Cosmic Queries: Science Fiction

Science Fiction meets science fact as Neil deGrasse Tyson and Eugene Mirman explore time travel, warp drive, force fields, transporter beams, parallel universes and Dyson spheres.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History where I also serve as the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium. And I'm here in studio in New York City with Eugene Mirman. Eugene, thanks for being back on.

• 0:39Eugene Mirman?

  It is great to be here.

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you know your task today?

• 0:43Eugene Mirman?

  Yes, it is to ask you, what? No? No, I don't know?

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is true. You've culled these questions off of our Facebook presence or Twitter. And these are questions on what topic?

• 0:53Eugene Mirman?

  Science fiction.

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice. Okay, I haven't seen these questions before. And but this is the Cosmic Queries edition of StarTalk Radio. So let's get right to it.

• 1:03Eugene Mirman?

  Let's do it.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you got?

• 1:04Eugene Mirman?

  Jason Bilieu asks, "Dr. Tyson, do you believe there is potential for a math theory that can predict future events like the one at the center of the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov?"

• 1:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Okay, so we have math equations.

• 1:20Eugene Mirman?

  Yes, we have two. We have the Pythagorean theorem and then one other.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And pi r squared. Right, right. So we have equations, which when coupled with physical phenomena in the universe become what we call physics.

• 1:35Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 1:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Physics is the mathematical representation of the physical reality in which we're embedded. So everything a physicist does with the already established laws of physics typically involves a prediction.

• 1:49Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 1:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so we can predict when the sun will rise to very high precision. Yeah. The slowing down of the rotation of the Earth, where the moon is, where planets are. You know, when we go to Mars with our probes, we don't aim at Mars in the sky and then travel there. We aim for where Mars will be when we arrive.

• 2:10Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, because we're smarty pants.

• 2:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, exactly. So in that, there's Earth is moving, Mars is moving, the spacecraft is moving. We have equations for everything.

• 2:21Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, almost everything.

• 2:22Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so it is the nature-

• 2:24Eugene Mirman?

  Except for how to make a rock and roll hit.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh, or a bestselling book. I mean, there's, the, the universe still brims with these mysteries.

• 2:30Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 2:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the point is, physics is the prediction of the future. And if physicists went around predicting the future and not telling people how they did it, they would be the greatest-

• 2:41Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 2:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -seers, temples will be made to them. The fact is, we tell you how we do it.

• 2:47Eugene Mirman?

  And also you, yeah, you can only predict so many things within it, like, like if you blew up the moon, it would change.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 2:55Eugene Mirman?

  When it rose.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's interesting, what would happen if Earth didn't have a moon? We, we can calculate the consequences of that.

• 3:00Eugene Mirman?

  Right, right.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's certain things we can't calculate because chaos arrives and it's hard to predict detailed weather more than a week in advance.

• 3:09Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, you can get your sense of climate.

• 3:11Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, they can do it, they're just wrong.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh, exactly. You can't predict it with high, uh, precision.

• 3:17Eugene Mirman?

  Accuracy.

• 3:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's what we do all the time. That's the, that's the, that's the takeaway there.

• 3:21Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 3:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 3:22Eugene Mirman?

  Next question by Justin Copin. Almost all sci-fi spacecraft are shaped similar to an aircraft with wings and a tail, et cetera. If a spacecraft is launched from space and has no need to actually enter an atmosphere, is a sphere the most functional shape for a craft? Hmm?

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it depends on how you want, good, great question. Depends on how you want to live in the ship, right?

• 3:44Eugene Mirman?

  You want to have like an eighties party.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, well, one of my gripes, it's not a gripe, but an observation of the original Star Trek series and the series to follow it, and the series to follow that, was that the Enterprise, as portrayed-

• 3:57Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -was cool aerodynamic looking.

• 4:02Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the Enterprise really never spent time moving in and out of atmospheres.

• 4:06Eugene Mirman?

  No, it was built in space.

• 4:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Built in space and, well, actually, well, I mean, it was built to exist in space and it was the, and as it moves, when it parks at a planet, it parks in orbit and then you beam down to the planet.

• 4:21Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah. Which you find even less realistic.

• 4:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I, I, I give it to them because that, it, it saves them money having to always show the ship land on a planet.

• 4:28Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 4:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, it's-

• 4:29Eugene Mirman?

  A lot of, a lot of inventions are simply money-saving schemes.

• 4:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Hollywood.

• 4:35Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 4:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. It's cheaper to beam them in than to show a ship moving through an atmosphere and landing. So, so this, I was an insider in the creation of Star Trek series told me that. This is not firsthand information, it's secondhand. The point is, if you only ever exist in the vacuum of space, you do not have to be aerodynamic. You could look like a dish rag.

• 4:54Eugene Mirman?

  Right. You could be a floating, yeah, oven mitt.

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, and it just simply doesn't matter. So you might as well design it in a way that serves your needs, and that's what they did in the film 2001. That ship was not, there's a sphere out front. If you remember that, it was the, what was the name of that ship? The?

• 5:13Eugene Mirman?

  Jason?

• 5:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 5:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was a sphere up front, but then it had all the engines that went back from it, and inside the sphere, there was a rotating, a gravity simulator. So you just make it how you need it, and who cares what the damn thing was?

• 5:27Eugene Mirman?

  So it wouldn't even matter what it looked like, unless you had to get it from a planet into space.

• 5:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 5:31Eugene Mirman?

  That's where it would kind of.

• 5:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  However, objects that large, typically they're not structurally stable, sitting at 1G.

• 5:37Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 5:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They would, they would fall apart.

• 5:39Eugene Mirman?

  You really would want to build it in space, and it really wouldn't matter. Is there an ideal way? Or no, it could be an oven mitt, a dish rag. Those are similar, but still.

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It simply doesn't matter. You build it to the efficiency of the needs of the crew.

• 5:47Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 5:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not for any aerodynamic.

• 5:49Eugene Mirman?

  You could easily have a flying, like a dance club from one place and another place for like acoustic folk music, and then some food.

• 5:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll give you an example. The, the Cassini spacecraft to Jupiter.

• 5:58Eugene Mirman?

  Uh huh.

• 5:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there, to Saturn, is there orbiting Saturn right now. There was a probe.

• 6:02Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 6:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was attached to the side called Huygens, named after Christian Huygens. It was a brilliant, I think it was Dutch.

• 6:08Eugene Mirman?

  And was there a barbecue joint in that little space?

• 6:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 6:11Eugene Mirman?

  Like Franklin?

• 6:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This deployed and descended down into Saturn's moon Titan itself, which had an atmosphere. So we all knew this. So you have your spaceship, which is not aerodynamic. It's got radio transmitters and things, and dishes and things, and the probe was aerodynamic and could descend into the atmosphere. It had a drogue chute, it landed and took pictures. So, you just, you design, you get the engineers to design what your needs are, and then you're, then you're good to go.

• 6:37Eugene Mirman?

  And then you're good to go.

• 6:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:38Eugene Mirman?

  All right. That's a great answer. Thank you.

• 6:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep it coming.

• 6:40Eugene Mirman?

  Matthew Ian Stanford from Warring, Pennsylvania asks, what is the feasibility of force shields? Energy shields, et cetera? Are we anywhere near that sort of technology?

• 6:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I thought long and hard about force fields.

• 6:56Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 6:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And.

• 6:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, we're not, you know.

• 7:00Eugene Mirman?

  Not even from telekinetic women?

• 7:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're just not. So here's the best example of a of a force field we have. It's a bug zapper, alright? So the bug flies into the electrical zone of this mesh that is itself electrically charged. You come near it, the electrical charge wants to go through the bug. Once the bug is made available to it, and so the the thing discharges across the tiny little gap through the bug. So that doesn't just sort of prevent you from entering, it kills you on entering. We could create such a thing as that.

• 7:34Eugene Mirman?

  So we could create, so like if a bunch of mosquitoes flew from another planet to get us, we could murder them all. With an energy shield that would kill them.

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would completely kill them, but to have something that you touch and then recoil back from.

• 7:47Eugene Mirman?

  That's unlikely, but you could create a shield that would murder aliens.

• 7:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If the aliens were mosquitoes.

• 7:52Eugene Mirman?

  What if the aliens were bigger, like elephant aliens?

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, more Cosmic Queries after this.

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk, the Cosmic Queries edition. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And in this edition, we're answering questions about.

• 8:29Eugene Mirman?

  Force fields. Whoa, science fiction, sorry.

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Science fiction.

• 8:32Eugene Mirman?

  Fiction, but we're specifically right now still talking about force fields.

• 8:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the voice of Eugene Mirman. And when we left off at the last segment, I guess I didn't bring closure to the force field question.

• 8:42Eugene Mirman?

  What we, yeah, so there's, so we could have a force field around the earth that would protect us from mosquitoes. Could we, could we have one that would protect, and it would kill them? Could we have one that protected us against, like, aliens the size of elephants?

• 8:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here, here's something.

• 8:56Eugene Mirman?

  Would that matter?

• 8:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's the best force field I can think of. You have a static charged doorknob. And I tell you, don't come through the door. But I want to come through the door. Don't come through. The door and you touch the doorknob and you get shocked every single time.

• 9:10Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 9:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you, it works on.

• 9:13Eugene Mirman?

  Set up a series of doors in outer space that idiot aliens will try to touch and then fail.

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So here's something you have to consider. If we had radio vision eyes.

• 9:24Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 9:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'd be able to, radio waves, we'd be able to see through wooden doors. And so the door is only sort of solid and opaque in certain bands of light.

• 9:36Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if your goal is to just see through some kind of zone, you don't just find some band of light that can penetrate it. If your object is to pass through it, I don't know of a field such as, so commonly portrayed in science fiction films.

• 9:52Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 9:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like I said, other than you completing a circuit and a bolt of lightning going through.

• 9:56Eugene Mirman?

  So an energy field that didn't kill people is very unlikely.

• 10:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nothing we've invented yet and nothing I know how to even think about.

• 10:05Eugene Mirman?

  Well, maybe you and I after the show will create a force field.

• 10:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I don't claim total.

• 10:09Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ever on every question here. I'm just giving you my. My degrees in physics equip me to respond to these questions.

• 10:16Eugene Mirman?

  Somewhere in the NSA, someone is laughing and calling us fools as they develop a totally harmless.

• 10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The NSA, National Security Agency, they're in Virginia.

• 10:25Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 10:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 10:25Eugene Mirman?

  I didn't want to give it away to our enemies, but okay.

• 10:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Drive down the Baltimore, Washington, um, Parkway, there's a turnoff to the NSA. I always wanted to turn off and just bust in the front door. Say, what's up?

• 10:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But go on.

• 10:40Eugene Mirman?

  Definitely shouldn't leave a sign. Um, okay. Jeffrey Bethel asks, is artificial gravity possible without using centrifugal devices?

• 10:50Eugene Mirman?

  Hmm. Good question.

• 10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know any other way to make artificial gravity.

• 10:54Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, really?

• 10:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, uh, there's, there's gravity for free that you have, and then you spin something up.

• 11:00Eugene Mirman?

  So spinning, so even tiny tornadoes in your shoes, is that at all helpful?

• 11:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's the problem. You can make an attractive force using magnets.

• 11:08Eugene Mirman?

  Uh-huh.

• 11:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But magnets.

• 11:13Eugene Mirman?

  A magnet suit that made people float any way they will.

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A magnet, magnetic force is so much stronger than gravity.

• 11:20Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 11:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, we have evidence of this, right? I can take a magnet and hover it over a pile of paper clips.

• 11:26Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's the entire mass of the earth, holding on to those paper clips, and they just pop up and talk to the magnet.

• 11:32Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so the entire mass of the earth's gravity is insufficient to keep the clips down. So you'd need like a really weak gravity, maybe?

• 11:41Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 11:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you'd wear, you'd wear magnetic boots and...

• 11:47Eugene Mirman?

  You sound very unconvinced.

• 11:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, just, just rotate the damn thing.

• 11:51Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 11:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you get your gravity. And the good thing about rotating is you can, the speed of rotation all affects how much total sort of centrifugal force there is out there. And so you can go in one tenth G, one half G, two G. If you're going to a heavier planet, or a planet with higher gravity, you can practice for that.

• 12:08Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 12:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By just dialing in what planet you want to go to. So I think the rotation solution is really good. I don't have a third...

• 12:14Eugene Mirman?

  How likely are helicopter shoes? Like a shoe that has, that you could fly with your shoes? I'm almost making sense, you get what I mean?

• 12:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, so helicopter shoes.

• 12:24Eugene Mirman?

  Shoes that had some sort of, uh, propellers.

• 12:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's the problem.

• 12:28Eugene Mirman?

  And then your hands would have them too, is that what you're saying?

• 12:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so here's the problem. You need an energy source, and in Iron Man, they solve that. They, they...

• 12:35Eugene Mirman?

  They put one in his heart.

• 12:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's got one in his chest.

• 12:37Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they just tell you it's this huge, you know, a source of energy. You need that to be flying around. You just, you can't just put propellers on you and then believe that that is sufficient enough to fly.

• 12:48Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 12:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where you're getting your energy from. And the rate at which a human being creates energy

• 12:53Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  is insufficient for our own body to launch ourselves into flight. So we need assistance.

• 13:01Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 13:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 13:01Eugene Mirman?

  So then the answer is, yeah, helicopter shoes possible?

• 13:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No. Only if you have Iron Man's chest.

• 13:07Eugene Mirman?

  Right, right, right. Only if you have a, okay.

• 13:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then if you have his chest, you don't need rotating blades, just use rocket, rocket propulsion, yeah.

• 13:14Eugene Mirman?

  In your iron suit.

• 13:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, in your iron suit.

• 13:16Eugene Mirman?

  Sounds good. Uh, Brian Mikowski asks, is it possible to have a ship that generates its own gravity field in front of it to actually pull the ship forward and have the gravity so strong that the ship would eventually break the speed of light?

• 13:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so the two things going on there. So one of them, is that even possible?

• 13:34Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, all of our laws of physics tell us no, because what would happen is, the ship is just sitting there and not moving at all.

• 13:41Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 13:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How much momentum does it have?

• 13:42Eugene Mirman?

  Uh, at that point, it sounds like very little, maybe zero.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Eugene.

• 13:48Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, well, you have to understand, I got a C minus in science.

• 13:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Zero momentum. And so, uh, based on the laws of conservation of momentum, it cannot simply put itself into motion with its own anything.

• 14:01Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 14:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unless it either loses mass out one end, or something external to it is yanking that is not, has nothing to do with it, is pulling on it from the other side.

• 14:12Eugene Mirman?

  Well, wait, what if it's shooting gravity in front of it? I mean, I think that's sort of the question. Can, is it possible to shoot?

• 14:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's particles called gravitons, which, which have never been discovered, but we're, we're pretty confident they exist, that are the propagators of the gravitational force.

• 14:26Eugene Mirman?

  Uh huh.

• 14:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we could wield gravitons, I don't, since we never, we've never, uh, uh, captured and isolated a graviton, we, I don't know its properties enough.

• 14:35Eugene Mirman?

  To know if it's possible.

• 14:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To know what, how we can exploit it for nefarious purposes, you know? And so, uh, it'd be intriguing how we might work with a graviton. Until then, I, I don't know any way you can just start still in space and just propel yourself forward and do, and continue that forever.

• 14:51Eugene Mirman?

  So if it's possible to control the force of gravity through gravitons, which we don't know how they work exactly, maybe, but not likely.

• 14:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Momentum would still have to be in play.

• 14:59Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 15:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the, so you'd have to, there'd be have, there's, something would have to leave the spaceship. The space shuttle.

• 15:05Eugene Mirman?

  Kids, we could throw kids out of the spaceship.

• 15:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The space shuttle, which starts on the pad at what speed?

• 15:10Eugene Mirman?

  Uh, zero.

• 15:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Zero, good. Uh, how does it then just start going up? It sends fuel out, it sends exhaust out the back.

• 15:19Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 15:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that the total momentum of the system remains zero.

• 15:23Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 15:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 15:25Eugene Mirman?

  All right, uh, Mark. Hawkinson.

• 15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's because momentum one direction cancels the momentum in the opposite direction. That's why. So you can, you can have things in motion.

• 15:33Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 15:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they have to be in opposite directions and then they cancel. This is the recoil of a weapon.

• 15:38Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 15:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you fire a weapon, something has to recoil back into your chest, unless it's self propelled.

• 15:43Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like a self propelled rocket launcher, that sort of thing. Or, or, or a bazooka is self propelled. Otherwise, the guy would completely get thrown backwards who's holding the bazooka. So, so a, a simple bullet that comes out of a gun has a recoil and the momentum in your shoulder equals the momentum of the bullet entering the target.

• 16:01Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 16:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The reason why the gun doesn't go into your body and destroy your organs.

• 16:06Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It has this huge butt at the bottom that spreads out that energy across your shoulder and then your whole body absorbs it.

• 16:14Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 16:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas the bullet, on the other hand, is a very tiny cross section, goes straight into your body.

• 16:18Eugene Mirman?

  Right. So the handgun, it's, it's the heavy butt of a gun.

• 16:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Heavy butt, yes.

• 16:23Eugene Mirman?

  Nice. Uh, okay.

• 16:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the recoil momentum so that the total momentum remains zero.

• 16:27Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 16:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you want your, if you want your bullet to have more momentum, you have to run with it when you shoot.

• 16:32Eugene Mirman?

  That's, that's what you should always do.

• 16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to help out that bullet.

• 16:35Eugene Mirman?

  If you really wanna hit the guy, you gotta really run and shoot.

• 16:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Run fast with your gun.

• 16:39Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. Add a mile an hour.

• 16:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 16:41Eugene Mirman?

  To the bullet. Um, Mark Hawkinson asks, can an antimatter reaction cause a spaceship to have a negative mass and allow faster than light travel?

• 16:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, so it was intriguing when antimatter was hypothesized.

• 16:55Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 16:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And discovered. It was the natural question to ask, does antimatter have antimass?

• 17:01Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if it has antimass, does it have anti-gravity?

• 17:06Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so these were intriguing, you know, where does the negative sign go is what the question turned out to be. Turned out antimatter has opposite properties only in its quantum state, which is a shorthand for saying particles have spin and there's a measurements of particles that have, that, that, that exist in the quantum, in the quantum world and they're opposite for antimatter and the existence of their mass is not. And it's just, it's an unfortunate fact, otherwise we would be so rocking the universe.

• 17:38Eugene Mirman?

  If we had antimatter, like if we could even just shoot a, something the size of a dime.

• 17:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah. If we had, if antimatter had antimass, we'd be all over it.

• 17:45Eugene Mirman?

  We would love it.

• 17:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All up in it.

• 17:47Eugene Mirman?

  Alright. So next question.

• 17:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't do it. Yeah, let's get another one quick.

• 17:51Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, can we do a quick one?

• 17:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A quick one, yeah.

• 17:52Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, because Ian Probst really wants to know, if faster-than-light travel was possible, could one theoretically see the Big Bang occur by traveling away from the fixed point in space that it occurred in for X amount of time?

• 18:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, if you travel faster than light, you can travel backwards in time and just visit the Big Bang yourself.

• 18:09Eugene Mirman?

  Nice.

• 18:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, that's how that works.

• 18:11Eugene Mirman?

  How likely is that?

• 18:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, it turns out that Einstein's equations

• 18:16Eugene Mirman?

  Uh huh.

• 18:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  allow you to travel faster than light.

• 18:19Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 18:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I will get back to that after the break.

• 18:21Eugene Mirman?

  I don't know, we all have to go. Bye.

• 18:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the solution is...

• 18:26Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 18:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk, the Cosmic Queries Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, answering your questions submitted to us throughout our social media outlets. Facebook, like us there, by the way, if you like us.

• 19:05Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. Even if you don't.

• 19:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like us anyway.

• 19:08Eugene Mirman?

  Do it.

• 19:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, uh, we tweet StarTalk Radio. Eugene, you tweet.

• 19:11Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, Eugene Mirman.

• 19:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I follow you.

• 19:13Eugene Mirman?

  And you can like me on Facebook, why not?

• 19:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only if we like you, yeah.

• 19:16Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah, obviously. You can't dislike me, but you can personally.

• 19:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You call these questions from the internet, I haven't seen them.

• 19:23Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 19:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all on, sort of, science fiction.

• 19:25Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 19:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Concepts.

• 19:27Eugene Mirman?

  So, so the question was about traveling back to the Big Bang by being able to go faster than the speed of light, and you're saying you actually could do that.

• 19:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm saying...

• 19:34Eugene Mirman?

  I mean, not you.

• 19:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not saying we could do it, or that we know how, but Einstein's equations

• 19:37Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 19:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that, in a, in a basic read of them, tells you that material objects cannot reach the speed of light.

• 19:44Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you can put something, a material object in there, that exists faster than light.

• 19:51Eugene Mirman?

  Uh huh.

• 19:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then the equation has no problems with it.

• 19:55Eugene Mirman?

  What does that mean?

• 19:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What it means is Einstein's equations do not work when material objects are given the speed of light in the equations. They blow up. They, you're dividing by zero essentially.

• 20:06Eugene Mirman?

  Uh huh.

• 20:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you go beyond that, the equations work just fine. And so you can ask, what are the properties of these?

• 20:14Eugene Mirman?

  So if you had a Prius that was already going faster than light, you're fine.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're fine. And we, and, and.

• 20:20Eugene Mirman?

  Same thing for a Porsche Cayenne.

• 20:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd stick with the Porsche, not the Cayenne, not the SUV.

• 20:27Eugene Mirman?

  The minivan.

• 20:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the Porsche minivan. That's right. It's, it, that's really a minivan. It's not a SUV.

• 20:34Eugene Mirman?

  No, yeah.

• 20:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My gosh.

• 20:35Eugene Mirman?

  It's a minivan.

• 20:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What the hell is Porsche making a?

• 20:36Eugene Mirman?

  I don't know. We'll talk to them. This is how they're gonna sponsor the show. To prove it.

• 20:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, so, uh, so here's what happens. We had a, a name for such, for such objects, for such particles, if they existed, and we took it from the Greek root of tachyon, meaning fast, and we call them tachyon.

• 20:54Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the tachometer on a watch comes from that same root, the, which measures speed of things, the tachometer. We don't have those anymore.

• 21:00Eugene Mirman?

  No, who would use a tachometer? We would just use a watch.

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just use a watch. But old timers know what I'm, know what I'm talking about.

• 21:05Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they exist faster than light, and one of the other properties is that they would live backwards in time.

• 21:10Eugene Mirman?

  Uh huh.

• 21:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if that's the case, and you're that.

• 21:12Eugene Mirman?

  Like that lady on Doctor Who.

• 21:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, yeah, actually, yeah.

• 21:15Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you, if you live backwards in time, just go back to the big bang and just watch it happen.

• 21:20Eugene Mirman?

  But then it would be hard to return to the future.

• 21:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you just go, uh, find a way to zip around the speed of light again and then go forward.

• 21:26Eugene Mirman?

  So you go fly around the sun.

• 21:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Eugene Mirman?

  I'm glad that we've worked that out. All right. Scott Ald asks, in Star Wars, the spaceships often travel at the speed of light. If time stops or does not exist at the speed of light, how do they know when to stop?

• 21:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ah!

• 21:41Eugene Mirman?

  I hope I read that correctly.

• 21:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is a beautiful, alert, and brilliant question, and you are correct.

• 21:47Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 21:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the speed of light, when they reach hyperspace, which is beautifully displayed at first in Star Wars, and then Star Trek copied it, although Star Trek was the first to have the concept of warp speed.

• 21:58Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 21:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That I know of on, in, on television.

• 22:00Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 22:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In movies.

• 22:01Eugene Mirman?

  It was first in a Buddy Holly song.

• 22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, yeah, if they're actually going at the speed of light by some way that they cheat, time identically stops, and if time stops, they would not know how to come out of speed of light. And the way light knows how to stop?

• 22:18Eugene Mirman?

  It hits something.

• 22:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It hits something.

• 22:20Eugene Mirman?

  Right. So these spaceships should theoretically be just crashing into stuff and then that's how they ride.

• 22:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've never asked how they... Now, there's a way to travel faster than the speed of light by not actually traveling faster than the speed of light, and you use the warp drives of Star Trek. And there's where you're going and where you are. Space has some fabric to it. You warp it. You cut a little hole, like a wormhole, travel through the wormhole, come out the other side, unwarp the space, and you're where you needed to be during the TV commercial. So that is not technically beating a beam of light on its own journey.

• 22:51Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 22:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? It's...

• 22:52Eugene Mirman?

  You cut a hole in a... and then you just walk through it.

• 22:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're legitimately cheating, and it's not clear to me whether taking that route would stop time for you, and I'd have to do the calculations on that.

• 23:02Eugene Mirman?

  It probably wouldn't, because you could travel slowly. You go like 50 miles an hour as long as you cut space.

• 23:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. You can cut it as tight as you want, or as loose as you want, in 50 miles an hour.

• 23:11Eugene Mirman?

  Would be fine.

• 23:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be lame, though, for the Starship Enterprise.

• 23:13Eugene Mirman?

  It'd be pretty funny if it was just a guy walking through folded space, using all the energy of all the known stars.

• 23:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or on a tricycle, yeah.

• 23:22Eugene Mirman?

  Yes, on a tricycle, going to new worlds. Um, okay, uh, here's another question. Um, Mark Hawkinson, ooh, I think he had a question earlier. This guy's lucky. Uh, while it isn't canon, while it isn't canon confirmed, there have been theories about the flux capacitor in Back to the Future. Captured tachyon particles and created a field of them around the car at 88 miles per hour. Should we discover tachyons, would creating a field to time travel be possible?

• 23:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't know if tachyons would actually have fields.

• 23:55Eugene Mirman?

  Uh huh.

• 23:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if they're neutral, there is no field.

• 23:58Eugene Mirman?

  But if there is a field, I think he... What's funny is he's not just asking if time travel is possible. He's asking if the flux capacitor would specifically work, which is a very funny way to limit... Like, it's like, we know how to time travel.

• 24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, don't ask me about that. Ask me about... Right. So, so we're talking about Back to the Future, of course.

• 24:17Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And 1985 film. And so it's not obvious to me that tachyons would have any particular field at all. That word we invented, we people around when this early 1970s.

• 24:30Eugene Mirman?

  Uh huh.

• 24:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was invented to describe anything that traveled faster than light.

• 24:33Eugene Mirman?

  Mm hmm.

• 24:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so the field theory of things that are traveling faster than light would be fascinating. But it's not obvious that those fields would be fundamentally different from fields on the other side of the speed of light. It's just not obvious.

• 24:44Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 24:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm not prepared to say wrap your vessel in tachyons, have it interact with your flux capacitor. And like in, in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the tachyons will float your car over into the past.

• 24:58Eugene Mirman?

  Right? Yeah.

• 24:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I just can't feel that. But it's a fun idea, though. Great first science fiction story yet to be written. You're listening to StarTalk Cosmic Queries back in a minute.

• 25:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk, the Cosmic Queries edition. Your personal astrophysicist here, Neil deGrasse Tyson, with the one, the only Eugene Mirman.

• 25:34Eugene Mirman?

  Hello.

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're reading me questions about.

• 25:37Eugene Mirman?

  I am. Science fiction.

• 25:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fiction. So give me more.

• 25:40Eugene Mirman?

  So Tom Giacchino asks, my favorite debate with my friends is the static 12 monkeys versus variable Back to the Future concepts of time travel. Which do you subscribe to and why?

• 25:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if I remember correctly, the 12 monkey scenario was one where you can't change what you know already happened in the past, even if you go back in the past to attempt it. So that's could be quite frustrating.

• 26:05Eugene Mirman?

  It means you're. Meaning you would go back in and kill Stalin, but nothing would happen.

• 26:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you, it depends on when you killed him, right?

• 26:11Eugene Mirman?

  Well, you'd kill him when he was a little baby.

• 26:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 26:14Eugene Mirman?

  That's when you kill anybody.

• 26:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, and it, so in one scenario, you can't do that because forces would prevent you from accomplishing.

• 26:21Eugene Mirman?

  What kind of forces, like a Dyson sphere?

• 26:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'll give you, I'll give you an example. In the original Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

• 26:27Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You remember, he had a girlfriend or some lady friend of his who died by getting, you know, hit by a bus and then.

• 26:32Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 26:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He said, oh, that's bad. Let me prevent her from crossing the street. And so she doesn't cross the street at the time the bus goes. And then she gets mugged and killed from a mugging. And then she prevents the mugging and then something else kills. She dies in every scenario.

• 26:45Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 26:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so.

• 26:46Eugene Mirman?

  That doesn't sound realistic.

• 26:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, he's, he's saying, maybe there's certain fundamental truths about a past that are already embedded in place. But I have an observation of this. The very fact that she didn't cross the street is a different past.

• 27:02Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 27:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just because she died in five different ways.

• 27:05Eugene Mirman?

  She's doomed to die, but so is everybody.

• 27:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, she, yeah, she dies, but why say that death is something that's constant, but not the fact that she stepped in dog poo? Her death is no less of an event in a history of time as anything else that she does.

• 27:21Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 27:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's rather artificial to sift it for events we care about. Her death.

• 27:26Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 27:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And say, that's what's constant. When she didn't get hit by the bus, the bus driver didn't hit anybody?

• 27:32Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How about in the life of the driver?

• 27:34Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, he's thrilled he didn't kill somebody.

• 27:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He didn't kill somebody. In that new universe, the mugger killed her. So.

• 27:38Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 27:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those universes are fundamentally different without specific reference to your loved one's death. So which one do I subscribe to? I like changing the past.

• 27:47Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 27:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had to pick one. Next question.

• 27:50Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, uh, Andrew Thomas Kellogg asks, would travel to parallel dimensions be anything like it is conveyed in sci-fi? Sliders or Star Trek, for example? Yeah, would it be parallel universes with like a few things off where you're like Hitler has a silly hat?

• 28:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Interesting thing about this whole slider concept is.

• 28:08Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 28:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  While you were moving into a higher dimension and then returning.

• 28:12Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 28:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You disappear entirely. It's like the ant stuck in a page.

• 28:16Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 28:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where if it's a prisoner of the page and then I want to move it to another place in the page.

• 28:21Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 28:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I pick up his friend, move the friend into the third dimension where I live.

• 28:26Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 28:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then the other ant says, whoa, what happened to my friend?

• 28:29Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 28:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She disappeared.

• 28:31Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 28:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you put her back into the page and then she appears out of nowhere.

• 28:34Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 28:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's just fine. She just had a view of the third dimension.

• 28:38Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, I see. So what would it be like in those worlds? Would they have a lot of the same historical events that we had, but all slightly different? I think we would be taken from this dimension and then put on a different piece of paper. Or we'd be put on a-

• 28:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, fine. The journey through those would be awesome. Just imagine how your brain would react to hyperdimensional things. So, once you're put back in, oh, sure, it's just another place. And if you have access to the time dimension as well as space dimension, I can pluck you out from the now and put you 30 years ago or 10 years ago.

• 29:06Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, that'd be so fun. I would love to be in Mad Men, except for most people.

• 29:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except for anyone who's female. Yeah, okay.

• 29:15Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 29:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or any nonsmoker.

• 29:18Eugene Mirman?

  Yes, exactly. Okay, Nicholas Garrett Neppl Klein asks, "Are there any known ways something such as a lightsaber could be made with technology as it is now?"

• 29:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Light itself is non-material. So, even if you reflected it back and forth quite a bit-

• 29:36Eugene Mirman?

  It wouldn't cut people in half.

• 29:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, unless it was, well, okay, you can imagine a really intense laser. But here's the thing, yes, it could cut things. But when it hit another lightsaber, they would just pass through one another. They wouldn't block like two swords would. So, sure, you can imagine a lightsaber that would cut things the way a laser would. But two lasers cross each other without any incident at all.

• 29:59Eugene Mirman?

  So, the best defense against a lightsaber is mirror gloves?

• 30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yo!

• 30:04Eugene Mirman?

  Huh?

• 30:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice.

• 30:05Eugene Mirman?

  Mirror gloves and a lightsaber. I'm on it.

• 30:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A mirror would so work for that, I think, yeah.

• 30:10Eugene Mirman?

  So, lightsabers are possible, but they wouldn't clink against each other?

• 30:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're not out of the reach of known laws of physics. You have to stretch a little, but they wouldn't be like swashbucklers.

• 30:20Eugene Mirman?

  Right, right.

• 30:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Couldn't pull that off.

• 30:21Eugene Mirman?

  But it would be an awesome, threatening thing that would cut things in half.

• 30:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but we already have that, and then there are lasers.

• 30:26Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, but not in a sword, like a-

• 30:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we have, like, automatic weapons, right?

• 30:30Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, but not a laser sword.

• 30:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, a laser sword, you have to actually be next to the person to kill them.

• 30:37Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 30:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas we have weapons that do better than that, all right? That can kill you 300 yards away, so-

• 30:44Eugene Mirman?

  You are not gonna convince me that I don't want a laser sword? And you are not gonna convince people listening they don't want a laser sword?

• 30:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk Radio Cosmic Queries Edition, and we'll be back in a moment.

• 31:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk after hours. The Cosmic Queries Edition on...

• 31:17Eugene Mirman?

  Science fiction.

• 31:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Science fiction, that's the...

• 31:19Eugene Mirman?

  And the plausibility of some things.

• 31:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The voice of Eugene Mirman. Eugene, when we left off, you kept trying to say you want a lightsaber.

• 31:24Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 31:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm saying, at some level, I'm not impressed with a lightsaber, because I can just shoot you from 300 yards away.

• 31:30Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, but you're limiting the point of a lightsaber to battle. You're not saying like, "Oh, I'm camping. I wish I had a lightsaber to gather wood." Or to open a can of tuna. Or, yeah, cut things up.

• 31:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying, I don't, you know, it's not...

• 31:42Eugene Mirman?

  We have knives.

• 31:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "I want to kill that guy, so I'm gonna walk right up to him within his arms' reach and then try to kill him."

• 31:47Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, but what if it could replace steak knives? Don't tell me you wouldn't really love grilling and cooking and eating out...

• 31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A bow and arrow is more effective than a lightsaber. I'm sorry.

• 31:57Eugene Mirman?

  To murder things at a distance, but not to cut a piece of meat.

• 32:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Yeah, bow and arrow can't cut a piece of meat. Or open cans. You're right. Open a can of beans in space. We are in the lightning round, okay? I got my bell. We'll test it. All right, we're gonna get soundbite answers, because we never have enough time to get to all the questions, but we're gonna get to as many as we can now. Ready, go.

• 32:17Eugene Mirman?

  Edith Terrelli asks, "Would being beamed up to different locations from Star Trek's 'Beam Me Up Scotty' be plausible in the future?"

• 32:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We so want that to happen. And what I recommend, there's a book called The Physics of Star Trek, written by my friend and colleague, Lawrence Krauss. He's a former guest on StarTalk. He speaks at length about the Star Trek transporter.

• 32:36Eugene Mirman?

  We can teleport light, though, can't we?

• 32:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The point is, you need the information about who you are. So just fax it over and then reassemble you over there. But the question remains, are you still you? Next.

• 32:46Eugene Mirman?

  You would have to shoot yourself.

• 32:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 32:48Eugene Mirman?

  Uh, Joe Walker asks, "Can you explain the application feasibility, engineering, logistics, and just overall coolness of a Dyson sphere as shown in Star Trek: Next Generation, Episode: Relics?"

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, Dyson spheres, if you want energy?

• 33:01Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 33:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are we doing now? We're digging it out from under each other's feet and killing each other for it. Meanwhile...

• 33:07Eugene Mirman?

  Which we enjoy.

• 33:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Meanwhile, there are hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes. That's energy that's trying to kill you. Kill us. One day, we might be able to harness that, right?

• 33:15Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 33:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that, but this

• 33:15Eugene Mirman?

  A machine that eats tornadoes and gives us light bulbs.

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 33:19Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 33:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or draws the energy from earthquakes. But there's another source of energy out there, the sun. Why not snare every photon that comes from it? Right now, we only intersect the cross section of Earth in the huge sphere at Earth's orbit. Why not create a sphere at Earth's orbit and put solar detectors everywhere on its inner surface? And snatch every photon from the sun? That's a Dyson sphere, and we would be awesome energetic species if we did it. We don't know how to do it just yet, but there's nothing

• 33:47Eugene Mirman?

  Do we not know how to do it?

• 33:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's nothing preventing us in principle.

• 33:51Eugene Mirman?

  That's great.

• 33:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no law of physics, even though it's very distant from an engineering standpoint. Next.

• 33:56Eugene Mirman?

  Matt Wilson asks, in the Asimov

• 33:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matt Wilson?

• 33:59Eugene Mirman?

  Matt Wilson?

• 34:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is a place in California.

• 34:02Eugene Mirman?

  Oh.

• 34:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 34:03Eugene Mirman?

  Great. Well, that place wants to know this one thing. In the Asimov Classic Foundation series, the home planet of the Galactic Empire, Trantor, is essentially one city, as in, the city covers the entire planet. What would be the effects on the atmosphere and weather patterns were something like that to exist without bodies of water? I imagine the planet would not be habitable, no matter how modern the city.

• 34:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, if you made a city that covered the entire planet and you knew how to do that?

• 34:30Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 34:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you just control your own damn weather. I mean, you have geoengineering.

• 34:34Eugene Mirman?

  Right, right. If you could do that, you've solved the problems he thinks are problems.

• 34:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, which is my Greek big gripe.

• 34:40Eugene Mirman?

  Silly man.

• 34:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, which is my big gripe about people saying, we're going to destroy the Earth. We have to move to another planet, but first we have to terraform the other planet. And I'm thinking, if you could terraform the other planet and turn it into a planet that you can live on, then do the same thing here on Earth, and then you don't have to leave it in the first place.

• 34:54Eugene Mirman?

  We could terraform countries we don't really care about.

• 34:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next, go.

• 34:58Eugene Mirman?

  Guillermo Mura asks.

• 35:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guillermo.

• 35:01Eugene Mirman?

  You?

• 35:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Guillermo.

• 35:02Eugene Mirman?

  Guillermo Mura.

• 35:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  William, it's William in Italian.

• 35:05Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, well, then why not just write William Guillermo?

• 35:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, go.

• 35:08Eugene Mirman?

  Isaac Asimov's, Jesus, everybody loves this Asimov character. Isaac Asimov's Foundation.

• 35:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does Jesus have to do with they loving?

• 35:16Eugene Mirman?

  Uh, it's an exclamation.

• 35:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go, go.

• 35:18Eugene Mirman?

  From slang.

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go.

• 35:20Eugene Mirman?

  Uh, Isaac Asimov's Foundation. There is a device that can turn any metal into gold. Is there anything closely resembling this in the present? Can materials change their properties and become something else by machinery?

• 35:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, there's something called modern alchemy and we do it every day in a particle accelerator. Uh, you can take particles, slam them together, make bigger ones, take big particles, slam other things into them, break them apart. So you can literally-

• 35:43Eugene Mirman?

  Can we turn like silver into wine?

• 35:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can.

• 35:46Eugene Mirman?

  The only thing that would really be maybe lead into wine.

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be a little harder. You need to make the carbon and the hydrogen and the oxygen from your silver. But you can turn one kind of atom into another. You can turn lead into gold. You can turn gold into lead in a properly designed particle accelerator. The problem is-

• 36:01Eugene Mirman?

  That sounds unnecessary.

• 36:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unnecessary. The problem is-

• 36:04Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 36:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The energy to turn lead into gold is greater. The cost of that is greater than just going down to the corner store and buying gold on your own. Next.

• 36:13Eugene Mirman?

  Well, in a few years, maybe in three years.

• 36:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 36:17Eugene Mirman?

  Okay.

• 36:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, the price is coming down on turning lead into gold.

• 36:19Eugene Mirman?

  So it's really an issue of energy. Once we have the energy, we'll have all the gold we need.

• 36:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And then the price of gold, then it wouldn't be valuable enough to even do it in the first place, except for industrial needs. Right. Okay, go on. Next.

• 36:31Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, Kevin Conme.

• 36:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Quick.

• 36:33Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, Minority Report had a bevy of technologies that seemed entirely plausible. Many of them have come into existence in some limited form in the 11 years since the movie's release. Memphis, Tennessee is using an IBM program named Blue Crush Criminal Reducing Utilizing Statistical History to predict crime. What other movies got it right in terms of theories or technologies?

• 36:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you know what? I, well, okay.

• 36:57Eugene Mirman?

  Star Trek created iTunes.

• 36:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, Star Trek predicted doors that open automatically when you walk up to them.

• 37:02Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 37:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, there's no, that, that question is an entire episode of StarTalk unto itself.

• 37:08Eugene Mirman?

  Yes, we will get into that.

• 37:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll get into it. We've got to end. This has been StarTalk. Oh, this has been StarTalk, the Cosmic Queries Edition. Uh, funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, Eugene Mirman, thanks for chilling with me. We'll see you next time. As always, keep looking up.