogen and a solar system that's just one of many in a galaxy that's one of many.

I mean, this is enormous.

And you start thinking about there's other galaxies out there.

And then beyond that, we could be galaxies within galaxies, within galaxies.

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