StarTalk Live! at the Beacon: Searching for Life in the Universe (Part 2)

Neil Tyson and Eugene Mirman investigate how the exploration of our universe intersects with art and society, with their guests: planetary scientist Carolyn Porco, musician Sean Ono Lennon, and comedians Vanessa Bayer and Michael Ian Black. Recorded live. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Find out more at https://www.startalkradio.net/startalk-all-access/

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk, live at Beacon Theater!

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are talking about space exploration, the search for aliens. Is that a good thing? Maybe, maybe not. And what impact would that, should that have on our culture, on our civilization? And we've got a panel of fun folks to help us decode these questions. I've got a friend and colleague Carolyn Porco, head of the imaging team of Cassini Mission to Saturn. Carolyn Porco, yes.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I call her Madame Saturn. And you're okay with that?

• 1:06Carolyn Porco?

  I'm okay with that.

• 1:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, good, thank you.

• 1:08Carolyn Porco?

  It could be, it could be worse.

• 1:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. We've also got Sean Ono-Lennon, who's an artist and musician. He's gonna give us that side of the story.

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Eugene, tell us who you brought?

• 1:21Eugene Mirman?

  Michael Ian Black and Vanessa Veer.

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Carolyn, some of the images that you were in charge of bringing back, or assembling, creating, because the field of view of the camera is not so large that you get everything. You have to mosaic many of the big pictures, sweeping pictures that we've seen. At the end of the day, we're looking at shadows of the ring cast on the ball. The sun is here, and you see the, how many tiny rings make up the big ring. And I'm looking at it and say, I want this as a poster on my wall.

• 2:00Carolyn Porco?

  I know.

• 2:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so Sean, do you see the space pictures as art?

• 2:06Speaker 03

  I certainly do. In fact, even when I was very young, I actually gave Carolyn this painting because we became friends recently, and I painted Saturn. And I remember realizing later on that the coloring of Saturn was artificially colored, and I was so depressed, I was like, "Well, what does Saturn really look like?" And that's what's so cool about Carolyn's work, is that she's actually showing us more, you know, beautiful images of what Saturn really would look like to our eyes. But I was always kind of surprised that they colored them. And I know it's for science and stuff.

• 2:37Carolyn Porco?

  He's talking about false color pictures.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, it looks so colorful, Saturn. But actually, I realized that Carolyn's pictures are much more accurate. So, yeah, I follow it, for sure.

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Carolyn, if you go back into the early 60s, space missions, no one really, the scientific community, didn't really want to send cameras.

• 2:56Carolyn Porco?

  No.

• 2:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because a picture is defined, but there's no real data in a picture. You want chart recorders and measure magnetic fields and spectral distributions. And so, how do you, how did photography of cosmic objects rise to such a height?

• 3:14Carolyn Porco?

  Well, let me, this is a very interesting little tidbit of planetary science history, but in the early days of the space program, Neil is right, they didn't want to send cameras. And it was Carl Sagan who was arguing for...

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He argued a billion times.

• 3:34Carolyn Porco?

  Billions of it. He argued for bringing along cameras on planetary missions when all the other scientists thought pictures were for PR. They weren't basic science, and they would just be taking up space on a spacecraft. But he lost...

• 3:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not only space, but weight. The weight of a camera.

• 3:53Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, the whole thing. Money, budget.

• 3:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everything. Money, budget, everything.

• 3:55Carolyn Porco?

  So, the first, I think I've got this right, the first planetary mission didn't have a camera, but he eventually won the war, and we've had cameras on spacecraft ever since. But, you know...

• 4:07Speaker 03

  How did they get that reverse shot of the moon craft taking off from the moon? I mean, you know what I'm talking about? In 1969, when they actually land on the moon? And there's this reverse shot where the moon lander goes back up off the moon. Was there a cameraman sitting there, like?

• 4:20Carolyn Porco?

  No, there was a camera that was left on the lunar module that took, that was left on and took a...

• 4:26Speaker 03

  That's a pretty spectacular shot.

• 4:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was the cameraman.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  It was just a dude sitting there.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  I just was always amazed that they got a shot of them leaving, because I mean...

• 4:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think what ultimately happened, NASA is formed as an agency first to compete with Russia, the Soviet Union, and to show our technological might. And you're right, but the public relations wasn't so much about what you do with the science, it was about, here's our astronauts. The public relations was all through that lens. And so, later on, you would learn that when you take those kinds of pictures, people eat it up, and it transports them into that moment. And then NASA's budget becomes a little more stable, and people, no matter who they are, have some sensitivity and interest in continuing this adventure.

• 5:13Carolyn Porco?

  That's right.

• 5:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, but it looks like... That's why I take pictures of boobs. And your mission did this like nothing else ever did.

• 5:18Carolyn Porco?

  Well, thank you, I'm glad you noticed, but, you know, I was...

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not worth repeating.

• 5:24Carolyn Porco?

  I was on, I was on the Voyager mission, and believe me, the Voyager was just absolutely the most magnificent romantic mission you could ever have been on.

• 5:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You were young back then.

• 5:33Carolyn Porco?

  I was, I was young, there was a time when I was young. And I noticed, I mean, as great as it was, I was noticing that, you know, the pictures were being processed basically to support press conferences. So, most of the pictures that were released to the public by the Voyager mission were put out in, you know, a period of about seven days around each of the flybys. And they weren't, there wasn't a lot of attention paid to...

• 5:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, Voyager visited many planets?

• 5:59Carolyn Porco?

  Jupiter, Saturn.

• 6:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it would not go into orbit around them. So hence, the word "flyby" had very high currency back then, because you never hung out at the planet that you visited.

• 6:07Carolyn Porco?

  That's right.

• 6:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you'd flyby Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and each of those had this packets? That's what you described?

• 6:13Carolyn Porco?

  That's right. So, and there wasn't a whole lot of attention paid to how you processed the images, or getting the color right. And so, when I was made the leader of the imaging team on Cassini, this was like one of my cardinal goals. It's not like I could tell my fellow scientists this, but I had it in my mind that I was gonna make the pictures absolutely as beautiful and as natural as I could, so the public would feel like they were along for the ride. So, and that's what we did, and I'm, you know, really proud of it.

• 6:44Carolyn Porco?

  You're welcome. Who is that?

• 6:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Michael, what do you got?

• 6:49Michael Ian Black?

  Where are the Voyager spacecraft now?

• 6:52Carolyn Porco?

  They're about, don't quote me on this, but something like 16 to 17 or 18 light hours away from here.

• 7:00Michael Ian Black?

  Have, are they out of the solar system?

• 7:02Carolyn Porco?

  One of them, Voyager 1, has crossed kind of the edge of the magnetic bubble, so to speak, so we can legitimately say it's in interstellar space, but you can't legitimately say it's no longer under the influence of the sun.

• 7:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Voyager 1, the two Voyagers, so Voyager 1 passed Neptune.

• 7:21Carolyn Porco?

  Passed the orbit of Neptune.

• 7:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The orbit of Neptune, the last planet in the solar system. You won't leave it alone.

• 7:31Carolyn Porco?

  No, but he's right, he's right, he's right.

• 7:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they turned the camera around.

• 7:36Carolyn Porco?

  Yes.

• 7:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By who's prompting? Tell me about that story.

• 7:39Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, okay, so this was just an idea that I had soon as I was made a team member of the Voyager imaging team, which was right after I got my PhD, so this was like in October of 1983, I went to work for Brad Smith, who was the head of the imaging team.

• 7:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you got your PhD, if I remember correctly, from Caltech?

• 7:56Carolyn Porco?

  Caltech in May of 1983.

• 7:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good school.

• 8:01Carolyn Porco?

  So, anyway.

• 8:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you Eugene for establishing that Caltech is a good school. Somebody's gotta.

• 8:09Carolyn Porco?

  Somebody's gotta go. So I just thought it would be great to take a picture, actually my idea was to take a picture of the solar system, because I knew Voyager 1 was not going to encounter any more planets after Saturn, and I had a different idea than Carl, who eventually had also proposed this, but I didn't know about his effort, he didn't know about mine. I thought, wouldn't it be great to show what the solar system would look like to an alien coming in from outside? That's what I wanted to do.

• 8:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A family photo of planets.

• 8:41Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, and Carl wanted to take a picture of the solar system too, but he really was after... That whole, you know, romantic idea of showing the Earth as, he didn't, he hadn't coined the phrase yet, pale blue dot, but that was his idea. And to show the picture of the Earth awash in a sea of stars, you know, just to emphasize the loneliness, the tininess of our planet, in the hopes of engendering feelings of planetary brotherhood and so on. So, I was going around hawking it on the Voyager project in like 1984. Annie tells me, his wife tells me, he had started two years earlier.

• 9:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Andrea.

• 9:17Carolyn Porco?

  Andrea. We both got like dull stares, like, "You want to do what? You want to take a picture of the Earth? It's only going to be a pixel. What are you, crazy? Get out of here." That kind of a response. And finally, as the mission, we're really getting near the end.

• 9:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They slapped you?

• 9:33Carolyn Porco?

  No.

• 9:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 9:35Carolyn Porco?

  That's just my audiovisual effect.

• 9:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 9:37Carolyn Porco?

  So finally Carl, now when I say they didn't want to do it, the Voyager project didn't want to do it, the big guys, the ones who made the decisions, Carl went to NASA. He went all the way to the NASA administrator and convinced him.

• 9:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The head of NASA.

• 9:50Carolyn Porco?

  The head of NASA. And so, the people at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were directed to take this picture. And that's what we did.

• 9:57Michael Ian Black?

  Why is it so hard? Isn't there a lot of downtime? I mean, you're just flying through space, can't you just say, "You just turn the camera around for a second." Why is that so hard?

• 10:04Carolyn Porco?

  I think it required doing something that we hadn't done on the Voyager project, and that was take the antenna, which was continuously in those days pointing to the Earth, and actually break communications, take it off, so we could use the antenna to shield the camera from the sun, or else you wouldn't be able to take this picture. And then take the antenna and point it back to the Earth, and they were afraid they'd never get it back there. So it wasn't until Voyager 1 was completely done with its mission, its planetary part of the mission, that they let us do this. And they managed to regain communications anyway, but we finally did it.

• 10:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This became the famous pale blue dot.

• 10:43Carolyn Porco?

  The famous pale blue dot.

• 10:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Image, that became the...

• 10:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It became almost the spiritual inspiration for the book, Carl Sagan's book, The Pale Blue Dot.

• 10:54Carolyn Porco?

  It's iconic. I mean, it just really, people really love it.

• 10:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's just Earth, just barely a pixel in the image. And it was not in a sea of stars, but it's a sea of nothingness.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  But that's just because of the aperture of a lens. If you set it for the lighting of the Earth, then you're not going to see the stars, but they're there. It's not like they weren't there.

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, of course. There are stars there.

• 11:17Carolyn Porco?

  It wasn't...

• 11:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct, thank you.

• 11:20Carolyn Porco?

  He's trying to keep us honest.

• 11:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep it honest. Right, your exposure matters here. And you'd blow out the Earth. I call bullshit. I don't think there were stars there.

• 11:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, all right, so in The Pale Blue Dot, the book, Carl Sagan waxed poetic and philosophical with great elegance on what our place is in space and in the universe in general upon reflecting on this pale blue dot. And, but you were not happy with the pale blue dot, were you? You decided to take another pale blue dot.

• 11:57Carolyn Porco?

  I did.

• 12:00Carolyn Porco?

  I did.

• 12:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what did you do?

• 12:01Carolyn Porco?

  So, okay, so I had always, since the first one, had it in my, well, since I became the leader of the imaging team, I had it in my mind to do that picture over again, only make it better. And, well, because, you know, in a proposal that Carl wrote to the project, the Voyager project, to request that they take this picture, he wrote, this is not commonly known, but he wrote that the idea was to take a picture of the Earth, and I quote, "awash in a sea of stars." And as Neil said, that picture didn't capture stars, and the Earth is sitting on a beam of scattered light. And of course, none of this matters because Carl, you know, he was the master of romancing things

• 12:43Carolyn Porco?

  and turning the whole thing into an allegory on the human condition.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His rose was bigger than the image itself.

• 12:51Carolyn Porco?

  Right, right. It just gave him the opportunity to point out, you know, our cosmic circumstance. So I wanted to take the picture that probably Carl would have wanted. And as I was looking through the timeline of events that my colleagues were planning and I were planning for the science that we were going to collect with Cassini. And I found an opportunity that wouldn't get anybody too angry. And I'm not taking too much time, too much resources to take this mosaic with the earth in it. It occurred to me, wow, you know, why, instead of doing what everybody seems to have done since the original pale blue dot, and take the picture of the earth and then two weeks later, tell everybody, hey, while you weren't looking, we took your picture and isn't it beautiful? Here it is.

• 13:36Carolyn Porco?

  I thought, why don't we tell the people of the world ahead of time that on such and such a date, at such and such a time, your picture is going to be taken? And go out as the window of opportunity opens and look up and think about your position on this planet and the never-ending blackness of space and how unique our planet is and its lush life.

• 13:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You told me you got people to step outside of their house and look up at Saturn while you took their picture?

• 14:05Carolyn Porco?

  I did.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  It was the original Pokemon Go.

• 14:13Carolyn Porco?

  No, it was, it turned out to be...

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You had a cute name for it. What was it called?

• 14:18Carolyn Porco?

  It's called The Day the Earth Smiled.

• 14:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Day the Earth Smiled.

• 14:21Carolyn Porco?

  Because I asked everybody to go out and smile, you know, smile in celebration of being alive on a pale blue dot. It was like the biggest cosmic performance art ever.

• 14:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is that art? I mean, you're an artist.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  Kind of, yeah.

• 14:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we have a scientist here talking about beautiful pictures and engaging people. And this is not how scientists usually talk, but it's how artists live for that.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Sure. I mean, I think, you know, the intersection of science and art and math and art, I mean, I think a lot of musicians think of music, for instance, as a kind of audio geometry. You know, I mean, you can easily graph pitch and time and volume, you know, on a graph. It's chartable. And so in a way, you know, melody and music could be considered a kind of audio mathematical language. There's actually this quote that I want to tell you. I don't know if you've heard it, it's kind of beautiful.

• 15:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. That was way deeper than the time it took you to communicate that.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 15:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was just, we have to pause on that. So music is an audio... Geometry.

• 15:31Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, there's this quote that's relevant to this. It's not, I wasn't on a tangent here, but yeah. You know this guy, James Joseph Sylvester, who was the tutor for Florence Nightingale, who invented nursing, or modern nursing? Anyway, yeah, he's a good guy, or she's an amazing woman. But he has this quote that's, "Music is the mathematics of sense, and mathematics is the music of reason," which I think is beautiful.

• 15:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  Right?

• 15:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very nice.

• 16:02Speaker 05

  We're both going, "What?"

• 16:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  And Puff Daddy is the Jupiter of, no, I'm kidding.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  Anyway, so I do think that, I mean, in fact, most of my, I notice, I mean, most of my mathematically and scientifically minded friends, I mean, professional scientists, tend to be really big art fans, too. So there's definitely an intersection personality-wise. But one of the things I was thinking about, you know, leading up to this show was, was science and art actually the same kind of thing, you know, in Babylonian, Sumerian, and Egyptian times? I mean, what I mean by that was, was there art for art's sake, or did it always have a function? I mean, hieroglyphs were telling stories and mythologies, and, you know, being an architect to make a pyramid, you know, you were a scientist, and astronomy and astrology were kind of the same thing, because it was all part of religion.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  And I guess what I'm saying is, I think science and art were, by definition, intersected until a period later on, when they started to be totally separate. Because I feel like now, art, what defines art from science or anything else, is that art doesn't have a function. It doesn't have a purpose other than to be art, so art for art's sake. I mean, that's why it's not math or science. But I feel like, you know, in Da Vinci's time, for instance, I mean, this is more like a question. Da Vinci was a scientist and an artist. Did he really feel there was a huge separation between those things? I don't know.

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, based on the notebooks of his that I've looked at, it's all the same.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  Exactly. I mean, he's sketching horses and studying the muscular, you know, patterns.

• 17:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the same.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  And the skin.

• 17:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in fact, I think, I think we have some, some residue of that time in our modern, some of our modern referencing. So, for example, today, you would say...

• 17:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's got it down to a science. And on the other, you say, you raised it to an art.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  Raised it to an art form, right.

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Science and art show up in those two phrases, and in each of those cases, we kind of mean the same thing.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That somebody has taken a craft to an extreme limit of perfection. And the only way you can reference that is to say they've raised it to an art or got it down to a science.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what I want, I want to bring this back to, to, to what started it. Carolyn did The Day the Earth Smiled, and everyone got engaged in a, in an activity that was symbolic. And people were touched

• 18:35Speaker 03

  Very.

• 18:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  by the science. And I've seen lyrics that you've written and co-written that were touched by science. And so you're not just an observer of what's going on. It has infused who and what you are as an artist. And I'm enchanted every time I learn that such a thing happens. You, you've got a, I got you, what you got?

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have a song.

• 18:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've got a song here called Nebula Lullaby.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I have a band with my girlfriend called The Ghost of a Sabretooth Tiger. It's a catchy title. And we have a bunch of songs. I mean, I mean, we're both kind of science groupies. And I say we're science groupies because if I were to say I was a science nerd, that would mean I'd actually have to know facts. But as a groupie, I'm just kind of waiting backstage and waiting to be touched by science, as it were.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  But yeah. I don't mean specifically, but yeah. But I'm open to it.

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Sean, what's the title of your album?

• 19:41Speaker 03

  Um, it's Monolith of Phobos. That's my-

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Monolith of Phobos.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Phobos, one of, one of-

• 19:46Speaker 03

  Mars' moons.

• 19:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mars' moons.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  Well, the origin of that record title, which is my, the most recent record I put out with a band called The Delirium, is, I don't know if you guys have seen it, but there's a, there's a C-SPAN interview with Buzz Aldrin where he says, "There's a monolith on Phobos, and I don't know who put it there. Maybe God put it there, but we have to go boldly forth." And he kind of- Gets really excited and I thought it was

• 20:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He has a T-shirt that says, "Get your ass to Mars."

• 20:14Speaker 03

  Exactly. He's really into it. But I just thought it was the most amazing interview I'd ever seen. I mean, I assumed it was gonna be front-page news of every newspaper, but no one seems to have seen this. Have you guys seen that? Okay, cuz it's pretty unbelievable. I mean, it's the second man who has landed on the moon telling us that there's a structure on Phobos. I mean, look, I know he's not saying it's artificial, but still...

• 20:38Michael Ian Black?

  Does he know about the hexagon on Saturn?

• 20:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, that's what I'm saying.

• 20:42Eugene Mirman?

  I can't wait to tell him.

• 20:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but the point is, you're inspired by the science that's unfolding around you.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have a song called "Schrodinger's Cat", which refers to, you know...

• 20:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Schrodinger's Cat?

• 20:56Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 20:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Schrodinger was a physicist? Fundamental to the birth of quantum physics as a branch of physics.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  Right, but didn't he come up with the Schrodinger's Cat scenario to disprove the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? Meaning, he was making fun of it as opposed to confirming it.

• 21:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, he proposed it as a test, as a thought experiment.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  But he was against it, as in, he wasn't for it.

• 21:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know what it was for or against it, but if you're smart, it doesn't matter. You challenge people's, other people's thoughts.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  Right, well, I wouldn't know anything about that.

• 21:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, no, no, you can be...

• 21:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I mean is, if you're smart in the room, you can pose a question that's either right or wrong, but if it challenges other people to think more deeply than they were before, that is useful, whether or not it turns out the way you had intended. Ptolemy's geocentric known universe had Earth in the middle, everything orbiting around it, and he came up with epicycles. It was a whole mathematical model. All turned out to be wrong.

• 22:02Eugene Mirman?

  What a dummy.

• 22:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it was fascinating. It became a fascinating model to try to attack, to see if you could find out why that was wrong. Is there an experiment that could falsify it? And so, this is what led to the great insult. You wanna insult a scientist? You say... Your work is not right and it's not even wrong.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Ooh. Cold, that is cold. Ice cold. Ooh, it's not even wrong.

• 22:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put some liniment on that burn.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  I like that.

• 22:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm just, I'm looking at your lyrics here. I'm very impressed.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  Oh, well, I mean, I'm embarrassed now to read them, but I was told to, so I'm going to.

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you give us just a few?

• 22:44Speaker 03

  Okay, so Schrodinger's cat, it's so dorky, isn't it? So, yeah, we wrote this song and I guess there's a few science references in here. Well, this is philosophical. It says, "Like a tree that falls alone in the woods without a sound, I can't be sure that I exist when you're not around."

• 23:00Carolyn Porco?

  Oh. Oh, is that romantic or what?

• 23:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, could you pause when you say something deep? Just give the rest of us. Just, just.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  The pale.

• 23:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was beautiful.

• 23:14Carolyn Porco?

  It was beautiful.

• 23:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can we hear that again?

• 23:16Speaker 03

  Oh, well, yeah, that's the chorus of Schrodinger's cat is, "Like a tree that falls alone in the woods without a sound, I can't be sure that I exist when you're not around, Neil."

• 23:27Speaker 03

  I just.

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love when physics, math, philosophy shows up in an artist's creative lair. So do you think today there's more or less, or what's the trend line in the hunger people have either for art or for science or for their marriage going forward? And I say that because, for example, there are significant appearances of films where scientific accuracy was strongly valued, yet it needed an entire room full of artists to create the visuals for the stories that were told. And that included Interstellar, the movie Gravity, especially the movie The Martian.

• 24:14Speaker 03

  Martian, right.

• 24:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Martian. You are evidence of this. Are you a trend line or are you an anomaly of artists?

• 24:21Speaker 03

  I don't really have.

• 24:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Reaching to the moving frontier of science to serve.

• 24:25Michael Ian Black?

  Just as an aside, as an aside, Neil, I'm also an artist.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 24:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  Right?

• 24:35Michael Ian Black?

  Thank you.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I was gonna say, I don't really have my finger necessarily on the pulse of much. I mean, I have my own pulse, but that's about it.

• 24:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is the universe serving as the artist's muse today?

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I've thought about this, and I think that what's interesting is that art, until deco, I think this is true, was always looking to nature for its inspiration. I mean, if you look at Art Nouveau, which precedes deco, everything was flowers and trees and naked ladies. And then something happens during the industrial revolution when everything starts to look like machinery, and it's because we stopped looking to nature for inspiration, which I would say would be like looking to physics for inspiration. And so I feel like that was the time in human history when we stopped really having as much reverence for the universe and nature and for our Mother Earth, because we were

• 25:34Speaker 03

  no longer paying attention.

• 25:36Carolyn Porco?

  You know, most of the architecture in old New York is art deco, right?

• 25:40Speaker 03

  I mean, not as much as Florida. I've seen some serious deco cities there. But, you know, not to knock deco...

• 25:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Florida has enough issues, you know, just lighten up on them.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  I don't wanna knock art deco...

• 25:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're gonna be the first state to just go underwater. You know, just let's be nice to Florida.

• 25:56Eugene Mirman?

  They're gonna float themselves underwater.

• 25:57Speaker 03

  Oh, no. You see what I mean? So, at the same time...

• 26:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I heard you, but I didn't see a cause and effect.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  Well, no, I didn't mean it's causal. I mean, it's interesting that they're happening at the same time. So at once, we're becoming more science literate as a society, we're also becoming less science literate.

• 26:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But don't you think that movies can... a scientifically literate movie? But I'm just saying, we're talking about forces that operate on us in nature. I just think sci-fi films, which are hugely popular, and they make hundreds of millions of dollars, that they may be our only hope to ensure that we carry a scientifically literate community into the future, lest the absence of science literacy lead to our own extinction.

• 26:34Michael Ian Black?

  Neil, may I ask a question about the intersection of science and art? What about the reverse, which also seems common in art leading to science? From what I see in my light reading of science, a lot of science is inspired by, or scientists are inspired by, things they saw as kids, like in Star Trek or Star Wars, or whatever.

• 26:58Eugene Mirman?

  Battlefield Earth.

• 26:59Michael Ian Black?

  And what?

• 27:00Speaker 03

  No, it's true, like, have you guys heard of that book, The Science or the Physics of Star Trek? It's kinda dorky, but, you know, it's basically what is possible in Star Trek and what isn't. I mean, next generation was pretty far ahead of its time in terms of trying to talk about real physics and wormholes and parallel dimensions and stuff. But I remember there was this controversy where there was an episode where they went back in time, and there were all these like Trekkie nerds being like, "Well, I looked at the stars in the sky and the star system, I calculated wouldn't have been that position of Orion and all that stuff."

• 27:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah!

• 27:31Speaker 03

  Which I just think is so funny. But I mean, I just find it so funny to be really uptight about like, "Well, the plasma engine wouldn't have been this or that way," but they have no problem with the fact that they're like, you know, in space, talking to Klingons. Like, that doesn't seem...

• 27:45Eugene Mirman?

  Whenever I release a tachyon pulse, it's pretty much like it is in the show.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  It's like, "Now I can't suspend my disbelief. Orion would have been slightly to the left. How am I supposed to get into this?"

• 27:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So...

• 27:56Carolyn Porco?

  They have no life. These are people who have no life.

• 28:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I must defend the Geekiverse in this moment.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 28:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, those debates that unfold, unfold where actual known science has been attempted in the storytelling. Which is why they're not arguing about whether they can have a conversation in English with Klingons.

• 28:19Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 28:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that's the fantasy side, where they've stepped off the circle of science, and then they made stuff up. But if you're gonna be, if you're gonna say you can have a photon torpedo, let it have some resemblance to an actual photon and an actual torpedo, and we're gonna debate that. If you're gonna use a phaser that stuns you, what is the mechanism?

• 28:39Speaker 03

  Okay, calm down. You gotta calm down. Just relax, okay? Just, just...

• 28:45Speaker 03

  Just take a breath.

• 28:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you can have warp drives, what is the warping mechanism so that you can cross the galaxy during the TV commercial?

• 28:52Speaker 03

  Speaking of which...

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want to think about this.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  Didn't they just make... Aren't they proposing at NASA, you would probably know about this, an actual plasma engine, which obviously would be much slower than jet fuel, but that's what runs the Enterprise is a plasma engine, isn't it?

• 29:08Carolyn Porco?

  I...

• 29:09Eugene Mirman?

  Lithium crystals, which I also have.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  Nice. Right on.

• 29:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, this intersection of what artists do and what scientists do, Carolyn, you... you... Did I get this right? You advised one of the Star Trek movies?

• 29:30Carolyn Porco?

  I did.

• 29:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which one?

• 29:32Carolyn Porco?

  The first one, the first one of the modern era. Star Trek 2009.

• 29:37Eugene Mirman?

  Nice.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 29:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, J.J. Abrams?

• 29:40Carolyn Porco?

  Yes.

• 29:41Eugene Mirman?

  So the one where they're near Saturn, hiding, no?

• 29:44Carolyn Porco?

  Oh, yes. That was my idea.

• 29:47Eugene Mirman?

  Nice.

• 29:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh. Ooh, so...

• 29:50Carolyn Porco?

  Do you want the story?

• 29:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Quick, do it quick, if you're quick.

• 29:53Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, so I met J.J. Abrams at TED. We exchanged, you know, cards, kind of thing.

• 29:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gave a TED Talk?

• 29:58Carolyn Porco?

  I did.

• 29:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he heard your TED Talk?

• 30:00Carolyn Porco?

  Yes.

• 30:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he said, "I... I... He..." Okay. That's what he said. Okay, go.

• 30:07Carolyn Porco?

  He didn't say it right then. We, you know, went our separate ways nine months later.

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have to say this. Her TED Talk, somebody used her audio...

• 30:16Carolyn Porco?

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And choreographed a little Lego woman, painted up to look like her, and the Lego person moved in Lego ways, giving the exact talk that Carolyn gave.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  Aww.

• 30:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is the cutest thing you ever saw.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  Aww.

• 30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that still on YouTube?

• 30:40Carolyn Porco?

  Oh, yeah, it's, yeah.

• 30:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's like Porco Lego?

• 30:43Carolyn Porco?

  The woman who did this, her name is Maya Weinstein. She set up a stage, a little Lego stage, identical to the TED stage. It was magnificent.

• 30:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is so...

• 30:52Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah.

• 30:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, now interrupt it, go.

• 30:55Michael Ian Black?

  Did she know we could just watch the TED Talk?

• 30:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's for all the Lego people out there.

• 31:01Carolyn Porco?

  For the Lego people.

• 31:04Carolyn Porco?

  So, anyway, nine months later, I get a phone call from someone who says JJ Abrams wants to talk to you, and I said, "JJ who?" I didn't watch Lost, I didn't really, you know. Anyway, he invites me to consult on it. He was very generous about it. He says, "I feel like I need to, you know, include you in on this." So I thought, "Okay, that's great." And I'm expecting we're gonna have like sessions, you know, in a big Hollywood office where we're gonna be shooting The Breeze and talking about the planetary scenes or something like really cool. He invites me out there. Actually, I was on a trip anyway, and he says, I asked him, "Could I come in?"

• 31:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Out there to Los Angeles?

• 31:39Carolyn Porco?

  Los Angeles, and I wanted to see something being filmed. I'd never seen a movie being filmed before. And I was hoping, I was really hoping I'd see a scene filmed on the bridge, right? Doesn't every Star Trek fan want to see the bridge? Okay? What? I get out there, and I'm watching poor Chris Pine, is that his name? Chris Pine, get the crap kicked out of him in a bar. That's the scene. You remember that?

• 32:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a good scene. Yeah, it is pretty good. It's a good scene.

• 32:09Carolyn Porco?

  Well, I'll just tell you, I saw this poor guy get hit in the face, fall on the floor, get picked up, punched again, fall on a table, fall in the bar.

• 32:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It wasn't real, it's a movie.

• 32:19Carolyn Porco?

  But it happened like 25 times he had to go through this. So, anyway.

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to Showbiz.

• 32:23Carolyn Porco?

  Anyway.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  But what was, because I saw that film. I'd love to see the Lego version of that.

• 32:29Carolyn Porco?

  Let me see.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  But what was real about how they hid the Enterprise on Saturday?

• 32:34Carolyn Porco?

  No, wait, I'm getting to that. I'm getting to that. So, so, we break for lunch, very unglamorous. I'm sitting with Abrams, I'm sitting with the head of special effects, and we're just eating these very boring meals. And out of nowhere, he says, "I've got a problem." And he says, "We've got the Enterprise coming back into the solar system to save the Earth and we've got to figure out where to hide it." What he said. So I'm thinking, "This is so ridiculous, but he must be trying to test me, right? He just wants to see if I could come up with any good idea." So I say the first thing that comes into my head. I said, "Well, why don't you have it come out of warp drive in the atmosphere of Titan? And then have it rise out of the haze and, you know, with the Enterprise and the rings and Saturn in the background, it'll be a really groovy scene." And to my surprise...

• 33:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Groovy.

• 33:20Carolyn Porco?

  To my surprise, goes with bitchin'.

• 33:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, groovy.

• 33:25Carolyn Porco?

  To my surprise, he says, "Oh, my God. That's brilliant." And that's all they ever wanted from me.

• 33:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they sent you back.

• 33:35Carolyn Porco?

  But they used it, they did a, you know, and then, oh, this gets to your point. They sent me like the first draft of it, and I pointed out lots of errors. I said, "Well, you've got Titan on an inclined orbit, it's not really on an inclined orbit. You've got the, the atmosphere doesn't look quite right." And the guy who does the special effects, Roger Gallet, is saying, "Oh, look, don't worry about it." And I said, "You don't understand. People are going to know I'm the science advisor on this, and they're going to think, 'I don't know that Titan is not on inclined orbit.'" You've got to fix it. And he wouldn't do it. He just says, "If anybody asks you about this, just tell them it was my fault." So what happens? The movie comes out, and there are blogs and blogs, never-ending blogs about, "What

• 34:19Carolyn Porco?

  the hell did that poor girl woman do?"

• 34:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 34:22Carolyn Porco?

  "Titan's not on an inclined orbit, but doesn't she know this?" I mean, it was just pathetic.

• 34:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is geekatude at its finest. It's cool, it's cool. Well, we're going to explore all the challenges facing the survival of humanity today, and whether we can appeal or reach for creativity in art and science.

• 34:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Sean, you think deeply about the state of the world. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the role of science or art as a savior to the human race?

• 35:01Speaker 03

  Well, this is actually interesting. I saw a documentary, and this is gonna make sense. We'll decide. On New York before the invention of cars. And they had this problem where they couldn't take the horse manure out of the city without bringing in more horses to bring it out. And it was actually a disaster, whereas if you look at brownstones, they're about eight steps high because they had to build, they started building the buildings with high steps so you could step over the manure. So it was actually...

• 35:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, a horse will poop about up to 30 pounds of manure a day.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  And New York, well, yeah.

• 35:41Carolyn Porco?

  How many thousands of horses were there in New York?

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Well, that was their only form of transportation, other than walking, right?

• 35:46Carolyn Porco?

  That's a bad design.

• 35:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so was it actually, wait, wait, so just, you said something that I had to talk. So, of course, to move manure out of the city, you need horse-drawn carriages carrying the manure, and they're pooping all the way.

• 36:03Speaker 03

  And it was a state of emergency.

• 36:04Carolyn Porco?

  It was equilibrium.

• 36:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the poop, you get the same poop to take the poop out as the poop was when you started.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  There was a poop resonance equilibrium, I think.

• 36:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, a resonance equilibrium.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  So, I mean, I was looking at this, and what's interesting is the city was in a state of emergency. They didn't know how to solve the problem. And then suddenly, I think the Model T came out. And then it was just, it wasn't a problem anymore. So I always try to, ever since I saw that, I thought, you know, that's a good metaphor for the unpredictable nature of technological innovation. So I think we always have to account for that, even though we're looking at our inevitable demise, that maybe some scientists will come up with something smart that saves us that we can't predict.

• 36:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so your solution is completely bound up in hope.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  To just basically, to just basically hope that, you know, you and Carolyn figure it out.

• 36:56Michael Ian Black?

  Well, in fairness...

• 36:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're also counting on alien slavery to help us.

• 37:01Michael Ian Black?

  That's right.

• 37:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The same guy. That's the same guy.

• 37:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. But having said that, I did just, unfortunately, I probably shouldn't have, but I read this book called "Learning to Die in the Anthropocene," which is by this guy Roy Scranton, who is very smart. And I learned the word "anthropocene" from him. I'm sure you guys knew it already, but it's the human distinguished epoch. So it's the time on the planet that essentially has been affected by humans. It's the epoch, that's the anthropo-epoch. And he basically says-

• 37:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In other words, all other periods in the geologic history of Earth have been marked by some natural disaster, volcanoes, asteroid strikes. And right now, if you look at the signature of what's going on on Earth, it is primarily that of human activity.

• 37:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 37:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And therefore, the geologists say, there's nothing else we can call this but blaming on humans. And so you get the Anthropocene.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  Exactly. So it's the human-caused environmental impact and all that other stuff, mass extinction, which we are also causing.

• 38:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Vanessa, do you have confidence in science?

• 38:12Speaker 05

  Well, you know, that reminded me a lot, what you were saying of the finale of dinosaurs. I don't know if you've seen... Do you remember the show Dinosaurs on TGIF?

• 38:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw the ads.

• 38:26Speaker 05

  What, you saw ads?

• 38:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 38:28Speaker 05

  In the finale, the di... Yeah, not the... In the finale, the dinosaurs die. Anyways, what did you ask?

• 38:37Carolyn Porco?

  You know what? In reality, they died too.

• 38:39Speaker 05

  No, no, no, but it was a comedy... Fair. But it was like a comedy show, and everyone was having a great time. Anyway, what did you ask?

• 38:50Speaker 03

  You can laugh about the dinosaurs dying.

• 38:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I'm just curious. He's preparing himself for death. What are you doing?

• 38:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, what are you doing?

• 39:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you working on a movie?

• 39:02Speaker 05

  I do think that there... We should be able to just, like, go to another planet. Also-

• 39:10Speaker 03

  Grow another planet?

• 39:11Carolyn Porco?

  What good is that gonna do you?

• 39:13Speaker 05

  But, okay, how do we...

• 39:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, if we put trout there, we'll be fine.

• 39:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, Carolyn, she's saying if we mess up Earth, he'll stay here and die, and she's got a new planet.

• 39:23Speaker 05

  Well, also, like, how do we know that all the other things didn't do that? Like, we're like, oh, they stayed here and died. What if they went to, like, you know, another planet?

• 39:31Speaker 03

  But think about it, we can't even terraform Arizona. I mean, how are we gonna terraform Mars, you know?

• 39:38Carolyn Porco?

  No, Sean is very right about this, this whole idea, and let's, like, get with the program here. We're not gonna take seven billion people and move them to Mars. That's not what going into outer space means.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  We only need like twenty-eight hundred of us, right? I mean, I think that's all we need.

• 39:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just need a minimum amount of really fertile people.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  Excuse me?

• 39:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just so they can...

• 39:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so, you know what I wonder?

• 40:00Speaker 03

  You did read my bio.

• 40:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wonder if either...

• 40:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wonder if either aliens will come help us and save us from ourselves, or whether we will invent artificial intelligence that will then solve the problems that we measly humans cannot.

• 40:16Carolyn Porco?

  What are the problems?

• 40:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The problems?

• 40:20Carolyn Porco?

  The problems.

• 40:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't know about problems in the world today? Do you need me to tell you? But, no, no, here's one. The problem is, we invent AI, and the AI judges that we are a virus infecting the Earth, and we should be destroyed.

• 40:35Carolyn Porco?

  But that, that's not a real problem. That's like a, that's not a real problem.

• 40:39Eugene Mirman?

  I mean, it would definitely be a problem if it happened.

• 40:46Eugene Mirman?

  I mean, for everyone but Sean, it would be like, eh, whatever, I learned to deal with it.

• 40:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, so Carolyn, if that happened, that would be a real problem.

• 40:53Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, but, but before you get, before you get there, our core, let's, like, you're a scientist, let's dig deeper, okay?

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, let's dig together, go.

• 40:59Carolyn Porco?

  I think the core of all our problems is that there's too many, damn many of us. That's why, there's overpopulation, there's too many...

• 41:06Eugene Mirman?

  Too many what?

• 41:07Carolyn Porco?

  Damn many of us.

• 41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, so Carolyn, wait, wait, wait, so we just, just, just...

• 41:12Carolyn Porco?

  No.

• 41:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Terraform another planet, and, and we, and we have two planets to live on?

• 41:16Carolyn Porco?

  I just, I just said you're not gonna transport all these people.

• 41:18Eugene Mirman?

  Should we poison foreigners' food?

• 41:21Carolyn Porco?

  No. No.

• 41:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Carolyn. Carolyn. Carolyn.

• 41:26Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, Neil.

• 41:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A hundred years ago, and a hundred fifty years ago, and two hundred years ago, people were worried, ever since Malthus.

• 41:34Carolyn Porco?

  I know.

• 41:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About too many people, and the people would outstrip the food supply. Now, we got, the fact that anybody is starving in the world today is not because there isn't enough food. We have more food than has ever been in the history of the world. It's a distribution political problem. So, so what are you worried about there being too many people? Why not innovate so that we can make as many babies as we want?

• 41:56Carolyn Porco?

  It's just like, it feels crowded, Neil.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  Well, no, because the population as it is, and I know what you're saying, what Malthusianism is, and it's kind of dark, but, uh, the, the, we're, we're already just, you know, getting rid of lions, and tigers, and elephants, I mean, these species, we can't even coexist with them now.

• 42:13Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, yes.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  And human-caused environmental change is so extreme already that it may be irreversible. So if there were twice as many people, there'd be twice as many mopeds and cars, and that's just dangerous for the planet, right?

• 42:23Carolyn Porco?

  And twice as much plast- I mean, you know how much plastic there is?

• 42:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, decade, twice as many mopeds? Where, where did that come from?

• 42:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, is this a time warp here?

• 42:31Speaker 03

  Somebody's worried about Belgium.

• 42:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 42:33Speaker 03

  You know, you say that, but in places like, you know, Malaysia, the Philippines, China, they're all on mopeds.

• 42:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just haven't even heard the word mopet.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  All right, we get rid of those, who else?

• 42:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mopeds. I haven't heard the word mopet in thirty years. All right, so...

• 42:50Speaker 03

  This is a real retro show with bitchin' mopeds. Have you seen my bitchin' moped?

• 42:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I haven't seen your bitchin' moped, no.

• 42:57Carolyn Porco?

  Groovy, man, groovy.

• 43:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, all right, so...

• 43:01Speaker 03

  So, yes, I mean, what are the problems that I worry about? You said I think deeply, I mean, certainly environmental disaster, that's human-caused by the Anthropocene, and I wonder, also, you know, Elon Musk and very intelligent people, it's not just a joke, Carolyn, they warn against, uh, super malevolent AI, well, maybe not malevolent from its perspective, but from our perspective, certainly, if it decided, as you said, that we were somehow expendable, or some kind of virus to be rid of, I mean, have you heard of Rocco's basilisk?

• 43:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Roko's Basilisk.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  It's a thought experiment, thinking that if, once AI creates itself, then, as Kurzweil states, it'll be able to infinitely improve itself in a sort of blink of an eye. It'll, it'll teach itself how to be the, you know, the most intelligent thing, at least in the solar system. And at that point, it will be essentially a kind of god, because it will, you know, be almost omniscient. But let's just say that it evolves to be the most intelligent thing imaginable. Then, its morality could be based on, "That which helped bring me about is good, and that which didn't help bring me about is bad."

• 44:16Speaker 03

  Because if it had a morality, it would consider itself to be the most important thing ever. And so that all decisions that led towards it are good, and all decisions that were not leading towards it would be bad. So the people who are scared of Roko's Basilisk, which is the name of the AI, are scared that it would figure out how to reproduce people through the DNA codons of, from the past, in, you know, doctors' archives, or whatever, and recreate you and torture you for eternity in some kind of weird virtual hell to punish you for not bringing it about.

• 44:48Carolyn Porco?

  I think the people who write these things are sociopaths.

• 44:51Eugene Mirman?

  What? What?

• 44:53Speaker 03

  I was just using the magic eyes thing, you know.

• 44:55Carolyn Porco?

  I think Elon Musk...

• 44:56Eugene Mirman?

  So you love science, but you're like, a little scared of some science?

• 44:59Speaker 03

  No, but you laugh, but there are people that take it very seriously. In fact, if you go on the website that the idea was first proposed, it's now banned to speak about, because no one wants to mention Roko's Basilisk in, online, because it'll trace back to the person who posted it and torture them forever.

• 45:15Eugene Mirman?

  Did you just endanger us all to some future AI? You murderer!

• 45:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I will delete the file tonight of this whole...

• 45:25Eugene Mirman?

  I love the Basilisk!

• 45:31Speaker 03

  Oh, god.

• 45:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 45:33Eugene Mirman?

  Can't wait for it!

• 45:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I want to do is, give the last word to Carl Sagan. With your permission, we will end this evening with a reading from the Book of Carl.

• 45:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you look at Earth from space, you see a dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings. Thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations. Every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar,

• 46:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, live there, on a mote of dust. Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot, on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another,

• 47:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

• 47:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It's up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another, and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

• 48:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Beacon Theater, thank you for your time. Thank you for my panel. Vanessa, Carolyn, Sean, Michael.