Neil deGrasse Tyson has responded to Demi Lovato’s claim that “aliens” is a “derogatory term” for extra-terrestrial.
In a recent interview with Pedestrian, in promotion of their new documentary Unidentified with Demi Lovato, Lovato speculated that aliens is an offensive term for little green men.
“I think that we have to stop calling them aliens because aliens is a derogatory term for anything,” Lovato said. “I call them ETs,” the 29-year-old singer added.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has responded to Lovato’s bizarre claims, in a new interview with TMZ the Director of the Hayden Planetarium insists that “all the aliens that I’ve ever met, they have no feelings.”
Though he acknowledged that Lovato’s stance was “considerate,” he questioned why somebody would “worried about offending them by calling them an alien,” musing that humankind does not have the capacity to know what “is going on in the head of species of life from another planet.”
Tyson went on to lay out his defence for using the term ‘alien,’ explaining, “When I refer to aliens, just to be specific, I always say ‘space aliens’. And then, what we used to call aliens on Earth — undocumented immigrants, that’s what the new term is for them, and I’m all in on that.”
He continued, “So what that means is — if we all do that — the only invocation of the word ‘alien’ is for creatures from outer space that want to kill us all.”
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Where Tyson believes that the MO for any aliens who bother travelling across the universe to Earth is to suck up our precious resources, Lovato has a more optimistic take.
“I think that if there were beings that could harm us, we would have been gone a long time ago,” they told Pedestrian. “Why would they want our planet when we’re running it into the ground?”
