Staying Curious with William Shatner

What is the value of curiosity? Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with William Shatner to explore the nature of spacetime, Star Trek, human curiosity, loneliness, and more. How would warp drive work?

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I caught you as in Judgment at Nuremberg, 1963. I said, "I recognize that man." That's Sir William Shatner.

• 0:09William Shatner?

  Yes, but here's a guy with three names. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 0:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't be dumb. No, I'm talking about your name right now.

• 0:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill, welcome back to my office.

• 0:32William Shatner?

  Isn't it wonderful?

• 0:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 0:34William Shatner?

  A continuity.

• 0:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I love it. I love it. Thanks for coming back. You've been busy?

• 0:39William Shatner?

  Yeah, I've been busy, but you know, it's my pleasure to talk to you. A real pleasure.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, thank you.

• 0:43William Shatner?

  People ask you, "Can we interview you?" And I'll interview you. But to talk to you in your erudite way, it's just a pleasure.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it reminds me that you have a very active mind because we go everywhere.

• 0:57William Shatner?

  Right.

• 0:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which we're certainly going to do in the next few minutes, I promise you. So I just want to get some perfunctory things out of the way.

• 1:06William Shatner?

  Yes.

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just, I have to ask you, forgive me. You've been asked this a thousand times, but I have to ask.

• 1:13William Shatner?

  Thousand and one now?

• 1:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let it be a thousand and one. Which of all your episodes is your favorite of Star Trek?

• 1:23William Shatner?

  So somebody in your flight path.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stephen Hawking?

• 1:30William Shatner?

  Stephen Hawking. Asked me, I asked to interview him. And so we wrote the questions out, sent them on to Cambridge, and then I followed it with an airplane and sat in his house. And we talked. I asked him the questions. I forgot the questions, but there were things like dark, the black holes and things that he was...

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's his expertise.

• 1:54William Shatner?

  It was his expertise. So we talked for maybe a half an hour. And then the interview was over. And he had said, asked me, you know, three, four questions, "And then I want to ask Shatner a question." So now we were at the end of the interview. I said, "Dr. Hawking, you want to ask me a question?" Because I thought, you know, I've read a little bit about black holes and the dynamics and the event horizon.

• 2:23William Shatner?

  So I thought he's gonna ask me about time. I'm fascinated by the, where does time go? I wrote a song about where does time go? I said, yes, sir, what's your question for me? And he said, with a little bit of a pause, what's your favorite episode? That one of the great minds of the 20th century wanted to know my favorite episode. I don't have an answer for that. I mean, first of all, I don't remember. But those that I do remember and everybody likes would be my favorites. There's a, maybe ten.

• 2:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That meant your work served its purpose in that way.

• 3:00William Shatner?

  Well, it was the subject matter of things that, there was a wonderfully moving one. I forgot, something across the river about I had to go back in time and save somebody and maybe alter the future which contained me. And that question of going back in time is always there. Like, where does time go? Can you go back in time? Can you take away what has happened and try and allow it to happen again if you had the ability to go back in time? So that was very moving, I thought. I don't know how well compared the drama was, but the concept of going back in time

• 3:44William Shatner?

  because of necessity of something you love, you need, somebody died and you needed to change that now. And you have the ability to go back in time and you go back in time and change what happened. But at the same time, you've changed the past, but the past has now changed the future. So do you exist? It was a wonderful, wonderful.

• 4:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 4:04William Shatner?

  Concept.

• 4:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good. So you, you became a fan of the, the theme and the idea of the show, regardless of how it was acted or anything else.

• 4:14William Shatner?

  Well, that's, that's the secret of science fiction, isn't it?

• 4:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it is.

• 4:17William Shatner?

  The secret of science fiction is, now you and I know, is about human stories placed in the future.

• 4:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stories that you might not even be able to tell in the present because people can't relate to it.

• 4:30William Shatner?

  Well, you can't go back in the future, but you can sacrifice for love. You can die protecting the person you love. How, you know, that's, that's got ramification, hasn't it? If you protect somebody you love and die in the process, what have you done?

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, if memory serves, that was sitting on the edge of forever.

• 4:51William Shatner?

  I believe.

• 4:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which was a famous story.

• 4:52William Shatner?

  Yeah.

• 4:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By Harlan Ellison, a famous.

• 4:54William Shatner?

  Oh, that's wild.

• 4:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, science fiction writer.

• 4:57William Shatner?

  Yeah, and I love, I loved Harlan. Uh, he was close to the show and wrote other, other shows.

• 5:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, a testament to the power of that storytelling was the sourcing of these stories from people who thought deeply about.

• 5:12William Shatner?

  The human condition.

• 5:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The human condition, how you place that story in the future.

• 5:16William Shatner?

  Exactly.

• 5:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because so many stories, if you put it in the present, no one would relate to it.

• 5:21William Shatner?

  No, well, you can, because I'd like to, oh, God, I wish I hadn't done that.

• 5:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 5:25William Shatner?

  Or, you know, I stepped on the mine. If I hadn't stepped this way, it wouldn't have blown up.

• 5:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 5:30William Shatner?

  I wish I could go back and watch my feet a little, a little closer, but you can't do that. But in science fiction, you go back and not step on the mine. So it's interesting.

• 5:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Star Trek lasted three seasons? And then it was canceled?

• 5:45William Shatner?

  Yeah.

• 5:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then minutes after that, we walk on the moon. What's up with that? What, what?

• 5:53William Shatner?

  You know, it was minutes later. It was a short time later.

• 5:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 5:57William Shatner?

  That I, now broke for a variety of personal reasons, mostly divorce, uh, was lying in a camper, uh, that, uh, on the bed of a truck that I had bought. And I was living in the camper touring summer theaters. And I'm now in the Hamptons, in a pasture in the Hamptons.

• 6:24William Shatner?

  And I'm lying on the little bed in the, in the camper with a four by four inch television set on my chest. I'm looking through the window of the camper at the moon. Armstrong is walking on the moon, and I'm seeing it on this little four by four television set, whereas, oh, several months earlier, I had been to NASA and had adulation.

• 6:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You were a, a, an honor.

• 6:53William Shatner?

  I was the actor, coming to, uh, to, uh, wherever it was, uh, in Florida.

• 7:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kennedy Space Center.

• 7:02William Shatner?

  Kennedy Spence, Space Center, and.

• 7:06William Shatner?

  I was on a stage with the lem. And in fact, got into the lem, the lunar excursion module that they used, that they walked out onto the moon from. And, and looking up at this myriad of lights and switches, and then coming out of the lem onto the stage, and they had gathered a thousand engineers and applauding. So I had all this adulation, and now, several months later, I'm broke inside a camper, watching this thing that I thought maybe had a little bit to do with that. Because I wrote on the model spaceship that they had bought, "Oh, look at this, we got a spaceship for it."

• 7:50William Shatner?

  And I wrote, "I'll see you on the moon." And there I was, looking at this thing, and I'm thinking, "Wow."

• 7:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, don't underestimate, even though the show was canceled, what seeds it might have planted.

• 8:04William Shatner?

  Well, little did anybody know. The show is canceled, it's gone, bye, and we're all off as a series is canceled. Every series sooner or later is canceled. We were canceled after three years, and we all went our disparate ways. I went to the Summer Theater. And, and that's like months later, because it went into syndication.

• 8:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Syndication.

• 8:31William Shatner?

  Syndication. It became, Star Trek became popular, and they asked me to come back.

• 8:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the fact is, the seeds were planted, but they were not appreciated until they germinated.

• 8:43William Shatner?

  That's right.

• 8:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there was a several year gap.

• 8:46William Shatner?

  In France and Germanated. They France-nated and Germanated, and United States. Yes, yes, it went into syndication and became popular.

• 8:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And tap roots were formed, and there was no stopping it then. At all.

• 8:59William Shatner?

  Exactly, it became.

• 9:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm just reminded that the Star Trek the movie was nineteen seventy-nine. That's just ten years after it was cancelled.

• 9:08William Shatner?

  Right.

• 9:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and meanwhile, there are other versions of Star Trek that kick in.

• 9:11William Shatner?

  Innumerable versions of Star Trek.

• 9:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, so I just want to thank you for, for helping the country and the world think about space as a natural next step.

• 9:26William Shatner?

  Well, is it a natural?

• 9:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, if we feel it, then we make it so.

• 9:32William Shatner?

  Well, wait a minute, yes, we feel it, but we're gonna go to the moon, no question.

• 9:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're going back to the moon again.

• 9:37William Shatner?

  We're going back to the moon, we're gonna build a thing on the moon.

• 9:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, a little base in the South Pole.

• 9:42William Shatner?

  A base, and we're gonna put things together, we're gonna get some manufacturing done. I don't know, perhaps you do the kind of manufacturing that they'll do in their weightlessness.

• 9:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You wanna be able to make some of your own parts. So the moon, you can't breathe the air because there's no air. You can't, so you need a little more.

• 10:00William Shatner?

  You're constricted.

• 10:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you need a little more, you gotta be a little more self.

• 10:05William Shatner?

  Energizing.

• 10:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, you need, you need what NASA calls ISRU, in situ resource utilization.

• 10:12William Shatner?

  Right.

• 10:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so they're gonna wanna build a little.

• 10:14William Shatner?

  Well, hopefully there's water there.

• 10:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 10:16William Shatner?

  And bring everything else.

• 10:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why they're going to the South Pole for that, for that, so.

• 10:20William Shatner?

  Do you think there is water there?

• 10:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, we're pretty sure, that's not a thing.

• 10:22William Shatner?

  Well, it's ice, but I mean, is there enough there?

• 10:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'll tell you why. So, on the moon's South Pole, we have craters. Imagine this crater has a complete rim on it.

• 10:33William Shatner?

  Okay.

• 10:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is just a three-point hole.

• 10:35William Shatner?

  Struck by an asteroid?

• 10:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Something hit an asteroid, you know, the moon's been struck before. So, imagine this has a full rim, and we're in the South Pole. When you're in the poles, not only on Earth but also on the moon, the sun, the sun never gets very high above the horizon. Yeah, it never gets very high. So there are craters on the South Pole where the crater rim shadows the bottom of the crater.

• 11:00William Shatner?

  Okay.

• 11:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the sun never reaches the bottom of the crater. It is literally. Where the sun don't shine, okay? So, the moon has been hit by asteroids and comets. Comets are a lot of water. Water will go up and fall back to the surface. If it's sunlit, it evaporates away. If it falls in here, it's called a cold trap. The water molecule falls in here and never escapes. Ever, for billions of years. So the craters on the south pole of the moon have slowly accumulated water. And water's gonna be a very important ingredient for the new travelers to the moon. And that's why we're targeting places where the sun don't-

• 11:41William Shatner?

  I understand that. Do you think there'll be enough water for an industry?

• 11:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For billions of years of comet impacts? I think we're expecting.

• 11:49William Shatner?

  Right.

• 11:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're expecting.

• 11:51William Shatner?

  Tell me, do you think-

• 11:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But who's conducting this interview? Who?

• 11:57William Shatner?

  I'm having a great conversation with you.

• 11:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go ahead.

• 11:59William Shatner?

  Let me ask you another question.

• 12:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go ahead.

• 12:01William Shatner?

  That hasn't occurred to me up until now. And that is, the water-

• 12:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 12:08William Shatner?

  What we think of as pure water, purified water. We drink in our bottles. We're gonna drink a bottle of water with no chemicals in it. How polluted is that water from a raw asteroid?

• 12:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, first of all, what we think of as pure water here is not what we're drinking. There's usually some minerals in it that give it some kind of texture and flavor. You want pure water, you'd have to drink distilled water.

• 12:34William Shatner?

  Right.

• 12:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's pure H2O through and through. But nobody does that. You know why? You do that, it sucks the minerals out of your body so that the mineral balance matches the water you just consumed and your body.

• 12:46William Shatner?

  So you suck the goodness out of your body?

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The goodness out of your body. So there has to be some mineral content-

• 12:51William Shatner?

  So you'd have to add that.

• 12:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta add that.

• 12:53William Shatner?

  Would that be pure water, do you think, there? Will it have been distilled?

• 12:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's what you do. Bottle a liter of it, bring it back to Earth, sell it. Moon water.

• 13:02William Shatner?

  Well, wait a minute.

• 13:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can make a fast buck.

• 13:05William Shatner?

  When they landed-

• 13:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 13:07William Shatner?

  There was no water there.

• 13:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, they brought everything with them.

• 13:10William Shatner?

  No, no. There must have been, uh, prior to their going there, some suspicion that there was water on the moon.

• 13:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, not where we went for Apollo.

• 13:21William Shatner?

  That's what I'm asking.

• 13:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no one went, this has been full sunlight. Any water molecules there will vibrate and escape.

• 13:28William Shatner?

  Okay. So they knew there was no water where they landed?

• 13:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They brought all the water they were gonna use.

• 13:33William Shatner?

  Right.

• 13:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's correct. And now we know how to recycle water, as in the space station. So your sweat, your pee, your spit gets filtered. Sounds delicious. Your poop, okay, unless you poop rocks. There's liquid in all of these body secretions that they then, you put it through through the purifying machine and out comes the water again. It's a water molecule, it's very stable. But my question is, what quality do you think the water has in those? It won't matter because you can turn it into the quality you need. There are filters, we have, uh, we can distill it. Or add to it. Or add to it correctly.

• 14:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's gonna be, you're gonna get, you're gonna be on the moon, you say, oh, this tastes a little metal. A little moonlight. A little moony. It's a little moony water.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  I'm Kais from Bangladesh and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 14:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do they break down water to make fuel? Well, so NASA knows, or has very strong suspicions that on the South Pole, there's water deep in the craters where the sun never shines. Well, you can do a couple of things with water, many things, but top two, you can drink it. You can drink it and that's good. You don't have to bring water to the moon for your sustenance. But also, if you put it in, there's something called, you can dissociate. So there are devices where you add energy to the system and it'll break apart. Add energy? Yeah, yeah, you need a way. Like electrical energy? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's one way.

• 15:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a way to do this so that you break apart the hydrogen and the oxygen. Because you know water is H2O. Once you separate them.

• 15:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh. Keep them apart. Keep them apart until the time arises where you want to bring them back together. Because the moment you bring them back together, it is highly exothermic. It releases huge amounts of energy and that is ex-

• 15:54William Shatner?

  How does that work? If you separate them with energy? Do you give them more energy in separation?

• 16:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so there's no such thing as a free lunch. So how much energy does it take to separate the hydrogen and oxygen?

• 16:06William Shatner?

  Right.

• 16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The same energy you're gonna get back when they come together.

• 16:08William Shatner?

  I see.

• 16:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there's no free lunch there.

• 16:10William Shatner?

  So.

• 16:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you have to-

• 16:12William Shatner?

  So how does that work?

• 16:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have to build a whole factory to rip them apart. And the oxygen goes here and the hydrogen goes there. Put them in separate tanks. Then, you want to launch back to Earth. You feed fuel tanks as part of your rocket assembly. And then have a nozzle that brings them together. And then you get exhaust-

• 16:31William Shatner?

  Why is it then making water?

• 16:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is. Water is the byproduct of that process.

• 16:37William Shatner?

  But that huge flame, why isn't-

• 16:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the energy of the, of the chemical reaction.

• 16:43William Shatner?

  I see.

• 16:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the exhaust is water.

• 16:46William Shatner?

  No.

• 16:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. Yes, it's as pure, as pure as it gets.

• 16:51William Shatner?

  So.

• 16:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so we can do that on the moon that's in situ resource utilization.

• 16:57William Shatner?

  Fantastic. We humans have learned to use some of the principles that we've discovered in, in, in the universe.

• 17:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yes. Let me say that even deeper. Oh, yeah. This is, this is what makes physics so useful. When you know a law of physics, you can do things even if you've never seen it before. Cause you know it will succumb to the laws of physics in whatever way you need it to, to get the job done. But the problem and the possibility is those explosive qualities. It's highly dangerous to work with those things. It is, but if you're good, it's not a problem. And by the way, these reactions are not unfamiliar to you. You've had these heat packs, maybe, where you slap them together and they get warm, and you put it on your joints to warm them up.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's an exothermic reaction, not nearly as powerful as bringing hydrogen and oxygen together. But nonetheless, and it works the other way as well. And we've learned that here on Earth. Yeah, chemists, yeah, yeah, yeah. And others, you can slap it together and it gets cold. It's an endothermic reaction, it's sucking energy out of the environment. Yeah, yeah, isn't science great? Science, science is romantic. Speaking of that, Bill, there's a film about you out there right now. It's about you. Yeah. You can call me Bill. Right. Which is something you never actually said to me. I didn't feel unneeded to. You're such a friendly guy.

• 18:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We corresponded for 20 years back. I occasionally drop you a very simple text or an email. I caught you in Judgment at Nuremberg, 1963. I said, I recognize that man. That's Sir William Shatner. Yes, but here's a guy with three names, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Don't be dumb, no, I'm talking about your name right now. So I popped you a note and you kindly replied, you say, oh my gosh, that was like, you know, centuries ago. Yeah, I recognize that name, deGrasse. It's a legendary family name, yes? That's a whole other, this interview's about you, not about me.

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in that, what impressed me, I was impressed but not surprised that...

• 19:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It wasn't just about this happened to me when I was this age and there was that. No, it was here are my thoughts on the world. That sometimes distract me, but always enlighten me.

• 19:39William Shatner?

  How presumptuous of me to think that my thoughts on the world would be of interest to somebody like yourself.

• 19:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, except that you have a very different path through life. Bill Nye is famous for saying, everyone out there knows something that you don't. No matter who they are.

• 19:57William Shatner?

  It's the same thing I say in, in working with other people. Everybody has their story.

• 20:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody's got a story.

• 20:04William Shatner?

  And if you can uncover that story.

• 20:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or yeah, reveal it in a way that can benefit others, then why not?

• 20:11William Shatner?

  Then you got oxygen and nitrogen.

• 20:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And oxygen and hydrogen together. So a good filmmaker will do this. They can find those gems and bring it forth. And there's certain themes of the film that were just sort of intriguingly philosophical.

• 20:25William Shatner?

  You're talking about the film?

• 20:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so I'm talking about this, this, this documentary on you.

• 20:31William Shatner?

  Right.

• 20:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you reflected on whether one of the, I got a list here. It's like, are electrons lonely? It's an interesting thought. Are electrons lonely?

• 20:46William Shatner?

  Well, well, are they? Are they looking for something or someone to unite with?

• 20:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They can, but if they're part of an atom.

• 20:57William Shatner?

  Well, we've got to, we can't have them coalescing, consorting, consorting with other elements. We have to have them apart to have them lonely. Is an electron looking for a resting place?

• 21:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At all times, because it has, it has an electrical charge. So it either wants to go away from something else over here that has the same charge, or towards this thing over here that has an opposite charge. We learn in physics that every electron is identical.

• 21:35William Shatner?

  What?

• 21:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what does it mean for an electron to be lonely if every other electron is exactly like itself?

• 21:46William Shatner?

  I'm trying to put, when I say those things. As a non-scientist, but also as somebody looking for

• 21:58William Shatner?

  basic truths that I know.

• 22:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:01William Shatner?

  Like, I believe everybody's lonely.

• 22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why do you believe that?

• 22:07William Shatner?

  Because we're born alone and-

• 22:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but I lead a life, and I meet people, and I have friends, and a wife, and kids.

• 22:16William Shatner?

  But how attached is that? Or are you lonely and your wife dies, you breathe, but you go on and find out-

• 22:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you confusing lonely with being alone? These are two different concepts, two different emotional states.

• 22:36William Shatner?

  Well, if you're alone-

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When I'm writing, I want to be alone. I'm sure it's true with you.

• 22:41William Shatner?

  Then you're occupied, and your mind is working somewhere else.

• 22:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that doesn't mean I'm not alone.

• 22:47William Shatner?

  Well, it does.

• 22:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm accompanied by words.

• 22:50William Shatner?

  Exactly, and thoughts.

• 22:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, words and thoughts.

• 22:52William Shatner?

  So this is all going through in your writing and saying, "That's not bad, that's pretty good." That deserves the name of Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 22:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:58William Shatner?

  But now you've finished, however, you've written down your thoughts.

• 23:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, there's a great quote about that, I forgot who, forgive me. "It's no great work of writing is ever finished, it just comes due."

• 23:14William Shatner?

  So that indicates loneliness.

• 23:18William Shatner?

  It's never finished. You get up from the desk, and you say, "Wow, that's it." No, it's not finished.

• 23:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, I've got to do more, but I've got to-

• 23:26William Shatner?

  So you're alone, and you've got to go back. So you see your wife, you see your kids and all that. But aren't you alone with those thoughts you're thinking about?

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You speak of it, let's even assume you're on to something there. Allow me to suggest that-

• 23:42William Shatner?

  That's a polite way of saying you're wrong.

• 23:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Allow me to suggest that when I am alone, or lonely, I'm more introspective than at any other time. And so maybe we all need periods of loneliness.

• 24:02William Shatner?

  Yeah, but that's not what I-

• 24:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that we can understand ourselves better.

• 24:05William Shatner?

  No, that's not what I'm referring to. We all have periods of being alone, interrupted by an association of some kind.

• 24:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 24:14William Shatner?

  A dog, or a wife, or a child, or a friend, right?

• 24:20William Shatner?

  But say there's none of that there.

• 24:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 24:23William Shatner?

  Say, for one reason or another, mental illness, your bodily odors, you're alone.

• 24:35William Shatner?

  What are friends? What does that mean? What does a friend mean? Tell you that you have a bodily odor?

• 24:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do something that clears the room.

• 24:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This sounds like you've done that before, cleared a room from body odors.

• 24:49William Shatner?

  Unbeknownst to me, people have left the room. What are you doing? No, but loneliness and being alone, as you point out, is not the same. But if you're alone, and you realize, wait a minute, where can I go not to be alone? And you have no place to go. You can go on the street, guy comes over, hello, you need a dollar? Here's a dollar, and you've made communication with another human being, but you really haven't. You're still alone.

• 25:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the documentary about your life, you speak passionately about curiosity.

• 25:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Curiosity. And you went up in Jeff Bezos's rocket.

• 25:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As a ninety-year-old man, most people would have said, my bucket list is done. Let me go to the Bahamas, you know, and don't call me. But you're still out there. You're still composing poetry. You're still... So, can you just comment on the curiosity that's within yourself?

• 25:57William Shatner?

  Yes.

• 25:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In ways that maybe others can learn from?

• 26:00William Shatner?

  Yes, but curiosity, what makes things, what makes things, people, objects, tick? Why electrical current, across an electrical current into amniotic soup could create life? I realize that curiosity is both the... What would be a good representative is both the food and the poison of human nature.

• 26:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why is it poison?

• 26:32William Shatner?

  Poison gas. Atomic bomb. Okay, so the curiosity of man spreads every which way. We're curious about God, and we're curious about how to kill.

• 26:49William Shatner?

  It's a two-edged sword that is probably very equal, that curiosity. It's both the bane and the benefit of mankind.

• 26:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so what guidance would you give us? As we...

• 27:02William Shatner?

  We are intrinsically curious. That mankind, along with the need to eat and sleep and make babies, is, "Why is that thing crawling there?" "Oh, it's crawling. I wonder if it's edible." "Oh, it wasn't edible. I wonder what made me sick." And you go down that rabbit hole of curiosity. So, that element of man, mankind, is... is a slippery slope.

• 27:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought you might have been a little more positive there. But do you...

• 27:37William Shatner?

  Well...

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then what hope do you have for us? Because the more awesome our scientific powers have become, the more, the higher risk we are with that other half of the curiosity.

• 27:48William Shatner?

  Okay, so when the universe was born, you know better than I...

• 27:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love all sentences that begin that way.

• 27:56William Shatner?

  Mine has an ellipse and I don't know what I'm talking about. There was both positive and negative energy. Maybe equal or slightly more positive energy. And that's why those molecules or atoms stayed. And the other...

• 28:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's matter versus antimatter, that's probably what you're referring to.

• 28:15William Shatner?

  Well, that's... Didn't I say that?

• 28:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said negative and positive energy, but that's fine.

• 28:21William Shatner?

  No, no, I'm just curious as to why that isn't the right thing to say.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, um, it's okay.

• 28:27William Shatner?

  Alright, so you're getting my point.

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:30William Shatner?

  My point is, for some reason, and we don't know the reason, positive energy, positive whatever, was, was the balance.

• 28:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matter outweighed antimatter and won the contest.

• 28:44William Shatner?

  And won the contest, but it was very, very slim majority.

• 28:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One part in a hundred million articles.

• 28:52William Shatner?

  How did you measure that?

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you can actually measure it.

• 28:54William Shatner?

  Is that right?

• 28:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:55William Shatner?

  So, one part in a million...

• 28:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hundred million.

• 28:57William Shatner?

  Hundred billion?

• 28:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 28:59William Shatner?

  Was positive and as a result, the universe was born.

• 29:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With regular matter and didn't completely disappear into photons?

• 29:06William Shatner?

  Exactly.

• 29:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 29:07William Shatner?

  My point. So, that curiosity may have a slight edge of positive...

• 29:15William Shatner?

  Oh, I'm glad I made you say oh that way. Because you say oh a lot.

• 29:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know where you were going.

• 29:20William Shatner?

  Well, that's, that pleases me more than anything.

• 29:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now I know where the man is going, okay.

• 29:26William Shatner?

  Okay, so when you say oh, you have a variety of meanings for your oh.

• 29:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 29:32William Shatner?

  I have something to say about that because I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson and I know.

• 29:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 29:37William Shatner?

  But you didn't know where I was going, and what do you think of my point?

• 29:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's interesting. It's, it's hopeful. I, I don't think we have strong evidence for it, other than that we're not all dead yet.

• 29:48William Shatner?

  Well, we're not all dead yet because of positive things.

• 29:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the day that we are all dead, no one is around the day after that to say, oh, we have slightly more positive.

• 29:59William Shatner?

  Well, we're positively more curious than negatively.

• 30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. It's, it's true. Up until this point, we've been slightly ahead of that.

• 30:07William Shatner?

  Well, we're up to this point because everything we've discovered, uh, atomic, uh, energy for, for energy and atomic, uh, energy for bombs, right?

• 30:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 30:19William Shatner?

  We're slightly ahead because we're alive. But as of the day we're talking, there's been a threat that, you know, the world will be consumed.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no guarantee.

• 30:30William Shatner?

  There's no guarantee.

• 30:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So what, what do you say to people who've lost their curiosity? Even from early on in life. I've met such people.

• 30:39William Shatner?

  They're dead because there's always curiosity and the question.

• 30:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're emotionally dead. They're, what kind of dead are you?

• 30:45William Shatner?

  Dead intellectually, dead every which way, because they've lost, but they haven't lost the curiosity of, am I going to die and when and what happens then? You never lose that question, and that may be the, the motivating factor of everything or some of what happens when I die.

• 31:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but other curiosity like what's under the rock, what's behind the tree, what's across the river, what's in the bottom of the lake?

• 31:13William Shatner?

  Is a product, a product of that.

• 31:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are people, there are grownups who don't have any of those thoughts.

• 31:17William Shatner?

  I can't imagine that a sci- a, a, a scientist who doesn't believe in God, what do you, uh, an atheist scientist doesn't say, "I wonder what's gonna happen when I die."

• 31:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not who I'm talking about. I'm talking about other adults.

• 31:31William Shatner?

  I want an, I want a, a thoughtful person.

• 31:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every one of my colleagues, if there's something we see and we don't understand it, we poke it, we probe it, we ask others.

• 31:41William Shatner?

  Right.

• 31:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is, it is a lot, it is a state of mind.

• 31:44William Shatner?

  I understand that. And, and, but at some point, doesn't somebody, scientist say, "I'm ninety-three years old, why do I need that knowledge? What I wanna do is have a good dessert."

• 32:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They do both. It's not one or the other.

• 32:03William Shatner?

  Eat it and study it.

• 32:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eat the, you think the good stuff and then you eat the dessert and then you go back to it. Particularly if the dessert is tasty and you get good energy from it. Tell me, um, we're both a big fan of trees.

• 32:17William Shatner?

  Big fan of trees.

• 32:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Big fan of trees. And...

• 32:21William Shatner?

  I'm a tree hugger.

• 32:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a tree hugger.

• 32:22William Shatner?

  Are you?

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, no, 'cause I'm born in the, my, my wife, my wife was from Alaska, so she's a tree hugger. I'm a, I'm a tree.

• 32:29William Shatner?

  Why, why from Alaska, there's no trees in Alaska?

• 32:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, she was, there are trees in Alaska. Yeah. Alaska's a big state.

• 32:35William Shatner?

  Well, that's true.

• 32:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's five times bigger than Texas. So, maybe there's some places you haven't been yet.

• 32:40William Shatner?

  That's true.

• 32:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Maybe. So, I, I, I value what they are.

• 32:47William Shatner?

  Trees?

• 32:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. You know, the giant sequoias live a thousand years.

• 32:52William Shatner?

  I'm a fan of giant sequoias.

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They deliver oxygen that we breathe.

• 32:55William Shatner?

  Yeah.

• 32:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're home to fungus and birds and insects and their role in our world.

• 33:02William Shatner?

  Right.

• 33:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is, I think, undervalued.

• 33:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Relative to what we do to this world.

• 33:08William Shatner?

  Yeah.

• 33:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and how our species conducts itself.

• 33:11William Shatner?

  The whole mystery of sequoias and how they irrigate themselves and, and I mean, it's just an enormously.

• 33:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you, you, you spend not a small amount of time in this film, in this, this biography, this, this documentary of your life.

• 33:27William Shatner?

  Uh, you can call me Bill.

• 33:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can call me Bill.

• 33:29William Shatner?

  Yeah.

• 33:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, you spend not a small amount of time reflecting on trees.

• 33:36William Shatner?

  Yes.

• 33:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, uh, so I, I, I thought that was poignant.

• 33:42William Shatner?

  Well, you don't, trees represent the mystery of our world. So we know that they emerged from the ocean, uh, as grass and the grass evolved into trees and trees became more, uh, preferred, uh, locations and as a result adjusted to the locations. It became the variety.

• 34:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, there are hardly any trees in Star Trek. Just thought I'd.

• 34:08William Shatner?

  There's only telephone poles.

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just thought I'd put it out there.

• 34:12William Shatner?

  Right.

• 34:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Star Trek.

• 34:13William Shatner?

  Well.

• 34:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hardly any trees.

• 34:15William Shatner?

  All right, so trees, trees, uh, and I've said this many times, I'll say it again. Talk to each other using.

• 34:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, the mycelium is the network of fungus.

• 34:27William Shatner?

  And they use the mycelium.

• 34:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 34:29William Shatner?

  And the way we use dendrites.

• 34:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 34:31William Shatner?

  In our brain to send electrochemical signals at a slower rate. But the magic of an electrochemical signal from a tree and its, uh, comment on electrochemical signal in our dendrite was not unlike a mycelium. Uh, so the mycelium and the dendrite are, perform the same function. And, and, and, and so our brains are working the same way trees are working. Trees are working the same way our brain. The evolution would have been from trees to humans.

• 35:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now you also reflect on the universe, whether there's some kind of analog to the structures of the universe.

• 35:13William Shatner?

  Everything on earth communicates, whether it's to each other or to other things.

• 35:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:18William Shatner?

  Everything is in communication. Everything is electrified.

• 35:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In some mode.

• 35:22William Shatner?

  Some mode of electricity that we call electricity is working on earth.

• 35:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:27William Shatner?

  It seems. Unlikely to me that that stops here on Earth, that everything in the universe is communicating with gravity and electricity.

• 35:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's an interesting challenge to the assumption that this interconnectivity on the small scales in all life on Earth would extend to the universe. It's just an interesting fact. And it has to do with how fast can anything actually communicate from one place to another? And so, your head itches. And then you your brain tells your hand to come up and scratch it. How long did that take? Well, they're electrochemical signals and they go. So you don't think about how long that takes because it happens pretty quickly. The bigger you are, the longer that signal will take.

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that seems to be a practical limit on how big any coherent organism can be in the universe. Imagine something the size of the galaxy and it has an itch on its head. It has to communicate that to the scratching mechanism. The scratching mechanism has to come to the head and scratch it. That would take 200,000 years.

• 36:44William Shatner?

  But it doesn't. Because it's just so a prehistoric animal, a dinosaur, would have scratched its ear in less time than 200,000 years.

• 36:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In less time. So it suggests that life or anything that's coherently self-aware would not be particularly functional on the largest of scales.

• 37:06William Shatner?

  Yeah, but you see, but I, you know, I wonder how much you really believe that because because the speed of light.

• 37:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As one limiting factor, yes.

• 37:19William Shatner?

  But I above the opinion. That in my lifetime, which is a lot shorter than yours, we'll discover that the speed of light, what's the speed of light again, 500?

• 37:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  186,282 miles per second.

• 37:32William Shatner?

  That we'll discover that that isn't a limiting factor. That we'll discover that light, that light, that, that, that, that li- light travels slower or faster. That it, that it isn't the, the basic measurement of-

• 37:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You already discovered it and you called it warp drives. That's how, that's how the Enterprise could cross the galaxy during the TV commercial. Otherwise it would have taken you 100,000 years.

• 37:57William Shatner?

  Well, there is a theory that you know of. Whereas instead of going to the object, you're traveling this, you know, from, uh, from left to right, uh, on your travel, you bring the travel to you. So you, you-

• 38:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You compress the space in front of-

• 38:14William Shatner?

  You compress the space in front of-

• 38:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and then stretch it out behind you.

• 38:17William Shatner?

  Well, wherever it goes-

• 38:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a version of a warp drive. And so, yes, but you're not traveling through space faster than light. You're warping space that you're effectively, yes.

• 38:28William Shatner?

  You could do whatever, you could explain it whatever way you wish, but it would be the, it would require the energy of the universe to make that happen.

• 38:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's, I'm giving that to you, but we can't imagine a life form that is going to scratch its head using warp drives to get there quick enough.

• 38:49William Shatner?

  No, but you, we can imagine that whatever, a brontosaurus, was that the one that reached up into the trees?

• 38:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but it was, they, it got renamed.

• 38:57William Shatner?

  Whatever it was, those long-necked-

• 39:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:01William Shatner?

  Dinosaurs that ate off the tops of the trees and the, and the, the, the engineering that went into those long necks in order to support, support that head is magical. Right? Magical in that it evolved from a little nibble here to going higher and higher. And the body and the chemistry of life adjusted to that.

• 39:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 39:24William Shatner?

  So I can't imagine that-

• 39:27William Shatner?

  Whatever, Brontosaurus, I'll name it for now. Which he got up into the leaves and said, "Oh, that tickles." And took 200,000 years to tickle its ear. It had to do, react to it now.

• 39:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's a much smaller creature than a creature the size of the galaxy.

• 39:39William Shatner?

  And, in a fight with a, with a, uh...

• 39:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  T-Rex?

• 39:44William Shatner?

  T-Rex. In a fight with a T-Rex, it had to move and get out of the way, or slap it with its tail. So, it took more than 200,000 years for it to happen.

• 39:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 39:53William Shatner?

  So, so, explain that.

• 39:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's a smaller creature on Earth. All I'm just saying is, we can get those sizes. But you want to think about the whole universe as so, some coherent mycelium communicating in some meaningful way.

• 40:07William Shatner?

  It's got to happen. There has to be a uni- unity to the universe that doesn't have disparate elements and say, "Well, that works there."

• 40:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A good scientist will never, ever say, "It has to happen."

• 40:20William Shatner?

  I'm not a scientist. I'm a believer, and I think the universe has to have a unity that we have, that we mortals, the little relentless mortals have to...

• 40:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The unity.

• 40:31William Shatner?

  Your hand is hushing me up.

• 40:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no.

• 40:33William Shatner?

  I'm about to say words.

• 40:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a, it's an agreement, Hush. It's an agreement that...

• 40:38William Shatner?

  It's an unwritten agreement, I haven't yet...

• 40:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That agreement you speak of is not in the animal scratching its head. It's in the laws of physics that underpin everything that goes on. And it has been the holy grail of modern physics to find the one idea, the one theory, the one equation out of which everything unfolds.

• 41:03William Shatner?

  Is that the speed of light?

• 41:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's bigger than the speed of light.

• 41:07William Shatner?

  Oh, you're saying, in theory, that's what we're looking for?

• 41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In theory, there's a, if the universe is unified, that's the unified field theory that Einstein's been looking for.

• 41:16William Shatner?

  Okay, so we're all looking...

• 41:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're in good company.

• 41:18William Shatner?

  I, I'm appreciative of you. I love this hand.

• 41:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Bill, what question about the universe have you been harboring ever since your earliest days? Now is the time to ask it.

• 41:39William Shatner?

  Uh, the question I ask every pseudo-scientist and an actual scientist is something I've never been able to get a decent answer. We talk about spacetime, and it's like one word, spacetime. And yet, if I look at a photon coming from 13.8 billion years away, and it hits my retina, it's taken 13.8 light-years to come. It's gone through that space, and it's taken that time. What is spacetime? What are we doing with this thing called spacetime?

• 42:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ask yourself, the last time you met someone, did you just say, "All right, I'll meet you in the town square"? No, that's, that's missing information. You know that inherently within you. Because the person is gonna ask, "When"? You supplied a location, but that's not good enough until you supply a time. That is a space and a time. Here's another one. "Bill, I'll meet you tomorrow at noon." That's not enough information for us to meet, because we have to include a where.

• 43:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So space by itself, and time by itself, in our lives, only have meaning when they are brought together as one concept: spacetime. We know this intuitively, when we set up encounters with one another. You offer a spacetime coordinate, and that's when the two of you come together. Otherwise, no, it's not meeting. Here's an interesting fact, out of COVID. A Zoom call separated space and time from each other, so that you only had to be at

• 43:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  the same time, you didn't have to be at the same place. And that enabled many more people to gather for meetings than what would otherwise be possible.

• 43:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So spacetime is a measure of where you are and what you're doing, and at what time you're doing it, every moment of your life, every moment of the life of the universe itself.

• 44:07William Shatner?

  The thing that unifies space and time is that proton, is that photon, whether it's a wave or a particle, and I don't know the difference. When that particle of light leaves the source and reaches my retina, that's where and when.

• 44:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An interesting fact about light, because it travels at the speed of light, we know from Einstein that if you travel at the speed of light, time stops for you. So that in fact, all photons that are crossing the universe have no clock at all. As far as they're concerned, the photon emitted at the early universe that enters your retina at the moment you register its existence, that's the same moment it was emitted in the early universe.

• 45:04William Shatner?

  That I don't understand.

• 45:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the timeframe of the photon itself.

• 45:08William Shatner?

  Alright, so everything you've just said, I don't understand.

• 45:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

• 45:19William Shatner?

  But it makes sense to other people, and it's driving me insane. You understand it, I don't. I want to understand it.

• 45:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, one more point about spacetime. We've always been wondering, what's it made of? Is there some... We speak of the fabric of the universe metaphorically, but is there something literal that can bend and twist as we describe it doing so according to Einstein's general theory of relativity? There is recent thinking that in the vacuum of space, where there are what we call virtual particles that pop in and out of existence. These virtual quantum physics predicts them. These virtual particles, when they're formed, are quantum entangled.

• 46:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they know about each other, so that when they come back together, they return to their state of energy from the particles they once were. But if the vacuum is a seething soup of this, then this quantum entanglement, how do they know about each other so instantaneously? Maybe they're all connected by wormholes. If all quantum entangled virtual particles are connected by wormholes,

• 46:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  then maybe wormholes are the threads of the fabric of the universe.

• 46:49William Shatner?

  Okay, good. Hmm. But talk to me about, about dark energy and dark matter, of which we know nothing about, and which is apparently 90% or more, we think, of the universe, and how, since it's totally theoretical, how you can explain that 90% of a universe, and we don't even know what it's about, and we're busy theorizing particles and, I mean, we got all these esoteric theories, not, not containing 90 or more percent of what we're talking about.

• 47:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill, try not to blow a gasket on this one.

• 47:34William Shatner?

  This is a gasket blowing of the thought.

• 47:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two points. First, what we call dark matter is that 85% of the gravity of the universe has no known origin. So we call it dark matter, but we don't know what it is. We don't even know if it's matter.

• 47:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  85% of the gravity of the universe. We measure that. We didn't pull that out of our ass. We measured this force in the universe, and we gave it a name. It's possible to talk about something if you can measure it, even if you don't know what's causing it. So just chill on that one for a moment. Then, there's a mysterious pressure in the vacuum of space that is forcing an acceleration of the universe opposite, opposite the wishes of gravity. That's what we call dark energy.

• 48:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can measure that. A Nobel Prize was given for the first measurement of dark energy way back in 2011. So, we don't know what's causing that either. Add up dark matter and dark energy? You are right. It is 96% of what's driving this universe, and we don't know what that is. But, we feel... It's a curious state of existence to say, "We know enough about the universe to quantify how much we don't know." And it's most of it. Deal with it.

• 49:10William Shatner?

  That's exactly right. Deal with it because we don't know. I love it.

• 49:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the point of getting older unless you have wisdom to show for it? In life, and in the history of civilization, it has always been the wise who has led the unwise. It's been the wise who we all line up to gain insight and advice from them. And there are people who we think might be wise, but who have never left their corner. Bill Shatner is restless in this world. He's never stopped to say, "Yeah, I got it now.

• 50:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come to me for everything I know and think and can advise on." No, he kept moving. And he's humble enough to recognize that a previous thought might have been wrong or incomplete. When I think of what we need to drive civilization forward, we need 8 billion Bill Shatner. We're just out there curious at every turn, restless because there's something behind a tree, under a rock, that they have yet to investigate. And then, upon discovering it, they have the urge to share it with others, sharing the knowledge, wisdom, and insight so that we all can become better shepherds of a civilization

• 50:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  where we want the next generation to be proud of the decisions we've made rather than embarrassed by it.

• 50:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is a cosmic perspective. We'll see you next time on StarTalk. Keep looking up.