Risk is Our Business with William Shatner & Scott Kelly

What happens when you put Captain Kirk, a NASA astronaut, and Neil deGrasse Tyson on a ship to Antarctica? Recorded on board with William Shatner and Scott Kelly, this episode explores the thrill of discovery — from rough seas to deep space — and what it means to boldly go.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This past December 2024, I was on a ship to Antarctica. That's one of my bucket list items. And I couldn't resist because there were some notables onboard. And I said, this would make a good StarTalk episode. So I snared the one and only William Shatner, Captain Kirk. I don't know if you know, but he is a big fan of exploration. That's not a hard stretch, given what he's known for, crossing the universe during the TV commercials using warp drives. But he's also a deep thinker and he loves science. So I had to get him on the program.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And also onboard was NASA astronaut Scott Kelly. You may remember he's a twin with Mark Kelly, and both of them have been in space. But Scott Kelly in particular was sent into orbit into the International Space Station for 340 days, almost an entire year. He holds the record for continuous time in space for an American. He has a lot to say about exploration and he's a big fan of Shackleton. And let's remember that every explorer who goes where no one has gone before is a risk taker. So if you encounter a challenge where you say, this might not work, this could be dangerous.

• 1:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For some people, Captain Kirk included, risk is their business. It's a conversation I'm having with both of them for StarTalk onboard a ship to Antarctica. Check it out. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scott, we're in the Drake Passage right now. Could you give us a little background on that? Why are we listening? Why are we feel nausea? What's going on here on Earth?

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, the Drake Passage is the part of the Southern Ocean where, at the tip between South America and Antarctica.

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cape Horn, the tip, yeah.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  But where the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans meet, and it's very deep here, which causes, you know, with the prevailing winds that are generally west to east, some pretty big swells. And I think we're seeing about, I don't know, maybe 14, 15 feet right now, but they can get as high as 50 feet in this passage.

• 2:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, so we're in a cruise ship. What would this passage have been like in a wooden ship 100 years ago? You wouldn't want to do it.

• 2:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But risk is our business! Yes, I said that!

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it would be pretty harrowing, you know, in this kind of, even in this sea state in a ship like that. But I can't imagine being at the, you know, swells of 40 and 50 feet. I was just talking to my brother on the phone.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is your twin brother?

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Twin brother.

• 3:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, when I last interviewed you on StarTalk, I said, "Which brother are you?" You said, "You're the good-looking brother."

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's still true.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  But anyway, he was telling me about being in the North Atlantic on a cargo ship, because we were both, when we were younger, training to be merchant mariners, in 80-foot seas and losing, you know, 20 containers off the ship. So if you think this is bad, just imagine that.

• 3:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now, Mr. Shatner. My dear. Your show, the original Star Trek series in the 1960s, was coincident with while we were...

• 3:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Priming our space program to go to the moon. And but as far as your show is concerned, we were already there. Space was not a question about whether it should happen. It had already happened.

• 4:12William Shatner?

  It was a matter of learning to speak Klingon.

• 4:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As many fans of the show managed to. I can't count myself among those who are fluent in Klingon.

• 4:24William Shatner?

  Nor I.

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So were you just an actor at the time? Or did you participate emotionally in this idea that exploration is in our DNA?

• 4:38William Shatner?

  Exploration doesn't necessarily mean going to Mars and colonizing Mars. You can explore. For example, may I spend a moment on exploration and why exploration? A while ago, seven years ago, I heard a story of a ranger in the in the forest in the Sierras, occupying a cabin. And he was there, a guest for fire observation. And while he was living in the cabin alone, deer came and ate the grass around. And then one deer poked his its head in the window to see who was there.

• 5:18William Shatner?

  And and he struck up a conference and had a relationship with the herd of deer and discovered that deer had posted types of personality. There was the diplomat deer who poked his head in to see what was going on. There was the guard deer. There was a deer, you know. So these the this herd group had assigned roles that he discovered that, my goodness, that's how we organize ourselves. When we were on the most, the last island with the penguins.

• 5:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On this voyage, having just returned from Antarctica.

• 5:55William Shatner?

  On this voyage of exploration for all of us, for me certainly, of discovering new worlds, new whatever that whatever the language was, and seeing new civilizations, which were the penguins. And a penguin came up to the group that was standing, having landed. And the penguin.

• 6:22William Shatner?

  What are you doing here?

• 6:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was that what it was saying?

• 6:26William Shatner?

  This was the diplomat Penguin.

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 6:29William Shatner?

  And I thought, of course, this whole thing is a circle of life and here's a Penguin acting like the deer and the ranger and us and this circle. I thought, wow, what a discovery. We're in this arid land that's rife with life, but you can't see too much of it. But it's there and the Penguins are a big part of it and it's exploration and it was a discovery and I had the best time.

• 6:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what you're saying here implicitly and explicitly is that humans aren't the only curious animals out there.

• 7:06William Shatner?

  That's right. The Penguin was exploring.

• 7:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was exploring in its own way.

• 7:11William Shatner?

  No, it was exploring in a very explicit way. What are you guys doing here? You're two-legged. You don't waddle. Some of us waddle, but...

• 7:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You point to me that I waddle. Let's go back 60 years ago. You're an actor. By the way, by the way, I don't know if you knew this, but William Shatner appeared in two distinct episodes of The Twilight Zone. Yes, and quite memorable episodes of that, predating, of course, the Star Trek series. You're an actor in Hollywood.

• 7:49William Shatner?

  Yeah.

• 7:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so was there anything in particular that drew you to the part?

• 7:55William Shatner?

  You're talking about Star Trek?

• 7:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Star Trek.

• 7:57William Shatner?

  I was in New York doing something in New York and they had made a pilot of Star Trek and NBC didn't want to buy the pilot.

• 8:10William Shatner?

  They had faults with it, but they loved the idea and they wanted, for the first time... I'd never heard of it before, I've never heard of it since. They said, "We'll give you another, whatever the cost was, to make another pilot recast it all." And they called me, I was in New York, they called me. Would I come to Hollywood to see this thing that they had made with the idea of playing the captain? So, I was like ushered in.

• 8:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I presume you had no idea what impact that would have on our culture at the time?

• 8:41William Shatner?

  None whatsoever, and I saw the thing that NBC had turned down. I don't know, that's pretty darn good. It's a little pedantic, it's a little, you know, here we are, sailing the five oceans. Whereas the guys in the capsules are all friendly and, you know, there isn't this distance between them. So, I suggested a little more camaraderie and humor and we sold the pilot.

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, when I, when I look at this, uh, by the way, if, I don't know if anybody's ever been to Comic Con. Uh, the one, at least in San Diego, I don't know if they also do this in New York. The very last session is a Starship SmackDown. Where every single starship, spaceship, ever appeared in fictional storytelling is put up on display, like drawings of them, photos of them, and you vote. There are people arguing the case of one ship or another, of which is the greatest of ships. The year the Starship Enterprise won that, what carried the day was a simple fact.

• 9:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That no ship before then, ever displayed in storytelling, was ever designed to just explore. Every ship you ever see someone get into and out of, in a science fiction movie or story, it's designed to take you to a destination. That's why those ships existed. So, this, this as a concept, it's like, oh my gosh. Exploration was... Paramount in why the ship existed at all.

• 10:26William Shatner?

  Right. It was designed, I, I mean, what you've said is, is a valid. The truth of the matter is, the designer of the ship had designed many versions. Put them on a wall and invited all the executives in to see which aspect of which drawing they loved. And then he combined what everybody loves. It was like a potpourri of a.

• 10:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 10:54William Shatner?

  Yeah.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  NASA's done that before.

• 10:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What? Say that again?

• 10:59Speaker 01

  NASA's done that before. That's, that's why they get canceled.

• 11:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space shuttle is an amalgam of ideas stapled together, pretty much.

• 11:08William Shatner?

  It's a noble looking ship, the, the, these, the, the, it's got, it's got, it looks like it should go someplace. Unfortunately, it's not powered, right?

• 11:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The space shuttle orbiter, it's got wings and, and jet nozzles out the back. So it seems to me, wherever you are, you ought to be able to choose, let's go someplace new. And in fact, that's what they did in the film Armageddon.

• 11:34William Shatner?

  Yes, but in real life, once they start their approach.

• 11:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They, they, okay.

• 11:40William Shatner?

  They gotta land it.

• 11:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, that's one of the reasons why Armageddon violated more known laws of physics per minute than any other film ever made. So, uh, just tell me about the space shuttle, what it meant. If its only job as, as fun and versatile as it looked, if its only job was to get you to orbit.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Well, that's not, that wasn't its only job.

• 12:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, please.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  So the space shuttle is one of the most, is the most diverse spacecraft we've ever built. And probably will be so in our lifetime, but it has one serious limitation. It's heavy, and it doesn't carry enough fuel to get out of low Earth orbit. But it does launch people, it launches cargo, it can build things. It built an international space station, it can be its own science laboratory, you can do spacewalks from it.

• 12:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that cargo bay is huge, as far as I can tell, because it launched, it deployed the Hubble Space Telescope, and my favorite, my favorite size analog to this Hubble telescope, it's about the size of a Greyhound bus, which means you could lower a Greyhound bus into the payload of the shuttle.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, something that weighed up to 50,000 pounds. Whereas the Soyuz, to use that as the counter example.

• 12:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the Russian.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Russian Soyuz spacecraft is really only designed to launch three people and a very small amount of cargo, and that's it. Does it very well, but it doesn't do very much.

• 13:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been up more than once. Have you been up on each of those crafts?

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Twice on each.

• 13:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Twice on each?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, now maybe because the Soyuz is not as complex as the shuttle and the orbiter and the solid rocket boosters, the Soyuz has the best safety record of any space rocket.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  They've had two fatal in-flight accidents, just like the space shuttle, but less people.

• 13:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  A similar number of flights, but.

• 13:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I thought they had many more flights. Okay, I didn't know that.

• 14:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where does this fit with you? We know, we learned earlier on this voyage, you gave a marvelous talk reviewing Shackleton, the explorer to the Antarctic, and the trials and tribulations he went through, and no one died after he got stuck in the ice. And he's a bit of a hero of yours, as we all felt.

• 14:34William Shatner?

  And mine too.

• 14:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And yours too. So here's someone who's gone where no one has gone before.

• 14:39William Shatner?

  Oh, I've heard that.

• 14:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Boldly, boldly. Boldly gone, where no one has gone before.

• 14:45William Shatner?

  Oh, sorry, he's right.

• 14:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and-

• 14:48William Shatner?

  You sound so good on the, of the track. Is that you narrating it?

• 14:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was me.

• 14:52William Shatner?

  Boldly go, oh my god.

• 14:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was you though, right?

• 14:54William Shatner?

  That was me.

• 14:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was right, with the very famous split infinitive.

• 14:59William Shatner?

  A boldly go, go boldly?

• 15:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and later in the later films, they said to go boldly.

• 15:04William Shatner?

  Well, I wrote a book called A Boldly Go.

• 15:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, no, we loved that. When they tried to fix the grammar in a later movie, it was like, no, that's just, just deal with it.

• 15:13William Shatner?

  Doesn't work that way.

• 15:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, doesn't work that way.

• 15:14William Shatner?

  You were talking about ships and its efficiency. I was invited to the Cape one time, we rolled out the red-

• 15:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the Cape Canaveral, Florida.

• 15:23William Shatner?

  Yeah, yeah, where they would launch all our spaceships. And in the center of one of those hangars, on a platform, was the lunar excursion module, the LEM. Went up the stairs, and they invited me in to the LEM, which looks like, whatever you call it, you know, the-

• 15:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pergola?

• 15:45William Shatner?

  Uh, uh, uh, yes, exactly. It looks, it's the simplest- and you get inside, and they have a hammock to lie down. I laid down on the hammock. And it's this ridiculous children's toy.

• 16:00William Shatner?

  And it's got more instruments, more complications, and that's the result from the shuttle to the spaceship to the thing in the mud, they've got a little garden tool thing to land on the moon, get out there, take a picture, get back in, and then meet up with the, whatever we call it, the thing circulating.

• 16:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The command module.

• 16:25William Shatner?

  And then they get out of the limb, into the, into the ship that's gonna take them uh back to the, back to Earth, and this, what happens to the, oh, that's been let, no, no, what happens to it?

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Crashes into the moon.

• 16:39William Shatner?

  It crashes into the moon. That's how.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Eventually, I guess.

• 16:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  However, if memory serves, Apollo 13 realized that for their life support, they needed some of the life support that was on the limb. So that in some, in missions subsequent to Apollo 13, didn't they keep the limb a little further in towards Earth to make sure? Is that what happened? I don't remember.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  They used to, used life support systems to, you know, save themselves, the life support systems on the limb, they had to do some modifications, but they were able to use that to, you know, safely get back to Earth.

• 17:15William Shatner?

  Can you imagine, you're getting, and they're saying, well, what'll we do when the engineers down on Earth is saying, well, try this and try that, and you're gonna die? Um, but, but when you, when you talk about exploration and the means of exploration from the, the, uh, what's his name, Thor Heidel, uh, using papyrus as a raft and then getting to all, uh, Shackleton in a wooden boat, and here we are on this modern liner, which was being explained, uh, by you, that the engines here are of particular make, and because we don't hear the engines propelling this boat as we are right now going back to

• 18:00William Shatner?

  uh, Yushua, we don't hear the engines. Except every so often, and I didn't understand why, you hear when we're parked. You hear a rumble. I think, what is that? Is that the anchor going down? It's not.

• 18:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, station keeping.

• 18:17William Shatner?

  It's the station keeping.

• 18:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, so you could drop an anchor, but if you don't need to, then why? Right? And now we know exactly where the boat is. We, it's not my boat.

• 18:27William Shatner?

  All the

• 18:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Captain knows.

• 18:29William Shatner?

  All the means of exploration going on, the variety of things that we're using to explore.

• 18:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me, let me throw a little monkey wrench in this.

• 18:39William Shatner?

  As usual.

• 18:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If, if you know that much about where you're going, and it could be done in the safety and comfort of a luxury ship, then is it really exploration? If the, if the risks have been reduced to zero.

• 19:01William Shatner?

  If you're rowing in an open boat, you're more exploring than getting a

• 19:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're going where no one has gone before, that is exploration. If you're attempting tasks that have never been attempted before. Scott goes into orbit. He's a guinea pig for the doctors on Earth, because he's got a twin brother. We're gonna learn about, no one had done that before with a twin brother.

• 19:28William Shatner?

  It's incredible. What an incredible thing.

• 19:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your brother was not the guinea pig. You were, because you're in space and you're exposed to cosmic rays. What happened, what happened to you?

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Well, I was exposed to the environment. He was, he was the guinea pig on Earth that was a

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, keep telling yourself that. He's, he's chilling on the, the safety of Earth's surface, and you're not.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  And, you know, he had people following him around the country and taking all kinds of samples and having to leave stuff outside his front door. Also was like the lowest

• 19:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stuff outside his front door. We figured what that is.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, for people to pick up. Lowest, uh, lowest paid government employee at the time, because they had to pay him. So he was making minimum wage because he was no longer a NASA astronaut. So I really have to hand it to him to do that, whereas I was like getting all the glory by being in space. But also, like you mentioned, the radiation.

• 20:17William Shatner?

  Yeah, but your heart is smaller than it was when you went in there.

• 20:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, stuff happened to you.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it grew back.

• 20:22William Shatner?

  It did?

• 20:22Speaker 01

  But as my wife Amiko says, it's a good thing I started with a big heart.

• 20:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ohhh.

• 20:29William Shatner?

  That's great.

• 20:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just want to understand this. So even though the exploration was not in the realm of place, it was in the realm of physiology. It's exploratory physiology.

• 20:39William Shatner?

  That's exploration.

• 20:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I agree, I agree.

• 20:41William Shatner?

  Yeah.

• 20:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I agree. So what did we learn by exploring what happens to your body in orbit for how many days?

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Uh, on that mission, three hundred and forty.

• 20:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Three hundred and forty?

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They couldn't stay an extra twenty-five days and call it a year?

• 20:56Speaker 01

  I wanted to, but the Russians had a certain schedule they had to meet, so we had to come back.

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause you came back on the Soyuz.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me remind people, the Soyuz does not land in water. They just land on land.

• 21:10William Shatner?

  They crash land on the.

• 21:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They crash land.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's really not a landing.

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  (laughing).

• 21:17William Shatner?

  Well, if you landage, if you walk away, it's a landage.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  It's the ultimate e-ticket ride, uh, when that parachute opens. And if I hated being in space every minute for that entire three hundred and forty days, I'd do it all over again for that last twenty minutes.

• 21:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really? Just the thrill?

• 21:36William Shatner?

  The last twenty minutes of coming back to earth, you mean?

• 21:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 21:39William Shatner?

  What was that like?

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Well, when the parachute opens, you're just tumble and are thrown around like crazy. And there have been, I know one particular person, I'm sure other people have felt this way, who was an experienced test pilot, I'm not gonna say the person's name, cause I don't want to embarrass him, but he was not, apparently not briefed on how dynamic the landing is.

• 22:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  And he started screaming because he thought he was gonna die.

• 22:04William Shatner?

  High bitch or low in guttural?

• 22:06Speaker 01

  I wasn't there, yeah, sure.

• 22:08William Shatner?

  Because there's flames coming out of the tile, right?

• 22:13Speaker 01

  It's like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, but while you're on fire.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  And as soon as you realize-

• 22:21William Shatner?

  So I mean, the flames are coming up through the windows. You're on fire!

• 22:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's while you're slowing down on re- yeah, but not, but-

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Shoot opens a little bit later.

• 22:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The shoot opens later than that.

• 22:30William Shatner?

  Oh, I understand that, but in that moment, when I was screaming, flames are coming up, you're burning up, and you don't know whether the tiles are glued down and up, they may be flipping out, the tiles may be, they lost some tiles.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  There's a lot of things you don't know that's going on behind the scenes.

• 22:52William Shatner?

  Yeah, right.

• 22:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From the inside, you don't see what it's got going on the outside.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  You might not want to know.

• 22:56William Shatner?

  What, what, what was it like to have, so three of you in the ship, right? And one guy's going, "Ahhhh!" What's that like?

• 23:04Speaker 01

  I wasn't there on that one, but I, it was only, you know, reported afterwards that this particular person-

• 23:11William Shatner?

  Was he, did they say, "You can't do that"?

• 23:15Speaker 01

  I don't know. Lot going on then, you might not-

• 23:18William Shatner?

  I'm an astronaut and I explore space, I'm going to Mars, but when I came down, I saw flames!

• 23:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I, I still want to get to the bottom of the advancing a space frontier by learning what's happening to your physiology. So-

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, okay, let me get back to that. Yeah. Heart shrunk 25%, changes to my telomeres-

• 23:44William Shatner?

  25%?

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Telomeres, that's like the end of your DNA or something, yeah?

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Really an indication of your physical age, as you get older, they get shorter, more frayed. Initially NASA thought that was due to the controlled diet and exercise, later, you know, we learned that there were some, some worms that the Japanese were doing telomere experiments on too, and their telomeres got better while they were on the space station, never once saw them working out on the treadmill, or doing any kind of exercise, so it turns out it was actually the radiation. Most important result, that I always want everyone to understand and point out, is after spending a year in space, like you mentioned earlier, I am now not only smarter, but more handsome than my brother Mark.

• 24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would he agree to that?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Probably not.

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. This idea of pushing the limits of not only what a machine can do, but what human physiology can do. Uh, this is exploration and who, and who, you, you?

• 24:42William Shatner?

  Yes.

• 24:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sir?

• 24:43William Shatner?

  Yes.

• 24:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now the oldest person to ascend above the carbon line.

• 24:47William Shatner?

  Again, I am not. My telemirs are very long.

• 24:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but let me ask you this. When I saw you go up the ladder to go into

• 24:59William Shatner?

  The space.

• 25:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Into the, to the, the, the blue origin.

• 25:02William Shatner?

  Yes.

• 25:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Capsule.

• 25:03William Shatner?

  Yes, you know.

• 25:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I said, this man is 89 years old. How old were you for that flight?

• 25:09William Shatner?

  I don't know, 32, something like that.

• 25:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, times three, right?

• 25:13William Shatner?

  No, wait a minute. I'm walking up the stairs to go and they're, something's venting out of a pipe.

• 25:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Out of the side of the ship?

• 25:21William Shatner?

  Side of the ship. What's that?

• 25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hydrogen.

• 25:25William Shatner?

  Hydrogen. The, the.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Fuel.

• 25:29William Shatner?

  Zeppelin, the.

• 25:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hindenburg.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Hindenburg, yeah.

• 25:32William Shatner?

  Burned. And hydrogen was what was burning.

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 25:36William Shatner?

  And I'm looking at this thing.

• 25:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There was some, uh, coating of aluminum powder on the surface to make it highly reflective.

• 25:42William Shatner?

  Exactly.

• 25:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That burned also on the standing electricity up the road.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Had you been in Russia, not only would the thing be venting the fuel, there'd be people smoking cigarettes right at the bottom of the launch pad.

• 25:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let us be candid with ourselves that part of the risk of exploring on some level is even the risk of even starting the trip.

• 26:03William Shatner?

  If you're exploring, you're ready to die because you're going.

• 26:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At some level, you gotta be ready to die. And here you go. What probability of death would you have accepted?

• 26:17William Shatner?

  What's the highest probability of death you would have accepted to do that mission?

• 26:21Speaker 01

  To launch on the space shuttle?

• 26:23William Shatner?

  Yes.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Well, I launched on the space shuttle, I was STS 103. And so, we had approximately 103 prior missions. And there was one fatal accident, so that's a 1% chance of dying.

• 26:37William Shatner?

  Yes.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  What would I have accepted? Certainly not 50%.

• 26:43William Shatner?

  10%?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe it would depend, it would depend on what we were doing.

• 26:47William Shatner?

  Well, that's an interesting question.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:49William Shatner?

  Because death is so permanent, you lose the bet. It's 10 to 1. You don't just pay up, "Oh, here's the 100 I owe you."

• 27:02William Shatner?

  It's your life. 1% is not acceptable. Nothing is acceptable. I'm going up, I'm a test pilot. I've tested this plane, I've tested this thing, I know it works. I'm not going up to die, I'm going to explore.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  That has to be your attitude, right?

• 27:19William Shatner?

  That has to be your attitude.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  And that is what you come to terms with. Like, I would think about it, leading up to my first flight with, you know, the... You kind of rationalize, "Hey, for one, I want to do this, I think it's important, I want to serve my country. It's my job, I'm a test pilot. There is risk." My brother and I used to exchange those like death letters for our families. Like, if the thing blows up, give this to my, you know, wife and children. And we do the, we would do the same, fortunately, never had to use those. But it's, you know, everything has risk, right?

• 27:54William Shatner?

  Is that a thing in NASA? Is that a thing? Death letters?

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Maybe, I don't know. It was a thing with my brother and I.

• 27:59William Shatner?

  You're a test pilot, so you've run that, it's a new airplane. And you're testing the airplane. So you run that airplane along the runway, the front. Now you're a foot up the ground, you make a circle, and get you 10 feet, 20 feet, 30. Then you're 50 feet, by that time, you know the plane works. You go up to Mars.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  No, you knew, you know it worked. It might not continue to work as you expand out the envelope, yeah.

• 28:22William Shatner?

  Now, you press a button, you eject, I mean, the chances of living. Now, let's go to Mars, guys, okay? Shup, flames, scream, "Ah, flames!" And then finally, you're into orbit and you're going towards Mars. You're gonna die. Meteorites, radiation, landing on Mars.

• 28:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is why we have engineers.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  You may die.

• 28:47William Shatner?

  What?

• 28:47Speaker 01

  You're not definitely gonna die, you may die.

• 28:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's why we have engineers to figure this out.

• 28:51William Shatner?

  You're going to die, the chances of you surviving a meteorite hit, or lasting six months on Mars with all that radiation, and then getting back in and saying, "Oh, more flames, we gotta get lift off, you know, get out of orbit of, I mean, and land on Earth." You're gonna die.

• 29:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, none of us want to hear you say that, who uttered the words, "To boldly go in."

• 29:16William Shatner?

  You're gonna die! Boldly go, boldly go to your death, and if you don't die, we'll congratulate you, and we'll tell you your telomeres are lengthening, you know?

• 29:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Take this back to Antarctica. They're, they're on the open seas. There, there could be monsters in the ocean. There could be weather patterns they've never thought of or predicted. They don't know how much food they'll actually need. They don't even know if there will be food there.

• 29:43William Shatner?

  Devon coined the word "catabatic," or "atabatic."

• 29:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does that mean?

• 29:47William Shatner?

  Down, 100 mile an hour winds, coming down wind, or 100 mile an hours going up. 100 mile an hour winds, you gotta, you're in a rowboat for crying out loud. You gotta sail.

• 29:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A sail!

• 29:57William Shatner?

  Sail's good for 15 knots. Eh, 20 knots, you're gonna blow your sails out. 30 knots, your master crashing. You're gonna die!

• 30:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so what I have come to learn, being a member of the species that we call Homo sapiens, not all of us fear the risk of death at the same level.

• 30:23William Shatner?

  Wait a minute.

• 30:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, hang on, no, it's very simple. There are people who ascend Mount Everest knowing There's a real chance they're gonna die.

• 30:31William Shatner?

  They got oxygen, they've got parkas, they're gonna slide down on their ass down the glacier to get back to camp. They've got Sherpas who go up without oxygen, run up and run back. If you need some help, sir, I'll help you, says a Sherpa.

• 30:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They probably give, you know, all those National Geographic specials where they show someone ascending the mountain for the first time, but there's a camera already there when they get up to the top. So who got the camera?

• 31:00William Shatner?

  The Sherpa.

• 31:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sherpa and the camera got there first.

• 31:03William Shatner?

  Exactly.

• 31:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what I'm saying is, there are people who jump out of airplanes willingly, people who rock climb.

• 31:10William Shatner?

  But they have a parachute, they're not going, this thing's gonna open. How about that guy that jumped out of, what, he's 50,000?

• 31:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Baumgartner. Felix Baumgartner, who, by the way?

• 31:20Speaker 01

  He was scared.

• 31:21William Shatner?

  He was a guest. He was dead.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  He was scared.

• 31:24William Shatner?

  Scared. He was gonna die the moment he started twisting. I'm gonna die of centrifugal force. How would you like to die of centrifugal force? Your blood comes out of your ears.

• 31:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had Felix Baumgartner on StarTalk. Yeah, see, check our archives. And he's a pretty good guy. I thought he'd be a little weird or crazy.

• 31:45William Shatner?

  What was he exploring?

• 31:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He liked, he liked exploring the limits of his own body's tolerances.

• 31:53William Shatner?

  So it's like a rock climber. How many rock climbers live to 40? Nobody. You know why? They're after that thrill. After a while to climb a rock, I gotta go further, I gotta

• 32:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And here's where I wanna take this. Listen to me. Some of us do that. And some of them die. Those who don't die, figure out how to do it without dying. They'll write about it. There'll be someone documenting it.

• 32:19William Shatner?

  No.

• 32:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it opens up horizons for the rest of us who aren't that brave.

• 32:25William Shatner?

  Wait a minute.

• 32:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's how we got out of the cave.

• 32:28William Shatner?

  You don't understand, they're a junkie.

• 32:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because whiskey's our business.

• 32:31William Shatner?

  I've heard that. The, the, they're adrenaline junkies. They need the adrenaline. And adrenaline doesn't flow after three times.

• 32:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dude, if we didn't have them in our species, we'd still be in the cave.

• 32:45William Shatner?

  Exactly, they're the explorers. And as they're falling, they say, "I'm dying!" And that's it.

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the next person that does it makes sure that they don't make whatever mistake.

• 32:57William Shatner?

  That's exactly right. Until they make their own mistake. And that's what, that's what these guys are. That's who these, that's who the original group of astronauts were.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  I agree with you on the, on the one, the one-way mission is not something I would be interested in. Having lived in a, in a, in an enclosed, sealed environment for a year, when you cannot walk outside. You know, Earth has like everything practically for, for humans. It has everything to offer.

• 33:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scott, Scott, we went 150 years with people coming from Europe on one-way trips to the new world.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Oh, I know, it's for some people, it's not for me. I would not want to live on Mars for the rest of my life. However, I would watch that reality show. Because I think at some point it's going to turn into like Lord of the Flies situation.

• 33:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, the darker side of what it is to be human.

• 33:53William Shatner?

  So, but that's, what, you're on, we're on to an interesting part of this thesis of what is exploration. Those who do explore, those, not, you know, the, the, the Ranger with the deer and the penguin who asked a question. That's one kind of exploration. But the jeopardy of exploration is something to be discussed. Who goes on what could be a one-way trip? These guys didn't know they were, they, they, they had to know. When that guy, when that brave astronaut was seeing flames coming up from the entry point and screaming, "I'm gonna die," that's just his humanity.

• 34:37William Shatner?

  But he was willing to go. Somebody must have said, "You know, son, the, the tiles are gonna heat up and you'll probably feel some heat and it's gonna look, oh, it's okay, I can take that." But when you see it flaming and, and you're, it's gonna burn your parachute and you're screaming, you're succumbing to humanity.

• 34:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you don't always know.

• 35:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where your limits are.

• 35:02William Shatner?

  Exactly.

• 35:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even if you have bravado leading up to that.

• 35:04William Shatner?

  Exactly, your bravado, and but that's what that's what this adrenaline is. One more rock I can climb, I put my fingers in there, I got a grip, I got a grip, do I let go with the legs? I don't know whether I can.

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I can tell you, the only people, friends I've ever had, who died prematurely were rock climbers, dying in just such an accident.

• 35:26William Shatner?

  I'm telling you, that's why they do it, free climbing.

• 35:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, I grew up in a city, the city was dangerous enough, I don't need to add other dangers to that. Okay, I already was feeling, not, it wasn't the exploration gene, it was a survival gene, enough so that I don't need to do something else to put my life at risk.

• 35:44William Shatner?

  So, what is your, your collective opinion on people who are looking at, like the people are gonna go to Mars? The, once the instruments go, people are gonna go for at least a year and a half.

• 35:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, so, so Bill, I think the people who want to go to Mars have already noticed that NASA has plunked an SUV-sized rover on Mars, following a half dozen other rovers that got there before. And this current rover brought a helicopter. So Mars is not some unbreached place.

• 36:19William Shatner?

  By humanity.

• 36:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By humanity. So I think that they're not thinking they're gonna die.

• 36:24William Shatner?

  No, but, but they know that the risk, like, like Scott was saying, 1%, you know, out of 99, 99, 1%, that's pretty good odds, I'm not gonna die. But would you put the odds at 50/50 to go to, to go to Mars? I would say 50/50 is very generous.

• 36:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I agree, for the first ones to Mars, I'd agree.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  And I think that's what they were considering, maybe even for Apollo 11, right Charlie? Maybe a 50% chance of success.

• 36:54William Shatner?

  Really? So now you're looking at guys in the, in the, in the magnificence, and they were all men at that time, in the magnificence of their manhood. They're running on the beach, they're in the best physical shape, they've learned everything, nine. Six years of geology, Jose was saying, wasted on him because he was.

• 37:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jose, the astronaut on board here.

• 37:20William Shatner?

  Trained to the warrior degree. They are wielding their swords of intellect like the ancient Spartans.

• 37:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 37:31William Shatner?

  Okay?

• 37:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 37:32William Shatner?

  They're gonna die nobly, 1% chance. That's what these guys were. That's the original 16, 19, what was it?

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Original seven.

• 37:42William Shatner?

  Original seven.

• 37:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Mercury Seven.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, Mercury Seven.

• 37:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, and by the way, in the spirit of your exchange letters of who might die, it, within a few years ago, I forgot exactly when, it went public, the letter that Nixon was gonna read had Apollo 11 not successfully left the moon. And if it couldn't launch, they'd still be alive until they died. And so, you'd be watching them die.

• 38:11William Shatner?

  Which is another aspect. You couldn't test that LEMS takeoff, right? The LEMS takeoff was, could not have been tested on Earth.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sure they fired the engine many times in a vacuum.

• 38:21William Shatner?

  One-sixth the gravity, and suffering that journey and landing. We're up and landing.

• 38:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we do have the laws of physics, which work very well for us. Yeah, it's not just a random, when we ignite it, where will it go? I don't know.

• 38:36William Shatner?

  No, not where will it go, but will it work was random. Will it work in those kind, with that kind of jeez?

• 38:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why.

• 38:44William Shatner?

  Starting off and landing and circling.

• 38:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every mission before Apollo 11 was incrementally leading up to that landing. Right up to Apollo 10, right up to Apollo 10. We all forgot Apollo 10, but that one was important.

• 38:57William Shatner?

  Yes.

• 38:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It got to the moon, deployed.

• 39:00William Shatner?

  But if you're in an airplane in the density of this air, and you can pull a switch and eject, is far different from circling the moon and wondering whether it's a little collapsible rugula? What was it? The little hut that was, that they were gonna live in the moon, live on the moon, and get it to fire to get back into orbit, and then climb from that, back into there, and then get from there, back to there. I mean, the chances were incredible.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  That's why they're heroes.

• 39:32William Shatner?

  That's why they're heroes. That's why they're heroes.

• 39:36William Shatner?

  Exactly.

• 40:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we're running short on time here. One feature of Star Trek in the original series, and it trickled into other incarnations of it, was that there was a morality tale. So each episode was a lesson in how we treat one another here on Earth. But, under the guise of, "Oh, it's just science fiction, and it's aliens, and it's..." So that would get you to comment on a lot of prevailing geopolitics, social-cultural issues, racial issues, and...

• 40:43William Shatner?

  My favorite episode was the one where the guy was black and white, and the other guy was white and black.

• 40:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With Frank Gorshin was the lead actor.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  My favorite, yeah.

• 40:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In that episode, the aliens were exactly half-black, half-white. And one group of them were persecuting the other group. Why? Because they were black on the other half of their bodies. And so, again, it's just the space, but really, they're mirrors back to civilization. Especially there in the 1960s, civil rights movement was still in full swing. So, I just want to say, to be able to explore and still do something socially conscious, I think was with Gene Roddenberry as the creative genius behind it all, and...

• 41:29William Shatner?

  Yes, he should get a lot of credit, but there were other guys that really worked on the show.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  You know, people, as a... And I was a huge Star Trek fan as a kid. My early memories were watching, sneaking behind the couch, watching Star Trek episodes. and I was like five years old when my mother didn't know my brother and I were there.

• 41:49William Shatner?

  What were you doing behind the couch?

• 41:50Speaker 01

  We were just hiding so she wouldn't see us. We were supposed to be in bed and we would watch.

• 41:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And she would be. Same with me. We weren't allowed to watch TV during the week.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  And it was scary.

• 41:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I had to catch most of it in reruns.

• 42:00William Shatner?

  What were you saying?

• 42:01Speaker 01

  And Apollo 11 memories. But as an astronaut, people would sometimes ask me a simple question. You know, the yes, no questions or the binary question, Star Trek or Star Wars?

• 42:13William Shatner?

  What was your answer, Scott?

• 42:14Speaker 01

  I used to say when I was a young fighter pilot, oh, absolutely Star Wars. X-Wing fighter.

• 42:21William Shatner?

  God, Scott, that's really.

• 42:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scott, Scott, security, could you get him off of this stage?

• 42:27Speaker 01

  As I got older and then.

• 42:28William Shatner?

  You're a test pilot, so you're gonna be in your twenties.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  You know, once I got into my 40s, my 50s, you know, the harsh edges have gotten rubbed off on me a little bit. Clearly Star Trek now, because of the very reason you mentioned and how that show was just so far ahead of its time. Decades ahead of this time.

• 42:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It cared about the laws of physics, unlike Star Wars, just to be clear. Just to be, I don't want this to go unrecognized. You flew for the Navy, correct?

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 42:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just want to make sure that's on the table here.

• 43:00William Shatner?

  Why?

• 43:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why?

• 43:01William Shatner?

  Why is it important that he flew for the Navy?

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Oh, as a fighter pilot, oh, versus the Air Force, because of the Navy, being a Navy pilot? Much more challenging than being an Air Force pilot, that's why it's important. I'm sorry, Charlie.

• 43:13William Shatner?

  Landing on those carriers, landing on the carrier, landing on the carrier at night, apparently is the.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  That's the worst, the worst.

• 43:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I once went on a centrifuge at a, in Brandeis University, we were doing a show there and they had a centrifuge. And they didn't put it at its fastest or anything and I got off and my lunch came out of me and it was. So I realized I was.

• 43:36William Shatner?

  None of them like this ship right now.

• 43:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I realized I was the inadequate stuff rather than the right stuff and but I can handle that because I have other talents I think I can bring.

• 43:48William Shatner?

  This is the second time I've talked to you in the last couple of days where your up-chucking has been a subject.

• 44:00William Shatner?

  Is it a fetish with you? I mean, are you trying to release something from inside you? What is it?

• 44:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm exposing my vulnerable side to the audience.

• 44:11William Shatner?

  That's who you are. You're letting us see your insides.

• 44:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so we can land this plane here, if I may use a metaphor, from your, or land this starship. When I look at the challenges of Shackleton and other polar explorers, it is many dimensional. It is the temperature, it is the time, it is a place they've never been before. Do they have enough food? There's all manner of things that have never been breached before. And it's all rolled up into one expedition. And that's gotta be the scariest thing ever. So, can you just comment on that? Reflect on how, it's one thing to say Mars is a risk because of its radiation.

• 45:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, maybe I'll get a radiation suit or something. That's one thing. But if you've got 20 things that could kill you, you know what it reminds me of? I don't remember which film. It's one of these sci-fi films where they're hand, oh, I remember, excuse me, I remember what it was. It was the movie Contact, based on the Carl Sagan novel. Where Jodie Foster's character is going to visit the aliens. All right? Because they sent us a recipe of how to do that. Before she gets on board the, this, this new-fangled alien spacecraft, they hand her this thing to bite on that, where she can kill herself. Commit suicide.

• 45:40William Shatner?

  Cyanide, too.

• 45:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, some kind of, it might have been cyanide, or I don't remember what it was. But it's, and she says, "You think I'm gonna travel all the way just to kill myself?" And they were, they leveled with her. They said, "We can list 100 reasons why you might want to do this. What scares us are the 100 reasons we can't think of why you might want to do this."

• 46:03William Shatner?

  I, I wanna ask one question about, about that very, uh, element of torture.

• 46:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 46:10William Shatner?

  Okay?

• 46:12William Shatner?

  You're dressed in a suit, from head to toe. I mean, it's airtight. Uh, it's, it's, water is flowing through it to cool it. The, the, it's 200 degrees on, on that thing. And your armpit itches.

• 46:30William Shatner?

  What do you do?

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Uh, well, you can't do anything. The worst, though, is something on your face.

• 46:36William Shatner?

  Oh, it's the face, yeah. You gotta scratch your cheek, and you can't scratch your cheek. What do you do?

• 46:42Speaker 01

  You deal with it.

• 46:43William Shatner?

  What do you mean, deal with it?

• 46:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dude, did the right stuff. They're not gonna freak out 'cause their face itches.

• 46:48William Shatner?

  No, I, I don't mind dying, but I gotta scratch this itch.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Not something we really ever talk about much.

• 46:54William Shatner?

  Yeah, but it's so practical.

• 46:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, as I understand, there was a variant on the spacesuit where they had, like, a thing where you can maneuver it from the outside, it can scratch. I read about this.

• 47:05William Shatner?

  Is that true?

• 47:06Speaker 01

  I don't know, I've never heard of it.

• 47:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I just heard about this.

• 47:08William Shatner?

  Uh, you may have heard about it.

• 47:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but I, I tested this.

• 47:10William Shatner?

  He was in one, okay? Whose word are you gonna take?

• 47:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I've tested this. Uh, so I tested, I said to myself, if I'm in a spacesuit and my face itches, I can't scratch it. So, I said, how long can I go without scratching a face itch? And I would stand there, and initially it's a little twitchy.

• 47:28William Shatner?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, after a while, the itch goes away.

• 47:31William Shatner?

  So I pictured myself as an FBI agent, and I'm hiding in a closet, and the bad guy is in the room, and I itch. I gotta scratch this thing, and he's gonna hear me scratch.

• 47:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You wouldn't be a good FBI agent.

• 47:42William Shatner?

  No, you have to deal with that itch.

• 47:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they'd shoot through the closet, and then you'd be removed from the gene pool.

• 47:47William Shatner?

  Here, you got an itch, where is the pain?

• 47:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I found, you can resist itches. If you wait long enough, the itch goes away.

• 47:53William Shatner?

  Is that right?

• 47:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have found. I did the experiment, at least on myself.

• 47:56William Shatner?

  Right.

• 47:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now...

• 47:57William Shatner?

  We've covered that.

• 47:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All, all of my shows, when they have fun folks on, I wanna give you a chance to ask me a question about astrophysics. Only because there aren't many astrophysicists in the world. In fact, if you do the numbers, it's one in a million people in the world is an astrophysicist. So if you're ever in the same space as one of them, you better ask your question.

• 48:19William Shatner?

  My ambition is to sit down and talk with you about astro... All the stuff I have no comprehension about, that you do, I, there's so much to learn.

• 48:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ask me one question now.

• 48:28William Shatner?

  I can't think of one. No, no, just, uh...

• 48:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scott, look, come to Scott, Scott, go.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Hey, I wanted to clear something up with you, Neil.

• 48:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh oh, clear something up.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  From Twitter, October 9th in 2022, after the Top Gun movie came out, you said, "Late to the party here, but in this year's Top Gun movie, Tom Cruise's character Maverick ejects from a hypersonic plane at Mach 10.5 before it crashed."

• 48:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Holy mackerel.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  "He survived with no injuries. At that airspeed, his body would splatter like a chainmail glove swatting a worm." Just saying. And then I responded to it. And I said-

• 49:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thus began the Twitter dust-up.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I said, "Depends on his altitude." I was going Mach 25 when I left the ISS on a spacewalk, and that was just fine.

• 49:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's true.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Which is a lot faster, so. And it was interesting to see this whole thing unfold because people chose sides.

• 49:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they so did. There was like, "Tyson, you've never been in space, so I'm siding with the guy who's been in space." And other people said, "You can't duck the laws of physics." So it divided right down the middle, I think.

• 49:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they thought it was just like beef, like we hated each other. Like, I don't, it's Twitter.

• 49:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me ask you a question. Because the internet thrives on just that kind of-

• 49:53William Shatner?

  Let me ask you an astrophysicist question.

• 49:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you going to leave this dangling here? Okay, that's fine. I'll come back to it.

• 50:00William Shatner?

  He's going 18,000 miles an hour with no air.

• 50:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 50:04William Shatner?

  And he's not suffering, I think, because there's no air.

• 50:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because there's no air!

• 50:08William Shatner?

  Right.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:09William Shatner?

  You're talking about a winged airplane using air as a lift.

• 50:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 50:15William Shatner?

  And ejecting it 10,000, whatever it is.

• 50:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mach 10 would be 7,000 miles an hour, yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  But there's almost no air where a Mach 10 airplane would fly.

• 50:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They would fly very high. You can't do that at low altitude. But, that's kind of the whole point. Where there's less air, you can go faster so that you're still intersecting the requisite air molecules to measure the fact that you're going Mach 10. Next time you're driving down the street?

• 50:39William Shatner?

  Yes.

• 50:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  60 miles an hour, roll down the window.

• 50:42William Shatner?

  Yes.

• 50:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or, oh, sorry, how do you open windows? Oh, lower the window. Lower the window with the button. Stick your hand out, just like that. You can barely hold your hand straight against sixty mile an hour air. That is a hard thing to accomplish. Now, increase the speed of that air by a factor of one hundred. You stick your hand out there, your hand will just blow away. Separated from your arm.

• 51:14William Shatner?

  And you're gonna, we've missed hundred mile an hour winds here, but they happen all the time.

• 51:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, pick up, where are you going with your question?

• 51:22William Shatner?

  Okay, the universe is expanding.

• 51:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All measurements tell us that.

• 51:26William Shatner?

  Okay. Where, so the, the, the, uh, the star system that we saw, we think is the original one, is the farthest away, thirteen point eight billion years away. Where's it gone? Where's it going?

• 51:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That star system, we see it not as it is today, but as it once was thirteen point eight billion years ago. Cause that light is only now just reaching.

• 51:51William Shatner?

  Jesus, yesterday you said that it's instantaneous. I mean, you gotta have the rules, follow the rules here. So, wait a minute. So, that still is my question, it's only more compounded. So, I'm looking at light from that galaxy thirteen point eight billion years away. And it's another thirteen, it's twenty six, it's twenty nine point six light years away now.

• 52:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Billion, so what, so what's going on is, there's the light you see from objects formed at the beginning of the universe, only now just reaching us. Today, that object is way farther away from us than that.

• 52:30William Shatner?

  So, the universe is far larger.

• 52:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just can't see that, yes.

• 52:33William Shatner?

  The, the measurements of the universe is far larger than thirty million.

• 52:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like ninety, nearly a hundred billion light years across.

• 52:39William Shatner?

  So, it's like immeasurably big. So, what is space?

• 52:46William Shatner?

  Gotcha.

• 52:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the final frontier.

• 52:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mic drop on that.

• 53:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me say, Scott, it was fun doing a little dust-up with you on Twitter. Just to see how people chose sides. Right, they thought we were just enemies and they wanted to watch it happen. But it was fun. It was a highly educational moment for people. They'd see what's going on there. Bill!

• 53:15William Shatner?

  Yes?

• 53:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're my man.

• 53:16William Shatner?

  You are my man.

• 53:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are a treasure, not only to me, but to everyone assembled here on this ship. To the country and to the world. Your enthusiasm, your boyish curiosity, childlike curiosity is infectious. It is contagious. I don't want to use these biologically bad words. It is, uh, it's, yeah, it's contagious.

• 53:41William Shatner?

  Great.

• 53:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's contagious to us all.

• 53:44William Shatner?

  That's wonderful.

• 53:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this past year, you had your 93rd birthday.

• 53:49William Shatner?

  My birthday is March 22nd, so it's not that far away.

• 53:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're gonna be 94?

• 53:54William Shatner?

  I'll be 94.

• 53:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we have, there's a documentary called "You Can Call Me Bill", that's out and around, making its rounds right now.

• 54:02William Shatner?

  It's really good.

• 54:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I was with you for the New York premiere of that, which I delighted in. Just to, and just if I can steal another minute here. Could you tell us all, recount for us all, as you did in the film,

• 54:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  what were you thinking after they had canceled Star Trek? After its third season? We haven't yet landed on the moon. And you're living out of a trailer, trying to...

• 54:30William Shatner?

  Did I tell that story in the film?

• 54:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or maybe you told me, I don't, but you had a trailer in regional theater trying to make a buck.

• 54:38William Shatner?

  I have three children, they're going to school. I was getting divorced as the show was being canceled. I was broke. I couldn't write a $15 check at the end of Star Trek. I had, I acquired, I think I bought, an old truck.

• 54:54William Shatner?

  With a cab on the back and a dog, a Doberman. And I drove and I put together a summer theater show. And I drove across the country to the Cape, uh, Cape, uh, Boston.

• 55:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cape Cod.

• 55:09William Shatner?

  And did summer theater for 13 weeks. Turned around, headed back home to go back to my family. Made a point of calling my agent every day from a gas station. Put the quarters in. And he said, oh, Rose Kennedy wants you to come to a party. Can you come to? I said, well, I'm on the road. I can't come to a party. I gotta go see my kid. All right, call me tomorrow. I called him tomorrow. He says, I'm telling you, Rose Kennedy wants you to come to the Kennedy party and the thing. I can't come. I get to Phoenix. I call him. He says, they'll send an airplane for you. Had I not been so blinded by coming home in this. Pilots know about the danger of coming, of home, home it isn't.

• 55:54William Shatner?

  Where you, you sacrifice the rules to get home. You're so anxious. I sacrificed the rules. I could have asked her, send the plane to Arizona. Fly me to Los Angeles. Pick up my kids. Fly back to New York. Meet the, the Kennedys and fly me back. I didn't think of it. And that was my, my journey. My initiation after Star Trek.

• 56:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it went to a low and that it has been ascending ever since.

• 56:22William Shatner?

  I've, I've had good luck ever since.

• 56:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course you have the book Too Boldly Go.

• 56:27William Shatner?

  Boldly Go. But it's more than one book out there.

• 56:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 56:30William Shatner?

  Yeah.

• 56:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, well, look for those. And Scott, what projects you have going right now?

• 56:34Speaker 01

  I do a bunch of public speaking. I'm on some, uh, you know, advisory boards.

• 56:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  You know, I write a little. I have some other book ideas I need to.

• 56:44William Shatner?

  He's a wonderful public speaker. He's perfect in front of an audience.

• 56:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guys, thanks for coming back onto StarTalk.

• 56:50William Shatner?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 56:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this has been StarTalk Live. In a voyage sponsored by the Future of Space. An organization that's trying to connect us to exploration.

• 57:01William Shatner?

  Absolutely.

• 57:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is the inaugural voyage of a space to sea. Trip to Antarctica. Which brought the three of us together. Fortuitously.

• 57:10William Shatner?

  Fortuitously.

• 57:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. I am Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And as always, I bid you. To keep working up.

• 57:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.