In an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Friday, astrophysicist and host of Cosmos Neil DeGrasse Tyson said his “great fear” was that aliens had already visited earth but “chose not to make contact, on the conclusion that there’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth.”

The Cosmos host caused a stir in the religious community in April when he argued that “enlightened religious people... don’t try to use the Bible as a textbook.” Though he said he believed faith and science were compatible, the Bible could not be used scientifically, as an example stating that “none of [the six-day creation account] is consistent with any scientifically derived information about the world,” and warning, “If you start using your scripture, your religious text as a source of your science, that’s where you run into problems...”

However, like Stephen Hawking (who believes humans should fear aliens raiding our natural resources), the popular astrophysicist has no problem speculating about alien invasions.

In a discussion that included several science-y subjects, like climate change, Hayes and deGrasse Tyson inevitably ended up rapping about aliens. DeGrasse Tyson said that while he believed it to be audacious for human beings to think they could define intelligence, he said he still hoped there was “intelligent life” out there, but he had a “great fear” that we might have already blown our chances:

"My great fear is that we’ve in fact been visited by intelligent aliens. But they chose not to make contact, on the conclusion that there’s no sign of intelligent life on Earth. How’s that for measures of intelligence?”

He explained that the existence of far older planets than ours suggested intelligent life far more evolved than ours. It is possible that they have been attempting to contact us for some time in a manner we simply are not smart enough to recognize:

“We were sending signals out before we were doing it on purpose. Our early TV shows, like I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners and that sort of thing, Howdy-Doody. These are our cultural emissaries.”

(Hayes got a big kick out of that one.)

“These are the things aliens will decode about our civilization, because in the radio bubble that is the volume around our solar system that contains our radio chatter — be it accidental or on purpose—that’s the first stuff we emitted.

He closed out the thought by working in a sexism and domestic abuse angle:

“They will learn how men and women treat each other by watching The Honeymooners, ‘To the moon, Alice!’ And people used to laugh at that.”

Video via MSNBC. H/T Raw Story.