From "Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries" by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

When Hollywood aliens manage to visit Earth, one might expect them to be remarkably smart. But I know of some that should have been embarrassed at their stupidity. During a four-hour car trip from Boston to New York City, while I was surfing the FM dial, I came upon a radio play in progress that, as best as I could determine, was about evil aliens who were terrorizing Earthlings. Apparently, they needed hydrogen atoms to survive so they kept swooping down to Earth to suck up its oceans and extract the hydrogen from all the H20 molecules.

Now those were some dumb aliens.

They must not have been looking at other planets en route to Earth because Jupiter, for example, contains over two hundred times the entire mass of Earth in pure hydrogen. And I guess nobody ever told them that over 90 percent of all atoms in the universe are hydrogen.

And how about all those aliens that manage to traverse thousands of light-years through interstellar space, yet bungle their arrival by crash-landing on Earth?

Then there were the aliens in the 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, who, in advance of their arrival, beamed to Earth a mysterious sequence of repeated digits that encryption experts eventually decoded to be the latitude and longitude of the aliens' upcoming landing site. But Earth longitude has a completely arbitrary starting point-the prime meridian-which passes through Greenwich, England, by international agreement. And both longitude and latitude are measured in peculiar unnatural units we call degrees, 360 of which are in a circle. Armed with this much knowledge of human culture, it seems to me that the aliens could have just learned English and beamed the message, "We're going to land a little bit to the side of Devil's Tower National Monument in Wyoming. And since we're coming in a flying saucer we won't need the runway lights."

The award for dumbest creature of all time must go to the alien from the original 1983 film Star Trek, The Motion Picture. V-ger, as it called itself (pronounced vee-jer) was an ancient mechanical space probe that was on a mission to explore and discover and report back its findings. The probe was "rescued" from the depths of space by a civilization of mechanical aliens and reconfigured so that it could actually accomplish this mission for the entire universe. Eventually, the probe did acquire all knowledge and, in so doing, achieved consciousness. The Enterprise stumbles upon this now-sprawling monstrous collection of cosmic information at a time when the alien Was searching for its original creator and the meaning of life. The stenciled letters on the side of the original probe revealed the characters V and ger. Shortly thereafter, Captain Kirk discovers that the probe was Voyager 6, which had been launched by humans on Earth in the late twentieth century. Apparently, the oya that fits between the V and the ger had been badly tarnished and was unreadable. Okay. But I have always wondered how V-ger could have acquired all knowledge of the universe and achieved consciousness yet not have known that its real name was Voyager.

And don't get me started on the 1996 summer blockbuster Independence Day. I find nothing particularly offensive about evil aliens. There would be no science-fiction film industry without them. The aliens in Independence Day were definitely evil. They looked like a genetic cross between a Portuguese Man of War jellyfish, a hammerhead shark, and a human being. While more creatively conceived than most Hollywood aliens, their flying saucers were equipped with upholstered high-back chairs and arm rests.

I'm glad that, in the end, the humans win. We conquer the Independence Day aliens by having a Macintosh laptop computer upload a software virus to the mothership (which happens to be one-fifth the mass of the Moon) to disarm its protective force field. I don't know about you, but I have trouble just uploading ftles to other computers within my own department, especially when the operating systems are different. There is only one solution. The entire defense system for the alien mothers hip must have been powered by the same release of Apple Computer's system software as the laptop computer that delivered the virus.

Thank you for indulging me. I had to get all that off my chest.