Playing the Game of Thrones, with George RR Martin

Dragons, skinchangers, the undead – Neil Tyson explores Game of Thrones with George R. R. Martin. With co-host Matt Kirshen, medieval expert Racha Kirakosian, Bill Nye, paleontologist Mark Norrell, Dr. Steven Schlozman aka Dr. Zombie, and astrophysicist Charles Liu. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/playing-the-game-of-thrones-with-george-rr-martin/ Photo Credit: Brandon Royal.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and beaming out across all of space and time, this is Star Trek: Where Science and Pop Culture Collide.

• 0:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to the Hall of the Universe. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and tonight, we explore the science and history behind the epic fantasy series Game of Thrones, featuring my interview with the author himself, George R.R. Martin. So, let's do this.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, my co-host tonight, comedian Matt Kershaw. Matt?

• 0:51Matt Kirshen?

  Hey, how are you?

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of the comedy writers on "The Jim Jeffrey Show", and you're also the host of the podcast "Probably Science".

• 1:00Matt Kirshen?

  You go for the "definitely", we keep the "probably" in there.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I said I'll come back on the show when it becomes "definitely science" rather than "probably science".

• 1:06Matt Kirshen?

  I'll take it.

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Also joining us, we need somebody with an expertise in this, is medieval expert Racha Kirakosian. Racha, welcome!

• 1:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a professor of German and the study of religion at Harvard University. Thanks for coming down from Cambridge-

• 1:22Speaker 02

  It's a pleasure.

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -to New York, and you teach a class called "The Real Game of Thrones: Culture, Society, and Religion in the Middle Ages", you're just setting the record straight.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's correct.

• 1:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In there, do you say "there are no dragons"? I'm guessing.

• 1:37Matt Kirshen?

  I'm gonna be honest, this is the first time I've realized that Game of Thrones isn't real, so...

• 1:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we'll be tapping your expertise tonight as we feature my interview with the creator of a pop culture empire, the sci-fi fantasy author George R.R. Martin. And he wrote the bestselling fantasy series "A Song of Ice and Fire", and that was adapted into the world's most popular TV drama, "Game of Thrones". And characters in this story, they fight for an iron throne with swords and shields, but also with dragons and zombies, right? So I asked George R.R. Martin about blending fantasy with the real world. So let's check that out.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  Game of Thrones is largely based on medieval history, but it is a fantasy. My technique on a lot of it was to find some real element of history, some real event or castle or something, and then to turn it up to 11 or 12 or 13 or 14. You know, like the ice wall, the Wall of the North was inspired many years ago when I visited Hadrian's Wall. And I stood on Hadrian's Wall as the sun was going down, and most of the tourists had left during the day, I pretty well had it to myself. And the wind was blowing, and I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be a Roman legionary stationed there and looking at these hills so north and wondering what

• 3:02Speaker 03

  might emerge from them to attack the wall, because they kind of thought of it as the end of the world, or at least that was the myth. But of course, then I turned it up to 11 and 12, and instead of 10 feet tall, I made it 700 feet tall, and I made it full of ice, and, you know, five times as long as Hadrian's Wall is, you know, because it's spanning a much larger continent. And that's the same technique you do for a lot of fantasy stuff. You always want the fantasy to be bigger and bolder and more colorful than the real life. That being said, I also, and maybe this is my, again, my penchant toward a certain amount of realism, that I didn't want to go all the way into high magic.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Game of Thrones compared to other fantasies is a very low magic fantasy. Magic is there, it's present, and we have magical beasts like the dragons. And there's certain sorts of magical things going on, but it's not high magic. And in that, in a certain sense, I took my inspiration from J.R.R. Tolkien. If you actually look at Lord of the Rings, as suffocating as it is with magic, there's very little onstage magic. You know, Gandalf is a wizard, but when orcs attack, he draws his sword. He fights just like the people next to him.

• 4:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He doesn't just go and then disappear. That's the end of the movie, right.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  So, you know, that's the kind of stuff I did with it. A wildfire, which is another of the quasi-magical things, is, you know, plays a especially big part in the Battle of the Blackwater. Was partly inspired by the legends of Greek fire that the Byzantines used, you know, which supposedly we've never been able to duplicate. The Byzantines kept it a secret. They used this Greek fire on attacking fleets from other nations. And somehow the secret was lost. And now we don't know what was in Greek fire, but.

• 4:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have resurrected this.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a little bit Greek fire. It's a little bit napalm. It's a little bit nitroglycerin. It has the coolest characteristics and it's jade green. It burns with green flames. Why? Because I thought that would be cool. And indeed, when we saw it in film, it was really cool.

• 5:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are chemicals that will emit only green light. So it's perfect. You can just say that's in the mixture and you're good for my tweets.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Racha, George says Game of Thrones is based on medieval history. Could you just straighten this out? Is the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, what is medieval history? Just set that record straight for all of us.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Once and forever.

• 5:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Once and forever, yes, yes.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Right. So the first issue that we have to bear in mind really is that the term Middle Ages is mostly, not only, but mostly connected to European history. So that's the first thing to bear in mind.

• 6:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So other parts of the world could have different periods that you might call Middle Ages.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Exactly. They're divided into different periods. So then when it comes to Dark Ages, a scholar of the Middle Ages will scarcely refer to any period of time as Dark Ages because no period was actually dark. So usually Dark Ages is used.

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For me, where there was no science, it is dark.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  But I've always been a scientist.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  What kind of scientist?

• 6:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  The thing is with Dark Ages, usually it's used to denote a non-Roman world before the ascent of Christianity. And when you take that definition, you see how erroneous it actually is. Because there have always been high civilizations, also in the early Middle Ages. Let's think about Muslim Spain.

• 6:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, of course.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  The Mongolian Empire. Right, so that's the other thing. And then when it comes to when have the Middle Ages actually begun, when have they ended? Minds differ on that. Usually we say the fall of Rome. And then when it ended, maybe when Columbus stumbled upon America? Or did they actually ever end? That's the other question. Have the Middle Ages ever ended? Because societies, you see, don't shift unitedly. And the Middle Ages end for different parts of the populations at different times. When we take women's rights, children's rights, equality before the law, regardless of ethnicity or belief, we realize that the Middle Ages have lasted far into the 20th century also in Europe.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought it was gonna be a simple answer.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Apparently not.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  1624, no, you're like, oh, actually, no, we are still in the Dark Ages a lot and...

• 7:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Matt, would you go back to the medieval times?

• 7:38Matt Kirshen?

  I mean, I don't know. I think, I don't think, I don't think either of us would fare well. I mean, sort of a black man asking a Jewish guy how, yeah, let's go back to medieval times and see how that works out. But here's the other thing, here's the other problem you'd have back in the day. If you went to medieval times, there's, there's no Twitter.

• 7:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can so live without Twitter.

• 7:59Matt Kirshen?

  Could you?

• 8:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, oh.

• 8:01Matt Kirshen?

  Because we investigated, we actually found out, this is what we think your Twitter account would look like back in medieval days.

• 8:09Matt Kirshen?

  It's actually medieval, not medieval.

• 8:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lord Tyson of the stars.

• 8:16Matt Kirshen?

  Here, here, before every tweet. Here, here, if you took a bath every now and again, lots of you would stop dying from the plague.

• 8:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, very good. Yeah, I would tweet that. Maybe, yeah. So, so Game of Thrones is all about like a ruthless battle for the Iron Throne. And my buddy, Bill Nye, recently claimed that throne himself and sent us a StarTalk dispatch. Let's check it out.

• 8:44Bill Nye?

  Iron weapons, swords especially, have changed the course of human history, both here in the real world, where you and I live, and on the Game of Thrones. Now, if you want an iron sword, first you need iron, and you get that from a mine or a peat bog. And before there was dynamite, that was not easy, believe me. But blacksmiths then take the iron and cook in a tiny bit of carbon. And blacksmiths do that so that they get a very hard, sharp edge backed by a relatively flexible broad part. Now, once you have that nice, sharp edge with the flexible back, you can just start slinging and swinging your sword around till you eviscerate or decapitate everyone you meet,

• 9:29Bill Nye?

  till they either give up or die. Or both. After you do that, this baby's all yours. Well, back to you, Neil, or Sir Neil.

• 9:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Matt, you gonna sit on the throne? Would you sit on the throne?

• 9:47Matt Kirshen?

  I don't know. I've just seen it already go to Bill's head.

• 9:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, up next, we will discuss the science of fire-breathing dragons when StarTalk returns.

• 10:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History. We're talking about the real science and history behind the hit HBO series Game of Thrones, featuring my interview with author George R.R. Martin. Check it out.

• 10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I watch Game of Thrones, maybe I pay attention to different things than other people do. I'm looking at the anatomy of the dragon.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this legit? And I had to, I think I tweeted once, I complimented the dragon.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Yes, I like that tweet.

• 10:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You like that tweet, good. So it was, I just wanted everyone to know that whatever other fantasy you're observing, the dragon has biological skeletal authenticity. Because anything that flies in this world had to forfeit its four limbs to do so.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 10:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get A+.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  Good.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  I mean, this is a real dispute in dragon thing. So I'm, I've always been insistent on the two-legged dragon, but there are the four-legged dragon things. And in heraldry, of course, I've learned, with writing these books, a fair amount about medieval heraldry. The two-legged dragon is not a dragon, it's a wyvern. And only the four-legged dragon on a heraldic shield is counted as a dragon. So I have the heraldic purist on my ass.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I lived my whole life and I did not know this.

• 11:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta bring in a new guest to get to the bottom of this stuff. So joining us now for a discussion on dragons is paleontologist Mark Norrell. Mark?

• 11:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're division chair and Macaulay curator of paleontology, right here at the American Museum of Natural History. You once curated an exhibit on mythic creatures. And I've got the exhibit companion book here, Mythic Creatures, and you're a co-author on this.

• 12:00Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 12:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so what's the connection between paleontology and dragons?

• 12:05Speaker 05

  Well, I think it could be one of many things. I mean, it's like that certainly that, that dragons or giant reptiles of some kind are universal amongst all cultures. But at the same time, I mean, dragons mean really different things, depending on what culture you're from. And that, you know, in the West, it's always like, you know, awful stuff, like they're guardians of virginity and tombs and the gold, all these kinds of things, so saints had to slay them. But in the East, you know, the dragons are something which is really great. That's why everyone wants their kid to be born in dragon here, in China and Japan, Thailand, everywhere else.

• 12:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what does that have to do with fossil evidence of dinosaurs?

• 12:42Speaker 05

  Well, certainly people in the past like knew much more about the anatomy of like animals than people do now. We go to the butcher shop, we buy stuff, it's prepackaged and stuff. But foods have to slay their animals. So when they'd find like fossil bones that in the old days, they would like, you know, see that, yeah, this is really unlike the sheep we just killed for dinner last night. So there would be this kind of like legacy kind of stuff, thematic stuff. They'd make up stories to explain what was going on.

• 13:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because presumably that's how you're making connections.

• 13:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, but certainly we know that a little bit from Europe because like in Crete and other places that there was like miniature elephants that were found. And that if nobody had ever seen an elephant skull before, if, you know, all you guys out there had never seen elephant skull before, that you saw one and it has a big hole in the middle of it, which is where the trunk attaches and stuff. So there's actually Greek vases that show these and say this is the head of the cyclops.

• 13:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 13:42Speaker 05

  So I mean, like as whether the myth of cyclops existed before that or that happened because of these finds, nobody really knows. But, you know, we know that people in antiquity looked at fossils and they were able to make some stories about them.

• 13:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so Racha, George Martin mentioned heraldic purists who use dragons on their coat of arms. What, what can you tell us about that?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Heraldry is, for example, coat of arms is part of heraldry. It starts as a visual literacy. So you imagine you're in a battle and everyone looks a bit the same, all kind of male clad, in male clad armor. How do you distinguish foe from friend? You need some sort of a sign and that sign needs to be actually simple, right? So you can actually catch it immediately. So that was the initial idea of heraldry. Then in tournaments, which are not about life and death, they became more intricate because it was not so much about actually recognizing who's, who's in your unit and who's not. Dragons have different, dragons in heraldry have different background stories and Mark already explained some of them.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  And certainly in English coat of arms, the dragon also comes into it because of the legends that surround St. George, the patron saint of England who's said to have slaughtered a dragon. So he went out with a white coat of arms, so he didn't have a specific sign, and killed a dragon that was just pissing everyone.

• 15:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or so he said.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  So he said.

• 15:15Matt Kirshen?

  That is my patron saint, and if he said he killed a dragon, he killed a dragon.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  And so what happened? The dragon's blood splashed a cross on his shield, and that red cross is, of course, the flag of England.

• 15:28Matt Kirshen?

  I should have known that, and I didn't, so thank you.

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa. So I think the scariest dragon on Game of Thrones, it's gotta be the zombie ice dragon.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is, just look at this thing. And so I asked George R.R. Martin about the origin of the idea of the ice dragon. Let's check it out.

• 15:46Speaker 03

  I wrote a book long before Game of Thrones, the one children's book I've written, The Ice Dragon, which is a dragon that breathes cold instead of fire and freezes things. The cold is just equally deadly. It comes over you, and you're frozen, and then you splinter into a million pieces because you've been dropped into liquid oxygen or something like that. So I think the ice dragon was my original contribution to the fantasy bestiary.

• 16:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's, it's gonna make a zoo of fantasy creatures, and it'll be in there.

• 16:28Speaker 03

  In the books, I do have, the dragons are various different colors. And the color of their flames varies with the color of the dragon. So Bellerion, the Black Dread, probably the biggest and meanest dragon in the history of Westeros, is black, and his flames are black. And they're really, really hot. At one point, there's a lord who says, "Well, I don't care. You have a dragon, but I have a stone castle, and stone doesn't burn." And well, stone will melt if the flames are hot enough.

• 16:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Called lava.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that's what he discovers.

• 17:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. If your castle melts, give up.

• 17:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Mark, what other fossils have sort of contributed to this bestiary of fantasy creatures?

• 17:20Speaker 05

  Well, there's a really famous fossil called Protoceratops. And it has a remarkable resemblance to griffins.

• 17:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just remind me, a griffon is a lion with wings?

• 17:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, okay.

• 17:34Speaker 05

  It's like mermaids, and it's like dragons. Every culture, it seems to be a universal, every culture's invented these things independently. What was the spark of that, we really don't know. But certainly because it has very different meanings, I think we can say this independent of origin.

• 17:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting. Well, that's our segment on dragons. Mark, thanks for joining us tonight.

• 17:55Speaker 05

  Hey, thanks Neil, good to be here.

• 17:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Up next, we explore the science of reanimating the dead, when StarTalk continues.

• 18:18Speaker 06

  Bringing space and science down to earth. You're listening to StarTalk.

• 18:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk, from the American Museum of Natural History. We're featuring my interview with author George R.R. Martin. And I ask about the army of undead corpses that he created for Game of Thrones. So let's check it out. If I just landed on Earth and I saw them, I'd have to call them zombies. They were dead and now they're alive.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Well, they're moving. I don't know that they're alive. I mean, obviously, when you die, you know? If I die, you know, five minutes from now, and oh, I have a heart attack, I fall, I'm dead on the floor. My body is still there. My body is still there and some force can animate it.

• 19:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In principle.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  And bring it up and get it going again, send electricity. I mean, it said, what moves our arms? It's electrical impulses from our brain and all of that. So if the impulses come from somewhere, can't our arms move and all that? You know, it's the Frankenstein thing. This is what inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, where she read about the experiments where dead frogs, if you poked them with electricity, their legs jumped.

• 19:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  So Frankenstein comes from that and...

• 19:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so they are just re-animated dead people?

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Yes, essentially.

• 19:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We need some extra expertise for this one, Matt.

• 19:59Matt Kirshen?

  All right, what have we got, Neil?

• 20:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We need some zombie expertise. So joining us for the science of the undead is Steve Schlossman. Steve?

• 20:08Speaker 07

  Thanks for having me.

• 20:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  AKA Dr. Zombie. You're a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School?

• 20:15Speaker 07

  I am, yeah.

• 20:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You wrote The Zombie Autopsies, which is a fictional medical journal of zombies.

• 20:21Speaker 07

  Yes, as a matter of fact, the medical school requires me to tell folks it's fictional. Like, I'm actually, I'm not making this up. The dean has mandated that I say that zombies are not real yet, but they're not real.

• 20:34Matt Kirshen?

  That sounds like something Dr. Zombie might say.

• 20:38Speaker 07

  That's what I said, too. That's exactly what we would say.

• 20:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So George Martin says that some force could, in principle, reanimate his dead body. So how true a statement is that? I'm imagining, of course, within a certain amount of time, you can be reanimated, but then we don't call you a zombie. We can stop your heart. There was a day when they just said you were dead, and then a minute later, bring it back. Now you're alive again, but you're not a zombie. So at what point are you just alive again? And at what point are you a zombie?

• 21:08Speaker 07

  So organs all have different viabilities. And when they stop receiving oxygen through the blood and they start to make their way from aerobic to anaerobic states, many of those organs remain viable for a long time. That's why we can harvest organs, which is not a term we use so much anymore, but use them for transplants, including the brain. Right now, you know, we're not there, obviously, but we can do things. We can use brain signals to move cursors on a screen. We can use brain signals to move automated limbs, even though they're not connected to the brain. It's like a Bluetooth moving an arm. That's pretty amazing.

• 21:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is the mechanism?

• 21:45Speaker 07

  So you have the somatosensory cortex, which is still working, but these are spinal cord injuries, right? So as much as the motor cortex region of the brain wants the left arm to move, it can't get the signal there because the spinal cord's been severed, but it can send an electrical signal, literally a Bluetooth signal, to the muscle here, cause that muscle through electrical impulses, just like Mr. Martin was saying, to move.

• 22:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's an electromagnetic signal?

• 22:09Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 22:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is sent over there. So, so I'm curious. Aside from using electricity or magic, is there some disease that can produce a zombie outbreak, like the kind we see in the movies?

• 22:21Speaker 07

  We don't have anything that exactly mimics the sort of zombie infection that George Romero so famously invented in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead. We just don't have that. But we can have aspects of it. We can make people lose their balance. We can do that with booze, right? But we can also do it with germs. We can make people full of rage with bugs like rabies. We can make people lose their capacity to open doors, open windows, to think clearly with things like Crohn's disease. The hard one is to make you hungry. That's a hard one. You think about when you've been sick, like really sick with a fever. You usually lose hunger. There are some viruses. Adenovirus, which is just a cold virus, but in some people it messes with the hypothalamus

• 23:04Speaker 07

  and makes you forget that you've eaten enough, and you keep eating. So there are some infectious agents that actually increase obesity.

• 23:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, so you have a whole catalog of these infectious agents that do different things to different urges of the human body?

• 23:21Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Now, can any of them reanimate a dead body?

• 23:25Speaker 07

  Nope, we're not there yet.

• 23:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yet, see, he said yet.

• 23:27Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah.

• 23:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You thought that?

• 23:28Matt Kirshen?

  And he also said "we."

• 23:32Speaker 07

  I'm just speaking for my community of scholars.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  He has an alter ego, right?

• 23:37Speaker 07

  Right, right. No, no, no, no.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Doctor Z.

• 23:39Speaker 07

  Doctor Z makes me sound like a rapper or something.

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Racha, is there, are there Game of Thrones-type zombies in any medieval literature or cultures or legends?

• 23:50Speaker 02

  I'm really glad you say Game of Thrones-type zombies, because not the zombies we have grown to be accustomed to, thanks to fantasy literature and fantasy films, but actually, when you think of what we just discussed, zombies being basically reanimated matter, that's actually at the core of the Christian belief. Think about it, resurrection.

• 24:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  And it's the Judeo-Christian belief, the resurrection of the body, the resurrection of the physical matter, and in this vein...

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She said it here first, Jesus was a zombie. Yes, okay.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  I did not say that, but basically...

• 24:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what she said.

• 24:24Speaker 07

  That's actually...

• 24:25Speaker 02

  And there'll be an army, right? The heavenly host, there will be an army of zombies.

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  No, okay, I didn't say that. Whatever.

• 24:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said it, that's fine. Go ahead.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  In the same, in the same vein, we have legends of martyr saints, whose body parts that were cut off or tortured reappear, physically reappear, but that's a marker of the sainthood. And mostly, these body parts do not decay, which is also a marker of the sainthood.

• 24:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these are early zombie concepts. Well, there's another power, mystical power in Game of Thrones, is the ability of some characters to become an animal by taking over their mind. So let's check it out.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  Skinwalking, shape-shifting, you know, there are various words for it, and various legends, and various cultures. The Navajo have a version of it here in New Mexico, and of course, it existed in Europe in various forms. But again, how to do this realistically?

• 25:25Speaker 03

  I think the actual bodily change where, you know, the bones get longer and the mass gets heavier and the whole body rearranges, well, it's cool for Horror Story and I've used it that, but it didn't seem to fit in Game of Thrones. So I thought, well, the skin changer would be, would be someone who actually moves his consciousness into a, into another thing. Not that his body actually changed, but he got his mind into an eagle or a wolf or had some bond with them.

• 25:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I tell you how brilliant that is? Because what, it took us a while to learn and to embrace, but that objects that have physical existence, that's one thing, but the concept of information doesn't have the same constraints of a physical object. Plus it's valued differently, right? So I can give you two oranges and you have two oranges, but if I give you two newspapers, you don't have twice as much information.

• 26:22Speaker 03

  No.

• 26:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the same information, but duplicated. So, and we've also found that-

• 26:29Speaker 03

  Unless one of them is the Times and one of them is the Herald or something, then you have completely different versions.

• 26:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So for you to transfer a consciousness, in a way you're transferring information-

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -that, that is completely plausible, relative to, you're right, bones growing, like the Hulk becoming the Hulk. Well, where did that extra mass come from, right? You have, you have issues.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  I mean, in some ways, the ability to transfer your memories, transfer your consciousness into something else is, is the possibility of, of, you know, immortality. If your, if your memories survive, um, then you survive, your, your personality, whether it's in a robot body or a clone body that we grow, I mean, science fiction is done many different ways. If you assume, of course, that that's really you. That's always been my issue with the Star Trek transporter. Okay, they disintegrate your body-

• 27:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  -and at the end they put together a new body from random atoms that they get and it has your memory and it, it thinks it's you, but is it really you?

• 27:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Steve, if you transfer your consciousness, is it still you?

• 27:46Speaker 07

  If you transfer your consciousness, is it still you? Uh, no, no, actually, because the you has changed from the time that you did the transfer to the time it's received, right?

• 27:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if it's your consciousness, who else's consciousness is it?

• 27:57Speaker 07

  So it's a different consciousness, that's a different you. So consciousness, technically, folks, it has to have three things. It has to be qualitative, so it's not measurable. It's the concept of being like something. It's subjective, so the subject experiences it. And it's unified, like I'm not thinking about the feeling of my butt in this chair, except that I just said it, so now I'm thinking about the feeling of my butt in this chair. All those things have to come together, combined with my memories and my thought of what's going forward. You take my consciousness out and put it into you, now I'm thinking of what your butt is like in that chair. I don't mean that in any sort of untoward way. I just mean that's what I'm thinking about. So suddenly, that's a new consciousness. That's what's so interesting about the concept that he created in the story.

• 28:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not just a consciousness that had extra stuff that happened to it, extra life experience? You're saying it's a whole new consciousness?

• 28:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm curious, Racha, is there a, in medieval history, is there any accommodation for the transference of mind in religion, for example?

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Sort of, especially in religion, actually. There are mystical traditions according to which a soul can be so connected to the divine that it can get the qualities of the divine, including looking into the future, looking into the past, looking into the present time, but seeing other spaces that the actual physical body is in. Now, telepathy, telekinesis were not categories that medieval people operated on, but they rather talked of visions and prophecy.

• 29:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, of course. It's full of references, such references.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 29:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so here's the question then. Steve, what's more likely to happen first? Reanimated dead bodies as zombies or transference of consciousness?

• 29:37Speaker 07

  Honestly, I think transference of consciousness. Because as we get better at mapping the way the brain works, we can then translate that into the ones and zeros that we make things like our smartphones possible. And then, if anyone's watched Black Mirror, any of these shows, if you've watched Game of Thrones, we know that we can start to then create a cookie of ourselves in ways that are both horrifying, but also kind of invigorating when you think about it, because then you can start to think about separating the consciousness.

• 30:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Horrifying and invigorating, in the same sentence.

• 30:06Matt Kirshen?

  I'm pretty sure that's the motto of his lab, where they do these experiments.

• 30:11Speaker 07

  I didn't say "we."

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That time you didn't say "we," right, right, right.

• 30:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I actually think we'll be there. I think in some ways we're there-ish.

• 30:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, when you get there, can you come back on the show?

• 30:20Speaker 07

  I would be honored.

• 30:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Dr. Zombie, thank you for joining us tonight on StarTalk. Thanks so much, guys.

• 30:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Up next, we discover fantasy author George R.R. Martin's early sci-fi inspirations when StarTalk returns.

• 30:42Speaker 06

  This is StarTalk.

• 30:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. We're featuring my interview with bestselling science fiction and fantasy author George R.R. Martin. And I ask where his passion for science fiction writing began. Check it out.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  My biggest influence was comic books. Superman and Batman and, you know, all of the other comic books of the day. You know, the kiddie books and, of course, the superheroes most of all. It was before Marvel initially, but I read those DC superheroes books and that was much more interesting, you know, fighting the Joker or the Riddler or Lex Luthor.

• 31:20Speaker 03

  Other planets, Krypton blowing up. I mean, it's my introduction to astronomy. You gotta watch out, you know, if your planet's gonna blow up, you put the kid in this little space chute and you shoot him off into outer space and hope that someone finds him.

• 31:35Speaker 03

  We didn't have the term astronaut. They invented that term with the Mercury Seven. Nobody had ever heard of astronauts before the Mercury program. They were spacemen, you know, and there were a lot of shows on TV about spacemen, you know, Tom Corbett, space cadet, Captain Video, Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, you know, and I watched all of these shows. And I did an encyclopedia of space here where I combined my fictional creations here with real creations. I designed my own solar systems and then I had a real solar system.

• 32:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these are from the 1950s?

• 32:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  See, here's the real solar system.

• 32:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, okay.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  I did a map and then...

• 32:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, and here, remember this one, Pluto?

• 32:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pluto? Let's not go there. No? Nope, we would not, we're not going there, no.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  And then I invented fictional solar system. Here's Alpha Centauri's fictional solar system, where I invented weird-ass names for the planets.

• 32:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you have?

• 32:41Speaker 03

  Ozma, which I obviously got from Oz. Throg, I don't know where I got that, you know? And then I had little entries here where you can read all about them. These are the real things that I looked up here. Here's some more.

• 32:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but you go far enough back...

• 32:56Speaker 03

  Here I graduated to color.

• 32:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Colored them in, very nice. So it looks like your imagination had higher precision than your ability to color in a circle.

• 33:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  George, this goes on and on. These are continents and oceans and... George.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  So, yeah, oh, here's Throg and...

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, here's Flacelar, Soria. These are great names. And how old are you in this?

• 33:25Speaker 03

  Uh...

• 33:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're in elementary school, I guess?

• 33:27Speaker 03

  Yes, definitely elementary school.

• 33:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I take it back, you were not a normal kid.

• 33:32Speaker 03

  Okay, probably not.

• 33:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, joining us to discuss George R.R. Martin's geeky origins is StarTalk's resident geek-in-chief, astrophysicist Charles Liu. So...

• 33:47Charles Liu?

  Hi, Neil.

• 33:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a professor at CUNY Staten Island?

• 33:51Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 33:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're a good friend and colleague of mine. So, what do you think of his space encyclopedia?

• 33:56Charles Liu?

  I think he's a perfectly normal kid. I had one too.

• 34:00Charles Liu?

  Mine was more about spaceships. It was inspired...

• 34:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you kept a notebook like that?

• 34:03Charles Liu?

  Yeah, well, it was actually a file folder. It was like I had a lot of loose paper in it. I wasn't as sophisticated as he was.

• 34:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so what was your, what were your, what were your pages?

• 34:11Charles Liu?

  Oh, they were mostly about spacecraft. I was inspired by the 1970s movie Battlestar Galactica.

• 34:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 34:19Charles Liu?

  And what I would draw was like, well, this ship could go this fast and had this much firepower and could contain this many people. That sort of thing. So he's perfectly normal, I promise. I mean, if I'm perfectly normal...

• 34:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, if he matches you, he's normal. Is this the measure of things? So, Charles, in Game of Thrones, the winter and summer seasons could last for decades.

• 34:39Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 34:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So... I tried to imagine a planetary system that could be that.

• 34:44Charles Liu?

  Ah.

• 34:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I just gave up and I said, let me just enjoy the show.

• 34:47Charles Liu?

  Here's the trick about that season stuff, and I've thought about this. See, the seasons, not only are they long, they're also unpredictable. Sometimes they can be only a few years, other times they can be lifetimes long.

• 34:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This would be a chaotic orbit.

• 34:59Charles Liu?

  Right, so if you talked only about astronomical orbits, you could imagine a strong precessional tilt. You could imagine multiple planets doing some sort of chaotic activity. But really, there's got to be something else that's changing the time scales on like a decade-like level, as opposed to the centuries and millennia.

• 35:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What would that be?

• 35:17Charles Liu?

  Global warming. There are volcanic activity

• 35:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 35:20Charles Liu?

  or other kinds of particulates that perhaps the solar system is moving through in its host galaxy.

• 35:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it would not be an orbital phenomenon, it would be a local phenomenon to the climate.

• 35:31Charles Liu?

  Yes, you have to add in something in the atmosphere and in the oceans surrounding Westeros in order to create these kinds of unusual climate situations.

• 35:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I asked him how his early interest in science helped him shape his writing career, because one can influence the other, so let's check it out.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  I've never been a hard science writer, you know. Like I said, science was hard. But maybe because I grew up reading and writing science fiction, there's always been something about me that applies a certain level of realism to whatever I do. One of my books before Ice and Fire was Fever Dream, which was my historical horror novel set on the Mississippi in 1857, about vampires. And I did a lot of research for that, and I'm reading all this stuff about vampires. And then I said, well, okay, how am I going to do my vampires? You know, I looked at all the vampire legends and I went through them. Okay, they can't come out in sunlight, I can make that work.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  You know, they're very photosensitive, their skin burns or something like that. They're not reflected in mirrors. No, I can't make that work. I mean, that's just ludicrous. Why are they not reflected in mirrors? It violates everything we know about light and all that. So I rationalized my vampires as much as I could possibly rationalize them and made them, if not quite science fictional vampires, certainly more realistic vampires than those in many other works.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  And when I came to dragons, this is the same thing. I looked at these dragons and... Yeah, I can't claim to be scientifically rigorous. They still breathe fire. I mean, there's no way you can get around the breathing of fire.

• 37:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Allow me to put you at ease. I'm a big fan of, for me, a famous quote from Mark Twain, which every artist needs to take to heart, and you clearly have. It is, "First get your facts straight, then distort them at your leisure."

• 37:36Speaker 03

  Exactly, yes.

• 37:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you have your basic anatomical dragon. Have them breathe fire. We're good with that.

• 37:43Speaker 03

  There's certain things you need. You need to, the dragon has to breathe fire. The vampire has to drink blood, you know?

• 37:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  The other stuff you can fiddle with as need be.

• 37:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Charles, as scientists, can we get so embedded in reality that it would prevent us from writing a good sci-fi story?

• 38:06Charles Liu?

  We could, but good scientists avoid that. Albert Einstein said it really well in 1932. He said that the feeling of being awed by the mysterious things of the universe, das Gefühl des Geheimnisvollen...

• 38:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The house is German, is it okay?

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's impeccable.

• 38:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, wow, okay.

• 38:25Charles Liu?

  Das Gefühl des Geheimnisvollen is the thing that powers all great art and science. Jeffrey Landis, PhD in space science, great science fiction writer. David Brin, PhD, also a great science fiction writer. And who can forget Isaac Asimov, one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time. PhD scientist.

• 38:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  PhD biochemistry, it was.

• 38:48Charles Liu?

  So not at all should there be any siloing between people who do science and people who don't, because that same origin of energy is where we get all of our ideas and imagination and the moving forward for discovery.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  It's the same for fantasy authors, when you think about it. Really, fantasy became a genre with Tolkien.

• 39:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tolkien, of course.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  And he was a medievalist.

• 39:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he was an academic medievalist.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  He was an academic medievalist. And the same with C. S. Lewis, who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia. And they were actually friends. Both of them were professors for medieval English.

• 39:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Okay, so when's your story coming out?

• 39:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll watch for that. Charles, thanks for joining us tonight.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  My pleasure.

• 39:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're our geek in chief. Always good to have Charles. Up next, we discuss the portrayal of violence in the hit series Game of Thrones when StarTalk returns.

• 39:48Speaker 06

  Unlocking the secrets of your world and everything orbiting around it. This is StarTalk.

• 40:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History right here in New York City. We're featuring my interview with author George R.R. Martin. And I asked about the portrayal of violence in his hit series Game of Thrones. Had to go there. Check it out.

• 40:19Speaker 03

  Game of Thrones, the TV show, of course, is adapted from my books. So they're these elements were there in my books to begin with.

• 40:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At that extreme?

• 40:29Speaker 03

  Yes and no. In some ways, more extreme, in other ways, less. I mean, there's something about seeing something that makes it more visceral than just reading about it. But obviously, I wanted to include sexuality. I mean, it's one of the usual, one of the driving forces of all of us. It governs our decision-making. It has shaped history. And violence was, you know, it's a war story. And a lot of fantasy, the great epic fantasies are war stories. Tolkien's is a war story.

• 41:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're right.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  All of these are war stories.

• 41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a stupid question.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  It seems to me that if you're writing a war story...

• 41:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The word violence shouldn't come out. You're absolutely...

• 41:09Speaker 03

  No, it's a...

• 41:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the great epics, somebody's fighting somebody and somebody's dying. Whole tribes are at war. That's there.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  But, no, I don't object to the word violence at all. I think it's a good, honest word. Working on that show gave me a real, really brought home to me this hypocrisy about action versus violence, you know? We want to show... People killing each other, gunfights, you know. We had no objection to scenes where people were shooting a gun repeatedly and someone is hit and they fall down and they're dead. But we don't want to show what a bullet actually does to the human body when it hits you. You know, we like a little hole to appear in the chest or something like, or at least element of our people do. And to my mind, the more I reflected on that, um, the more I became convinced that it's, it's, on some level, it's actually immoral here.

• 42:02Speaker 03

  If we're gonna show, if you want to do a show that has no violence, I'm all in favor of that. But if you want to show guns or swords and people killing each other with guns or swords, show what guns and swords actually do to human beings. You know, show what war is actually like if you're gonna do a war story, you know, and show the horrors of war as well as the glories of war. And that's what I tried to do in writing, you know, uh, Game of Thrones.

• 42:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Racha, I think we have the stereotype of violence in medieval times. How, how authentic is that?

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm glad you say stereotype. Of course there were feuds, of course there was war, and of course it could have, it was also brutal when there was war. But also in the Middle Ages, the preference was that one would find a diplomatic solution. Because when you think about it, no one wants to have a heap of corpses to clean up afterwards, right?

• 43:01Matt Kirshen?

  So is it just that these violent stories are the ones that survive more because they're more exciting than the story of just, ah, we reached an agreement and signed a treaty?

• 43:09Speaker 02

  I think that's, again, more refashioning of the Middle Ages. Killing, you know, was not an honorable thing to do.

• 43:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So how much worse was it for women? Were women bought and sold and traded?

• 43:21Speaker 02

  That's the one thing, of course, in the event of war, women and children were, uh, were in the danger of being abducted. Absolutely. But of course we have powerful women in the Middle Ages, that's not...

• 43:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To me, that was not an "of course." I mean, the earliest powerful woman I know of is Queen Elizabeth I. Before that, I don't know many... So what history am I missing?

• 43:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot.

• 43:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A lot, yeah, that's what I'm guessing, yeah.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  So, one figure that I find very interesting is Eleanor of Aquitaine. She was Duchess of Aquitaine, but in her own right, which meant she was actually reigning Aquitaine. Her first husband was the King of France. Her second was the King of England. But she also led armies strategically. She didn't fight on the battleground, but she led armies strategically, among others, in the Second Crusade. We have Joanna of Arc, the Woman Warrior. We've got Hildegard of Bingen, a visionary in Germany, who sets out to found her own monastery.

• 44:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there are enough of those cases where you can draw from them and still make plausible portrayals of women in Game of Thrones.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  I don't think Game of Thrones needs to be historically accurate, because it's so a fantasy world.

• 44:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I agree. It just can be historically inspired.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. It is, yeah, for sure, for sure.

• 44:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Well, in this final clip of my interview with George R.R. Martin, which took place at his man cave in New Mexico, I asked about infusing his passion for outer space into stories such as Game of Thrones. So let's check it out.

• 45:02Speaker 03

  These concepts are so vast that I don't know how you write stories about them with a meaningful human interaction, you know, dealing with quasars and pulsars and dark matter. And they're amazing concepts, but so difficult to come to grips when you're writing a story about human beings.

• 45:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But there are elements that, to me, are astronomical, right? There's this long winter that's coming. And then when it comes, it's there for a long time. There's this huge sort of ice wall. I think of glaciers when I think of this. There are taproots that allow me to grasp some greater reality in which that world is embedded.

• 45:49Speaker 03

  Well, a lot of that, of course, is based on magic, because it is a fantasy. And I gave a lot of thought...

• 45:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Magic is just science you haven't discovered yet.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  That Arthur C. Clarke.

• 46:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Arthur C. Clarke, thank you.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  Arthur C. Clarke.

• 46:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That's all, so the blade, that, I look at that and I say, okay. That's magic, but they figured something out and they can do that. Why isn't it any different from me flicking a lighter? Okay? If I flick a lighter in front of cavemen, they, they'd freak out.

• 46:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 46:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. No, they would write a story about me with the lighter. They're storytellers.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  They would improve it, though. It wouldn't just be a lighter. It would be, he could make fireballs glow from his hands.

• 46:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right, right. So, but there's more going on in there. There's other languages, there is...

• 46:47Speaker 03

  World building, you have to create an entire world. And you can see, if you are engaged in world building, you, you have to try to get everything right. And you're not going to succeed, you know, because I, I am not the font of all human knowledge. As, as much as I may research and learn things, you know?

• 47:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, they may pay more, closer attention to what you wrote than you did.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  So, yeah, yeah. So you will get letters, you know, I, I tried to be very accurate, for example, with horses. A lot of fantasy fans get horses all wrong, or fantasy writers. They just make them, you know, just these tireless beasts that can go anywhere and, and, you know, gallop for seven days straight or whatever, and etc. So, I tried to get the horses right. But there are always things you don't, you know? I tried to research the ships to get the ships right, how the weapons work, etc.

• 47:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You didn't give the horses wings on their backs, like Pegasus.

• 47:38Speaker 03

  I didn't, no.

• 47:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good, good, all right. So, no, this...

• 47:41Speaker 03

  I have an interesting take on unicorns coming up, but in the new book. Oops.

• 47:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I think of these fantasy stories, in almost all of them, and especially in Game of Thrones, there's the portrayal of some creature. In this case, it's dragons. It's a creature that is not real, and we know it's not real as a consumer of the story. But the advantage of it not being real is that you don't really understand it. You have no experience with it. There's no scientific analysis of it. There's a mystery to it. And where there's mystery, for something that is large, bigger than you, with teeth and flames,

• 48:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  there's fear. It's a metaphor for the sum of all of our fears, wrapped into this entity, that might make you behave right, that might make you think differently about the things that promote life, rather than take life away. So for me, a dragon is a force that acts on your behavior to be good, to do something right in the world. So in a way, we need that force.

• 49:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a force of evil outside of our bodies and a force of good within us. And that is a cosmic perspective.

• 49:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. You've been watching StarTalk. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up.