StarTalk Live! Water World (Part 2)

Navigate the stormy seas of greed, politics, economics and the science of water with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Eugene Mirman and their guests Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Gyalwang Drukpa, Dr. Tess Russo and Jason Sudeikis in Part 2 of our show from The Beacon Theater.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back live at the Beacon Theater, New York City. StarTalk Live.

• 0:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're talking about water. In all its forms, in all the consequences of too much water, too little water, dirty water, clean water. Tess, you've also studied disruptions to the hydrologic cycle. What are examples of disruptions to that?

• 0:47Speaker 01

  I would say changes, not really disruptions.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, what's an example?

• 0:51Speaker 01

  If you build a dam on a river, you are...

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like what beavers do?

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 0:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Humans do it too, but we learned it from beavers, yeah.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Right. So that's an example of disrupting the flow down the river.

• 1:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, is that always bad?

• 1:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what else would disrupt it?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  If you pumped lots and lots of water out of the ground.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You might be a redneck.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  I don't know where to go from there.

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Shout out to Jeff Foxworthy, right there. Okay, so continue.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so pumping lots of water out of the ground could lower the groundwater table. It could start pulling water from the rivers and the streams down into the ground. So water that used to make it all the way to the ocean now gets sucked into the ground.

• 1:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I never knew that. Are you saying if you pull water out from other places, your river now might leach into those places that it didn't go before because there used to be water there?

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that drains your river before it even gets to the ocean?

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the surface water, the groundwater are connected, even though you don't see the groundwater or the connection.

• 2:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and so some of the hidden costs of climate change would include what, would you say?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Well, changing the water availability. So changes in precipitation patterns are going to change how much water seeps into the ground and recharges our groundwater. It's going to change how much water flows down our rivers. Temperature changes are going to change how much water we need, which is a big problem.

• 2:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And as you melt glaciers, sea levels rise, so that's another...

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, flooding, if you're melting glaciers too quickly.

• 2:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so if the sea level rises, might that force water back up rivers and make it brack-ish?

• 2:43Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When it wasn't that way before, is that something that can happen as well?

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, and you can have seawater intrusion into the aquifers. So now you're pushing salty water into our groundwater, and then no one wants to pump it anymore.

• 2:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Contaminating the wells that people might go from?

• 3:00Eugene Mirman?

  So it sounds like most of the problem is beavers.

• 3:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so I'm fascinated by hearing this and hearing Bobby give the recitation of geopolitical conflict. Your Holiness, is there any history of how water is dealt with spiritually? Water as ritual? Is there any traditions that you could share with us about how people think about water beyond just something to drink?

• 3:28Speaker 03

  I just wanted to ask you that question, since you are a scientific man.

• 3:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh-huh.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Do you really think that there is some sort of a connection with the spirituality? A spiritual connection with the water?

• 3:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a quote from JFK, John Kennedy, the president. He spoke of returning to the water's edge. He was a boatsman, as we know. If I get any of this wrong, correct me here. And when asked, "Why do you come to the ocean?", and he reflected on the fact that life on land started in the ocean. And he hypothesized that this point of origin of life continues to call to us. And in its calling, we are drawn to the boundary between land and water, and we gaze upon it.

• 4:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who here hasn't stared at the waves coming in? Not even in conversation with anyone, just transfixed by nature and how it moves water towards the land and away. And so, I don't know if that's a spiritual reference to water as much as sort of a biological one, but it's a comment that I've never forgotten ever since I've heard him speak those words.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  To my understanding, the old elements has the spiritual existence, definitely. The water represents the energy, energy of the growth, the prosperity. And of course, the fire represents something else. I don't want to take much of your time to tell all these things, but...

• 5:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it's kind of why we have you here.

• 5:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's kind of you to not want to take up my time.

• 5:12Speaker 04

  Why won't you tell us the secrets of wind?

• 5:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you ask for the secrets of wind?

• 5:22Speaker 03

  I did!

• 5:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's well-known. George Bernard Shaw said wind is caused by trees waving their branches.

• 5:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Disprove that one, right?

• 5:35Speaker 03

  So the water definitely has spirit. We call it Naga, which is of course the holder of the water. When we pollute the water, these guys are not happy. This is from a superstitious point of view. When it works, I believe, when it doesn't work, I don't believe.

• 5:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are all happy to learn that you lead an evidence-driven life.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  So, if I share some example. Up in the Himalayas, there is a village that has a very beautiful lake and the beautiful rivers. And then they were contaminating the river and the water. They don't have that many stuff to dump in water. But when people die, the dead body goes in there and horse goes in there and the dead yak, dead sheeps, they're all dumped in there because, you know, it's easier for them. And I've noticed that so many people are sick, especially skin disease. And every doctor goes there, they can't help. So, they want me to help. So then I thought, okay, there must be something to do with the water.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  So then I said, "Let's experiment." Then I asked them to clean the lake, to clean the river, and I asked them not to throw the dead body there. Please cremate in a cemetery. I create a cemetery for them. And within two years, the whole entire disease stopped.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  That's where the saying, "Don't throw your dead host," where the water comes from.

• 7:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The very first biochemical warfare ever. It was figured out that if you had the carcass of some farm animal that was sort of putrefied, and you managed to dump it into the well of your enemy, you would then contaminate their water supply and basically make them all sick and possibly kill them. This biochemical warfare in its earliest...

• 7:36Speaker 03

  Really?

• 7:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what, in this case, they are waging biochemical warfare on themselves, contaminating their own water supply.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  That part I believe because I saw with my own eyes. But there are many things that we can talk about, religious, blind faith and all these things, superstitious, that I don't believe. Many things that are not believable.

• 7:57Speaker 05

  What more of a spiritual journey exists than existing on Earth like water does? Ascending to the heavens, hanging out there for a few days, then coming back down, and then helping people out again? That seems like a pretty common spiritual journey, at least Catholicism. I mean, like, that water cycle is, you know, the trin... There's a, you know, threes, magic number, Schoolhouse Rock, et cetera, et cetera, man, et cetera, et cetera.

• 8:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's another point about water. Water is a very stable molecule. It's really hard to break the H2O apart. Really hard. Takes a lot of energy. In fact, the inverse of that fact is what drives what was once the engines of the space shuttle. The big orange tank?

• 8:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fuel tank is hydrogen separated from oxygen. You don't see it, but there are two tanks inside that tank. One of them is twice the size of the other. The one that's twice the size has hydrogen, H2. The other one's half the size is oxygen. Those two chemicals funnel out of the engine, and when they combine, they release energy. An exothermic reaction it's called. And therein is rocket fuel. And that energy is the energy you'd have to put back into water in order to break it apart again. So because it's so stable, every water molecule you ingest has basically been around since the beginning of the earth. So you want to talk about spirituality?

• 9:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You take a swig of water. It contains water molecules that have passed through the kidneys of Abraham Lincoln.

• 9:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of Genghis Khan. Of Jesus. Pick your person from the past. Be they holy or otherwise.

• 9:48Speaker 04

  Bill Russell.

• 9:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill Russell.

• 9:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, not, uh, he's not far enough in the past. Because the water, you have to drink it. That's to come out of you. Goes in the groundwater, goes to the river. River goes to the ocean, the ocean circulates. It comes up as rain, comes back on the, so it takes a while.

• 10:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. William McKinley?

• 10:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nooo, 150.

• 10:13Speaker 04

  When will we get to drink William McKinley?

• 10:18Speaker 05

  That'd be great, like you start selling water, then this pass through whom, ever, yeah? That's great.

• 10:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so of course my broader point is that water is communal. Internationally communal. For that very reason.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  That's true, yes.

• 10:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Water molecules don't carry passports. They will move from one part of the world to the other.

• 10:36Speaker 05

  I've never been more scared in my life than moments in water. Like when you're in a wave, you know, you're there having fun and then you get caught. It's the time I've been most afraid of my life. And I've been on the highway in LA. And it's still, it's still being in the ocean.

• 10:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, we fear death.

• 10:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, and that's a very spiritual moment in that moment. It's like, oh no, here I go.

• 10:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's water that can bring life and death.

• 10:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:59Speaker 06

  We all need some contact with wilderness, with the wild part of the earth. And if you've gone camping, or if you've been on whitewater sailing, or whatever it is, there's kind of a spiritual renewal that takes place and that everybody can document. Everybody knows that. And one of the things that the water keepers do is we focus on waterways that go through our major cities. This country particularly was founded on the idea Frederick Jackson Turner said that an American democracy came out of the wilderness. And it was a whole movement in this country after the revolution of our artists and our cultural leaders who were telling the American people, "You have to build public parks in your city," like Frederick Olmsted, our great painters

• 11:44Speaker 06

  painted these vast landscapes, usually including water, to tell the American people that you don't have to be ashamed because you don't have the 1,500 years of culture that they have in Europe, because you have this relationship to the land, to the water, and wilderness, and that's the undiluted work of the Creator. That is the distinction that you're going to have as a nation. That's where your values and your virtues and your characters of people are going to come from.

• 12:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We do a little bit of that. We have the national parks. Are you not happy with how we've divided up the landscape here in America?

• 12:16Speaker 06

  You're making me look like a malcontent. The most important environmental issue is that we have livable cities. Instead of investing in huge highways and subsidies that go out to settling the landscapes around our cities, we should be investing in police protection, and great schools, and great healthcare in the city, making people want to live here, and then saving the landscapes to filter water. And that's what they do in Portland, which is consistently the most livable city in the United States. They've made an urban boundary.

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're from the Pacific Northwest, right?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  I used to live in Portland.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you miss that about Portland?

• 12:50Speaker 01

  I do. I loved living there.

• 12:52Speaker 06

  You know, in Portland, you can take a bus to the end of the line, and you're in a city, and you can step out of that bus and walk into a redwood forest, you know, with Sitka spruce that are 30 feet around at the base, and you know, you see the eagles and everything else, and it's accessible to the poorest person in the city. Whereas in New York, when Robert Moses designed the parkways, the whole point of those parkways was to get New Yorkers out to their parks so they could renew this relationship with the roots of the democracy. But he specifically made the bridges on the Hutch and the Merritt low enough so that a Greyhound bus couldn't pass under them because he didn't want black people from New York visiting the parks. And that's how they are today. And it's one of the most important civil rights issues that we have in this country.

• 13:35Speaker 06

  Is the access of poor people and minority communities to public parks. And they're always the ones who shoulder disproportionate burden of environmental issues.

• 13:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you've seen those parkways, all the bridges are very low. So all you'd have to see is a black person in a really low Lamborghini coming through. He would, his head would explode. He wouldn't know what would happen there.

• 14:02Speaker 04

  Lamborghini buses are the solution to this problem.

• 14:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Many of us are old enough to remember when you didn't just buy water in the store. It means somebody owns access to water and is selling it to you. Your Holiness, does that offend you when someone says, "I have declared this water something I own, and now for you to have fresh water, I'm going to sell it to you."

• 14:27Speaker 04

  Well, he controls all the water in New York.

• 14:32Speaker 04

  He's maybe not the one to ask that. He lives in a mountain and controls all the water and those stumps.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  Are you mad other people own some water as well?

• 15:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, let me make it a bigger question here. Your Holiness, from your understanding of human nature, are you hopeful? Because sometimes I'm not.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  Of course. I am very optimistic, but we have to educate. And also, me coming from Himalaya, the waters are all running down to the world. The biggest river, the Indus River, is just next door to me, is going down. And elsewhere, if there's some sort of tragedy that is connected with the weather and the so-called "natural disaster," of course, it is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster. But when I hear these sort of disasters elsewhere, I feel, "Oh, oh, is it us who created it?" So we feel very big responsibility. "We" means we, people who live in Himalaya. We feel very big responsibility to take care of all these water and the elements.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Then here, we are talking about selling and buying all these things, and also the people in the city, they bathe a lot. I was sharing with Kennedy the other day that people are having a shower like for hours, you know? They don't need to.

• 16:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not a real thing.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, in the name of enjoying, they just stand there for a long, long time, wasting a lot of...

• 16:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't know anything about that.

• 16:22Speaker 07

  Do an hour's shower.

• 16:24Speaker 03

  I feel like, egoistically speaking, "Oh, this is my property," you know? Water is not... belongs to one person. It belongs to everybody. So we have to be careful and we have to be thoughtful.

• 16:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good. That's good. So Bobby, you've occasionally said a positive thing this evening about the future of our species. Do you think World War III would be fought over water?

• 16:53Speaker 06

  You know, the Pentagon's done two assessments over the last decade, and in both those assessments, they said that global warming and particularly water shortages are the principal threat to America's national security because of the disruption to global political systems and populations that it's going to cause. In the last 10 years, water privatization has become a trillion-dollar industry.

• 17:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Trillion-dollar industry.

• 17:17Speaker 06

  Trillion-dollar industry, according to the World Bank. We've already seen water wars fought all over the world, in Bolivia, and Cochabamba, and Belize, and many other countries where foreign companies have come in. Privatize local water supplies and then raise rates and literally kill poor people who can't afford those higher water rates. You know, the interesting thing, Neil, is to look at nations that have water and those that don't. The nation that has the most water, if any, in the world is Canada, which has about 20% of the global water. Russia has probably somewhere around 20%. We have almost as much as Canada, but we have 300 million people. There's only 30 million people in Canada.

• 18:00Speaker 06

  What you're gonna see is a very, very strong demand from the southwestern cities that are drying up right now to get a hold of the Great Lakes water, to put a pipeline down for the Great Lakes water. And these proposals are constantly being made. And the Canadians will say, "Well, part of that water is ours." So that's the kind of conflict you're gonna have even in what we call the first world. But in other places in the world, the scenario you described before, where you have poor farmers migrating to cities, it's not that they're making demands on government. These are people who are gonna die. And somebody who is gonna die has nothing to live for. Any of them are gonna decide to die violently. That is where civil wars come from.

• 18:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're bumming me out again. Man.

• 18:44Speaker 04

  You asked him how World War III would start. His answer is accurate.

• 18:53Speaker 04

  If you were like, "What's your favorite flower?", maybe you would be some kind of...

• 18:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, before we go to Q and A, let me end with a rephrased question.

• 19:04Speaker 04

  We have some geopolitical ideas. Yeah.

• 19:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  What they all said, but happier.

• 19:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His Holiness said something we all embrace and agree with, that education is key. It's always the key, for sure.

• 19:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know that education necessarily makes people less violent when pressed into violence. So what would you say, in addition to education, is the most important thing we all need to do going forward with regard to water for all? What bit of wisdom can you share with us? We want to be responsible citizens, but we don't always know how.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  Are you his holiness?

• 19:55Speaker 04

  No! All right now, you're just a holiness.

• 20:03Speaker 04

  Knock it off.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  You got him, you got him.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  I mean, it's true, veganism is a thing. Let's not get carried away.

• 20:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what would you...

• 20:14Speaker 03

  Education to me is that people have to understand how important the water is. That's all.

• 20:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's it.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  That's it. Water does what?

• 20:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you have an abundance, you don't know how important it is.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  That's true. And the water now, right now, people, almost like a majority of people, thinks that the water comes from the tab. But it is not true. Water comes from elsewhere.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  And the tab.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  And the tab.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  Technically?

• 20:44Speaker 03

  You know? And it comes from the mountain and the river. I don't want to go through all the details, but of course you have to know much deeper than the tab.

• 20:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, it's hard to know that by being told it. Perhaps, maybe Americans should travel more to other...

• 21:00Speaker 03

  To Himalaya.

• 21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To Himalayas? Are we all invited?

• 21:03Speaker 03

  More invited.

• 21:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I mean, we don't know.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, no, I mean, jokingly, I'm saying, travel to Himalaya, but they don't have to go to Himalaya. They just go to a little mountain they have here, and they have to walk around, and they have to talk with the trees. They have to really be like, really, the trees will talk to you. Trees will talk to you, plants will talk to you, flowers will talk to you, and water will talk to you, everything. Really, you just have to be friendly with them. You know, stop being rude to them, abusive to them. That is the thing. You have to be respecting them. Nature needs to be respected, like all us, all of us. We all need the respect.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  We have to understand the good about everybody. You know, not only me, me, me, I. Everybody has a good thing. Everybody has something to offer. And nature definitely has many things to offer. Not only that, we survive on the nature. For example, supposing if there is no tree in this world, there is no oxygen. I mean, I don't know, please correct me.

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Green light gives oxygen.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  That's true, yeah.

• 22:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a by-product of photosynthesis. It's there. Waste product is our life product.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  That's it, yeah. That's the education I'm talking about, you know? That we should know how to respect the nature. We should know how to respect the animal also. We don't know how to respect the animal. Animals are the owner of the world. We are not the only one owns the world, but the animals owns the world. But we always, always somehow abuse the animal in the name of, I don't know, superior. They can't talk, so therefore we just kill them, chop them, abuse them very badly. So we should respect them. Not only from the point of view of Buddhist or religion, the Christianity or something, no.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  We shouldn't talk about any other religion. We just talk about the reality. So this is the religion. This is what... We should be, we should always be with the reality. This is what I'm thinking, I don't know. You should correct me again.

• 23:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, Neil, you should correct him. Set him straight, Neil. First of all... Put him in his place. Trees are good listeners, but not good talkers.

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your holiness, there is nothing I can add or subtract from what you just said.

• 23:49Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 23:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. Let's get a round of applause for our panel here.

• 24:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I keep thinking there's some kumbaya song that we should be singing at the end of that. Does anyone need a quick potty break before we...

• 24:15Eugene Mirman?

  Do a Q and A.

• 24:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're good up here?

• 24:17Eugene Mirman?

  I'm not gonna use more water.

• 24:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 24:20Speaker 04

  Today's the last day I use any water.

• 24:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're gonna open this up to you to find out just what questions and comments you might have. There's a microphone on this aisle here. Sir, yes.

• 24:33Speaker 07

  Beyond the importance of protecting the scarce resource of small fraction of 1% of fresh water that's available to us, is desalination an option or desalination plants in order to try to reclaim part of the 99% that isn't, especially for some areas in the Middle East that are pretty arid?

• 24:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Forgive me for not even raising that topic during this hour and a half. So let's go straight to Tess on that. Tess?

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why can't we just take the salt out of the ocean? That would solve all our problems.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  So decel is, I think, gonna be one of the solutions. The problem is it's still really expensive. It uses a lot of energy. The other problem is you have to still have a water source. So that works for people on the coast, but like, I think Neil said earlier, water is heavy, and so moving that water inland to the people who live in the middle of the country is not efficient.

• 25:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's a regional solution, but not a global solution?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Excellent. Yes?

• 25:32Speaker 08

  You said that there was a point where water is liquid, solid, and gas at the same time. So what properties would it have?

• 25:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. How old are you? Just like...

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Ten.

• 25:46Eugene Mirman?

  He's 74.

• 25:47Speaker 04

  Ah, little Benji button.

• 25:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Call me out on what I said. All right. So yes, maybe I wasn't clear. It's not a new kind of water that's all three in the same spot.

• 26:04Speaker 08

  Oh.

• 26:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But a bucket. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah.

• 26:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would have been cool, though. Something that is simultaneously solid, liquid, and gas. I don't know what that would look like. But when we talk about the triple point of water or of any other substance, a bucket of it would just be happy having ice cubes, water, and that water will be boiling, creating steam. And the ice and the boiling water are just fine, and the boiling water doesn't melt the ice. The ice is just happy. And so that is what we mean by the triple point of a substance. And if you could have something that was simultaneously solid, liquid, and gas, that would be an awesome superhero or something.

• 26:56Speaker 05

  That's usually what happens to me after Taco Bell.

• 27:06Speaker 05

  I call it the triple crown.

• 27:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, right here.

• 27:14Speaker 09

  Besides desalination, are there any other promising technologies for improving people's access to clean water?

• 27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, good.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  I think there are a lot of really simple, low-cost technologies that we can improve the way we capture water and can store it using managed recharge into the groundwater.

• 27:32Eugene Mirman?

  What's managed recharge?

• 27:34Speaker 01

  It's managing the recharge of the aquifer.

• 27:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Duh.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  So, you're basically, you're capturing the water and retaining it, so you give it more time to go into the aquifer, or you actually pump it in. So instead of pumping out, you're pumping in.

• 27:50Eugene Mirman?

  Nice.

• 27:51Speaker 06

  There are a lot of technologies out there.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  That's a good question.

• 27:54Speaker 06

  Right now that if they were widely used, would dramatically reduce the amount of water that's needed, for example, agriculture. There's drip agriculture, where you have these very, very inexpensive probes that can measure the moisture in the ground, and then turn on computers that tell you exactly how much water the plant needs, and you can reduce water in agricultural uses by... Upwards of ninety-five percent. So we overwater our... Almost all agricultural water is wasted.

• 28:24Eugene Mirman?

  By ninety-five percent?

• 28:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's huge. By ninety-five percent, because you only need the water that's actually going to the plant. What you do is you saturate the whole field with water.

• 28:32Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 28:33Speaker 06

  Most of that water either evaporates or it goes into the ground. Which we spent such hard energy trying to get out. Right. In the first place. Close to twenty percent of the water that is used goes to dying cotton. It's a huge use of water, and there are now water-free dying methodologies that are being adopted by businesses, and you should make sure that when you buy clothes that they're using either low-water or water-free dyes. It's a consumptive use, because the water is so polluted at the end of the dying process that it can't be recovered except by the highest-end clothing manufacturers.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Can I add that the point about the agriculture is right on, and we need to emphasize that if we can save even a little bit of water in agriculture, we're actually saving a huge amount of water, because agriculture uses the most water. So if you're saving five percent in ag, it's much more water than five percent of drinking.

• 29:28Eugene Mirman?

  We can save up to ninety-five percent of it.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:31Eugene Mirman?

  Without knowing any math, that is around something.

• 29:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, let's go to another question, yes.

• 29:55Speaker 10

  Hi. So, every seven years, the International Panel for Climate Change gathers together all the leading scientific data and compiles it into some conclusions. And 2013 was the last one, and I think they concluded that even if the human race stopped polluting, stopped releasing greenhouse gases, cold turkey, the average temperature of the Earth would raise 1.1 degrees Celsius, and at 2 degrees Celsius, it's irrevocable damage. So clearly, it's an issue that we should be thinking about. What's the best thing we should be doing as regular people?

• 30:30Speaker 06

  The most important thing that you can do is to vote for a politician who believes in global warming.

• 30:40Speaker 06

  It's much more important to change your politician than your lightbulb or your automobile. Because they're making the rules that will incentivize good behavior. Free market capitalism is the most powerful economic engine ever devised, but it has to be harnessed to a social purpose. Otherwise, it will lead us inedulently down the path of environmental destruction and oligarchy and corporate kleptocracy, which is what we're headed for right now.

• 31:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kleptocracy?

• 31:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's where the Koch brothers run everything and steal everything.

• 31:16Speaker 06

  We're the wealthiest country in the world, we create the most greenhouse gases, and we have the capacity to change that. We shouldn't punish people, we shouldn't reduce our quality of life, but we should incentivize businesspeople and others to make the right choices and to make sure that you can make money in this country by doing good things for our community, rather than forcing people to make money by poisoning the rest of them.

• 31:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right here, next.

• 31:44Speaker 05

  You were talking about how the pressure on the ice skate affects ice, but I thought the jury was still out on how ice is slippery? That's it, that's all I got.

• 31:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so this has been eating at you the whole time?

• 31:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's possible for ice to be so cold that even if you tried to compress it, you don't succeed and then you cannot skate on it. So, ice is not slippery because it's ice. Ice is slippery for an ice skater because it has converted it into water by squeezing it.

• 32:19Eugene Mirman?

  Why is it then slippery for just when you're walking on it, on your little path to your house and then you're home? With no ice skates, because no one skates into their home.

• 32:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a temperature below which, if you skated, you would not melt the water, or the water would melt briefly and freeze quickly, and you wouldn't be on loop, or free to the act of skating.

• 32:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, but just walking around.

• 32:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, but he asked why it's slippery, I don't think it's unfair what I'm saying.

• 32:46Speaker 05

  You know, because I don't wear skates. You know, I've only worn skates like five times in my life, but I've slipped on ice.

• 32:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, okay. In physics, it's called the coefficient of friction, which is how one material intersects with the other. And if you look close in, if one is very smooth and the other's smooth, like Teflon against some other surface, then the friction is low.

• 33:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If the surfaces are not smooth, like rubber on asphalt, the rubber gets in the thing, so then you have a high coefficient of friction.

• 33:17Speaker 04

  Right.

• 33:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's why cars have rubber and their roads are made of asphalt, rather than Teflon on cows.

• 33:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, ma'am.

• 33:29Speaker 11

  Hi. Fracking is probably one of the most divisive issues that we have in the country today. With over 500,000 wells in the country now that use probably 3 to 5 million gallons of water per frac. That means if they're running at capacity every day, they're wasting our drinking water at a number of 2.5 trillion gallons of water per day. And that's only in the United States. In the context of the amount of water you use for agriculture or in dying cotton, which, thank you, I learned that today, is that a significant number? Because in my mind, it seems insane.

• 34:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wonder that as well.

• 34:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you for that question.

• 34:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We could argue about one topic or another, but if it's a tiny percent of the total problem, we're sort of wasting breath. So I want to know the answer to that question, too. With this fracking, it uses water...

• 34:19Speaker 01

  It's about 1% of the total water consumption in the US.

• 34:23Speaker 11

  Wow.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Which is not trivial.

• 34:25Speaker 11

  No.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Like you said, it's trillions of gallons. But it's nowhere near what we're using for agriculture or industry.

• 34:32Speaker 06

  Well, one of the answers to your question is that it depends where you are. Like in New York State, water consumption is something that we don't have a lot of grounds complaining about. There's other reasons to oppose fracking. But the water consumption is probably not a good one because other energy uses use more water per kilowatt hour produced. For example, the Indian Point Power Plant uses a million gallons a minute of water. In the Western states, water would be a huge issue, particularly when they have a drought, as they do today. I would love to use that issue to sue somebody on.

• 35:08Speaker 06

  We have time for a few more questions. Yes.

• 35:10Speaker 12

  So my question is along a similar vein. Is there a scientific consensus on the dangers of fracking to individual water supplies?

• 35:20Speaker 06

  It depends if you ask the gas companies. If you say, is there a consensus and you're asking whether we agree with the gas companies? No, there's some gas companies that are honest. I will admit that they're causing big problems, but the gas industry trade associations that will say, there's no proof that our production chemicals or the produced water is actually getting into waterways, but the science says otherwise. And where rigorous science has been done, in Wyoming, for example, Dimmock, Pennsylvania, EPA has done very exhaustive reports and found out there is tremendous leakage from

• 36:00Speaker 06

  the gas wells of benzene, toluene, xylane, produced water, salt, and all of the chemicals that go into the fracking fluids that they can then fingerprint and identify in the groundwater. So the science is very clear that it is happening, although the industry still will say that they don't believe it. A repeating pattern in so much of the world. Yes.

• 36:24Speaker 13

  I would like to know, if this climate change and water pollution, it's proven that it's happening, why is it such a big political problem? Why does everyone have to debate about it when we know that this is happening, other than greed?

• 36:40Speaker 04

  Is greed not enough?

• 36:43Speaker 13

  Why would we need to debate on something that we know is happening and that we know it will affect us in the future?

• 36:50Speaker 06

  I would say that there's a failure of democracy.

• 36:55Speaker 06

  In a perfect democracy, you would have policy that was driven by science and by objective criteria and by empirical data. But in our democracy, at this point, policy is driven by moneyed interests and by investing a little bit of money in a politician and then some money in these so-called free-market think tanks and they fill them up with these phony tobacco scientists we call bi-ostitudes, who will say, there's no such thing as global warming. Bi-ostitudes? Bi-ostitudes, that's a...

• 37:27Speaker 04

  I like that.

• 37:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's good, that's good.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  I think the answer is greed.

• 37:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, plus, we seem to live in a world where people want something to be true, whether or not it is. And that's a peculiar state of a democracy, because it is an unstable foundation for anything that would follow. And so, I keep wondering whether we just have to collapse as a civilization, and from that state, have all our pistons aligned and move forward together.

• 38:00Speaker 06

  The best template for what's going on now in a massive scale is what happened at the tobacco industry. Here it was an industry that was killing one out of every four of its customers that used its product as directed, and yet they were able to avoid regulation for sixty years by creating these phony think tanks and generating this phony science. Lying politicians, subverting the political process, capturing the agencies that are supposed to protect us from the polluters and from the bad guys, and making them sock puppets for the industries they're supposed to regulate. And they developed this whole template. They had a PR firm called Hill & Knowlton that went out and developed all these strategies for them, and those strategies have now been adopted by the carbon industry that have

• 38:44Speaker 06

  a lot higher profits at stake than big tobacco ever did. And you remember, eight years ago, when Congressman Waxman's committee, the heads of the seven tobacco companies, the CEOs, stood before Congress, raised their right hand, and swore under oath that they did not believe that cigarettes caused any health problems to human beings. And everybody knew they were lying, but they did it anyway. Why would they do that? They did it, as you said, because of greed.

• 39:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eight years ago, I was being sued by third graders for the demotion of Pluto. So I had other... Just so you know.

• 39:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't always have the same issues that you do. We just have time for a couple more questions.

• 39:29Speaker 14

  All right, well, thank you. I would like to talk about energy. What do you think is the real future of energy? I mean, I guess to the scientists on the panel, I'd like to say, for a theoretical far-fetched question, do you think 100 years from now we'll have, contain fusion and be able to use that? But in a more practical, contemporary sense, what's the real status of the renewables, particularly solar and wind?

• 39:53Speaker 06

  I did an op-ed recently with David Crane, who's the head of NRG, who's the biggest energy producer in the country. He has coal plants, gas plants, nuclear plants, oil, and wind and solar. And he says that if he has $100 million to spend on a plant, he will build a solar plant. Because solar energy now is so cheap, it costs under $3 billion a gigawatt to generate energy. Coal costs $3 billion a gigawatt. Nuclear costs $15 billion a gigawatt. I'm talking the capital cost of building the plant. Wind costs about $3 billion, so they're all the same. But once you build a solar plant, it's free energy forever. Because the photons are hitting the earth every day for free. Once you build that oil plant,

• 40:38Speaker 06

  now you gotta go to Saudi Arabia, punch holes in the ground, bring up the oil, refine it expensively, genuflect to the sheiks who despise democracy and are hated by their own people. Bring it across the Atlantic with a military escort. And guess what? Exxon doesn't pay for it, you and I do. Spill it all over the Gulf, spill it all over Valdez, burn the oil, and poison everybody who breathes the emissions and raise the sea level and everything else.

• 41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And have a nice day.

• 41:07Speaker 14

  How many gigawatts to go back in time again?

• 41:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  2.22 gigawatts? Gigawatts!

• 41:15Speaker 14

  Oh, sorry!

• 41:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The flux capacitor needs that energy. Right here.

• 41:23Speaker 14

  Classic.

• 41:24Speaker 15

  Given that the Middle East has such low water and they spend a lot of their agriculture watering watermelons, it seems kind of silly. Why don't they plant things that don't require watermelons? Is there any...

• 41:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, less water-intensive crops.

• 41:42Speaker 15

  Exactly.

• 41:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why don't they just eat bees?

• 41:47Speaker 15

  Not that, but they end up exporting a lot of the watermelons because they're subsidized. So it's a combination of economics and science, so why don't they ever collaborate?

• 41:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me go to Tess on that. Tess, are people planting the right stuff around the world?

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Typically, no.

• 42:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, no.

• 42:05Speaker 15

  They're definitely not, but what is stopping them? Why are they being subsidized?

• 42:11Speaker 01

  So it depends on the country. So like if you're talking about melons being grown in the Middle East, you could look at Jordan, who has no water and they're growing melons. They shouldn't be, and then they're exporting, so they're losing all that water. If you look at northwest India, for example, the government has told the farmers to grow rice and wheat. They say, "We'll give you a guaranteed price for these crops. You don't have to worry about market fluctuations, nothing." So the farmers say, "Great, I'm gonna grow rice and wheat, even though we don't have enough water for it." So they're pumping their groundwater faster than they can use it, and it's all because the government is saying, "This is what you should grow in this part of the country." So you're right to bring it up, in that it seems like we should just be able to talk

• 42:54Speaker 01

  to the politicians and change what crops they should grow, and that's something that we're working on, and the politicians in these areas are starting to realize it, because they're seeing their farmers facing the point where they're not able to keep farming.

• 43:09Speaker 15

  That really doesn't answer the fundamental question of why.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Oh, why were they wrong in the first place?

• 43:14Speaker 15

  Yeah, so what created that discrepancy between what is allowed and what is not allowed?

• 43:19Speaker 01

  I don't know, some politician said, "I think I can make a lot of money for growing rice," and so they picked rice for Punjab, and they shouldn't have. Greed, maybe just greed?

• 43:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Greed, that's the answer to all of this. Forgive this long line here, but we have time for only one more question. We're gonna take it from the gentleman in the second row there. Please, go.

• 43:37Speaker 16

  Thank you. Is there any point where we could get to a point where there were enough natural and man-made disasters that basically all of our accessible water could get to a polluted point beyond repair? And if that's the case, could we as humans adapt to compensate for that?

• 43:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so you're saying...

• 44:00Speaker 04

  Yes, but a lot of us would die. This room would live, everyone else, bye-bye.

• 44:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're saying, we pollute the whole planet?

• 44:11Speaker 04

  By accident.

• 44:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then just evolve to thrive on polluted water? Is that...

• 44:17Speaker 04

  Basically.

• 44:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or adjust our genome so that polluted water is just fine for us?

• 44:25Speaker 04

  I mean, it would take time for evolution, but is it possible?

• 44:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, may I feel that?

• 44:30Speaker 04

  I mean...

• 44:33Speaker 04

  I mean, I hope the answer is yes.

• 44:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 44:36Speaker 04

  But it's not great.

• 44:38Speaker 06

  I would just say that it's not a good plan.

• 44:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 44:45Speaker 04

  It's not the solution to this problem.

• 44:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bobby, that was your most succinct answer this time.

• 44:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All honest, though. Believe it or not, I think a lot about those kinds of issues. Because the question is, what is easier, or harder, or cheaper, or more expensive? Finding a solution to a problem, so that the problem is solved? Or adapting to the problem, so that you never have to solve it, but you can keep living with it? It's an interesting challenge that we face throughout the history of our culture. If you go back 120 years, there was a challenge among urban dwellers, where there was horse manure all in the streets, flies would reproduce on it. Back then, before supermarkets, there were just carts with food,

• 45:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and flies would get on the food. There was a health challenge. And so, people did all this research, how do you put something in the feed of the horse that could change the nature of the manure, so that flies will not reproduce in it? It would be considered unattractive to the flies. All this research went into this, and the fly problem was solved... By the invention of a car. Okay? The car solved that problem. And so, solutions are not always linear. By the way, that's a very different, it had its own problems. But cars don't breed flies, right? So, it's just interesting to me, as I study human ingenuity and the advance of civilization,

• 46:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  how and when people decide what a solution is to something, and whether they just leapfrog it into a whole other realm. And so, I'd like to think that if we had the power of genomic engineering to change our human physiology so that it could survive polluted water, that that world would have enough power to have purified the water in the first place. That's what I'm just kinda thinking here.

• 47:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, this is why the STEM fields are science, technology, engineering, and math. As Holiness spoke of the value of this. That's why it is so important in our future. Because a problem arises, what's your first thought? I think of it when the asteroid comes. The asteroid's coming, what's your first thought? Is it, run? Buy water? Toilet paper, whatever people buy when they're escaping. Is that your first thought? Or is your first thought, how do I deflect that asteroid? That's the world I wanna live in. Where people see a problem and imagine a solution to it

• 47:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that solves the problem, rather than escaping from the problem, trying to prevent the problem from further affecting them. These are two different worlds. I wanna live in this one.

• 48:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get that by a STEM literate culture. Not everyone has to be a STEM professional. You could even be an attorney, but if you're STEM literate, you can fight for causes that promote STEM interest in our culture.

• 48:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His holiness said multiple times, "I'm not a scientist, I'm not..." You are a spiritual leader who can change the world by example. And so, you are an example to us all. Guys, thank you again for StarTalk Live!

• 48:48Speaker 04

  Thank you very much.