Cosmic Queries: COSMOS with Steven Soter

Questions about the science and visualizations in the COSMOS series on FOX? Get the answers from Neil deGrasse Tyson and Dr. Steven Soter, co-writer of both COSMOS series.

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?

  This is StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host. I'm an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City, where I am now. And across from me, across from my recording table, is Chuck Nice.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Hey Neil.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  How are you, buddy?

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Thank you, sir.

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love having you.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  And I love being here.

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is a Cosmic Queries edition. Did they tell you that before you came in?

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Uh, no, they didn't. But you know, that's one of my favorite things, is the Cosmic Queries.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cosmic Queries, we pick a topic, and we solicit input from the listeners and fanbase, and they write in questions. I don't read the questions in advance.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they're handed over to you.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You pick and choose.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if I don't know, I'll just say, "I don't know." There it is. Go on to the next one.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Which, by the way, has never happened.

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, it's never happened.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Thus far.

• 1:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what it is? It's not that I... because there are answers I didn't know, but I gave a different answer to something else. That's how I did it, right.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  You should run for office.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, I think that the... So the topic here... The topic here is Cosmos.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not "the" Cosmos, but Cosmos.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The show.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  The show.

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I had something to do with the show, right?

• 1:30Speaker 01

  You have a little something to do with the show.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I hosted the show.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I mean, we had 100,000, zillion other people working on it. We have writers, and producers, and...

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Animators.

• 1:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And gaffers.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Gaffers.

• 1:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, these are all on Cosmos, and we have in studio, briefly, well, I don't think we have them for the whole show.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have Steve Soter, my friend and colleague and co-writer of Cosmos, along with Andrew. And Steve, thanks for coming in.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Thank you, Neil.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, and by the way, he co-wrote the original Cosmos. So if any question comes up, I'm back there, I'm going to him.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 2:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Fantastic.

• 2:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what do you have?

• 2:02Speaker 01

  You want to jump right into this?

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  All right, let's go to our first, from email, and this is Nicholas Brody. I won't give your email address, Nicholas. Here's his question. "I have a question for Dr. Tyson." Uh, I figured that, because you wouldn't have a question for me there, Nicholas.

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it is StarTalk Radio.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  It is StarTalk Radio.

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is my show.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  That's right. I finally got the chance to see the first episode of Cosmos and I loved it. I noticed though, that when the ship was traveling through the rings, there was a disturbance in the rings from the passage. However, at Mars and Venus, there were no atmospheric effects shown. Even though the ship was clearly in the atmosphere, was this a deliberate oversight?

• 2:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh. These people are carrying on like the way I do when I look at stuff.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I get all on their people's cases.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, buddy.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I don't want to defend what may have been an oversight in the illustration and in the animation and in the, and in the visualizations, but what is sure is that we focus on portraying what is visually accurate, anything we are describing.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's where the true focus of this exercise is. So, there are other visuals that may be sort of visually enhanced, just so that it makes the journey a little more fun. For, the best example here is we went through the asteroid belt.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they were like, the asteroids were kinda all over the place there, and then they're not that close to one another.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the actual asteroid belt.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Voyager would have been toast, had it gone. If, if the asteroid belt was as portrayed, but we didn't have a conversation about how things are, rocks are distributed in the asteroid belt.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we just wanted to convey, we're going through the asteroid belt now, check it out.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all that was. We landed at the Oort Cloud, a repository of comets in the outer solar system, described as comets far enough apart that they're as far away from one another as Earth is from Saturn.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's empty. And so, this was conveyed and talked about in great detail. So, but on Venus, we did show that the atmosphere looks different because of how high the air pressure is on Venus. The refraction is different on Venus than it is here on Earth, and it looks like you're in a bowl. So, we showed that in the visualizations.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  So, so, some, there is, I shall say, some literary leeway or license?

• 4:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, some literary latitude.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Latitude.

• 4:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, to keep, keep alliterating there, yeah. Literary license and latitude. No, so, but what we describe is the real running theme of the show.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that, that is tight, as tight as we think we've made it.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  As tight as you can make it.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've, we've made it, that's right.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  But then other things...

• 4:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, and at the end of the day, it is the ship of the... Imagination. So if it doesn't leave a wake through the atmosphere, you know, you can chill out on that.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  How convenient.

• 4:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Steve, Steve, the ship of the imagination was in the original Cosmos. And but we totally re-envisioned it for this one. Were you happy with the original rendering of it?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  I never liked the one in the original series.

• 5:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  But I love the present one.

• 5:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You love the present, okay. You said the right, you gave the right answer there.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  Well, there you go, uh, there you go Nicholas, there's your answer, so, um.

• 5:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the ship goes a lot of places without messing up the environment.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Right, there you go. Alright, cool. I gotta tell ya, he's a very detailed guy, this Nicholas. He was on every little minutia. Let's move on to Amy, also emailing a question in, and her question is about Arabic numbers. Mister Tyson, hey, Amy, that's Doctor Tyson to you.

• 5:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's Doctor Tyson to you.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Oh, that's true.

• 5:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's Neil to Amy.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  It's Neil to Amy, yeah, yeah. There you go. I was just watching the latest episode of Cosmos, love it. And you mentioned Arabic numerals and the concept of zero. This got me to thinking. I've often heard of math being a universal language, but would an alien civilization use a base of 10? What if they had 12 fingers, for example? If we counted in a different way, would pi be rational? Is our method of math a universal truth? Thanks.

• 6:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, Steve, why don't you kick in on that?

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Well, there, there was a base 12 number system, it's, it's, uh, one of the oldest. And it's almost certain that aliens with different numbers of digits would have a different base number for the counting system.

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, the base 12 is, was Babylonian, right? And so it's like clocks have 12 hours.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  12 is really more convenient in some ways, because it's divisible by 3, 4, and 2. Whereas 10 is only.

• 6:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by, yeah, 2, 3, 4, and 6.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Makes sense, I never thought of that.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  But in any numbers.

• 6:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you can talk about a quarter of an hour, a third of an hour, yeah.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  But the number pi, the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, would be an irrational number, an in, in, in, in infinite fraction in any.

• 6:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No matter how many fingers you have.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  In any system. In any system.

• 6:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mmm.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 6:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's good.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  So, so now.

• 6:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So all the irrational numbers stay irrational.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Stay irrational.

• 6:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There, there's no hope for them.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 6:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, wait, Steve, suppose we went in base pi?

• 7:02Speaker 02

  I can't even imagine that. I don't think it's very practical.

• 7:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but then pi would equal to, would be equal to one or something, or ten, right? You count in pies.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  I hope they're blueberry, because you guys have lost me. You have lost me.

• 7:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, because it's base ten is we have ten numerals, zero through nine, and when you run out of numerals, you start combining them.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get to nine, you go one, zero, one, one, one, two, one, one. So that's how you would count in any base.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  So base pi, pi would be the unit.

• 7:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The unit.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  The unit is pi.

• 7:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is pi. And so you can count in base four would be one, two, zero, one, two, three, one, zero, one, two, one, three.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Our integers would all be irrational.

• 7:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have irrational integers, I think.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  It'd be a mess.

• 7:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'd be a mess, yeah. Cool. All right, when we come back, we are in Cosmic Queries mode. Everything about Cosmos, the TV series. We'll be right back.

• 8:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk Radio, Cosmic Queries Edition. I like to think of it as StarTalk After Hours.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come and bring your questions. We call them from the internet, all of our social media outlets, email, Twitter, our website. And we ask you, do you have any questions about Cosmos?

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not the Cosmos, because we'll take those anytime, but Cosmos, the show.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  The show.

• 8:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right, appearing on Fox and on National Geographic. And so Chuck, you've got the questions.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  I have the questions, which you have not seen.

• 8:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've not seen. And I have in studio as a special guest, one of the co-writers of Cosmos, Steve Soter. Steve, thanks for being on StarTalk.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, let's go for it.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  All right, let's move on to our next question. And this one is coming from Joe Trow. And Joe says, in Cosmos, you recently suggested that the furthest mapped galaxy was among the first galaxies to be formed. I'm curious as to why that is thought to be so. If more- Or distant galaxies exist and their light hasn't reached us yet. How can we be sure galaxies from thirteen point four billion years ago? Were indeed the first galaxies to be formed. Ooh, he is throwing down a gauntlet.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  That's good stuff.

• 9:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's some good stuff. Okay, so here's the thing, there are galaxies whose light haven't yet to reach us. Wonder could they be older than that galaxy? That's what he's wondering.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  That's what he said.

• 9:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so there's a problem in how we talk about the early universe that I have to clarify. It's not a problem, it's it's it's a lexicon problem, right? So when we say we look so far back in time, we see galaxies forming. We are seeing a galaxy in the act of forming. Okay, somebody on that galaxy today, looking in our direction, will see the Milky Way forming.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  I got you.

• 10:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, and so all the galaxies were forming at about the same time in the early universe. And so when you have a window to the early universe, as you look out in space, we look back in time. The universe is a great time machine because light takes time to reach us. We we're seeing an epoch in the universe when galaxies were forming. So we just say we are seeing the youngest galaxy that our telescopes have yet to find. And there'll be others and but all all galaxies in our current universe look like that back then.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So so we maybe we shouldn't say it is the single oldest galaxy. I mean, that's I think that's. Would you agree, Steve? We're we're saying it the wrong way.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Well, if you were to wait a few billion years, you would see galaxies forming. More that many more billions of light years away from us, but they all still formed at the same time in the past. So there's a distinction between.

• 11:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get that Chuck? Wait a few billion years.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Wait a few billion years and listen, I got nothing but time. I think I got a gig next June. Other than that, I'm good.

• 11:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so in a billion years, that freshly born galaxy is now a billion years old. And now we see another billion light years farther away.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we see that galaxy being born.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  But they all were born at about the same actual time.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  That's because there's a singularity that created this.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Correct?

• 11:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Gotcha. So it doesn't make a difference because the singularity will be the same. That's the constant.

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For everybody.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  For everybody.

• 11:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody. You got it, Chuck.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for helping us answer that question, Chuck.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Hey, no, you know, I'm feeling kinda good about myself right now.

• 11:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, that's good.

• 11:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You go back and tell your sixth grade teacher, "Yeah, I didn't do good in science later on." Alright.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Actually, yeah, actually, it'd be my eighth grade teacher, and he would be so jealous of me right now.

• 11:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Yes, he would. Mr. McNeil, F you. No, I'm joking. No, he was a great guy. Um, let's move on. This is from Justin Brickell. Okay, subject matter, black holes. Alright, here we go. Uh, on the last episode of Cosmos, we saw an X-ray image of a black hole. If the gravity of the black hole does not allow light to escape, then why can we see X-rays from black holes? Aren't X-rays light waves? And I'm gonna tell you right now, I am so excited about this question because this is a great question, and I really don't know the answer.

• 12:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you didn't think of it at the time you saw that episode?

• 12:39Speaker 01

  I did not.

• 12:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Steve, why don't you get that?

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Well, you're not really seeing the light coming from inside the black hole. You're seeing the light coming from a disk of material which is spiraling into the black hole, and that is allowed to escape.

• 12:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it's not in the black hole yet.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  It's not in that black hole yet.

• 12:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the, it's the, it's the, it's the last cry of matter that has been heated to such high temperatures. It's the, it's the, it's the death cry. It's, it's the, it's the last gasp of matter in its death spiral, which has been heated to so high temperatures, it emits. You know, out of your stove, you turn it on and it glows red hot.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You say red hot is hot, it can glow hotter than that.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 13:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It can go white hot.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  White hot.

• 13:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Blue hot.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Blue hot.

• 13:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But then it melts, but it can still glow, and it can glow so hot that it can be glowing in X-rays.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, this is glowing matter at just, "I'm coming to find me, Matilda," and then it's gone.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh, so it's not in the black hole, it's just heated where it becomes X-ray.

• 13:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It becomes, X-ray light becomes copiously emitted.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  So it's the Fred Sanford of material before, is.

• 13:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Elizabeth, I'm coming to join you, honey. That's it. Hello.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  So that's what it is.

• 13:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're too young to remember Fred Sanford, Sanford and Son.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 13:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Elizabeth, yeah, it's the last bit.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  It's the last bit. Aw, man, that is fascinating stuff. Excellent, excellent. Alright, let's move on. This is from Laura Nugent. Laura wants to know about light years, guys.

• 14:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this email? You got this.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  This is an email, sorry. Uh, this is an email from Laura. Laura says, "I was watching the latest episode of Cosmos, a full, a sky full of ghosts, and had a question. I understand that every time we look at the night sky, we are looking into the past. I also know that a light year is the distance light will travel in one year. What I would like to know is, how are light years calculated? For example, how do we calculate that the center of the Milky Way is approximately 30,000 light years? Is it some sort of triangula, triangulation?

• 14:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Ha ha.

• 14:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Steve, you wanna get that?

• 14:48Speaker 02

  It begins with triangulation, yes. We determine the distances to the nearest stars by basically triangulation. And then, when we knew how far away those stars were, we learned something about stars themselves, and how luminous stars of different kinds are, which is, uh, depending on their particular spectrum, the kind of light they put out. And then when we could see those same kind of spectra. In other more distant stars, too far away to measure by triangulation, we would know how far away they were by how bright they appeared to be, and so on. So it was a kind of bootstrapping operation to extend these distances, eventually to know how far away the center of our galaxy was, and then to recognize individual bright stars in other galaxies to then determine how far away those galaxies are.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hubble did that first, the man, Hubble the man, in the 1920s, yeah.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  But it did begin with triangulation.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 15:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, it's a huge effort, it's called the Distance Ladder. In fact, if you Google Distance Ladder, you'll get a whole Wiki page on it. And it's a, it was a major triumph of 20th century astrophysics, and it was many people working in consort, even competitively, trying to get the distance scale of the universe, the yardstick of the universe. And it wasn't much reported on in the news, because there was no eureka moment, burning a midnight oil overnight.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was just this long, drawn-out effort to find out how far away things are in the universe.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Just to be able to calculate distance, and that's it.

• 16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, exactly. So she picked up on one of the greatest challenges of 20th century astrophysics. But we got that, and we're on to the next problems, yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Okay, so now, gosh, all right, very quickly, here's my follow-up question. Has there any, ever been an anomaly that would create the appearance of a brighter star, longer distance, but it actually wasn't?

• 16:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there was a set of observations of galaxies sitting right next to one another.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And one, you use the same method of distance calculation, and you get two very different distances for these two galaxies that look clearly right, one right next to one another. And so this would be the anomalies in the distance scale. There was a professor at Caltech named Halton Arp, Chip Arp was his name, who's a big proponent of these anomalous cases.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And closer scrutiny would ultimately reveal that these pairings of galaxies were just line-of-sight juxtapositions, that they were not actually interacting with one another.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Although, the claim is, though, that some of them may be interacting with each other. I'm not certain that this is solved yet.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Oh, controversy abounds. Oh, that's pretty awesome. Okay, okay. Well, thank you.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Steve is always for the underdog.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  All right, I think we have time for one more.

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. A quick one.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Here's a quick one. This is from Trevor Bradley, also by email. And, uh, dark matter Dyson spheres. I had an idea one day that all the dark matter in the universe is actually Dyson spheres. And all the aliens are hiding inside of them. I'm glad I picked this one for last, okay? While I think this makes for good science fiction, I suspect it isn't true. What do we know about the distribution of dark matter in the galaxy?

• 17:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in, so in the 20 seconds left in this segment, you want me to give the full exposition of Dyson spheres? And whether dark matter is hiding out within them with aliens? All right, so, so we're gonna have to pick that up after the break. After the, are you okay with that Chuck?

• 18:13Speaker 01

  No, I'm okay with that.

• 18:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can, Steve, you're okay with that? All right, all right. When we come back, more of StarTalk Cosmic Queries. Cosmos.

• 18:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. The Cosmos. The Cosmos TV series.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A little self-serving, because I'm host of the series, Chuck, so I feel, I feel awkward in this.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  I don't know why.

• 18:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  There's no reason to feel, it's a, it's a fantastic show, you're a great host, there's nothing wrong with that.

• 18:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, and who gives you paychecks here?

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Um, I believe that would be you.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Funny how that works out.

• 19:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just the disclosure here, yes, Chuck is paid for his appearances on StarTalk. So... So, uh, we left off talking about-

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Dyson spheres.

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dyson spheres, yeah, yeah. So there's a colleague of mine, Freeman Dyson, a rather senior physicist, who had thoughts that if you were in advanced civilization, you would need energy. More energy than perhaps your home planet could support on its own.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 19:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So then you go to your home star. Well, how much star energy are you gonna get? Only the energy that's sort of headed your way.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The star is illuminating other planets, but if you were greedy, if you were just overcome with greed, you would say, "I want every photon emitted from that star." And you'd build a sphere around that star to capture all the light and channel all that light to your planet.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 19:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what you would do. And whether or not you approve this with your neighbors on planet's exterior to you-

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because then you would be snuffing out their-

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Their light would be gone.

• 20:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Their light would be gone.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you now control that much energy, uh, you could have an awesome civilization, it is imagined.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  You'd be the Mr. Burns of your solar system.

• 20:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is. And so you wonder, are these aliens in Dyson spheres closing off the existence of matter and could this be all the dark matter in the galaxy? And I, no, no, because that sphere will actually still radiate.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no such thing as a free lunch. You can't take energy away and not have it come out in another form.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 20:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that sphere would heat up and it would glow and have a kind of infrared glow. It wouldn't glow visibly, it would glow invisibly in infrared. And so, so you'd see, we'd see that with infrared telescopes and we don't. Plus, there's good reason to think that the dark matter is not made of ordinary matter at all. That it's something that remains mysterious, but is nothing that we know. Like electrons, protons, neutrons. So, uh, if you put in dark matter as electrons, protons and neutrons in the Big Bang models, you don't get the universe that we currently live in.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, there you have it.

• 21:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're good, we're good on this.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  Okay. All right. Well, that makes perfect sense.

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, what else you got?

• 21:17Speaker 01

  All right, let's move on to, oh, a question from a nine-year-old fan is what this says.

• 21:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does that mean the person's been a fan for nine years?

• 21:27Speaker 01

  No, it means that she is indeed nine years of age.

• 21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nine years of age. That's how old I was when I discovered the universe, or rather, the universe discovered me.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  There you have it.

• 21:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Called by the universe. Okay, go on.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Zoe Vales. Okay, it's her name. Hi.

• 21:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're gonna imitate a nine-year-old girl.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Come on, I gotta give it to you. Hi, my name is Zoe and I'm, wait for it, nine years old. I'm your biggest fan in the universe. I was a fan before your TV show. I watch Cosmos all the time, by the way. I listen to StarTalk Radio in the car with my mom. And when I grow up, I wanna be just like you. In fact, in February, I wrote a report about you for Black History Month. Anyway, I have two questions. One, you said the most meteorites are only as big as blueberries. How come they look so big in the sky?

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Two.

• 22:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two questions.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  How come space is a vacuum? Why isn't there any oxygen or anything else? That's all I have for now, but you'll be hearing from me. That's sounding like a threat.

• 22:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's for...

• 22:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't diss me on this one.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  But you'll be hearing from me.

• 22:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna be old in a nursing home. Remember me, Zoe? You dissed my questions. Alright, so, so for, so one of them was, how come space is a vacuum? Well, all the air that would be in space is attracted by gravity. So it falls down to the surfaces of planets. And so it's really just gravity.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  It's just gravity.

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's real, that's all there is.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  So that's it.

• 22:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And as you go higher up in the atmosphere, the air gets thinner and thinner.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Because there's less, well, you're further and further away.

• 22:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, yeah, so all the air is crammed and compressed down right near the Earth's surface. So, by the way, the thickness of our atmosphere is to Earth what the skin of an apple is to an apple. Yeah, so the gravity's really squeezing this stuff down. So, most of the universe is a vacuum. So the saying, "Nature abhors a vacuum," that's just false.

• 23:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nature did love it itself some vacuum. It's, if, that means you've never been in space, if you say, "Nature abhors a vacuum."

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 23:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because on Earth, there's so much pressure in the air. If you try to take away the air, air's gonna try to fight you on it.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, by the way, that's why it's hard to pick up a pun, a suction cup.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not because it's sucking itself down. It's because the weight of the atmosphere is pressing down on the rubber.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Because you removed.

• 23:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You removed the air that would balance it.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Inside that would balance it out.

• 23:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not, there's no, there's no suction. We call it suction. It's just the weight of the atmosphere leaning on it.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Right. So there's nothing pushing back. So therefore.

• 23:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Balance it out. You got it. And was the other question was what?

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Here's this, uh, the other question was, you said.

• 24:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Although the idea, so.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Most meteorites.

• 24:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So, so, so it's meteors, most meteors. These are the things that are rendered to glow, moving through the atmosphere. They're about the size of a blueberry. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And you say, well, how did, how do I look so big? Because they're moving fast and, you know, tens of thousands of miles an hour. And all that energy, where does it go? It heats up and it can vaporize the meteor. It could render the atmosphere a glow. And so what you see is the glowing trail of this moving blueberry.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  It's all a light show, Zoe.

• 24:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all a light show.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Light show.

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, bigger ones come through and if they're big enough, they won't burn up and they hit the ground, then they're a meteorite.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 24:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you don't want to be where it fell. Cause that would be the end of you, Zoe. And we need you to come back and be my nemesis later on.

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta run. Uh, uh, just for this segment, we'll be back with more Cosmic Queries on the Cosmos.

• 25:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. Star Talk, Cosmic Queries Edition. Chuck Nice.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The question deliverer.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Correct, sir.

• 25:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go for it, man.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Here we go. This is from Matt Schroeder.

• 25:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All about Cosmos.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  All about Cosmos.

• 25:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The show.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  The series.

• 25:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Which you are the host, by the way, in case you didn't know.

• 25:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for that plug.

• 25:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I needed that plug, yeah, go on.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  All right, Matt wants to know about singularity and subatomic particles. Okay, I recently watched and thoroughly enjoyed the latest episode of Cosmos as I have the previous episodes. I had not considered the possibility of multiple universes on what you described within a black hole. This raises the question of how does the this theory fit with singularities? As well as what happens on the atomic level in a black hole? Does quantum physics still obey the same laws? Inside of a black hole?

• 26:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, okay, so.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  By the way, I put the inside part.

• 26:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is a brilliant question. So if you look at what we call classical relativity, so relativity without quantum physics? And you do the spacetime diagrams for what happens inside of a black hole? There's a way, there's a trajectory you can plot for yourself through a black hole where you will end up in another spacetime. And that is what we portrayed in the series.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we didn't know how to draw it because no one's ever been there to come back out and tell us about it. So we just imagined going into whole other universes that are there. Whole other spacetimes are allowed inside of black holes. No doubt about it. Well, let's put it another way. The general relativity equations have been accurate for everything else they've predicted.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That we've been able to test. So we're not given reason to think that they're all of a sudden wrong when they say there's a whole new spacetime that can open up inside a black hole. Why think it would be wrong in there but right everywhere else? So that's why we give it some confidence. However.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What we don't know is the day we marry general relativity to quantum physics.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 27:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because quantum physics is the science of the small.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And general relativity is the science of the large.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they never really had to talk to one another.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But when is the large small? At the center of a black hole, when whatever was the progenitor became little.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And now you have big things being little, same problem is at the big bang itself, where the whole universe was small. So there's some kind of shotgun wedding going on there. We don't know exactly what, and we don't know who's gonna win. Whether there's a third theory you need that encompasses the both of those, or whether quantum physics absorbs general relativity, we don't know.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, only when that comes out will we be able to say with certainty or with much higher confidence. Whether this spacetime is real or whether some quantum phenomenon kicks in preventing it.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  So are you.

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he asked exactly the right question.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  We may have, let me follow you here, just if I'm, if I'm, we may have indeed, once you marry these two, different laws of physics, they may be created by this shotgun wedding you talk about.

• 28:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, no, no, not, I mean, some new understanding of nature that supersedes both of those two.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  I got you.

• 28:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, we've done that before. We've had, uh, in, in other ways, there's magnetism and electricity and we found, hey, this, these are the same thing.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But under a larger umbrella that we call electromagnetism.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Exactly, yes.

• 28:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that word was, is two concepts stapled together in the 19th century, when we discovered that they're the same phenomenon.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 28:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, yeah, that was a great question.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Matt, you are a very astute young man.

• 28:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You had that question too, when you were watching Cosmos.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  I certainly did.

• 28:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Uh, be- because Matt emailed me.

• 28:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He said, let me try Chuck first, because this is so easy. Uh, Chuck will get it.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  All right, let's get to this one, uh, very quickly. Metric expansion of space from Oliver Snell. And Oliver is emailing us, okay. Uh, I was watching Cosmos and it was so amazing. I spent the entire following day reading about the universe, galaxies, black holes, and the local group.

• 29:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As it should be.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  That's right. Um, and the metric expansion of space. Here's my problem. I wasn't ready for how depressing the metric expansion of space is. The idea that eventually everything in the universe that is not in the Milky Way's gravitational range will be unobservable is terrifying and sad. Do you have the same thoughts? If so, how do you deal with that fact?

• 29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This guy, we, uh, okay, on our website, we'll put a list of counselors for you.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Need a metric expansion of space hotline.

• 29:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In, in the accelerated expansion of space, there will come a day where all galaxies will have expanded beyond our visual horizon.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 29:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we'll look beyond our galaxy and there'll be nothing there.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 30:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And everything we currently know and accept and love about cosmology, that book will have been discarded. Because there'll be no evidence that there was ever a past in the cosmos.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 30:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we get the information about the past by looking at galaxies from long ago.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you were born into that world. You would be reading a book of the universe with a chapter missing and you would not even know it was missing.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 30:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  That is a world I don't want to live in.

• 30:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, well, maybe you already are and there are chapters missing from this universe.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  That makes sense.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that you have yet to consider its impact on how we now think about how the universe works.

• 30:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, more Cosmic Queries after this break.

• 30:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, Cosmic Queries, StarTalk. That last question, he wondered if I had some kind of existential angst about the expansion of the universe.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  How do you deal with it?

• 31:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Accelerating galaxies out of our horizon, leaving just the Milky Way, emerged Milky Way Andromeda system, how do I deal with it?

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I don't, I try not to invest emotions in the universe and I say, isn't that awesome? That there will be a future time where we won't even have cosmology because we won't even have any access to the history of the cosmos. That's just kind of interesting.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  That is.

• 31:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it makes me wonder today, like I said, is there any chapters ripped from our book that we are currently reading to understand or inventing and writing to understand the nature of the universe? So it's all cool for me.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Fantastic.

• 31:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but now we are in the lightning round.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Yes, it is, my friend.

• 31:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Test the bell. There it is.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  There it is.

• 31:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will give Speedo answers to your Speedo questions, all right? Ready, go.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  This is from Adam and Adam is emailing in about the moon. Neil, in Cosmos, you said the moon coalesced from debris. I thought I heard you say before that it formed from a Mars-sized impact event. I heard that theory before, just not sure if I heard it from you. By the way, loved the conversation with God.

• 32:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, that was the earlier episode. Interesting, thanks for that God plug. Yes, in the show, in Cosmos, we showed the impact of the Mars-sized object that then made the debris that coalesced to form the moon. So go back and find it, you'll see. And so, yes, there's still a Mars-sized object colliding with the moon. Most of that continuous mass goes away, but there's a hell of a lot of debris, mostly from Earth's crust that formed the moon. The moon is made of largely Earth's crust. Next. That's why it has very little iron in it. Most of the iron in the Earth is in the center of the Earth.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Boom.

• 32:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Having fallen there for weighing so much more than the rocks that floated to the top. Go.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, a double answer.

• 32:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  This from Christopher Fletcher, and Christopher wants to know about the cosmic calendar. I think the cosmic calendar is a great idea for lending the scope of deep time to history as we know it. But is there some version of this concept that uses the quote-unquote "end of the universe" as the final date with heat death as midnight, December 31st? Or are there estimations of such a far future going up in the end and having the current moment something absurd like the first fraction of a second January 1st?

• 33:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so here we go. Uh, there's a book called The Five Ages of the Universe. Check it out. Okay, I might have even written a blurb for that book.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Sweet.

• 33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in that book, uh, written by a colleague of mine, that book talks about the death of the universe, and it is in 10 to the 100 years from now, or more.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm fine now.

• 33:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, a Google-

• 33:30Speaker 01

  I'm good with that.

• 33:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Google years from now. That is so far away, it just doesn't make sense to start making calendars out of it.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 33:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, there you go.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 33:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Okay, this one is from Alex Dolan. Alex wants to know this. "Hi Neil, every model of our solar system I've seen shows all the planets orbiting basically on the same plane. Why is this the case and not something closer resembling a model of an atom with many planes?" So like electrons and an atom.

• 33:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the famous nebular hypothesis that first came out in the mid-1700s. Uh, Laplace and Kant, both independently, uh, they may have heard of each other's work, but they're both brilliant people, came up with the idea that you start with a gas cloud that started spinning while it's collapsing. If you spin while you collapse, you make a disk. And if all the stuff you make is made in that disk, everybody's orbiting in the same plane in the same direction.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 34:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's the Oort Cloud of comets that surrounds us entirely that tells us that the Oort Cloud did not participate in that collapse.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Ah-ha!

• 34:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's what's left over after you collapse the pancake and make your planets and moons and the star in the center. Got it, go.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Bang, that was great. Okay, Neve Rav Bonsali. Uh, Neve wants to know about faster than the speed of light. "Dr. Tyson, regards." I'm writing for Royal Coke, excuse me. Can the inner-

• 34:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, writing for- I wonder where the people came from?

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Royal Oak, Michigan.

• 34:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, fine.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  "Can the energy of a supernova increase with the speed at which photons travel from the star, thus essentially increasing..."

• 34:56Speaker 01

  The speed of light.

• 34:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, it's just an explosion. Matter comes out, light will always move at the speed of light. No violations of anything, of any known laws of physics there. But it's nonetheless quite the spectacle in the cosmos. All right, next.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  All right, Pat Hickey wants to know about the origins of life. Pat emails in and says this.

• 35:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So do I. Next question. What about the origins of life? All right, go quick.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  In the news cosmos, you say our humanity's journey started at nine forty-five on New Year's Eve. What do you think the earliest realistic time that advanced life could have evolved on another planet? After the big bang, given perfect conditions.

• 35:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, so the point is if Earth was born at the time of the big bang, the universe would have had life as we know it. As early as, you know, a billion years after the universe formed. But we had to wait until enough heavy elements were formed. The kind of elements that make life and that make planets. And that was not formed in the big bang. Big bang with pure hydrogen, helium, trace amounts of lithium. What are you made of? Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen. You get that from inside of stars that had to be born, die, spread their guts everywhere and rich, make the life later on. So here's the thing. What you want to do is form complex intelligent life earlier on a planet.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Got you.

• 36:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because Earth was really slow about making that happen.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  And still is.

• 36:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Still makes it.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  To this day.

• 36:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that would have been cool. How if intelligence was this moving force? How intelligent would we have been had we evolved earlier ago as complex life than than just a couple of million years? I mean, forget about it.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Got you.

• 36:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know if we have time. We don't have any more time for another question. I get.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  All right, here's another child this way. Uh, loved your explanation about artificial selection of dogs on cosmos. If we had a couple of millennia to spare, would we be walking cats getting them to fetch?

• 36:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ah, you want to breed cats to fetch?

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Yes, could we do it?

• 36:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have a cat that fetches. It's called a dog. All right. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio Cosmic Queries Edition Cosmos. Chuck, thanks for being on with me.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  My pleasure.

• 37:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Earlier, we had Steve Soter, my colleague in earlier segments, uh, helping me out answering these questions. Until next time, I bid you to keep looking up.