Cosmic Queries Science in Movies and TV

Stay Tuned for… Science! Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Eugene Mirman answer more of your questions about science in Star Trek, Star Wars, Sliders, Superman, Contact, Mary Poppins and more.

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?

  Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. In studio with me Eugene Mirman. Eugene, love having you, man.

• 0:30Eugene Mirman?

  I love being here.

• 0:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh, the comedian Eugene Mirman. He's here to make fun of all my answers is what's gonna happen.

• 0:38Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, and to learn, like you, the listener.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is Cosmic Queries edition of StarTalk. This is where we collect all the questions that we accumulate from our website, StarTalkRadio.net, or on Facebook.

• 0:52Eugene Mirman?

  Twitter.

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Twitter, StarTalkRadio is our handle there, and we get enough on one theme or another, we put them together. So today is "Science in Movies and Other Forms of Entertainment."

• 1:03Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 1:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And some people have like genuine questions about it, others want to know if I, anything I can pick apart, but I haven't seen the questions yet.

• 1:11Eugene Mirman?

  No, and I'm gonna start in.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's just start right in.

• 1:14Eugene Mirman?

  This is about the movie Contact from Danny Davis.

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Movie Contact, the story written by Carl Sagan.

• 1:19Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yes. My question comes from the movie Contact, one of my favorites. "The problem I'm trying to figure out is the ending when Jodie Foster's character travels in the spaceship and has her experience, but for Earth viewers, the ship instantly falls through like nothing happened, and then it is later revealed that her camera recorded 18 hours of static. Now, from what I understand about relativity, it should have been opposite. On Earth, 18 hours would have passed, but her camera would have recorded seconds of static. Please help me put my mind at rest on this query once and for all. Did the movie get that part wrong, or am I missing something?"

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, this person knows just enough relativity to just get angry about it. Yeah, so just to remind people in the film.

• 2:03Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 2:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, Jodie Foster's character visits aliens in another part of the galaxy and does so in an odd sort of rotating spaceship that never leaves Earth. And they see her take just seconds and in that time, in those few seconds, she goes on this journey.

• 2:20Eugene Mirman?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think the point here is that the fabric of space and time.

• 2:26Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 2:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is such that you can warp either space or time or both. And so you can basically travel through a wormhole, get to some destination instantly.

• 2:39Eugene Mirman?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, and if you travel fast, that you're the the questioner, oh, who is it? Who is it that?

• 2:44Eugene Mirman?

  Danny.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Danny, and it's from where?

• 2:46Eugene Mirman?

  Uh, I don't know, but uh, his name is definitely Danny. He didn't include it.

• 2:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So normally, if you're the one.

• 2:52Eugene Mirman?

  Albuquerque.

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're the one that goes away, you live for a shorter amount of time than Earth that you've left behind. So Danny is perfectly correct about that. But these are aliens who gave us instructions how to build a spaceship to do exactly what just happened. So I'm not worried about that relative time dilation.

• 3:11Eugene Mirman?

  So Danny's right that it would logically work that way unless aliens gave him a plan that he stuck to that worked differently.

• 3:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, which is what happened in the film.

• 3:19Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 3:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could also imagine that she was not the one who left, that it was Earth that left that location and then returned. I mean, and then Earth is the one that that lives for the only the few moments and he's the one that lives longer. You can imagine aliens controlling space and time in such a way that that's what happened.

• 3:37Eugene Mirman?

  So so in the movie, they could have moved the whole planet with.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be hard. It would be, it would be hard.

• 3:42Eugene Mirman?

  No one's saying it's easy, Neil. I am not saying that this is easy. Saying that it's within possibility of science fiction.

• 3:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I mean is that it would be hard not only to physically move the planet, but Earth has to be the one that accelerates away and then accelerates, slows down, stops and comes back. We would all feel that.

• 4:00Eugene Mirman?

  You would feel that?

• 4:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 4:02Eugene Mirman?

  If we went through a wormhole, we would feel it.

• 4:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, if we slowed down, if we sped up and slowed down and stopped.

• 4:07Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 4:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We would just fall over and roll, roll off the planet because we're not attached to the Earth, so.

• 4:13Eugene Mirman?

  Not even a little?

• 4:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, not at all.

• 4:15Eugene Mirman?

  Not even with, not even gravity? So we would all fly away if you could stop the earth.

• 4:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you just stopped the earth from its movement in space or it's adjusted it in some way.

• 4:26Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Earth would stop, but we were moving with the earth in orbit around the sun.

• 4:29Eugene Mirman?

  We would just fly very quickly.

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As you would fly through a dashboard in a car that hits a brick wall and you're not wearing a seatbelt.

• 4:35Eugene Mirman?

  I really can't believe that like people who do like jump from outer space or bungee jumper or any of that haven't tried to stop earth to just go flying.

• 4:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be a fun experiment.

• 4:44Eugene Mirman?

  We'll try it.

• 4:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm not worried about that, but strictly speaking, if she was the one that went away, Danny's correct.

• 4:50Eugene Mirman?

  All right.

• 4:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:51Eugene Mirman?

  All right, Danny. Good job. Congrats.

• 4:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What else?

• 4:54Eugene Mirman?

  You just got your PhD. Okay, this is from Brendan.

• 4:59Eugene Mirman?

  Uh, it's about a time dilation effects of wormholes.

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 5:03Eugene Mirman?

  In the episode Rimmer World of the comedy Red Dwarf.

• 5:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so I missed that episode.

• 5:08Eugene Mirman?

  Well, it's season six, episode five, he writes, "Thanks, Brendan. You just wasted our lives." "One of the characters goes through a wormhole in an escape pod that is accelerating away from the other character's ship into a wormhole to a planet that he would land on." "They mentioned time dilation effects of wormholes, and the first one through the wormhole had to wait 557 years before the rest of them caught up to rescue him." Would that, how true would phenomena be? How true would phenomena be if the wormhole travel was real? Is that real?

• 5:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so a wormhole allows you to go to another part of the galaxy quickly, much faster than a beam of light would take you there. By the way, if you can travel through wormholes, it allows backwards through time travel.

• 5:55Eugene Mirman?

  That's how you would do it.

• 5:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just an FYI on that, if you can travel, you're effectively traveling faster than light, and that allows certain trajectories through the fabric of space and time.

• 6:04Eugene Mirman?

  Are you saying Sliders is pretty real?

• 6:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If they can manage the wormhole part. So, uh, so the point there is the wormholes, if you're accelerating through the wormhole and you're moving fast, you would not age very much at all, and you come out the other side, everyone else is aging a long time.

• 6:19Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if someone else comes through a wormhole right after you, no, you don't wait 500 years for them, no.

• 6:24Eugene Mirman?

  No, they'd just be right there too.

• 6:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, just come.

• 6:26Eugene Mirman?

  You're both using the same thing, so it'd be about. About a minute.

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, yeah, whatever, whatever. And, and the wormhole could be arbitrarily short time for you.

• 6:34Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 6:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Depending on how warped the space is, or how, how tight the hole is between one section of the galaxy and the next.

• 6:40Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, in fact, this thing that he's describing, he should have just said in the first reboot of Star Trek, there was a wormhole. You don't need to go into season six, episode five of Red Dwarf. This is literally the plot of the first Star Trek.

• 6:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To have a conversation about wormholes, you don't need to be that specific in your science fiction.

• 6:56Eugene Mirman?

  And you could pick a much broader, I mean, yeah, anyway, so, so that's the same thing about the Star Trek, you wouldn't.

• 7:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So, so, uh, the point is if you're all going in together or immediately after one another, yeah, you're good to go.

• 7:07Eugene Mirman?

  Fifteen minutes apart, fifteen minutes, yeah.

• 7:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't worry about it.

• 7:10Eugene Mirman?

  Nice. All right. On Facebook, Robert Millard, this is his thing. I promise I had this thought before I saw Men in Black. We believe you, Robert. You liar. No, yeah, okay. Uh, it seems that matter is basically mass and energy swirling around each other. The same could be said for solar systems. Is it possible our solar system is an atom or the Milky Way is a molecule?

• 7:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a deep thought a hundred and, a hundred and ten years ago. People, as we started probing the structure of the atom, we looked at it and say, oh, there's a nucleus. There's electrons and they're orbiting around. Maybe that's just a mini.

• 7:47Eugene Mirman?

  But there are no cats and there's no cows and farms and buildings.

• 7:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, I will give the answer to why atoms are not solar systems. You're listening to StarTalk Radio, Cosmic Queries Edition.

• 8:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm a astrophysicist. And my day job is as Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Check us out. Eugene, do you have a day job?

• 8:31Eugene Mirman?

  Uh, I mean, I mean, I, I think as much as you, I guess you have a thing that you would call your day job, but it probably blends into some of your nighttime work.

• 8:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the thing you call a day, your, your voice on Bob's?

• 8:42Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, Bob's Burgers, I guess, would be.

• 8:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love to know that. Excellent. So we're in the Cosmic Queries edition.

• 8:48Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, so someone had asked.

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Science in movies, right. And so where do we leave off?

• 8:51Eugene Mirman?

  Basically, they were like, is our solar system an atom or is the Milky Way a molecule?

• 8:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and these are great questions, deep questions that were asked about 120 years ago. He's about 120 years late in asking this.

• 9:01Eugene Mirman?

  Right around when Hashish first reached Boston.

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting, you have the date for that. So here's the problem, the problem. When we discovered atoms and that there's a nucleus and electrons, you say, hey, that looks like a solar system.

• 9:17Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 9:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wonder if inside an atom, there's yet another atom and another atom.

• 9:20Eugene Mirman?

  This is an episode of Mork and Mindy, but yeah.

• 9:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It turns out that the laws of physics that describe what goes on in a solar system are different from the laws of physics that describe what goes on in an atom. And so the conduct of matter and energy is completely different in these two regimes.

• 9:39Eugene Mirman?

  Really?

• 9:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And because of it, as you mentioned before the break, no, within atoms, you don't have cats, you know? You don't have.

• 9:47Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, bulletin boards.

• 9:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This stuff that does not happen inside of atoms.

• 9:52Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 9:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That happens macroscopically.

• 9:54Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 9:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the microscopic world and macroscopic.

• 9:56Eugene Mirman?

  Different physically.

• 9:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The macroscopic world responds to what we call classical physics, right? And the microscopic world responds to quantum physics. Quantum physics actually applies to the whole universe, but on a large enough scale, it looks like classical physics and equations are easier. So we just use it, use those modes to describe it. So, no, it's not just the Russian egg, the Russian dolls.

• 10:17Eugene Mirman?

  The nesting dolls.

• 10:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The nesting dolls. All, that's how you say that?

• 10:20Eugene Mirman?

  Matryoshky, yeah.

• 10:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matryoshky.

• 10:23Eugene Mirman?

  Very good.

• 10:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Says my.

• 10:24Eugene Mirman?

  You and I should go to Moscow now.

• 10:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matryoshky dolls. So, no, it's, it's just not that, but it would have been a really cool philosophical revelation.

• 10:34Eugene Mirman?

  So there's no life inside of an atom or molecule?

• 10:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  None that we know of or that we would have ever defined as such.

• 10:39Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's correct.

• 10:40Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, okay, next question.

• 10:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What else you got?

• 10:42Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, I have a lot.

• 10:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 10:44Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, Brian has a question.

• 10:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he's from where?

• 10:48Eugene Mirman?

  Brian Hodgson, no one here is telling us where they're from. I think they're afraid we're going to find them and help them learn. If you were an astronaut tumbling through space like in the movie Gravity, could you change your rotation or trajectory, say through twisting your body? Thank you, love the show, Brian.

• 11:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 11:06Eugene Mirman?

  No?

• 11:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unless you, unless you're in contact with some other thing.

• 11:10Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or unless you lose mass.

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you do not lose mass or come in contact with anything else, you will tumble in that same way at that same speed.

• 11:22Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, but you.

• 11:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Forever.

• 11:23Eugene Mirman?

  But you actually will lose mass in the sense that you'll grow hungry and die.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, uh, it depends. You, well, okay.

• 11:30Eugene Mirman?

  Thirsty? Would that be better?

• 11:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really slow, as people who have tried to lose weight will attest, that is a slow way to lose. There are much faster ways to lose mass.

• 11:38Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, but if you're tumbling through space and you don't have access to any restaurants or anything.

• 11:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, what you can do is if you open up certain hatches of your spacesuit.

• 11:46Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could like pee in one direction or another.

• 11:50Eugene Mirman?

  Oh.

• 11:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This will send your mass out another direction, opposite presumably the way you're tumbling and you don't want to go. That will slow you down.

• 11:58Eugene Mirman?

  So I do like the idea of someone spinning and peeing and then just it would just they'd be spinning in the other direction. They'd still spin.

• 12:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you'd have to know some angular angular momentum physics before you went about.

• 12:11Eugene Mirman?

  Started peeing.

• 12:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Started peeing or spitting or.

• 12:13Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pooping or or or or.

• 12:16Eugene Mirman?

  Do you think that's the end of gravity is just someone peeing themselves back to earth?

• 12:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying, oh, by the way, you can't be inside the suit. It has to actually leave your body.

• 12:23Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, of course, of course.

• 12:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Into space, right?

• 12:25Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 12:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you do this, you can then control to some level that your your wayward trajectory. This is no different.

• 12:32Eugene Mirman?

  Would you die? Like, say you open the suit, there'd be, your skin wouldn't be able to contact. You would.

• 12:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, it's just a vacuum. I mean, yeah, it's not, it won't be comfortable, but you can do it temporarily in order to adjust your, oh, yeah.

• 12:41Eugene Mirman?

  For how long?

• 12:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A couple, few minutes.

• 12:43Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, really? That sounds great.

• 12:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 12:45Eugene Mirman?

  Now I have a new goal. Tumble through space for a few minutes in no suit.

• 12:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so the the point is that when you lose, if you look at spacecraft when they make adjustments, if they're in free open space, they're little sort of what they call these nozzles.

• 12:59Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These rocket nozzles that are strategically positioned around the body of the ship.

• 13:03Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 13:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To make it rotate one direction or another, to change the attitude, the angle.

• 13:08Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or to slow down or to speed up. It is losing mass.

• 13:11Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 13:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the act of burning fuel that sends gases out in one direction or another.

• 13:15Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, wow.

• 13:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So anything that comes out burp, any other flatulent activity?

• 13:20Eugene Mirman?

  I understand.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 13:21Eugene Mirman?

  Yes, that all the things that are funny to children become the way you survive tumbling through space is what you're saying. Every bodily function that you're not supposed to discuss during the day in school, you need to survive to fly back to the earth.

• 13:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 13:36Eugene Mirman?

  Sounds like a plan.

• 13:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:38Eugene Mirman?

  All right, here we go. This is a question from Robbie. Oh, and he's at the University of Michigan. He didn't mind telling us where he was.

• 13:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent.

• 13:45Eugene Mirman?

  Here's his question.

• 13:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he could be a student or a professor. We'll find out.

• 13:48Eugene Mirman?

  It's true. Well, depending on how good his question is.

• 13:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or an administrator.

• 13:52Eugene Mirman?

  He used a lot of exclamation points. He's probably a student.

• 13:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, the OMGs and exclamation points. Right, okay.

• 13:59Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. While at home, I was watching Futurama and during the episode, the characters land on an alien world that had three suns. It left me wondering what would happen if there was a second or third star in our solar system, either in orbit around our sun or fighting with it to become the center of the solar system. Thank you and thanks for the show.

• 14:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, so here's the problem.

• 14:20Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 14:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you start throwing extra suns in the middle of your star system, depends on how far away your planetary orbit is.

• 14:27Eugene Mirman?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're not far enough away from all of them.

• 14:30Eugene Mirman?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's say it's a triple star system.

• 14:33Eugene Mirman?

  Sure.

• 14:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do one up on what they showed in Star Wars. So let's have a triple star system. If you're not really far away from all three.

• 14:39Eugene Mirman?

  What's considered really far, like Jupiter?

• 14:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, much farther than any one of them are from each other.

• 14:44Eugene Mirman?

  Uh huh.

• 14:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's a relative statement. So you want to be far enough away so that all three stars feel like one source of gravity to you.

• 14:52Eugene Mirman?

  I see.

• 14:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're too close and one is over to the left and one is over to the right, your gravitational allegiance becomes constantly compromised.

• 15:01Eugene Mirman?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who am I orbiting today? Oh, it's this star, not that one. And you'll become really close to one star and far from another. Your climate would be all to hell.

• 15:10Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 15:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you wouldn't sustain a stable temperature environment. And you can do models on a computer to show what happens to these orbits and most of them are unstable.

• 15:19Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 15:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A star will either fall, a planet will either fall into a star or be ejected from the star system altogether. So.

• 15:27Eugene Mirman?

  But it would be fine if you simply were so far away that that they felt like one.

• 15:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They felt like one, and they did it right in Star Wars, where they had the double sunset, if you remember that scene. Those were far enough away from the planet.

• 15:38Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 15:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the planet is really only seeing one sort of collective gravitational.

• 15:43Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And and so that's the problem that you have here. But otherwise, it'd be really cool. It'd also be cool if the stars were different colors. And.

• 15:50Eugene Mirman?

  And then you'd have a.

• 15:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, as one star set, the color of your sky would change, you know.

• 15:54Eugene Mirman?

  What are the, what are some of the?

• 15:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you can have red stars, uh, white stars, blue stars. You don't have green stars, though.

• 15:59Eugene Mirman?

  Why not?

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want me to get into, I can't get into that now.

• 16:03Eugene Mirman?

  Wow, okay. Finally stumped with green stars. Ah, it's exhausting. There's no green in space.

• 16:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, there's green in space. There are just no green stars. There's plenty of green.

• 16:12Eugene Mirman?

  Why, no, now you have to tell me why there's no green stars. Finally, I want to reveal a piece of science, and you're like, no.

• 16:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, fine. There's actually green emissions from gas clouds in space. And we looked at it, and we looked at its spectra. We didn't know what it was. And we, as my my historical brethren in the field that I study. And in fact, it was named of nebulae, and it was called nebulae.

• 16:34Eugene Mirman?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This green, this green light in space, nebulae, there was a placeholder until we've actually figured out what it was. We figured out it's actually oxygen behaving in ways that we've never been able to reproduce in the laboratory.

• 16:47Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, wow.

• 16:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Under the, under the rarefied vacuum of space, oxygen behaves badly. Or good, depending on how you want to look at it.

• 16:53Eugene Mirman?

  It's a green cloud that's coming for us.

• 16:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, so it it emits a beautiful green light, and if you're, if you're angstrom fluent, it's 5,007 angstroms.

• 17:02Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 17:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the, on the scale. So you can have green light coming from gas clouds. But stars, because they're giving off a whole spectrum of light, green is this narrow part in the middle of the spectrum.

• 17:14Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 17:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when you puddle together all the light, you can, you can lean towards the red side of the red.

• 17:19Eugene Mirman?

  Cause it's not a primary color.

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, that whole spectrum.

• 17:24Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 17:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It either leans to the blue side, it leans to the red, or it gives about the same of each. And that'll give you a blue star, red star, or a white star. You're not going to get a green star.

• 17:33Eugene Mirman?

  All right.

• 17:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why.

• 17:35Eugene Mirman?

  All right, uh, here, I'll ask. Here, one more, one question.

• 17:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you've got about a minute left. Yeah, go for it.

• 17:40Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 17:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A minute left in this segment, but go.

• 17:42Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah. This is from Harrison Bizzle Fizzle. It is. Dear Neil deGrasse Tyson and funny person, how can one fly a kite?

• 17:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For you.

• 17:51Eugene Mirman?

  I watched Mary Poppins recently and it got me thinking if one had a long enough string, how high could a kite possibly go if the kite and string were made of a sturdy enough material? Could it go up through the atmosphere, up where the air is clear? Anyway, it goes on. Oh, let's go fly a kite.

• 18:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that question, especially since I also love that song. I love corny Broadway songs. So what you need is enough updraft to keep the kite afloat.

• 18:17Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 18:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Against the weight of the string that's pulling down the kite. All right, we gotta think, don't forget that.

• 18:24Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 18:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let me pick up on this answer when we come back to StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition, Science in the Movies.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Radio. Neil Tyson here.

• 18:53Eugene Mirman?

  So kites, what, how high can a kite go?

• 18:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Again, thanks for doing this. Yeah, great question we left before the break about how high up can a kite go? Brought a thought brought on by watching Mary Poppins. And by the way, at the end of Mary Poppins, where they're all flying kites.

• 19:07Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 19:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All kite string angles are the same as they're all standing there. I just want to make note of that. That would be true if all the kites are flying at about the same height. And then the wind is the same for everybody. And so they did that accurately. So I want to commend the Mary Poppins creators of the movie.

• 19:25Eugene Mirman?

  For accurately presenting the kites.

• 19:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The kite.

• 19:28Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, good. All right.

• 19:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how high up can it go? So you have to watch out because the higher the kite goes, holding wind currents aside for the moment, the higher the kite goes, the more string is dangling beneath it. You reach a point where the weight of the string rivals the weight of the kite. Not only the weight of the kite, but even the updraft buoyancy of the kite. And when that happens, the string becomes a burden to the kite and the kite will not continue to ascend. That's a problem.

• 19:55Eugene Mirman?

  So but what so your but your kite could be one mile long.

• 19:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if you had a really huge kite.

• 20:00Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 20:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:01Eugene Mirman?

  A a a super kite.

• 20:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh, you take it up to the stratosphere. Oh, my.

• 20:04Eugene Mirman?

  Then, yeah, OK, so say you have a one mile.

• 20:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the problem is in this in the stratosphere.

• 20:08Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 20:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wind speeds are about a hundred, several hundred miles an hour.

• 20:11Eugene Mirman?

  Sounds good. Sounds like a su- super fun kite ride. So basically, if you had a mile long kite.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep your kite up there.

• 20:18Eugene Mirman?

  Tie it to your foot, got it up there, you would just fly. So it'd be fun, but temporary.

• 20:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stratosphere a little higher than a mile up, but yeah, yeah.

• 20:25Eugene Mirman?

  No, I mean, the the, sorry, the kite itself, the the with one square mile would be the size of a physical kite.

• 20:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So and you, uh, you can put that up really high.

• 20:35Eugene Mirman?

  OK, good. I now have a new, uh, summer project.

• 20:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, it's a good way to think about physics problems is compare one thing going on to the other. And you don't even have to get a number. You don't have to be numerical about it.

• 20:47Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 20:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How high can the kite go? As high as the weight of the kite versus the weight of the string, you know, you just think about it in those terms.

• 20:53Eugene Mirman?

  Kites wouldn't be enough, but a super kite that you and I made.

• 20:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, if you tried with your kite, you will see there's a point where the string starts getting saggy. Compared with the ability of the kite to keep it buoyant. And the kite just gets farther away from you rather than higher up.

• 21:07Eugene Mirman?

  I feel like you would like win a kite contest. Like if there was one and someone had to build one, I would definitely put you on my team. All right, here's a question. I was gonna skip it because it's long, but because it's Buck Rogers and that's something I love. I'm just going to ask it. Watching an episode of Buck Rogers from, oh, this is, uh, Ray, by the way, Ray Bamer. All right, watching an episode of Buck Rogers from nineteen seventy nine, Tweaky is missing. The subplot was transferring ten million tons of frozen oxygen from space to the North Pole, where it would melt and replenish the oxygen depleted atmosphere of the planet. The quote spaceberg has to hit a window in our atmosphere exactly, or be ignited by friction and scorch a third to a half of the planet. My questions, one, would an exgen- I know.

• 21:52Eugene Mirman?

  Would an injection of frozen oxygen or anything from space help Earth? And B, could a spaceberg of oxygen scorch the earth?

• 21:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  OK, so. So a couple of things.

• 22:02Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 22:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  First, Berg, actually German for mountain.

• 22:05Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just be a oxygen Berg.

• 22:07Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, but space Berg would be a mountain of space if you want to.

• 22:11Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, I see.

• 22:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Analyze this.

• 22:12Eugene Mirman?

  I will let whoever wrote Buck Rogers know that they have made some terrible word mistakes.

• 22:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The iceberg is a properly named object.

• 22:19Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a mountain, it's an ice mountain.

• 22:21Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 22:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the, so here's the thing. Uh, Earth is, has no shortage of oxygen at the moment. We just have too much carbon dioxide. We don't have a shortage of oxygen. Uh, if you wanted to just simply add oxygen to the atmosphere, what will happen is fires that are ignited will not burn out as easily as they might today.

• 22:43Eugene Mirman?

  Oh.

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because oxygen feeds fires.

• 22:45Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? So let's say we have twice as much oxygen as we do today and lightning strikes a leaf. And ordinarily, the leaf would just sort of ignite, but then fizzle away. Not with more oxygen in the atmosphere. It would totally come to flames. It would catch to another leaf and you would burn forests like it was nobody's business.

• 23:04Eugene Mirman?

  So a space Berg made of oxygen is what you would describe as a very bad idea.

• 23:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be a bad idea unless we're actually for some reason losing our oxygen and you have to replenish.

• 23:14Eugene Mirman?

  Right. And what we're gaining is carbon dioxide. We're not losing oxygen. It's two different.

• 23:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct. Now, we have plenty of water. We don't need to bring oxygen from space. Water is what chemically?

• 23:23Eugene Mirman?

  Hydrogen and oxygen.

• 23:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  H two O.

• 23:25Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you just, what's, you, you break the hydrogen away from the oxygen and you got free oxygen.

• 23:30Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't have to go to space for it. Yeah. So maybe the, the Buck Rogers writers didn't know this.

• 23:35Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus oxygen itself is not flammable. It only allows other things to burn.

• 23:39Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 23:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when they say, don't smoke near oxygen tanks, you're not going to burn the oxygen tank. The oxygen tank is going to burn you.

• 23:46Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 23:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. You light a cigarette, the cigarette burns instantly. And then the, the flame, the spark hits your finger, then it burns your skin. And then it burns your clothes.

• 23:55Eugene Mirman?

  You, you would explode.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. And this is how we lost three, three astronauts in Apollo one.

• 23:59Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, really?

• 23:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was a pure oxygen atmosphere inside their capsule on the launch pad, on a practice launch pad as they were testing communications and other things. And a spark inside the spacecraft. craft triggered and everything burned inside the spacecraft.

• 24:13Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, but they didn't like light a cigarette. They weren't.

• 24:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, they were not smoking.

• 24:18Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, you said that's what happened and then you were and then but now I realize it's a spark. No, it's good.

• 24:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. What else you got?

• 24:23Eugene Mirman?

  Here's a question from Alex Robinson about the Death Star. In the movie Star Wars, thanks for clarifying. We see the Death Star blow up the planet Alderaan. Setting aside the question of how a thing would be possible, what would happen to our solar system if the Empire blew up, say, Mars?

• 24:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's a great question. So it's really simple. First, how would you want to go about blowing up a planet?

• 24:50Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 24:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you can do is look at what's holding the planet together. There's all the gravity.

• 24:54Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 24:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's all the all the tensile strength of all the solid matter that is the planet.

• 25:00Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 25:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when we come back, I'll tell you how to blow up that planet.

• 25:03Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 25:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk Radio Cosmic Queries Edition. We'll be right back.

• 25:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk Radio, Eugene Mirman with me in studio live in New York. Eugene?

• 25:30Eugene Mirman?

  Hello.

• 25:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you're reading me questions. I'd never seen any of these questions before and we left off. Somebody wants to like blow up Mars.

• 25:35Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah. Someone's basically like if the Death Star blew up Mars, how what's a good way to blow up Mars?

• 25:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:40Eugene Mirman?

  Do that? What would it do to our solar system?

• 25:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so here's how to blow something up. You ask yourself how much energy is keeping it together?

• 25:46Eugene Mirman?

  Mm hmm.

• 25:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you put more than that amount of energy into the object.

• 25:50Eugene Mirman?

  Mm hmm.

• 25:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It will explode.

• 25:52Eugene Mirman?

  So more than whatever, so more than the gravitational?

• 25:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so you find out you can calculate that. That's physics 102.

• 25:59Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 25:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not physics 101, 102.

• 26:01Eugene Mirman?

  Is how to blow up Mars. That's a pretty, that's quite an accelerated sciences.

• 26:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you calculate what's called the binding energy of the planet. All right, and it's a gravitational binding. It's gravity keeps it together. You want to overcome the gravity that's holding it together. Calculate that. How much energy is it? Now you have a device. That can pump that energy into your planet and have that planet absorb the energy rather than have the energy come out the other side. It will completely destroy the planet to smithereens.

• 26:33Eugene Mirman?

  Uh huh.

• 26:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Entirely. So that's how one would go about it. If you did it to Mars, uh, we'd lose our curiosity rover that's fine discovering science there now.

• 26:41Eugene Mirman?

  But it wouldn't affect us that much.

• 26:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would affect our rover.

• 26:45Eugene Mirman?

  No, no, of course.

• 26:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tax money. Excuse me.

• 26:47Eugene Mirman?

  I mean, I mean, our physical well being, not our mental, emotional and knowledge well being.

• 26:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, we, we will continue to orbit the sun and Mars will have essentially no effect on us.

• 26:57Eugene Mirman?

  Right. Will, uh, will parts of it land here and then?

• 26:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 27:00Eugene Mirman?

  Will, will people then gain powers?

• 27:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There will be Mars debris scattered all over the solar system. There's some Mars debris will land everywhere. Yes.

• 27:06Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 27:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eventually it'll land everywhere.

• 27:07Eugene Mirman?

  And would it, uh, radiate kids and make them powerful?

• 27:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, cause Mars is not radioactive. So, all right.

• 27:13Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, well, well, at least we get some of it. Okay. Here's another question from SAR. Uh, planetary death in the movie.

• 27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, can I back up for a minute?

• 27:22Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you make a snowball?

• 27:23Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 27:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How much, how much effort did it take to make a snowball? Well, not much, right?

• 27:26Eugene Mirman?

  Not, not a much.

• 27:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not much at all. And then you throw it at the wall.

• 27:29Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It explodes on the wall.

• 27:30Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 27:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't think of it as an explosion.

• 27:32Eugene Mirman?

  I do.

• 27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it doesn't bounce off the wall.

• 27:34Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 27:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It completely shatters on the wall.

• 27:36Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's an example of the energy of motion of the ball.

• 27:41Eugene Mirman?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of the snowball being greater than the energy that's holding it together in the first place.

• 27:46Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 27:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so you explode a snowball by throwing it into a wall.

• 27:50Eugene Mirman?

  I would love to throw Mars into a wall.

• 27:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 27:52Eugene Mirman?

  And watch it just go everywhere and not irradiate anyone.

• 27:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 27:56Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, planetary death in movies, uh, which is the most scientifically accurate death destruction of a planet you've seen on the big screen? How many?

• 28:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, uh, so two things, uh, the Death Star planet, if it can pump the right amount of energy into a planet, it will blow up a planet just the way it's shown.

• 28:14Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. With all debris scattered.

• 28:17Eugene Mirman?

  That was pretty accurate.

• 28:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was accurate.

• 28:18Eugene Mirman?

  Probably the most scientifically accurate part of Star Wars.

• 28:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was accurate. Now.

• 28:21Eugene Mirman?

  That and Yoda.

• 28:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, now in the red matter, uh, droplet, uh, in Star Trek, the J J Abrams Star Trek.

• 28:28Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 28:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, that one, holding aside.

• 28:32Eugene Mirman?

  The unlikeliness of red matter? Holding, yeah.

• 28:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you turn a planet into a black hole, it would become a black hole just the way they, essentially the way they showed it.

• 28:40Eugene Mirman?

  So that's sort of accurate.

• 28:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, it's imposed.

• 28:43Eugene Mirman?

  Assuming that, uh, red matter creates tiny black holes, that is a great plan.

• 28:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 28:49Eugene Mirman?

  But would you need to drill it into the center?

• 28:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's the only one you want to go to. Don't get me started.

• 28:52Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, sorry. Oh, boy. Okay.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Once the, once the red matter is into the surface at all, it won't know that it's at the center. How is it gonna know it's at the center of the planet? It has no idea.

• 29:01Eugene Mirman?

  Well, yeah, no, they don't. They don't make it seem like this is the red matter's plan. They definitely make it seem like a Romulan idea, but Romulans, what do they know, right?

• 29:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 29:09Eugene Mirman?

  Um, and then the other deaths of planets, Superman, I guess the new Superman, it implodes and then the old one, it exploded.

• 29:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, uh, yeah, well, it just, it's destroyed from within because they.

• 29:18Eugene Mirman?

  That's more realistic, or no?

• 29:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They overmind the planet. So here's, here are people who have superpowers and super everything, and they don't know that they're overmining their own planet.

• 29:27Eugene Mirman?

  I don't know. Can you think of any analogies?

• 29:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they can send the baby Superman, Moses style, on a basket.

• 29:33Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 29:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spaceship, you know, so anyhow, yeah, that could happen if you, if you.

• 29:37Eugene Mirman?

  Are you telling me that Superman is unrealistic?

• 29:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can, you can destabilize a planet if you make, make Swiss cheese out of its innards.

• 29:44Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's clear, but, but I like the Star Wars destruction, just good old, good old fashioned planetary explosion.

• 29:49Eugene Mirman?

  Put some energy into it, blow it up. All right. Here's a question. Crowdsourcing science from Ryan Labee. With the popularity of crowdsourcing Kickstarter, Indiegogo, why haven't scientists taken to the internet in the same way? Why can't we get a mission, say to Mars, by crowdsourcing true science geeks who would love to support in a big way? If Veronica Mars can do it, so can the real Mars.

• 30:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think the problem is, well, there are two things. There's using the internet and having people participate in data reduction. That's just sort of another efficient way. And then getting people to sort of contribute to make a mission happen. Space is expensive, far more expensive than your laboratory science experiment. That's all. It's a matter of scale. It's billions of dollars, billions and billions of dollars. So.

• 30:36Eugene Mirman?

  Not three million.

• 30:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So if you want to create the budget to do real space things, it's not millions, it's billions, and it's a whole other scale. That's why. Gotta take a break. When we come back, more of StarTalk's Cosmic Queries Edition.

• 31:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk Radio Cosmic Queries Edition. This, the last segment, we traditionally have our lightning round because I take so much damn time answering all the other questions.

• 31:20Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, the other questions are so involved and tell you the episode and what made them think of it.

• 31:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, lightning round, I'm gonna pretend I'm in soundbite mode and we'll test our bell. There we go.

• 31:30Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 31:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eugene, you're here for me.

• 31:32Eugene Mirman?

  Yes, I am. Let's do it. Let's do it. Eric, he's got a question. Could an alien species consist of only thought or energy, nothing we would recognize as body or mass?

• 31:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't see why not, except, by the way, mass is energy, energy is mass, so I can imagine an alien species that is energy. I can imagine it.

• 31:49Eugene Mirman?

  Like a pound of energy.

• 31:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can allow my brain to accept the possibility of it. I don't know how to portray it. I don't know. But since matter and energy are equivalent, I think we're good here.

• 32:01Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 32:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The problem is, energy, it's hard to create form out of energy. When energy becomes matter, you can make molecules and things and objects and brains and this sort of thing. Without it, it's amorphous, and it might be harder to make amorphous life than material life. Next.

• 32:20Eugene Mirman?

  Could you eat it, though? Could you eat a being made of energy? Okay, acceleration.

• 32:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, since the only point of humans eating is to give ourselves energy and nourishment. If there is an alien that is made of energy, you wouldn't have to eat it, you just have to absorb it.

• 32:34Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, great. I'm on it. Acceleration of expansion of space 2C, that's the, okay, Justin, here's his question. Is the expansion of space accelerating? If so, will that acceleration reach the speed of light? If so, what happens when it reaches the speed of light?

• 32:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's accelerating, and over time, it will one day exceed the speed of light, which it can do because it's expanding space, not objects moving through space. This is allowed by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, published in 1916 by Albert Einstein. And in so doing, as the universe expands faster than- The speed of light, the objects that it puts beyond that horizon will forever then be visible from your view. So the very distant future, all galaxies will accelerate beyond your visible horizon. And the nighttime sky beyond our galaxy will go dark.

• 33:27Eugene Mirman?

  Uh oh.

• 33:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And our entire known universe will just be the stars in our nighttime sky.

• 33:32Eugene Mirman?

  Sounds fine. It's still pretty far.

• 33:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And and all that we know of and what we call cosmology will no longer exist. Because there'll be no information about the rest of the universe, other than the stars that are sitting in front of our nose.

• 33:44Eugene Mirman?

  Oh.

• 33:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next.

• 33:45Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, Justin wants to know lunar terraforming. If we terraform the moon, would nights be darker due to the lost surface reflectivity?

• 33:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, almost anything you do to the moon will make it reflect more. The moon is one of the worst reflecting. The moon reflects.

• 34:01Eugene Mirman?

  Even adding skyscrapers?

• 34:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The the moon reflects like a sidewall tire. The moon is a is like, I forgot then it's like 5% reflects low, single digit reflective.

• 34:11Eugene Mirman?

  What if we covered it in mirrors? Would that be helpful? What would happen to the earth?

• 34:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So for example, earth, which has oceans and land and clouds, earth is like 10 times more reflective than the moon is.

• 34:24Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, wow.

• 34:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so the moon is is a bad. It's like dark.

• 34:28Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 34:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just so much light pouring.

• 34:30Eugene Mirman?

  Reflective as a pancake.

• 34:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, well, no, it's as reflective as the surface of an iron skillet.

• 34:36Eugene Mirman?

  Oh.

• 34:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so anything you put there is going to make it more reflective.

• 34:39Eugene Mirman?

  Wow, I can't even believe we can see it because of how non-reflective iron skillets are.

• 34:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because how bright the sun is.

• 34:45Eugene Mirman?

  Sun is very, very bright.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. So when you do this, if you want to terraform it, you will make the full moon brighter at night.

• 34:50Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, really?

• 34:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next.

• 34:52Eugene Mirman?

  All right. If the universe is expanding, can we use the direction of expansion to determine the center of the universe? Aka where the big bang occurred?

• 34:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is expanding in every direction. Therefore, there is no center.

• 35:03Eugene Mirman?

  Oh.

• 35:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the best analogy I can think of is if you inflate a balloon.

• 35:07Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 35:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody on the surface of that balloon is expanding.

• 35:10Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 35:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you can say, where's the center of the surface of that balloon? Where's the center of earth's surface?

• 35:14Eugene Mirman?

  It's a balloon shaped like a rabbit. You know, it's gonna make it harder.

• 35:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so there's certain geometries where there is no center, even though it can be expanding, and the universe is one such shape. Next.

• 35:25Eugene Mirman?

  What is the minimum size for something to be labeled a planet? And why is it that Kepler 37b, which is only a fraction larger than Pluto, has been labeled as an exoplanet while Pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet?

• 35:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so a couple of things. In the 2006 definition of a planet, it has to be large enough for its gravity to make it a sphere. Pluto checks out on that.

• 35:47Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kepler checks out on that.

• 35:49Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it also has to be significant enough with its gravitational attraction to have cleaned out its environment in which it orbits. And Pluto has done no such thing. It orbits in the Kuiper belt of other icy bodies in the outer solar system. Pluto, dwarf planet, Kepler planet, real planet. There you go. So just get over that.

• 36:08Eugene Mirman?

  So Kepler is not covered in ice?

• 36:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, no.

• 36:10Eugene Mirman?

  In an icy belt?

• 36:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could be covered in ice, but we don't...

• 36:13Eugene Mirman?

  Surrounding you.

• 36:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, exactly. Next.

• 36:16Eugene Mirman?

  Quick. If a quasar of a...

• 36:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lightning round, go.

• 36:19Eugene Mirman?

  Stars in its distance. If a quasar or a star is billions of light years away, how do we calculate that distance if light takes billions of years to reach us?

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, because the universe is older than that, and we've waited around for it to get here, and it finally got here. And the light that reaches us is light that left that quasar back at the beginning of the universe. So the stuff that sent us light that hasn't gotten here yet, we don't see those objects.

• 36:42Eugene Mirman?

  But we will.

• 36:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We will eventually, as the universe gets older, those objects, we will see them being born.

• 36:47Eugene Mirman?

  Yes!

• 36:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They will rise up out of the firmament of the cosmos, and their light will show up to us and will say, "There is an object being born now that the universe and our cosmic horizon has enveloped their existence."

• 36:59Eugene Mirman?

  Nice.

• 37:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the universe is old enough for its light to reach us. We gotta go. Thanks, Eugene, for being part of Cosmic Queries. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Thanks always to Eugene Mirman, who does such a great job with me. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.