Cosmic Queries – Science to Know

Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice answer fan-submitted Cosmic Queries on a variety of topics including life on Mars, the expansion of the universe, building wormholes, and more to mark hitting one million subscribers on YouTube.

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.

• 0:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and I got with me as always Chuck Nice. Chuck.

• 0:26Chuck Nice?

  Hey, Neil.

• 0:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we are live.

• 0:29Chuck Nice?

  Live. Oh my god. Wait.

• 0:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does that mean?

• 0:32Chuck Nice?

  It means I get to hold up a newspaper and it will have today's thing on it.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You still read newspapers? What is that? Your news comes to you in paper?

• 0:41Chuck Nice?

  Wait a minute, wait a minute. It means I get to hold up my tablet.

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So anyway, why are we doing this? This YouTube Live? First, I just want to say thank you to our Patreon members. These are people who basically actively subscribe to us by giving us money each month. This is a higher level of participation and we do things for them, exclusive things for them, like they get their own cosmic queries, for example. And there are other things. There's like a scale depending on how much you put in and it becomes a fundamental buoyant force in what we do to bring this show to you. And also, I think some people don't know that we have this sort of topical spinoff of StarTalk.

• 1:29Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Called StarTalk Sports Edition.

• 1:31Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 1:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're my co-host with Gary O'Reilly.

• 1:35Chuck Nice?

  That's right. Former footballer.

• 1:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Footballer in, translate that Chuck.

• 1:41Chuck Nice?

  That's a, that's a professional soccer player across the Great Pond. He played for, played for Crystal Palace and Tottenham Hotspur.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, very good. And so we realized that there's a lot of science in sports and a lot of actual athletes and coaches and trainers. And all of what goes on in sports is such a big part of modern life, social life, really, that we felt it deserved its own sort of path within the StarTalk universe. So StarTalk Sports Edition is there, so you can check that out. But anyway, I want to open this. Can I open this now?

• 2:18Chuck Nice?

  Please.

• 2:20Chuck Nice?

  Let us see.

• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here we go. Oh, so, so here's what happens. So if you have a YouTube channel, as we do, StarTalk channel, when you hit these milestones, these are, these are milestones in base 10. Okay?

• 2:34Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 2:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, 10 to a power of some number. So, uh, if, if you hit 10,000, 100,000, uh, and we recently hit a million.

• 2:44Chuck Nice?

  Hit the, looks heavy.

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 2:49Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's really pretty.

• 2:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So I'll read it to you. It says, presented to StarTalk for passing 1 million subscribers.

• 2:59Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's very cool though.

• 3:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so we'll find a place to, to hang this. And so next, next target, I guess, would be 10 million.

• 3:07Chuck Nice?

  10 million, there you go.

• 3:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe.

• 3:08Chuck Nice?

  To the powers of 10.

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So anyhow, so, so we're gonna, uh, we can do what we do best and take some questions from the audience. Some have already rolled in and then we can take some live, since this is live.

• 3:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 3:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you've got it all. I haven't seen any of them, Chuck.

• 3:22Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah. And, um, it's funny, I love it because, you know, I lifted them right off of the YouTube site, as you can see, and they say like, uh, 18 hours ago, 12 hours ago. It's kinda cool.

• 3:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. When they arrived, yes.

• 3:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, right from when they arrived. So, uh, this is SnackDealer1. Uh, he says, "If a separate human colony was well-established on Mars, what would likely be the most valuable resource Mars could trade with Earth?" Ooh, so, kinda reminiscent of a, a, a television series called The Expanse, except it's not Mars. The humans that move to Mars become far more advanced because they're all like real sciency-minded. And then the ones left on Earth are just like, um, you know, uh, Trump supporters? No, I'm joking. Uh, I'm joking. That was a joke. The ones left on Earth.

• 4:19Chuck Nice?

  You know, they continued on in the path that we Earthlings could have, the trajectory that we're on. But then there's a separate group of Earthlings that go out to the Kuiper Belt, and they're miners. And so they're actually bringing all the good stuff out of these, mining these asteroids. And it's funny, because the three of them together have like commerce. And so when he says this, I immediately thought of that, that if we were, if there was a Mars-Earth II,

• 4:55Chuck Nice?

  how interesting would it be? Would Mars have something to give to us?

• 4:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so first of all, the Kuiper Belt has mostly icy objects, icy bodies, and which is much less used to us than heavy metals. So, and the asteroid belt is way closer than the Kuiper Belt.

• 5:11Chuck Nice?

  No, I'm sorry, it is the asteroid belt. I'm sorry, I said Kuiper Belt. I meant to say asteroid belt.

• 5:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fine, don't get me started.

• 5:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's my fault.

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More up in your situation.

• 5:22Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's, don't blame the writers of The Expanse on that.

• 5:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 5:26Chuck Nice?

  That was me, that was my slip up in words. They're not in the Kuiper Belt, they're in the asteroid belt, hence the mining operations, because they're grabbing these large, craggy, floating boulders and drilling down into them and pulling out all kinds of good stuff.

• 5:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so here's the thing. We don't yet know the full depth profile of Mars and what it contains and what's there. There's probably not oil deposits, I'm guessing. Oil on Earth comes from dead vegetation from millions of years ago. So, no. But, that's what discovery is all about, right? But who knew that Earth had oil that you could pull out of the ground and build civilization on it and then have to get rid of it later, right? So, you just don't know. You just know that's the whole point of exploration. So, Mars, it would be interesting. What I can imagine is you can have inventive people there that use the

• 6:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  natural resources that are common on the surface of Mars and do something inventive with that and then trade that. And that way, so it wouldn't have to be only something that Mars has, it could be that Mars has the intellectual capital, that is, the people who went to Mars are of a particular variety of people who have certain inventive ways that then create a resource that other people want. Look at Switzerland. Okay, Switzerland's in the mountains, all right? It's like, what do they have? So they took their natural resource and made stuff. They pioneered chocolate and clocks and the Swiss Army knife. The top three, no,

• 7:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  there's just, they made precision timekeeping an art. And so the Swiss watch wasn't just a sales tag, it was a real thing. And you don't mine watches out of the mountains. This is a, this is an expertise that your culture brings that you then put into commerce. So I can imagine if we are a multi-planet species, that not everybody's gonna be building the same stuff. And so whether or not there's a natural resource that you would trade as natural ore, which surely would still happen, it could be that you got people who like making one thing versus another, and you need it on another planet. So then you'd have this interplanetary commerce, which would be great. I look forward to that.

• 7:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool. And by the way, asteroids, like you incorrectly have remembered, asteroids from the asteroid belt, if you get a metallic asteroid, that is a concentration of all the heavy elements that we've cared about in our civilization. Cadmium, platinum, gold, what else? Just name, all the rare earth elements, yttrium. All of these are in high supply in these asteroids. So it might be whoever gets to lasso the asteroids best, then their commerce is not only what they do on their planet, but their ability to exploit the resources of space, of wandering objects within space itself.

• 8:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So yeah, that's that's the future of what do they call it before they invented capitalism? A mercantilism, interplanetary mercantilism, that's what that is.

• 8:43Chuck Nice?

  Very nice.

• 8:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:45Chuck Nice?

  Very nice. I love that word mercantilism.

• 8:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm, mm hmm.

• 8:48Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what they that's what made Venice and and Amsterdam and all.

• 8:52Chuck Nice?

  The mercantiles.

• 8:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the day, the mercantiles, yeah, merchant of Venice.

• 8:55Chuck Nice?

  Merchants of Venice.

• 8:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They didn't say capitalist of Venice, they said merchant of Venice, right?

• 9:00Chuck Nice?

  That's right, cool.

• 9:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Shakespeare's play, of course.

• 9:02Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 9:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, what else you got?

• 9:04Chuck Nice?

  Okay, this is Kevin.

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, wait, were these focused into any theme or is it just any question about anything?

• 9:11Chuck Nice?

  Well, I don't see a theme.

• 9:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay, all right. Okay, so here's what I'll do, and we discussed this in another episode, where it's not that I know the answer to everything, but I'm I know some things about a lot of things. So if you ask me a question I can't answer, I might give you something to know about that that might still not answer your question, but gives you still something to walk away with.

• 9:33Chuck Nice?

  All right, so we'll call this one cosmic queries, something to know.

• 9:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, let's do it.

• 9:39Chuck Nice?

  There you go. Kevin Vivale says this.

• 9:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it Devali? Is it two L's and an E?

• 9:46Chuck Nice?

  No, no, it's not a it's not a Yardro type deal.

• 9:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Those who are those who for whom this is their first cosmic queries, Chuck don't know how to pronounce anybody's name.

• 9:58Chuck Nice?

  No, I do not. I do not know how to pronounce anyone's name, and by the way, when I mispronounce your name, the great thing is you now have a new name.

• 10:08Chuck Nice?

  You can hide from the government.

• 10:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck will baptize you with a new name.

• 10:14Chuck Nice?

  That's right, I'm giving you a new name. This is the beauty of being on StarTalk.

• 10:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 10:19Chuck Nice?

  So Kevin Kevin wants to know this, why is our galaxy in the shape of a spiral? And why do other galaxies have other shapes? What determines the shape of a galaxy?

• 10:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Most galaxies in the universe are spiral galaxies, so we're we're in the club. Okay, we are not rare in this, first of all. Second, so the two main things, that's a great question, by the way, an observant question. All right, because some galaxies are kind of elliptically shaped, and others are sort of spiral, flat spirals. So we call the elliptically shaped galaxies elliptical galaxies. And we call the spiral shaped galaxies.

• 11:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spiral galaxies, alright, cuz that's how we roll as astrophysicists.

• 11:04Chuck Nice?

  Astrophysicists are too busy doing math to come up with inventive names for stuff.

• 11:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We just call it.

• 11:10Chuck Nice?

  They just call it what it is. Oh, look at that. It's a cigar galaxy.

• 11:17Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 11:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like, region of space you fall in, you don't come out, black hole, okay? Light doesn't come, black, origin of spacetime, big bang, right? We're, we, we, we fully embrace one syllable communication with each other, okay?

• 11:35Chuck Nice?

  It's about a, a, a kind of a word.

• 11:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ju- Jupiter has a, a big red spot on its surface.

• 11:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what we call it?

• 11:43Chuck Nice?

  What?

• 11:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jupiter's red spot.

• 11:45Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 11:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not the only spot, right? The sun has spots.

• 11:51Chuck Nice?

  And we call them?

• 11:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sunspots, okay?

• 11:54Chuck Nice?

  There you go, yeah.

• 11:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 11:56Chuck Nice?

  Look at that. And now, back to this equation. What should we call this? Neil, what should we call this? It's spots on the sun. Call it sunspots, man. Back to this equation. Back to this equation.

• 12:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so.

• 12:12Chuck Nice?

  What determines the shape of a galaxy?

• 12:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so watch. So you have this huge gas cloud. And it begins to collapse, alright? And, because gravity, that's the natural thing gravity wants to do. I'm talking about a gas cloud larger than a galaxy that will become a galaxy, alright? If the galaxy has any kinda extra spin to it, as it collapses, it spins faster. Okay, you've seen this on ice, where ice skaters, right? If they're spinning at all, if they bring in their hands, they end up spinning faster.

• 12:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a basic, uh, feature of physics. It's called the conservation of angular momentum, but that's what happens. If you shrink down, you spin faster. If I weren't in a chair, I would do it physically. The next time we'd have StarTalk Live, I'll do it StarTalk Live. In fact, we did it when one of the StarTalk Live, when we had, who's an ice, uh, we had an ice skater on, uh, one of our guests.

• 13:06Chuck Nice?

  Sasha Cohen.

• 13:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's Sasha Cohen, yes. Exact, thanks for remembering that. Yeah, so but anyhow.

• 13:13Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 13:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you're one of these higher spinning, faster spinning, as it, as it get, as it begins to shrink, it spins faster and faster and the, as it spins faster, that part of the galaxy has a harder time making it into the middle. Whereas the top and bottom just falls in. So you get a nice big bulge in the middle, but the rest flattens to make this disk. Okay, it's what happens when you spin pizza dough, it flattens, okay? And so if, if, if you took Pillsbury Doughboy.

• 13:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And started spinning him, he flattened, okay?

• 13:49Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 13:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hazardous activity for.

• 13:53Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 13:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you are not a solid shape.

• 13:56Chuck Nice?

  And if you throw some chocolate chips on them and put them in the oven.

• 13:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's worse.

• 14:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these galaxies have a lot of gas in them and it's gas out of which you make stars. Okay, stars are gas and so you have all this gas. And here's what happens, we think that there is a shock wave within the rotating system that compresses the gas. And where that gas compresses, you make extra stars. So the spiral structure of a galaxy is where extra new stars are being made. And so it's the stellar nurseries that trace the spiral pattern. There's still stars everywhere else. All right, if you look carefully at spiral galaxy, there's stars everywhere.

• 14:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But along these spiral edges, that's where you get very high mass, high star formation activity. And so, and galaxies that don't rotate much at all, they don't flatten out. And they forever stay as these spherical elliptical shapes. And they're not making many stars today. You're not going to find exploding stars there, which is the sign of newly formed stars that have high mass that become supernova and black holes and all the cool stuff. So we live in a really cool galaxy because you have a lot of stuff going on.

• 15:18Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 15:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, so were you, were you first asking Patreon questions?

• 15:24Chuck Nice?

  Um, uh, no, I was not. So I probably-

• 15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so, so in a normal Cosmic Queries-

• 15:29Chuck Nice?

  We would.

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The first section is occupied by Patreon questions. Plus, like I said, they get their own exclusive, uh, uh, um, posting.

• 15:38Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 15:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, just with you-

• 15:40Chuck Nice?

  Their own Cosmic Queries, a command performance where you get to ask whatever you want to Neil, and that happens once a month, uh, if you are a Patreon, uh, patron. So go to patreon.com/stargtorkradio and support us right now. And, uh, and then, uh, if, if you're $10 and above, then, uh, you know, we, we, we'll be, we can do this privately for you, just for you.

• 16:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. We're in the middle of a live Cosmic Queries. Let's jump right back in.

• 16:29Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. This is, uh, why don't we take a live question? All right?

• 16:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, and just to be clear, you're watching, people are watching this on YouTube, right?

• 16:38Chuck Nice?

  Yes, they are.

• 16:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I just want to remind people, this, this million plaque, million. So thank you all for did, for having done that. And if you haven't done it yet, what's stopping you? Just, I'm just asking.

• 16:53Chuck Nice?

  Right, if you haven't subscribed yet, right.

• 16:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 16:56Chuck Nice?

  Now's, now's the time.

• 16:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now's the time.

• 16:58Chuck Nice?

  Now's the time. If not now, when? Right?

• 17:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if not who, you.

• 17:03Chuck Nice?

  There you go. If not now, when? And if not who, you. There you go.

• 17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 17:08Chuck Nice?

  Uh, this is, uh, let's go to live from our, um, YouTube chatroom, and this is Isra Gashi. Uh, sorry, Isra, if that's not right. Uh-

• 17:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is right according to Chuck.

• 17:21Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the Chuckiverse, it's correct.

• 17:23Chuck Nice?

  There you go. I like that. Um, Isra says this, "If light has no mass, why is it affected by gravity?"

• 17:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a brilliant question. And, cause you know, gravity attracts mass, right? And so if you've got no mass, why should you care?

• 17:42Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 17:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Because-

• 17:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  According to, well, so

• 17:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  there are a couple of ways out of that one, but let me give you the cleanest. The cleanest explanation is, gravity is not a force on a mass. Gravity is the distortion in the fabric of space and time caused by any concentration of mass and energy. Uh huh. And so if you are moving through space, you are moving on a path that the, your speed plus the curvature of space requires of you. And so if you're matter moving substantially less than the speed of light, you will curve in towards the object. If you're moving the speed of light, you will follow the pure curvature of spacetime itself. Wow.

• 18:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As distorted by the effects of, of any kind of concentration of mass. So, so light, we say the light bends, but if you are the light, you think you're going in a straight line? Oh, wow. Right, so if you look along this direction, even if it curves down like that, it'll, it'll appear to you as that thing down here is right in front of you. Because you are traveling the shortest distance between those two points, and it's a straight line to you. Step back and you see the curvature in the fabric of space. So, so there you have it. Another way to think about it is, uh, E equals mc squared, energy and mass, and, um, and c squared is the speed of light. So, energy and mass are equivalent.

• 19:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you drive an electric car, let's say a Tesla, and then you fill it up, fill it up by charging the batteries, your car weighs slightly more for, for having charged batteries, given the energy that you put into the car than it did before you put in the energy. Okay, so that's the equals mc squared equation. So, you can, you can convert the energy of the photon into a mass. And then treat it as though it had that mass and then follow the equations uh there uh then forth. So, so there you have it. That's why.

• 19:57Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty wild.

• 19:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 19:58Chuck Nice?

  That's, that's so cool. So that's, that's why when you look at a black hole, you see the light around the black hole, but you're not really, that's not light from the black hole.

• 20:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not black. It's light that was behind it that got curved.

• 20:11Chuck Nice?

  That got curved.

• 20:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So my head is the black hole and the light here came up and around and then it came out the other side and you're over here watching it and you saw something on the other side of the black hole and that works in all directions around the black hole. So in that famous photo of the black hole that made headlines.

• 20:26Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 20:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, uh, several months back, what you saw is light surrounding the black hole having come around it. So you see the shadow of the black hole.

• 20:35Chuck Nice?

  Sweet.

• 20:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a sense. Yeah.

• 20:37Chuck Nice?

  Very, very cool. Okay.

• 20:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's light. So that's light being affected by the, the force of gravity.

• 20:43Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 20:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:44Chuck Nice?

  All right. Lucid Potato.

• 20:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 20:52Chuck Nice?

  Okay, Lucid Potato wants to know, what are your thoughts on NASA's recent remarks on the possibility of parallel universes? I'd ask a lot of questions if I could, but this has been bugging me since I don't trust news articles.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. So there was a, an experiment conducted where they're looking for particles from space. These are called cosmic rays. They're called rays, but they're actually high energy particles and they collide with the atmosphere and they make a stream of other particles and you can measure them. And we've been doing this for like, since back in the, the, since the early 19th century. Okay. So these particles are coming through. Well, okay, this apparatus that's measuring these particles found a particle come from the opposite direction. Okay?

• 21:40Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They, they didn't expect that.

• 21:43Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 21:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One interpretation is that this particle is in fact from another universe where time moves backwards and you're watching this particle travel backwards through time.

• 22:00Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 22:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it had already passed you, but you're seeing it move backwards through the other direction. Okay? Or there was a glitch in their apparatus. Okay. I mean.

• 22:14Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 22:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's 99 explanations you can put into this before you're compelled to have to say, this is a parallel universe where time moves backwards and that particle happens to be detected. That's all I'm saying. So what makes headlines is the one that gets the click. That's the clickbait. Okay? If it's probably something wrong with the apparatus, or they made a mistake, or whatever, that doesn't get the clicks. So I think on that level, who's, what's the person's name? What's his name?

• 22:46Chuck Nice?

  Lucid Potato.

• 22:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On that level, Mr. Potato, you are, you should be skeptical of the magnitude of news headlines when they are reporting a scientific result. In almost every case, if you read the original scientific paper and look at how they couched the explanations, it will have nowhere near the hyperbole of how the newspaper article was written. Because scientists are trained to be conservative in our estimates. So.

• 23:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but like you said, that is not a very good news story, you know? Could be a parallel universe, probably a malfunctioning piece of equipment.

• 23:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, I'm just, there's a ranking of things. You know, if you can have an extraordinary explanation for something, you better have extraordinary confidence that the whole supply chain of your, of your experiment was working. That's all.

• 23:50Chuck Nice?

  All right, cool. I, I see here in the chat that.

• 23:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got another one?

• 23:56Chuck Nice?

  Rishab, Rishab.

• 23:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rishab, uh huh, okay.

• 24:00Chuck Nice?

  Says this, it's a really cool question. How is the universe 92 billion light years across when the Big Bang happened only 14 billion years ago?

• 24:12Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 24:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 24:15Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 24:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so let me put some context in that ninety-two billion light years across. Okay, so you cannot see forty-five billion light years in one direction or the other. Right, that'd be forty-five billion that way, forty-five billion that way. This plus this equals to get you the ninety or forty-six, right? So, no, you can't see that because their light has not reached you yet. Okay, we calculate that is the current size of the universe based on the rate of expansion from the Big Bang. Okay, so what's the farthest you can see? The farthest you can see is fourteen billion light years away.

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? That galaxy that's giving you light, well, thirteen, the universe is fourteen billion years old, the first galaxy light is like a twelve billion, but for this, for the answer to this question, that distinction doesn't matter. Put a galaxy at twelve, thirteen billion light years away, we are seeing that galaxy being born, that its light is now just reaching us. Okay? All right. Right now, in this instant, that galaxy is forty-five billion light years away. In this instant, if you could see everything all at once, that's where that galaxy is. That's why you would say the diameter of the universe is ninety, is ninety-two billion light years across.

• 25:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the horizon is smaller than that. That's, that's why, that's how you get those two numbers.

• 25:51Chuck Nice?

  Okay, all right. And, and, okay, that makes sense. So, but I think what he's, or he or she, I can't, what, what he's also saying is, if, if light is time, like the passage of time in order for a light year, you're talking about time as well, then how did you get so many more light years in the totality, even though you're only seeing the horizon?

• 26:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, no, so what you see is not all that's out there. That, that's my only point.

• 26:29Chuck Nice?

  Uh, there you go.

• 26:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so it'd be, what's, what's, what would be a good example of that? Um, let's say, uh, let's say a turtle had a message on its back.

• 26:41Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 26:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It said, uh, "The universe just began." Okay, and you put it in St. Louis and have it walk towards New York. Okay?

• 26:49Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 26:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'll be a long while before that happens.

• 26:52Chuck Nice?

  About forty-five billion years.

• 26:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no. It'll take the turtle thirteen billion years to get to you.

• 27:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but what has happened to St. Louis? That it's expanding beyond that horizon. It is something, it is, and you, you put in the model, the model, the expansion of the universe.

• 27:13Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Puts that far beyond.

• 27:15Chuck Nice?

  And that's, that's really where the, that's really what he, uh...

• 27:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, the model could have been different.

• 27:21Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it could have been even farther than that.

• 27:22Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, right.

• 27:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we have, we, we have modeled the expansion of the universe, and that's where it get, that's where you have it.

• 27:27Chuck Nice?

  So, it's not about the fourteen, uh, point eight billion light-years. It's about the expansion of the universe.

• 27:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 27:35Chuck Nice?

  That's really what it's about. Cool.

• 27:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got it.

• 27:37Chuck Nice?

  And is that, is that model in, in also...

• 27:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it's modeled just by the rate of the expansion of the universe. You see how fast it was expanding early on, and then a little later, and a little, so, so you look at that expansion rate between then and now.

• 27:50Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 27:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Light is still doing its own thing, but what is the gal... So, in other words, the moment that galaxy emitted the light from thirteen billion years ago, the light is en route.

• 28:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and it's decoupled from what the rest of the universe is doing.

• 28:03Chuck Nice?

  It's a mobile post office.

• 28:07Chuck Nice?

  They put the lec, the letter, the letter is on the way, but the post office is still headed off. Yeah, that's kinda cool.

• 28:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. There you go.

• 28:15Chuck Nice?

  That's it. Alright, there you go. Alright, let's go to, um...

• 28:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go into like, soundbite mode.

• 28:21Chuck Nice?

  Samirin R., we running out of time already?

• 28:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, but I just wanna get back into that rhythm.

• 28:26Chuck Nice?

  Alright, let's get back in the rhythm. Samirin says this, uh, congratulations, coming to us from YouTube. "Congratulations, Dr. Tyson, on one million, uh, subscribers. Hey Chuck, uh, the, when the James Webb Telescope is finally in orbit and operational, what kind of discoveries will it expect to make, and which discovery are you most excited for?"

• 28:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, excellent. So, a, a false assumption was made that it would just be in orbit like the Hubble Telescope? This is gonna be a million miles on the other side of the moon.

• 28:56Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 28:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, it will be orbiting the Earth, but in a way that is out at that distance, okay? So it's not like astronauts, if something goes wrong with that telescope, ain't nobody going to fix it.

• 29:07Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 29:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not gonna be serviced, it's not gonna have hero astronauts replacing the lenses, or the detectors, or the computer chips.

• 29:15Chuck Nice?

  No Bruce Willis.

• 29:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, saving us from an asteroid, I presume, is your reference there. So, uh, so, that telescope, here you go, you ready? Newly born galaxies, thirteen billion years ago, okay? Had emitted a lot of, uh, uh, most of the energy was high, high-energy light emitted by these galaxies, mostly from the birth of brand-new high-mass stars. A lot of blue light is coming from them. However, that light has been moving through an expanding universe, and that light has red-shifted. It has become lower-energy light.

• 30:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it shifted from blue to go backwards through it, so it's, um, what is it? Green, and then orange, and, uh, yeah, uh, no, yellow, green, uh, and then red, and then infrared, you go through the whole spectrum. It has shifted so much that the principal light from those galaxies is now in the infrared part of the spectrum. This telescope was conceived and designed to observe red-shifted light from galaxies born at the beginning of the universe.

• 30:38Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 30:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is brilliant. Brilliant.

• 30:43Chuck Nice?

  Wow, that is, that is really brilliant. So you, it's, it's almost like a little... A little visual time machine to go back and look at the near beginnings.

• 30:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And because we know, we see, originally, we were just discovering stuff with our normal optical telescopes. And it's like, okay, um, is it there? Is it not? I don't know. What am I looking at? Let me decode it. Now we know what that light would look like, even though we have no data. If there are galaxies being born, this telescope will see them in the infrared because we know what galaxies would look like being born. So it is the invocation of very deep understanding of the history of the universe and the formation of stars and the formation of galaxies. To have the audacity to build a telescope just to sneak in and observe that in the way no other telescope has done before.

• 31:37Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 31:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, because it's sensitive to infrared, it can also look deep into gas clouds that are nearby. Cause infrared penetrates gas clouds in the way visible light does not. And so you can look and see stellar nurseries, stars being born, planets taking shape in the discs around the stars being formed. So it'll be hugely useful for nearby gas clouds as well as the origin of the universe itself. James Webb Space Telescope. Can't wait.

• 32:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's pretty exciting. And it will also be able to see Predator. So.

• 32:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 32:10Chuck Nice?

  All right, nothing.

• 32:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, because Predator sees infrared.

• 32:14Chuck Nice?

  It's near for real.

• 32:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You.

• 32:16Chuck Nice?

  See, see what I did there? Okay.

• 32:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I had to like, okay.

• 32:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it was, it was a walk.

• 32:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Predator the movie.

• 32:22Chuck Nice?

  It was a walk around the block, man.

• 32:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a total walk around three blocks.

• 32:26Chuck Nice?

  That was a walk around the block. Okay.

• 32:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Predator the movie.

• 32:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was an alien who happens to be about the same size as humans and walks on two legs, has two arms and a head and eyes, nose and mouth, but he's from outer space.

• 32:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, we started. And Arnold, Arnold and others.

• 32:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, you make fun of Arnold.

• 32:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You make fun of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Okay, English is not his first language. If, if he speaks, however, however much you make fun of him, he speaks English better than you have ever spoken German.

• 33:09Chuck Nice?

  Well, this is true. And I'm sure he could pronounce these names. Jack, I could pronounce the names better than you. Okay? Listen to me, Jack. You screw up the names all the time. I am pronouncing better than you. Okay? So, I'm sure.

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anyway, so he starred in the movie. We had some other sort of muscled, um, uh, soldier types with very powerful guns, and it's they against Predator. And Predator, you find, you got to see what Predator saw, and Predator saw in very low-res infrared images. We have detectors that have way better resolution than Predator saw when you saw just this sort of glowing heat source moving in front of them.

• 33:53Chuck Nice?

  There you go. Alright.

• 34:04Chuck Nice?

  It's time to give a Patreon shout out to the following Patreon patrons. Chris Goschorn and Russell Koenicki. Guys, thank you so much for your assistance as we make our way across the cosmos. We could not do this show without you. And for those of you listening who would like your very own Patreon shout out, go to patreon.com/startalkradio and support us.

• 34:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. We are in the middle of a live cosmic queries. So let's jump right back in.

• 34:42Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here we go. Uh, I love this question from Extra Crispy Colonel. He says this. "How plausible do you think the idea that it is possible for light to reach around the universe and reach us again? For example, I've heard on the show from people like Janet Levin that it is possible that some distant galaxies might be our galaxies billions of years ago. The light is just reaching us again."

• 35:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so you need a different kind of geometry of the universe. Uh, what's his person? Mr. Crispy, what is his name?

• 35:16Chuck Nice?

  Extra Crispy Colonel.

• 35:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Colonel, okay, Mr. Colonel?

• 35:19Chuck Nice?

  Um, sorry. Mr. Colonel.

• 35:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Uh, no, you, so it needs a different kind of geometry. And, but, so the point is, there exists a geometry where the light will go out from our universe, curve in the curved fabric of the entire universe, come back, and then you can see that light from this direction, and it would be our own galaxy. But the, the shape of our universe is not one that allows that. But people have posed that question and attempted to answer that by looking at the birthday photo of the universe. This is the famous cosmic microwave background, the CMB. It is a, it is a background of microwave light.

• 36:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So here's another redshift thing. That light started out as visible light, like the surface of the sun. It is very rich in visible light, and over the expansion of the universe, it has redshifted way through, came out the other side, went down through the infrared, and it landed in microwaves. That's how redshifted it got. And so that is a record of the structure of the universe when that light was released. That's when the universe was about 380,000 years old. Very, like, that's a baby picture right there. All right, relative to the 14 billion year age of the universe that we have today. So there exists shapes of the universe where that could happen.

• 36:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, and, but we're not in one of them, but it, that's, it would be a fun, interesting universe.

• 36:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's very cool.

• 36:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, we had, well, Chuck, was it one of our other cosmic queries? It might have been a Patreon cosmic query where someone suggested, uh, can we set up a sequence of mirrors in space? And so you can see our past and there's nothing preventing that. So if there was a perfect mirror thirty-three million light years away. Okay?

• 37:21Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 37:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we took out our telescopes and looked at that mirror. We would see Earth from how long ago?

• 37:29Chuck Nice?

  Thirty-three million years?

• 37:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 37:32Chuck Nice?

  Wait, thirty-three million light years away?

• 37:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 37:35Chuck Nice?

  Check. Wait, what am I missing?

• 37:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Check. Don't make me go in there and slap you. Okay, so there's a mirror thirty-three million light years away. Okay?

• 37:45Chuck Nice?

  Oh, sixty-six.

• 37:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 37:47Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm sorry.

• 37:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 37:49Chuck Nice?

  I forgot about the mirror.

• 37:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a mirror.

• 37:52Chuck Nice?

  I forgot the mirror. We're looking in the mirror. I missed.

• 37:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a mirror.

• 37:56Chuck Nice?

  I missed that part. I missed the mirror.

• 37:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it goes out there and it comes back. So the light that we see now is like the left Earth sixty-six million years ago. Okay? And that's just on the cusp of when the dinosaurs were taken out by an asteroid and possibly other natural forces on Earth like supervolcanoes. So, so if you had a series of mirrors, you could in principle see the history of the Earth.

• 38:22Chuck Nice?

  You could see your own past.

• 38:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. You have to preset those up and then get back here. That's part of the problem.

• 38:27Chuck Nice?

  Well, yeah.

• 38:30Chuck Nice?

  We'll work that part out, you know?

• 38:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So, no, no, think about it. If, if you put a mirror thirty-three million light years away, you have to travel there. At the speed of light, we wait for you, you come back sixty-six million years later. Now you'll only see what Earth looked like when you left. Not in our past, because you can't see into the past of when you first put up the mirror.

• 38:57Chuck Nice?

  And, and this is.

• 38:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unless, what, unless you can travel faster than light.

• 39:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 39:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And wormhole will allow that, by the way. I can't wait till we have wormholes, really.

• 39:07Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah. Uh, well, this, this is why we have to shore up social security.

• 39:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so when you get back, you'll still be here for me.

• 39:20Chuck Nice?

  Alright, okay, okay, here we go. How about this one?

• 39:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said I'd give soundbite answers and I haven't been.

• 39:25Chuck Nice?

  Eh, I don't care. They're good answers.

• 39:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 39:27Chuck Nice?

  I don't like your soundbite answers, I'm gonna be honest. I mean, they're all-

• 39:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's try one, try one. Let's try one.

• 39:31Chuck Nice?

  Alright, here we go for a soundbite. Um, this is Cesar Ariz, who wants to know this. Uh, "If the universe is expanding and galaxies are moving away from each other, how come the Milky Way will collide with Andromeda? Shouldn't they be moving farther away from one another?"

• 39:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ahhh. Galaxies that are near each other have speeds that are greater than the expansion speed of the universe at those close distances. So their orbital speeds override the expansion of the universe, and that's true for our solar system. It's true for nearby galaxies that are nearby each other. That's why we have galaxies colliding all across the universe. These are galaxies that already started nearby each other. Now, uh, I gotta break soundbite mode and give you something that will prevent you from having restful sleep this evening.

• 40:24Chuck Nice?

  Uh-oh, here we go.

• 40:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. You've heard of dark energy?

• 40:28Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 40:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So dark energy is a pressure in a vacuum of space causing an acceleration of the expansion.

• 40:34Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 40:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That acceleration is, if it is, if it is caused by a pressure in the vacuum, then the more vacuum you have, that is, the more the universe expands, then the more of this, uh, the more of this dark energy you have relative to gravity. Because gravity is thinning, okay? As things get farther, gravity gets thinner and thinner, and if you live in the vacuum of space as dark energy, you win. And you not only win, you not only beat gravity, your rate of expansion becomes exponential.

• 41:10Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 41:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A word we've heard a lot about in the coronavirus, okay? So, calculations show that in 10 to the 22 years from now, okay? The, the, the expansion, the accelerated expansion will be so severe that we'll have what's called the big rip.

• 41:32Chuck Nice?

  Oh yeah, that happened to me once on stage. It was terrible. Oh my god, it was so embarrassing. And you know, you gotta go on with the show, man. You know, you can't just say, "I'm sorry, guys, I gotta..."

• 41:46Chuck Nice?

  "Give me five minutes."

• 41:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it reaches a point where even the gravitational attraction of the planets and their moons, and the planets and the host star, and in a galaxy, and nearby galaxies, even those will not be able to stay together. And galaxies that would have collided would get ripped apart. Then it starts stripping planets from their host solar systems, their star systems. Then, it begins ripping matter apart. Okay, this is the big rip, and this accelerates. Okay, so the scenario I'm describing happens fast after you've waited that much time. Because the power of this rip, okay, manifests on large scales first, and then it's happening so much that the very fabric of space itself

• 42:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  feels it even on the small scales. And so it starts ripping apart solar systems, ripping apart matter. Then it rips apart atoms. Then...

• 42:45Chuck Nice?

  Game over, dude.

• 42:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Game over. Then it might even rip apart the particles themselves.

• 42:51Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's just terrible.

• 42:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The big rip. So this person wants two galaxies to spread apart? Be careful what you wish for.

• 43:00Chuck Nice?

  Wow, says Arthur. There you go, buddy. You opened a whole can of galaxies, didn't you? Holy moly. But, by the way, that's a really depressing thought.

• 43:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, just think about it. Just imagine that

• 43:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  beginning to happen

• 43:18Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 43:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Around you. Oh my gosh.

• 43:20Chuck Nice?

  Dude, that's the Thanos snap. It's like everything just, ugh. That's just terrible. That's terrible. Okay, here we go.

• 43:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Thanos saved some people. He didn't do that to everybody.

• 43:32Chuck Nice?

  That's true. Yeah, but see, the universe doesn't even have as much compassion as Thanos.

• 43:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanos did.

• 43:38Chuck Nice?

  Damn, universe? Damn, universe? You're cold.

• 43:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Universe...

• 43:44Chuck Nice?

  Absolute zero cold. Damn. Okay, here we go.

• 43:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. That was beautifully geeky. Chuck, I just want you to say. Because in the hood you say, "You know, that's cold."

• 43:55Chuck Nice?

  That's cold.

• 43:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Insult you. And then you say, "Yeah, that's so cold. That's absolute zero cold."

• 44:02Chuck Nice?

  Oh my god.

• 44:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can write, you can write a whole, a whole, a whole play on, on like really geeky street hoods.

• 44:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's so cool. Call it blurds.

• 44:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Blurds, yeah.

• 44:15Chuck Nice?

  Black nerds.

• 44:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Black nerds.

• 44:16Chuck Nice?

  That's so cool.

• 44:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, I think Saturday Night Live had a, had a skit about that.

• 44:20Chuck Nice?

  About black nerds?

• 44:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, in the street. They hang out on the street.

• 44:24Chuck Nice?

  I did not know that. Oh, I might have to look that up.

• 44:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Check that out, check that out.

• 44:27Chuck Nice?

  And you know what's funny? The one time in life when I'm home to watch Saturday Night Live, because I'm not allowed to go out, because I'm never home on Saturday nights. I'm always working. And there's no Saturday Night Live.

• 44:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They had a few in the Corona, had a few Corona verse episodes.

• 44:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay. All right. Uh, Hunter Coleman wants to know this. Could the fourth dimension be holding together the fabric of space, the one that we just talked about ripping all apart? For instance, in our 2D dimension being stuck on a flat surface that our 3D world makes up and holds together, is space the flat surface for us?

• 45:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it, it could be, but I don't require, I don't think it requires higher dimensions to contain us. It could just be that our life in three spatial dimensions, one time dimension, is the flat surface for the five, six, seven dimensional beings.

• 45:18Chuck Nice?

  But not, but not, doesn't necessitate that that is

• 45:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That that contains us.

• 45:23Chuck Nice?

  Holding us, right.

• 45:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. And I would say they would pity us for living in a mere four dimensions.

• 45:29Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 45:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As we would pity anyone that exists only drawn in a sheet of paper in 2D.

• 45:35Chuck Nice?

  That's so true.

• 45:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. All right, keep going. Lightning round. Five minutes, go.

• 45:38Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. Uh, Nebula Man 6,000, 60,007 says, would be, would it be possible to make your own man-made wormhole? Is it ever possible?

• 45:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So, so we know how to make a wormhole?

• 45:52Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 45:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, sorry. We know the mathematics of.

• 45:54Chuck Nice?

  Uh, okay.

• 45:57Chuck Nice?

  You got me really excited. I was like, what?

• 46:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oops, did I just?

• 46:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 46:03Chuck Nice?

  You gave up the tapes, Neil. It's too late. It's too late.

• 46:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, we don't know how to make a manhole. No, I prom- I mean, a wormhole. I promise, we don't know how. But on paper, we can describe it. But it turns out to configure matter and energy to open the hole is makes a very unstable conduit. And so we don't know how to keep it propped open. So that if you step in it, then it would collapse around you and no telling what that looks like. If it collapses around you.

• 46:31Chuck Nice?

  Ah, there you go.

• 46:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I have to tell this, I've said this probably the fifth time I've said it on StarTalk. I was in Charlotte Airport and going from a big plane to a little plane. I swear it's three miles to walk that distance. And this is early in the days of Twitter. And I thought I was cute. I tweeted about that and I said, you know, I can't wait for when we have wormholes, that when all gates are adjacent to one another. That'd be an awesome airport, right? You just sort of step and then you're there. And then someone replied, Dr. Tyson, if we have wormholes.

• 47:04Chuck Nice?

  You wouldn't need airports. But the wormhole is the airport, see?

• 47:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. All right.

• 47:11Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go.

• 47:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep going. A couple more.

• 47:13Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. Here we go. This is Ramen Sage who wants to know this. How recent is the information our telescopes giving us about anything up there? Since the light is a lot in the past, how are X-ray and other telescopes or even radio signals doing in this context of bringing us information?

• 47:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so we speak of things in the present, just because it's easier. In the same way you speak of the sun rising, even though Earth is rotating such that the sun comes in view above your local horizon. It's easier to say the sun rose, okay? In astrophysics, it's easier to say, oh, we observed the star blow up yesterday. Or this thing happened two days ago. Well, it happened way longer ago than that and the light is just reaching us. It just becomes very clumsy to say that. We have no way of knowing anything in the present moment. Because it takes light time to reach us. You can't even know what the sun is doing right now. If Thanos came in and removed the sun,

• 48:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  we would still be in orbit around the sun. You'd still feel the sun's rays. Everything would be the same for eight minutes and 20 seconds. You would have no idea there was no sun there. So we see things not as they are, but as they once were. And the farther away it is, the more ago it once was.

• 48:34Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 48:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we're just stuck with that. So in a way, everything we see in the universe is kind of like a ghost.

• 48:41Chuck Nice?

  It's all yesterday's news.

• 48:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in fact, there's an Italian movie called La Correspondenza.

• 48:46Chuck Nice?

  La Correspondenza.

• 48:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correspondent, the correspondent, j- j- correspondence. Jeremy Irons starred in it as an astrophysicist. And he, he, he had a, a terminal illness and he had a love interest and he would send her letters. Okay, but she didn't know he was dying and I think it was overseas or whatever. But he would send her letters so that after he died, she would still get letters.

• 49:13Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 49:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like stars that might have died long ago, but still sends you their love.

• 49:21Chuck Nice?

  It's kind of cruel, man.

• 49:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was an, no, it was an astrophysics love story.

• 49:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, like I said, it's kind of cruel.

• 49:29Chuck Nice?

  All right, one more. How about this one?

• 49:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One more, okay.

• 49:31Chuck Nice?

  Archer, uh, twelve, uh, one hundred twenty-three thousand says this. Do you believe in life on other planets?

• 49:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it's not about belief. Is, is there evidence? There's no evidence yet. What are we made of? Life on Earth, the most common ingredients in the universe is what life is made of. And I've said before, if we were made of like some isotope of bismuth, you would have good arguments and say, hey, life is special. Well, life is rare. Life is, we're made of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen. This stuff is the top four ingredients in the entire universe. So as we look for life, just because we haven't found it yet, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Okay, so, and by, by the way, how much of the universe have we looked?

• 50:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we quote Jill Tarter, uh, from the SETI Institute. Jill Tarter? Says, based on how much we've looked in the universe for life so far, to declare that there is no life would be like going to the ocean with a cup of water, with a empty glass, and you scoop up some water and look at it, say, there's no whales in the ocean.

• 50:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or no fish at all, right?

• 50:48Chuck Nice?

  No fish at all.

• 50:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how much, how much of the ocean you've looked at by scooping up a glass, that's how much of the, what we call parameter space of life in our galaxy that we have studied, that we have observed. So restricted by time, restricted by frequency, all these factors combined is like dipping a cup in the ocean. So, just because I, we haven't found it, doesn't mean every one of my people, astrophysicists have very high confidence to look for it on the expectation that one day we will find it. The real test is, and the scary and tantalizing part is, could there be intelligent life out there? And if there is, is it more intelligent than we are?

• 51:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would we even know it if we found it? Because as we've said, one thing is for sure, there is no sign of intelligent life on Earth.

• 51:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, I think we gotta stop it there.

• 51:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, damn, that's a shame. This was fun.

• 51:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. All right, and again, we welcome any and all Patreon members. Um, you're, you're part of our lifeblood. So Chuck, always good to have you.

• 51:57Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure, Neil, and yeah.

• 51:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I know we couldn't get to all of the thousand questions, of course, but, uh, you know, it's, that's how this goes.

• 52:05Chuck Nice?

  Well, that means we have to do it again. There you go.

• 52:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, bidding you, especially in the Corona-verse, to keep looking up. Signing off.