Cosmic Queries – Science Is Cool 3

Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice answer Cosmic Queries about colonizing Mars, promoting science, stimulating curiosity, stargazing, and more for a remote audience of thousands of science teachers. Recorded live at ScIC3 in collaboration with PocketLab. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: <> Thanks to our Patrons Gary Wight, Adrian Hernandez, Cheyenne Leo, Ashod Kuyumjian, Michael S Morrison, David Hudson, Brock Watson, Ava Body, Al Hasan Al Maghrabi, and John Varney for supporting us this week. Image Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab/Michael Lentz.

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.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. And for this one, this is going to be our second occasion bringing Cosmic Queries to the Sciences School Conference hosted by PocketLab. Chuck, always good to have you as my co-host.

• 0:31Chuck Nice?

  Hey, what's happening, Neil?

• 0:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And these are questions coming from science schoolteachers from K through 12. These are the people who have the future of civilization in their hands, which is the next generation of people who will rise up and become captains of industry and political leaders and whoever else will help to shape what civilization is and will become. They're in their classrooms right now. So let's get on with some of this Q and A. Chuck, what do you have?

• 1:03Chuck Nice?

  This is all from the teachers and we've got some great questions here. Let's just start off with Abby Gandhi. She's coming to us from Ottawa. I hope she's in the room with us now. How can we encourage curiosity in all students given our and their limited resources and time in this coming year? So this seems to be a theme that's running throughout all the questions, the fact that we're learning remotely and that, you know, over digital platforms and that type of stuff. But, you know, that notwithstanding, how do you encourage curiosity?

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I don't have a silver bullet there, but what I do know, and I've said this before, that kids, obviously we have kindergarten through upper high school represented among the teachers and... Children, students are different at each of these stages. I get that. I can tell you, and you certainly know, those who teach kindergarten and first through fifth grades, that curiosity is just a built-in feature of what it is to be a kid. And so I think for me, the task of teachers is not so much how to stimulate curiosity, but how to not squash the curiosity that's already there. And that's a different task, right? Because if you know it's already there, then you can nurture it.

• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can bring in elements, tools, methods that continue to stimulate it. So that the child never knows a day without being curious about one thing or another. And one thing I know that squashes curiosity, and I get it, it's got to be a part of the curriculum, I get it, that you gotta sort of hand kids information that you then test them on later. I get that. But there's gotta be some room, either built in or you pry it open, to put things out in front of the students for which there is no obvious answer. And they say, "Well, I wonder how you get the answer to that." Wow. "How do I dig?" And, you know, it's easy to give the example when you're in a yard and there's grass and

• 3:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  there might be some flowers or leaves or a tree, and you're poking around nature. But curiosity can manifest in practically any discipline. And artists know that you just give a canvas and paint and give it to kids, they'll just start painting, right? That's true. That's an act of exploration that you are not guiding. All you're doing is providing the tools and let that creativity unfold. Because for me, curiosity and creativity go together. They're basically the same word when you're a student coming up through the system. So I think if you devote some fraction of a curriculum to just exploring, rather than being there as "I'm the one with the answers and you take notes," because you'll be tested

• 3:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  on it later. Try to find ways to put out even questions that you know the answer to, but they require a little bit of exploration, you know?

• 4:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What did happen, if it's a history class, what did happen when Napoleon tried to conquer Russia? Well, hmm, I looked at the weather, let's look at the weather for Moscow in December. Oh, it's 20 below, it's this, it's snow, hmm. Now, what did Napoleon thought about that? Let's investigate this. You can hand them the answers, or you can collectively find the answers together. And for me, that's the difference between learning by being taught and learning by doing and fulfilling your own curiosity. And that would be a way to sustain it. For the youngest of kids, they already have it.

• 4:38Chuck Nice?

  Already have it. I love that. So, kind of reverse engineering the learning process. You start with the answer and work your way backwards.

• 4:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's another way to do that, right?

• 4:50Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 4:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But sometimes, you don't know what the answer could or should be.

• 4:54Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 4:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And even if the answer is known, if you're learning, you can treat it like it's a brand-new kind of exploration.

• 5:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What would you do if you were Napoleon? No, I would have checked out the weather forecast.

• 5:09Chuck Nice?

  I would have checked the weather, right, yeah, exactly.

• 5:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Check the weather, okay? For the French Revolution, are people eating, or are they not?

• 5:18Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly.

• 5:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you paying attention?

• 5:20Chuck Nice?

  And was there enough cake? Was there enough cake?

• 5:26Chuck Nice?

  How good were the bakers?

• 5:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, if you treat something that may even be known as an unknown, that's a point of curiosity for everybody. And then everyone stimulates their thoughts and their ideas, and then you go to what actually happened. Then you can criticize or compliment what actually happened.

• 5:46Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 5:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's an example, not even drawn from the sciences, but keeping this multidisciplinary as an educational task, and as so many teachers need to think about. So, yeah.

• 5:59Chuck Nice?

  All right, man, great answer, great answer.

• 6:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what else you got? Bring it on.

• 6:02Chuck Nice?

  I've got Alan here.

• 6:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there a last name, or where they from?

• 6:07Chuck Nice?

  Yes, yes, thanks Neil, thanks. This is Alan Wasmoen from Omaha.

• 6:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, stop pronouncing last names, never mind.

• 6:23Chuck Nice?

  Alan was so, it was so simple Neil with Alan.

• 6:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll take a collection, help Chuck read.

• 6:31Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, Alan knows who he is.

• 6:35Chuck Nice?

  Alan does not need me to tell.

• 6:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's Alan from Wisconsin?

• 6:38Chuck Nice?

  Alan from Omaha.

• 6:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh Nebraska, okay.

• 6:40Chuck Nice?

  Nebraska, Wasnoo and I think, but anyway, Alan says this. We hear a lot about anti-science folks in the United States. How do we restore science to its proper status among the general populace? So, is, is there anything that you can do to create a greater respect for science? Especially in light of our leaders, and I'm not being political, but our leaders, I'm not, but, but they, they tend to poo poo science. I mean, you have a number of governors who are defying their public health officials. You have people saying, "Don't wear a mask."

• 7:25Chuck Nice?

  You have people saying, and so this, this has got to have a deleterious effect on the way people view science.

• 7:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I, again, I don't have a silver bullet here. I think, here's the answer I don't want to give, but I'm going to start with it.

• 7:40Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 7:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wish I didn't have to give this answer because I don't like this answer, but it could actually work, is if every science research program came with a fraction of its budget for advertising.

• 7:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you just advertise what science is doing for you in your everyday life. And because science is there in ways that we all take for granted.

• 8:06Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 8:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh, how many people are, did not die in childbirth who are alive today simply because advances in medical science?

• 8:15Chuck Nice?

  Thanks, science!

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or, thank you. So, you would, you would just, every day, you'd see a public service announcement, here's what science does for you.

• 8:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this, here's what led to that discovery.

• 8:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you, you used, you, you had an MRI measurement today? Where did that come from? It came from this physicist who got a Nobel Prize for that discovery. Did he care about how your health? No, he cared about molecules in space and won the Nobel Prize. That piece of information got picked up by a medical technologist and became a machine that diagnoses your health. A reminder of this. And, uh, yes, it's adverti- I hate advertising because it's always designed to make you do what you don't want to do. But if it's a public service announcement every day, maybe that would have some influence. Just maybe. I'm tired of hearing people, "I don't like the space program.

• 9:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, let me find out what the weather is for next week on my satellite TV." Right. You know, and people have lost track of what role science, innovative science, engineering and technology play in not only their, their, their health, their wealth, their security, but just in how, whether or not they can enjoy life. And so, um, so there needs to be a better marketing plan, and that's the answer I don't want to give. Let me give another answer that's directly related to our audience today. Okay. Ten thousand science teachers around the world. I think, and I'm just, just putting this out there.

• 9:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think if some portion of your curriculum were devoted to teaching science not as information, but as a way of querying nature, okay? We hinted on this in developing and curating curiosity. But think about it. If you learn what science is and how and why it works, then you're not going to grow up and say, "Oh, I distrust science." Or what those scientists are telling me. Because you will understand what it is, where it's coming from. That there's an experiment, there are observations that have been confirmed, that led to research results that are arriving at these conclusions.

• 10:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll understand the entire anatomy of that understanding, uh, of that, of the anatomy of those statements that are getting made. And I'll give you a real good example of this. At the beginning of the coronavirus, where it's rising in the United States, early March, um, it was like, "Wear a mask, don't wear a mask." There was, there was, there was, seemed like there was conflicting information. You know why there's conflicting information? Because at any given moment, you plug in all the information you have. And the information you have at any given moment for a new and novel virus. You're gathering it, you want to know it immediately, you don't want to wait to six months for all of these things. So we're giving you this as it comes across, kind of in real time.

• 11:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then we find out, no, this is not working, do this, okay? What I'm saying is, yes, that was changing because new information was informing it. It wasn't changing because this one drives up those, I don't know, no, new data was informing it. And that's how science works, okay? I'm screaming at you, I'm sorry.

• 11:36Chuck Nice?

  No, man, I liked it, I love, I love the passion, I like the passion.

• 11:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how science works.

• 11:41Chuck Nice?

  You're like the Samuel L. Jackson of science right now.

• 11:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just angry with everything.

• 11:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if that's how-

• 11:49Chuck Nice?

  Say "science" again.

• 11:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To my face.

• 11:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so if that's how science works, then you'll understand that arc through something that is brand new that we're experimenting on in the laboratory.

• 12:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you'll also know that the people who don't have that kind of access are like your neighbor or your mayor or your governor, unless they themselves are listening to the medical experts who are plugged in to that flow of research. And so, so when they say, oh, scientists used to think this and now they think this, therefore I'm not going to believe any of it? No, that's not how this works.

• 12:28Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not how we got to the civilization that we have today. So it means teaching science in a slightly different way to understand that is a way of arriving at what is objectively true in the world.

• 12:41Chuck Nice?

  That's great, man.

• 12:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you get them early on, and then when they become mayors, some of the students of these teachers are going to become mayors, very powerful people, heads of, captains of industry and the like, they will then have this understanding so that, um- They'd be in a position to try to convince an electorate that if they're angry and you want to take off your mask, that has consequences that we have researched and the consequences you don't want because it could make it worse later. And so that's, that's what I gotta say.

• 13:14Chuck Nice?

  All right, man.

• 13:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna calm down.

• 13:16Chuck Nice?

  No, that's very passionate. I really enjoyed your, I enjoyed it. You know what I mean?

• 13:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 13:21Chuck Nice?

  Very cool. All right, let's move on. Now, I don't want to waste any more time with me's looking. So let's go within my 30s. Oh, sorry. So this is Amanda and Amanda and Amanda Watson wants to know this. I'm in my 30s. Do you think we will colonize Mars or the moon in my lifetime? Okay. And then Amanda Phillips says, what are some of the space related activities that can be done with preschool students via long distance learning? So.

• 13:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Okay. So, so there's two different Amanda's?

• 13:54Chuck Nice?

  Doubling up on you. These are two different Amanda's.

• 13:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two different Amanda's. Okay. So, so again, that one was, the first one was what?

• 14:04Chuck Nice?

  Colonizing the moon and Mars. She's in her 30s in her lifetime. So let's say she'll live, let's say she'll live to 130.

• 14:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Back in the day, like 50 years ago, 100 years ago, people imagined we would never get to the moon because of how hard the task was or how with challenges it would bring upon us. And then we got to the moon and then people's attitude towards such achievements shifted. It actually did 180. And people said, oh, we went to the moon. Now let's go to Mars. Right? No longer were there people saying what was or was not possible because we did the impossible. So I will now tell you, I think not in your lifetime will we colonize either the moon or Mars because, not because we don't know how to do it, not because we couldn't figure out how to do it, but because I don't see the motivation to be there. Yeah,

• 14:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  you could want to do it, but at some point, somebody's got to write the check. Somebody's got to sign the check. And what is their motivation to do it? Is it just, oh, let's just do it? No, there's going to be, you know, what drives it? Power drives it. Military dominance drives it. Economics, the prospect of making money drives it. The great drivers in the history of civilization. And so great as in the most powerful drivers. I'm not value judging it, I'm just stating it. So if we colonize Mars, it would be because there was a geopolitical reason to do so. And then eventually, yeah, maybe you can make a buck off of it. You send tourists there, this sort of thing. You'd have a lottery ticket.

• 15:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you can imagine scenarios where you can start making money on this. But I've said many times, there are other ways to make money in space. Go mine an asteroid for its natural resources. And the first trillionaire ever will be the first person who exploits the natural resources of asteroids. So it's not like space couldn't be an excellent frontier, but to colonize? You want to actually go to the moon and live there? You want to go to Mars and live there? Do you know that Antarctica is warmer and wetter than any place on Mars? Yet I don't see people lining up to go buy condos in Antarctica.

• 16:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you have to just factor all this in. I can imagine an outpost, that you go and vacation there for a week. I can say, oh, I was on the moon for a week. But to live there, and that be your only place? I don't see that, I don't feel that happening. So maybe tourist trips to the moon in your lifetime.

• 16:39Chuck Nice?

  So there you go. There'll be no colony, but there will be Airbnb.

• 16:45Chuck Nice?

  There we go.

• 16:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And maybe even restaurants, but they probably have no atmosphere, I think.

• 16:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Had to throw that one in, Chuck.

• 16:55Chuck Nice?

  Oh, you did it to me, man. You did it to me.

• 16:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, now also for-

• 16:59Chuck Nice?

  Do you have a space, do you have a space-related activity that could be done with a preschooler?

• 17:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so it's not about going into space, but at least about thinking about what's happening over your head. With preschoolers, get them to notice the moon. And have them draw the phase of the moon tonight, okay? And then tomorrow, have them draw the moon again. And then the next day, have them draw the moon again. And they will see the shape of the moon is changing. It changes. And by the way, if you go back at the same time to draw the moon, it's not in the same place. It's in a different part of the sky. Oh, my gosh. It moved. Oh, and so then you learn the moon orbits the earth. It changes. And you can do experiments in a classroom. You turn out the lights, close the blinds and get a flashlight. And you get an orb. And have kids all observe the orb when the flashlight is illuminated from the side.

• 17:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's gonna be a half-lit orb. It's like a half-moon. And then as you change your angle, you can see the crescent. You can see the full if the light is from the other side. And so you can start thinking about the machinery of the solar system in that way. And the moon makes a great target for this because it's a nice, long project. It takes a full month. And kids can think about it. And then you do the experiment in the classroom. That works for preschool right on up.

• 18:17Chuck Nice?

  So when do you tell them that the moon is made of cheese?

• 18:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You save that for the very end.

• 18:25Chuck Nice?

  Good answer, man. That's a damn good answer. All right, this is Amy Monahan from Deland. Deland, she says, for beginning stargazers, what do you recommend to start? So I'm a young meal to grass type, so what do I need to get into stargazing?

• 18:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, first, a pair of good binoculars, which is not all that expensive. I haven't checked lately, but I think you can get a pair between fifty and a hundred dollars. And if that feels like a lot of money, consider that you buy it once in your life. And so just amortize that over between when you buy it and when you die. And ask, what does that cost per year relative to other things you consume daily? So that's how you need to think about that purchase. I still have binoculars today that I used forty years ago because I'm that old, right? So it's a...

• 19:17Chuck Nice?

  Or the binoculars are that good.

• 19:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, both, both. And so with a good pair of binoculars, what's good about it is they're good at night. You can see the moon and the craters and the phases. You can, depending on how good they are, the upper end of that, you can see the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter. You can see that Venus goes through phases like the moon does. This freaked out Galileo, he didn't freak him out. He said, wait, that means Venus is going around the sun, not just around the earth. For it to go around the sun to go through phases. So that meant some else was going on than what everyone was teaching you in the day. So, and binoculars are great for sporting events and for bird watching and the rest of that. So start with binoculars. And plus they're easy to sort of hand off to other people. Hey, take a look at this. What do you think of that? And so start there.

• 20:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then there are stargazing books that can help you identify. Oh, sorry, books. We have apps now. In my day, we had to remember what the constellations look like. Now we have apps where you hold up your smartphone to the sky and it knows which direction you're pointing and what's behind it. And it shows you the object and you can tap on what everything is. So almost all the sky gazing apps do that. And because they have your coordinate, they know where you are at all times. By the way, you can even point it into the ground and it tells you about the sky that you can't see that hasn't risen yet. And so it's really good. And that way you can sort of work your way in to these, to what the sky, what your relationship can be with the night sky.

• 20:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And as always, visit your local planetarium.

• 20:51Chuck Nice?

  Right, of course.

• 20:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I slipped that in there, yeah?

• 20:53Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, yeah. And you had to do that. You get paid to say that.

• 21:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. We're in the middle of a live Cosmic Queries with Pocket Lab. So let's jump right back in.

• 21:31Chuck Nice?

  All right, let's, uh, let's do Anna Vittoria. Um, and Anna Vittoria Perez Leon wants to know this.

• 21:44Chuck Nice?

  How do we need to modify our approach to learning? Now that students have so much more information, yet less guidance? So I love this question. And I, you know, I'm going to expand this question from Anna Victoria just a little bit wider. We live in an age of information now. Information is everywhere, period. Not just for children, but for everybody. How are you able to process this information in such a way? That you're able to separate the wheat from the chaff?

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that needs to be a new part of the educational curriculum. Which is assessing the reliability of your sources and your references. That was less necessary long ago. There was still some garbage out there, some, the chaff, I get, the wheat, yeah, the chaff is the bad stuff you don't want. There was still some chaff out there. But if you read a book, it had to, it went through a manuscript phase that got read by an editor, then a publisher invests in it. And then, so there are multiple filters that boosted the chance that what ended up in book form had some integrity to it, some academic authority and integrity to it.

• 23:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The pedigree of the author would factor into this. Today, since anybody can post anything on the internet at any time, anywhere, you don't have that built in filter to the system. And so I don't know that the wheat has increased. Yes, it surely has. But what has definitely increased is the chaff.

• 23:26Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 23:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I once tweeted, just if you Google Earth and you see pictures of a round Earth. I said, the Google Flat Earth, and there are pictures of a Flat Earth. There's a whole Wiki page on the Flat Earth. Google Donut Earth. There's a Donut Earth. Okay?

• 23:41Chuck Nice?

  Sounds delicious. I want to live on, I want to live on Donut Earth. I'm sorry.

• 23:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the fact that you can type these into a Google search, and each one of them gives you an entire Wiki page describing that belief system.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you don't otherwise know, if you're just an alien who landed here, well, you would know Earth was round, plus you had the technology to figure that out. So not including aliens, talk about if you're just born into this, if you, if you were in a, in a closet and you just came out and you're trying to understand the world, you would not know which of these to select. So again, I gotta put the burden back on school teachers. Somewhere in there, you need to teach students how to prioritize the sources of their information and the likelihood that something is true or is simply fulfilling a, a political, cultural, social, religious agenda in ways that then will mask what is otherwise objectively true about the world.

• 24:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And no, you, there's no guarantees here, but you can boost the chances that what it is you see, think and do are connected to an objective reality. And, and, and I, as I've said many times, a, a search engine is the ideal way to confirm any belief you have, no matter what that belief is. All right. So if you wanna say, you know, say, come up with anything, you type it in, it goes through the world and it finds any other people who think the same way as you do. And then you get this false sense that your thoughts are legitimate because somebody else thinks it.

• 25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not be, and, and, and, and this, so that's a problem that needs to be addressed. And I think you have to address it in the schools. It should be part of the curriculum. Squeeze it in, push something else out. I don't care how you do it. But it could be the un, the unraveling of civilization. If people just say, oh, I don't wanna vaccine my kids because look, and they type something in and out comes some gibberish about what vaccine, people think what vaccines do to you other than prevent you from getting a virus. So you're getting fed information that is not authentic nor in your best interest. But you think it is, and that's the problem.

• 26:02Chuck Nice?

  Cool. That's good stuff. I, I gotta tell you, I'm, I'm still stuck on thinking about really stupid aliens that land here and think the Earth is flat.

• 26:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They'd have to come from space and then.

• 26:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, they'd have to actually see it and they're, "It could be a hologram. I don't know."

• 26:22Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. Here we go.

• 26:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wouldn't that be cool if aliens spoke like that?

• 26:26Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 26:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, what are you talking about? And Louis, how you doing? It could be, hey, what planet is this?

• 26:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hey, we took the wrong turn at Alpha Centauri. Hey.

• 26:40Chuck Nice?

  Oh, God. There we go.

• 26:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those are aliens from Brooklyn.

• 26:43Chuck Nice?

  That's what I was gonna say. Only in New York would we come up with Brooklyn aliens. All right, here we go.

• 26:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 26:49Chuck Nice?

  Uh, this is Anne LeBlanc, or LeBlanc, from, um, I think it's from Dartmouth.

• 26:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dartmouth, New Hampshire, sure. Unless there's a Dartmouth, UK, I don't know.

• 27:00Chuck Nice?

  Well, yeah.

• 27:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we were not very creative when we came to the New Eng- New England.

• 27:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They named it after everything else that they came from. New England, right? New Canaan, new this, new that, new, you know, New York.

• 27:14Chuck Nice?

  It used to be New Amsterdam, and then before it wasn't, yeah?

• 27:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just can't you think up another name, old explorer people? Very disappointed.

• 27:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, how new is New York? We, it's, you know, what, we should call us York and the other one Old York.

• 27:30Chuck Nice?

  Old York, right. That says it. Right, there you go. Um, this is what Anne wants to know. How do we explain the magnitude of space to a child sitting in front of a computer? Wow. That's a, that's, wow.

• 27:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, okay, so there's some fun YouTube videos that do zoom outs from starting on Earth and going to the edge of the universe and then coming back. And in fact, the American Museum of Natural History, which is my day job, um, uh, we produced something called the Known Universe. It's got like a zillion views on YouTube and give it to them and give it in full screen. And if you do one of those things, we can put it on a flat panel screen on the wall, so it becomes almost cinematic rather than just looking at a small screen. That is a zoom. Unnarrated, just visual trip from Earth to the edge of the universe and back. And you get a sense of the immensity of it all as Earth shrinks to this dot.

• 28:23Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 28:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As, as, as the solar system shrinks to a dot.

• 28:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As our entire stellar neighborhoods, as our galaxy containing a hundred billion stars shrinks to a dot in the distance.

• 28:37Chuck Nice?

  And then-

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'll put him in, that'll, that'll set him straight, right there.

• 28:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, there you go. That's a cool thing. We did a, uh, on the TV show, we did a bit, where we started, it was like one of those Powers of Ten's videos where we started at the edge of the universe and we kept zooming in until we saw Neil deGrasse Tyson laying on a lawn and then we zoomed into his mustache and there was a whole nother universe.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember that.

• 29:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Pretty funny. All right, here we go.

• 29:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The jig is up.

• 29:07Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. Okay, um.

• 29:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What else you got?

• 29:12Chuck Nice?

  Let's go, let's go. What's the most important? This is from Clifton, uh, Roseboom. From Mountain View, not, uh.

• 29:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mountain View, the headquarters of Apple Computer, I think is Mountain View, California. Yeah.

• 29:27Chuck Nice?

  Oh, cool.

• 29:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think so, yeah. And other, other high-tech giants, but go on.

• 29:30Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so he says-

• 29:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, you know how I know that? When you start a new Apple Computer, it's a Mountain View time zone that it's built that starts with-

• 29:39Chuck Nice?

  Oh, really? Is that it? That's funny.

• 29:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:43Chuck Nice?

  Very narcissistic of them.

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Totally.

• 29:46Chuck Nice?

  Uh, Clifton says this, what is the most important astrophysics concept for everyone to know?

• 29:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah. I got this, got this, okay?

• 29:58Chuck Nice?

  Okay, okay.

• 29:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is, um, you need to know the immensity of space, which you would get in one of these Zoom videos, I mean Zoom out, not, not the, the-

• 30:12Chuck Nice?

  Right, not, not what we're doing right now.

• 30:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The immensity of space and the immensity of time.

• 30:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think those two are some of the hardest to grasp. And people don't really comprehend a million years, a billion years.

• 30:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They can't wrap their head around it. And so for me, those, it's not understand a black hole. Those are just objects that you can explain and learn. I'm talking about concepts. And once you get those concepts and you embed these objects in those concepts, then you have a true cosmic perspective of who and what we are here on Earth. There are people who are in denial of evolution because they say, "How can a single cell become a human being with a brain and everything?" Because they don't understand how much time has elapsed. They can't comprehend that. They're thinking, "Well, I don't see it happen." Because it's happening longer than your lifetime, longer than a hundred of your lifetimes.

• 31:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so you, at geologic, how do rivers cut mountains and glaciers cut? That takes time. And if you sped things up to a timescale that's longer than human life, you'll get to see things happen. Volcanoes would come up and down, they repaved it. You got an earthquake, they get subduction of the continent. All of this would be going on like it's a daily thing. It just takes way longer than your lifetime to see it, know it, and embrace it. They used to call it deep time. And yes, time is older than the history of human civilization. And that's a concept that needs to come across.

• 31:56Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Well, I don't know why, I'm depressed now, but.

• 32:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, there's an award-winning short film, and forgive, I think it's called The Wheel? It's a German film, very short, it's like six minutes or eight minutes. I think it's called The Wheel. But I, to me, I just call it The Rock. Rocks, rocks. And what it is, it's a conversation between two rocks.

• 32:22Chuck Nice?

  Oh, cool.

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? And, um.

• 32:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Things are happening in the background. You say, what is that? What is that? What is that? Um, you know, the sky is like pulsing in light. And then you realize those are days going by.

• 32:37Chuck Nice?

  Right. That's funny.

• 32:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is like the world as seen by rocks. And one rock says, oh, do you, do you have a problem with lichens? They, I got itchy on the back of my neck here. And it takes a long time for lichens to start eating away at rocks. But to them, it's like, it's their lifespan. And they're spending their whole time and they see trees come up and down and volcanoes and all of this. And then civilization shows up. And then a road goes by and it gets built like instantly in their reference frame. And then all the civilization goes away and they're still there.

• 33:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 33:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you know, civilization, the time of civilization relative to rocks is very short.

• 33:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, super cool.

• 33:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So fine, I think it's on YouTube somewhere, The Wheel.

• 33:23Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 33:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think it's called. It's a wheel because what they find a wheel and they wonder about it. Um, that the cavemen had just invented a wheel.

• 33:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 33:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're admiring it, but then it just sort of dissolves in their hands because time moves quickly for them. But, um, anyhow, check it out. That's a sense of trying to get a grasp on timescales and what effect that would have when you finally, uh, uh, appreciate it and recognize what role it plays in trying to understand who and what we are in this world.

• 33:51Chuck Nice?

  Excellent. All right, let's move on to Dawn Ritz. And Dawn Ritz is from San Diego, California, and she says, uh, what would be a place in space that you would take a science class and why?

• 34:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, I love that.

• 34:05Chuck Nice?

  That's a great question.

• 34:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that.

• 34:08Chuck Nice?

  So what's your space field trip for the class?

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, oh, okay, is it, does it have to be a real trip? Or a trip that I'm imagining? Let me, here's I imagine. Uh, I would take a trip and we would go and ride alongside a comet.

• 34:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you'd start from the outer solar system. And it'd just be this frozen ball. And as we get nearer the sun, the heat from the sun evaporates the frozen ice, the ice. The correct word there is it sublimates because it'll go straight from ice to gas. You'll see the tail grow. As you come closer into the sun, the inner planets begin to reveal themselves. You'll see Jupiter and then this asteroid belt and then Mars and then Earth and Venus and Mercury. And then you zoom around the backside of the sun and you come out the other side. So you get a tour of the solar system. You learn about comets. You get to see all the planets and that would be my field trip.

• 35:06Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 35:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They take, to get a full trip there takes, depending on which comet you ride, would take a few decades. So your kids will be really old by the time it's done, but it would have been a trip of a lifetime.

• 35:18Chuck Nice?

  It was worth it, though. It was worth it, yeah.

• 35:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, you just put them in orbit. Have them take a few orbits around the Earth. Okay. And you see Earth from above and you see like lightning storms and aurora. And you'll see 18 sunrises in one 24 hour period. Because that's how quickly an orbit takes you around. So that would be, you get the overview effect, which astronauts get. Where you see the Earth not as the color coded ball, color coded globe in your social studies class. You see it with no boundaries at all.

• 35:53Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 35:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's oceans and land and clouds and that changes you. And it's called the overview effect, which is a version of the cosmic perspective, which we all need if we don't otherwise have it.

• 36:04Chuck Nice?

  There you go. All right, let's go to Emily Goncalves.

• 36:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From?

• 36:11Chuck Nice?

  From Moose Creek. And she wants to know.

• 36:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where's Moose Creek?

• 36:14Chuck Nice?

  How would I know?

• 36:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay.

• 36:20Chuck Nice?

  I'm sitting here in Hoboken.

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hoboken, New Jersey. The, uh, a lot of creeks in, in Michigan, uh, maybe it's in Michigan, I don't know. Okay, go on.

• 36:28Chuck Nice?

  So, um.

• 36:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's, and it's gotta be a place that has moose, right? So you gotta be like north.

• 36:32Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that gotta be, yeah, exactly.

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could be Alaska, I don't know. Okay, but go on.

• 36:37Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so she says, um, she says, "How should I be tying my love of all things space into my English class?" Ooh.

• 36:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love it.

• 36:50Chuck Nice?

  A little cross, a little cross-disciplinary love going on there.

• 36:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love it. Cross-collination, yes. Uh, so, hmm, okay. Uh, there's some literature that actually makes interesting mention of space. Uh, so for example, in Kirk Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, uh, that, uh, it involves cleanup efforts in Dresden after the bombing of Dresden in the Second World War. Okay, fine. But the rest of the book folded into that is the encounter that the protagonist has with space aliens. And he has access to the fourth dimension in doing so, where he sees his entire life all at once.

• 37:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's always being born, he's always dying, he's always living it out in between.

• 37:38Chuck Nice?

  He's Dr. Manhattan.

• 37:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For example, and from, from Watchmen. And so he, uh, so the aliens give him this perspective. But the cost of that is they put him in a, in a zoo for the other aliens to see the earth creature that's there. But, but because he's not bound in time.

• 37:59Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It doesn't matter that he's in this zoo cage, cause he can just go to anywhere else in his life.

• 38:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm good, dude. I'm good being in the cage.

• 38:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so there's stories such as this. You can read War of the Worlds, which involves invading space zones. This is classic literature, written of course by H.G. Wells. Um, you can read Time Machine, once again by H.G. Wells. It's literature, you know, does all literature have to be Faulkner and, and Hemingway? No, there's other literature written by great writers who, and forgive me, I know only primarily the English, um, writer, uh...

• 38:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  English language writers, there's surely others in other languages. I'm just saying that you can tap these stories and then analyze them for their create their scientific creativity and those writers are brilliant. They have brilliant command of the English language. So you can definitely fold these lessons in. So, so that's what I'd recommend.

• 38:51Chuck Nice?

  Okay. Yeah. So I'm trying to get as many in here. I mean, first of all, we gotta stop asking teachers for questions because first of all, teachers have great questions. Secondly, you can't, it's so difficult to choose which question you should ask because like they really are thoughtful in the way that they ask.

• 39:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're on it.

• 39:15Chuck Nice?

  They're on it, man.

• 39:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you guys for being on it.

• 39:30Chuck Nice?

  Hey, we'd like to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons, Gary Wright and Adrian Hernandez. Hey guys, thanks so much for the gravity assist as we make our way across the cosmos. You know, we couldn't do it without you. And if you're listening and would like your very own Patreon shout out, go to patreon.com/stargtorkradio and support us.

• 40:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk and we're in the middle of a live Cosmic Queries with Pocket Lab. And for this next and final segment, we're bringing on Dave Baker, one of the founders of Pocket Lab, to bring questions directly from that live audience.

• 40:19Chuck Nice?

  I see Dave, Dave's popped in, so I guess we're done.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  We're gonna wrap up and we're gonna do more Q and A.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  You guys are right, all the teachers on, we got thousands of questions, literally. We sent them to the Startalk team and it's a stack of paper. I appreciate everybody's perseverance. If you got your question answered, you're lucky.

• 40:42Chuck Nice?

  Dave, let me just say this to all the teachers. Many of you think very much alike. If I didn't ask your question, I didn't pick one person's question over another. It's just that for every question I read, there were maybe 25 other teachers who asked a version or similar version of the same question. So, thank you guys.

• 41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Dave, you got some questions?

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was great. Just a couple of things. I love Kurt Vonnegut. That's one of my favorite novels. I think it was Billy Pilgrim was the protagonist.

• 41:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Billy Pilgrim. That was the name of the protagonist in Slaughterhouse Five, yes.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Slaughterhouse Five, yeah. The other thing I wanted to mention, you were talking before about being able to discern truth from fiction. My eldest daughter went to UW.

• 41:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, just not to be nitpicky, but I do not hold the word fiction as an opposite word to the word truth.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, if there's something true and it's otherwise false. Fiction is a different thing, okay? It's a different, we're communicating ideas and stories. And you're not, while you're reading these stories, saying, "That's not true. That's not true. That's false." No. You're saying, "There are lessons here to be gleaned, even though the character does not exist, even though the storyline has never occurred." So, there's a fact or fiction. I want to reserve the word fiction for its own genre, rather than thinking of it as the opposite of what is fact.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Well, you'll be glad to know.

• 42:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, I feel the same way about the word myth. Is it true or is it myth? You know, myths are stories. They're like, as I described for the word fiction, they're stories of great tales that have deep insights, that offer deep insights into our lives. I don't want to think of myth as something that's just not true. It doesn't matter that a myth is not true if it otherwise has great value to us. So just use the word false. Is it true or is it false? Rather than is it true or is it myth? Okay, so that's my, that's my two cents in there.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  That's great, that's interesting. Well, myths are important, right? Um, yeah, you know, um, my eldest daughter went to UW. They actually have a class.

• 42:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  UW, University of Washington, yes?

• 42:53Speaker 02

  Yes, University of Washington, go Huskies. And the, the class is called Calling BS in the Age of Big Data.

• 43:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice, so we need that in elementary school.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 43:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you call it, uh, Calling Baloney Sandwich in the Age of Big Data.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah, you, you, you do need that.

• 43:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you spot the baloney sandwiches? Yes.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  That's right. So I got a couple of questions for you. Um, you know, one thing I was thinking about, you know, teachers, we're all of us, teachers especially, are being forced to learn a new skill. And that's, you know, video conferencing. We, we work on video conferences, we organize, we teach, we communicate, we meet new people. And it's been a struggle, right? And I think there's been a lot of stress. But is, is there maybe a silver lining? Is this like a tool that we're gonna have in our toolbox that years from now, we're gonna look back and say, remember that, that the COVID pandemic? Good thing we learned video conferences, it turns out it's really useful.

• 43:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, yes. Okay, next question.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 43:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I, I, let me offer some reflections on this. First, yes, the silver lining of all this Zoom calling and, and, and, and otherwise video chatting is, and I'm gonna answer this from the point of view of an astrophysicist, okay? What it has done is, I don't know if you, if you've ever thought about this, but anytime you've ever met someone for lunch or for dinner or to, you, you, you would say, okay, I'll meet you at 10 o'clock. Well, that's insufficient information to actually meet them. Because you have to then give a location. Built into our lives and our social discourse is communicating a time and a place.

• 44:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the space-time coordinate system that Einstein tells us about.

• 44:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We live in space and we live in time. And you will only meet that person if you are in the same place at the same time. That's why you can't give just one of those and have it be a successful meeting. I can't tell you, "I'll meet you at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Fifth Street." When? Okay, "Oh, again, I'll meet you at 2:00 P.M." Where? All right. What videoconferencing made for the masses has done. It has separated those two coordinates. So now, the where doesn't matter. Because the where is now distributed into everyone's computer. And all that matters is the when.

• 45:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And as a result, in this coronavirus lockdown, I have attended more science seminars than I ever did in the last five years. Because I can't always be in the department when my colleague is speaking because I'm on tour, I'm in this, I'm that. But now, it's a 45-minute thing. I've got time on my... Let me dial in. And so, the zooming, as distant as we are from each other, in fact, the silver lining is that we've never been closer. Simply because we can communicate in ways that we care about, with body language, with gestures, with, "Oh, where's your... Oh, show me what you've got in the kitchen."

• 46:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You carry around the device. So, by being more distant from each other, there's a part of it that actually makes us closer together. And if we carry that forward out of the Corona-verse, it's definitely another key tool that I think teachers can use and invoke to deliver content and instruction and whatever else is necessary to get the job done. So that's how I think about it.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's great. You know, a great example. Chuck and I never met in person, but we were working on this project. We know a lot about each other and we made a ton of progress. We didn't have to meet. I would love to go and have a drink with Chuck, but, you know, we just can't right now. You know, it's okay. It's not great, but it's fine.

• 47:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 47:13Chuck Nice?

  Don't worry, Dave. I have a mask with a hole in it and a straw.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  If we could both get permission.

• 47:21Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  Chuck, this is good. You know, another thing I'd love to have your thoughts on. We have thousands of science teachers here. And, you know, with this and the last conference, we're gonna do a ton of these. We have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of science teachers. Have you ever thought, is there like, if you could have a goal, if we could all organize and get together and have a single mind as science educators and set like a five-year or 10-year goal to really change education and change the next generation of young students? What like, what would be like the top couple of things that would be worth focusing on?

• 48:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This brings us, that's a great question, and it brings us full circle back to the, was it the very first question that Chuck pulled up? Which is, I think it's too short-sighted to say, here's what we should do, and here's what you should know. Because that could change, that might need modification, that might need to be adjusted based on culture, politics, whatever are the forces operating, budget, whatever the force is operating at the time. But if you instilled, successfully instilled a sense of curiosity, curiosity aiming to find out what is objectively true, that is something you carry for your lifetime.

• 48:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's something you carry into every room you step, into every conversation you have, no matter how powerful the person is with whom you have that conversation. Being curious about what is objectively true enables you to navigate a path of inquiry to arrive at that truth. And almost anybody enjoys that journey. You know, I think people, if you can say, well, let's think about it this way. I've never thought about that. Well, if that's true, then this could be true. Let's check that. And you just navigate this together, and then you arrive at sensible, wise conclusions together. So this is a tool.

• 49:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That students need to have. So, so as teachers, especially as science teachers, except there was one English teacher out there who asked about the novel. Totally welcome you there. But especially as science teachers, who are the keepers of the, the, the, the, of, of, of the search for what is objectively true in the natural world, that, those tactics are what matters here. Okay? And let's go to the, the, the, the, the social sciences and the, and the liberal arts, where you do a research on, on a, on a research topic, on, on a, on a paper, right? You write a paper. I guess they still do that in high school, maybe not in elementary school. But there's a topic you don't know much about. How are you going to research

• 50:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  it? What are your sources? How are you going to trust those sources? What conclusions will you draw based on this? This is all analysis. And not enough in the school system is about analysis. It's all about knowledge, like you're some kind of empty vessel, fill it with knowledge, and now you're done. Let's process you and send you on your way. I'd rather you started out as an empty vessel and ended as an empty vessel, except you had a toolkit around you to feed that vessel with whatever you encounter later on. And, and know how to establish what is objectively true in what it is you have investigated. Once you've done that, you won't have any of this, you know, that, you, you won't have

• 50:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  flat earthers, you won't have vaccine deniers, you won't have climate deniers, because they would have understood what the path is to find out what is objectively true. And, and they will know the risk of their bias, cultural, political, social bias influencing what it is they're thinking. And to be scientifically literate is to have this fluency in inquiry, in knowing how to ask questions, and knowing when you have arrived at an answer that has sufficient data to support your conclusions. So I've always said to be scientifically literate is to be inoculated against charlatans who are out there, against people who think

• 51:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  they know what they're talking about, but in fact, don't. Because the biggest challenge we have, just as a species, as individuals, is, is thinking, I've said this before, thinking you know enough about something. To knowing enough about something to think you're right, but not enough about that same thing to know that you're wrong. There's this valley in there and there are a lot of people that are sitting in that valley who don't know enough to know that they're wrong, but know just enough to think that they're right. And if those people ever rise to power, and if they do, and when they do, it's dangerous. It's like I said, it's unraveling. It's too late. Too late, Neil. You're too late.

• 52:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry, buddy. So, these are my words of wisdom in whatever way they can land among the teachers out there.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  I think that's a goal. I think that's something to think about. You remind me, I had a great mentor in my life who always told me, "You have to invest in yourself, in your education, because no matter what happens in your life, nobody can take that from you."

• 52:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, that's correct. That's right. It becomes part of who you are and what you bring to every next encounter and challenge that life delivers. And if I can, and I know we're running long, I want to end with one sort of, something about which I feel strongly, okay? Every teacher tuned in right now was once a student, okay? We were all students at some level of the educational pipeline. As a student, we all had some great teachers and we had some crappy teachers, okay?

• 53:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we remember them for being great and we remember them for being crappy, okay? And those teachers who were great, you just enjoyed being in their classroom. They had an enthusiasm, an expertise, a a command of the content where you just wanted to bask in their brilliance.

• 53:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it wouldn't matter what the subject was. You can have a favorite subject over here, but they're a great teacher in this other subject. They make that your favorite subject that semester. You know you had those teachers. And by the way, how many of those teachers did you have? I've done, I've done this exercise, okay? I've been in a room with thousands of people. I say, how many truly great teachers have you had in your life? Most people, it's like, it fits on one hand. Maybe three, five at tops. Most people, it's two. Two, two, and some of them, it's just one. And I say to myself, this is out of scores of teachers, in some cases, hundreds, if you went through college and graduate school. There's only this many? Well, those are the super teachers.

• 54:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So here's my challenge to every teacher tuned in right now. Be that super teacher.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  Super teacher, yeah.

• 54:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That you know you had as a student. Be that teacher. And if you do, if you become that teacher, and you might already be that teacher, don't, I don't want, you know, I don't want to call out stuff that doesn't need to be called out, but we know as students, as having been students, who these great teachers are. Become those super teachers. And if you do, you will transform the school system overnight.

• 55:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, that's great. And you know, I'll tell you something about the audience who comes to these. I think a lot of them are those super teachers. That's why they're here. This is the summer, you know, you're supposed to be on vacation. What are you doing? You're going to spend all day listening to us. That's because...

• 55:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, I mean, it means you're committed.

• 55:28Speaker 02

  You're committed.

• 55:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're committed.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  So it's fantastic. Neil, those are great words to end with. Chuck, thank you so much. You guys were fantastic. The chat is going by, they're going crazy. I congratulate you. Great job. Really appreciate it.

• 55:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that about does it. Thanks for tuning in to this special edition of StarTalk Cosmic Queries in collaboration with PocketLab. I want to thank all the PocketLab folks for organizing this. As always, until next time, I bid you to keep looking up.