StarTalk Podcast
Hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Academy-award winning actor Morgan Freeman joins us for a light-hearted discussion of some of the deepest mysteries facing science today.
6,676 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Radio. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and today my comedic co-host is Chuck Nice. Chuck.
It's always a pleasure to be here Neil, how are you man?
I'm doing good and you're still tweeting at ChuckNiceComic.
That's right ChuckNiceComic, so follow me.
And what will we get for that?
Your impending doom.
You know, we got a special show today. We got a special guest in studio, live, and if you don't recognize this man's voice, then just go home. In fact, I'm not even gonna say his name, because the voice should be sufficient. Welcome, sir.
Oh, you talking to me? Yeah, I'm glad to be here. Thank you very much. It's very nice, very nice to be here with you and Chuck. I've always admired both of you. Chuck, smack him.
That is, let me tell you about our guest's voice. His voice is so unique and distinct. I do a lot of voiceover auditions, and every time we get the breakdown for the audition, under the type, it says, "Looking for Morgan Freeman," and then in visible parentheses, it says, "Cannot afford him. That's why we're asking you."
Why didn't I know that?
So Chuck, I didn't know, this seems like you've been badly affected by these experiences.
No, first of all, to see that on an audition is intimidating, to say the least. Like, why would you put Morgan Freeman's name, "This is what we're looking for," and then you send in the audition to me? I'm like, okay, thanks a lot, what you're telling me is I don't have the job, number one.
Sucks.
Well, Morgan, you know, you're one of the most admired actors working today. You've received Academy Award nominations for Streetsmart, Driving Miss Daisy, which I saw on Broadway, by the way, Shawshank Redemption, which is a very watchable film. In fact, what was, what was, what was the station that had it like a Shawshank Redemption marathon? Yeah. To any time of day, there it is. They ran it for 24 hours. It was to, it was completely there and... When criminals were gentlemen. Shawshank Redemption.
It was Invictus, what a, what a proud role that was, playing Nelson Mandela. And of course, with the, our opening, uh, our opening clip with you receiving the Academy Award for Million Dollar Baby and other popular films, Unforgiven, Glory, Seven, Deep Impact, one of my favorite films of all time. Mine too. And the man was president. Our president, our first black president, Mr. Morgan Freeman.
Second.
Oh, really?
Yeah. James Earl Jones was the first.
Yes, he was in The Man. That's right. That's right. Yeah, but... There you go, that's true. I stand corrected. But did an asteroid come during his presidency? Nope.
So, so here we are saying, nothing that disastrous will ever happen to a black president. Yeah, they, I'm not gonna, I was about to say, the Tea Party. I was about to say that, that they didn't know the Tea Party back then. They didn't know the, the melt, the economic meltdown. So, Deep Impact, some of all fears, Bruce Almighty. Where you play God, no doubt. And then came back for Return Trip as God in Evan Almighty. And of course, Batman Begins, great film, I think it's still the best in the series, where you're the tech dude making up the... From Mr. Wayne. He's the one, he's the scientist that puts together all the products from Mr. Wayne, Wayne Industries. Scientist engineer. Scientist engineer, correct. Research and development. And of course, Bucket List, all this is a great portfolio to have you, but that's not why I have you on the show right now.
No, it isn't. This is not why you have me on the show.
It is so not.
Why do you have me?
Because I wanna focus on, cause this is like StarTalk and Star as in cosmic star, not Hollywood star. You got the wrong guy. So, because you come in, you're doing some science stuff out there, the Science Channel, you got a series going into its second season. It wasn't just good enough to do it once, you're doing it twice, and I'm told that you're going, that might even go a third time.
No, not Mike.
This is the third time.
Already the science.
This is the third time going, I was off by ear, excuse me. And so, it's the show Through the Wormhole, and this is a different kind of science show, because Chuck, as you've seen regular science shows, they interview folks and they talk about, "We discovered this, and here's a picture of that."
Right. I mean, with the exception of your shows, and Morgan, your show, I use science shows to go to sleep on.
Okay.
Normally.
Isn't that polite of him, Morgan?
No, no, because I know what he's saying. If it's good, he won't go to sleep.
Right.
Will not.
Science can be entertaining.
Well, so, in it, what I liked about it is that there's a dimension about it that goes beyond just, "Here's the latest thing that we found, and here's what it looks like." You're tackling very difficult, some unanswerable philosophical questions, metaphysical questions, bordering on religion, and so, this is audacious, I think, for you to take on that role. That's a huge role to play. So, let me ask you, how did an A-list, Oscar-winning movie actor come to be involved in a TV show doing science?
Uh, gee, that's a long story.
Okay, 20 words or less.
Uh, Laura McCreary. Laurie McCreary, two words.
Two words. Laurie McCreary.
We had a company called Clickstar, and we...
This is your co-executive producer on this?
This is my...
Yeah. I've seen her name and credits and things, yeah.
And then she's my producing partner. And so, we had this, this, um, company, and in it, uh, through it, we were going to have different channels.
You could have a prizefight channel, you could have a documentary channel, and I was going to have, like, a science channel, going to talk about outer space, because I really like the subject. Who doesn't? So, somehow, I think, uh, Discovery people learned about that, and Laurie can give you chapter and verse on it. But they thought it was a great idea.
Mm-hmm.
So why don't we can, why don't we do that? Why don't we follow through on that? So here we are.
Right, because it takes two sides of that equation. The person with the idea and the network.
The network person who says, "Good idea."
So in one of your first shows, or was it the very first show? You asked whether there's a creator. And what I'm wondering is, why did you choose that as your first show? And were you influenced for having played God twice? Come on, you can't tell me that they're not correlated there.
Okay, I'm not going to tell you that. Um, we sit around a table and sort of throw ideas around. What, what, what's interesting to talk about? What is out there? What are people really curious about? What are we curious about? Uh, and one of the ongoing questions is the creation, uh, theory.
Of course.
The Big Bang.
That's one.
Okay, you got more up your sleeve?
Well, you know, that was, that was, uh, uh, what do we call it? Um, uh, intelligent design.
Oh, okay. The religious folks had that.
I.D. Mm-hmm. Yeah. A little I.D. action. Yeah, so you can't say, "No." You can't just out and out poo-poo it because in, in the end,
it's about what you believe.
All right, well, let's, we've got a clip.
We have to accept that when you look up at the sky, you look and it's illusion.
I got a clip from the show where you, where you talk about the perfect explosion, the Big Bang. Let's check it out.
For Dr. Alan Guth, what happened during this early moment in time was an intriguing mystery that had to be solved. Figuring this out became his life's work.
There had been in cosmology a serious problem in understanding the uniformity of the universe. It has the same intensity in every direction that we look, uh, to one part in a hundred thousand. And that means that the Big Bang was unbelievably uniform. And that's hard to understand because conventional explosions just don't behave that way.
So this is what a typical explosion might look like, and as you can see, it's anything but uniform. There are spots here and spots there and white spots in between. The early universe was nothing like what's on the canvas here.
Alan needed something that would immediately smooth out all the hot dense plasma that had just come into existence.
I came across this idea of inflation, the idea that gravity can, under some circumstances, act repulsively and produce a gigantic acceleration in the expansion of the universe, and that this could have happened in the very early universe. The key idea behind inflation is the possibility that at least a small patch of the early universe contained this peculiar kind of repulsive gravity material, and all you need is a tiny patch of that and the Big Bang starts due to this repulsive gravity effect.
Cosmic inflation takes place right after a pop from nothing into something. About one trillion trillion trillionth of a second afterwards, the force field takes all the highly compressed space created in that first singular moment, which is still almost infinitely small, and drives it out. A tiny fraction, the universe has doubled in size 100,000 times. With this smooth and orderly expansion, our universe was formed.
This idea of inflation has now essentially become the standard version of cosmology. It makes a number of predictions which have been confirmed, so it agrees very well with what we see.
Wow.
The Big Bang. Inflation, who knew that? So the early universe was a hell of a lot more expensive than the one we live in now.
In fact...
This one's a bargain.
The idea for inflation was advanced at a time when we had very high inflation in the United States under Jimmy Carter. So that word had a lot of bit of currency at the time.
Ah.
So, all right, so you didn't stop at the Big Bang. That's apparently, there was no big concept in physics that was not beyond your reach.
No.
Because then you went on to talk about thermodynamics. This is a big, these are ideas, these aren't just objects you can show a picture of. Here's a pretty picture of Saturn and its moons. Thermodynamics, Big Bang. Let's check out this next clip.
Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at City College of New York, is fascinated with the big questions in science, like whether the laws of physics require that all living things die.
One of the iron laws of physics is the second law of thermodynamics, which says that everything rusts, everything decays, falls apart. We're all made out of atoms, and these atoms in turn obey the second law of thermodynamics.
Anything and everything in the universe has the tendency to go from order to disorder. And once the damage is done, it's extremely difficult to reverse things and unmix them. It's a process known as entropy.
If I mix coffee, I realize that when I put cream into coffee, I increase entropy. In fact, to see this milk jump out and reform in this cup is such a preposterous event that you would have to wait longer than the lifetime of the universe to see it happen.
The second law of thermodynamics is an unmitting force. Nothing is immune to the power of entropy, not even the cells in our body.
And that's why we age. In fact, that's why we die.
But it turns out that there is a loophole to the law of entropy. There is a way to restore order from disorder.
We cut the clip there? I was gonna say. You left me hanging.
Well, I haven't figured out how to actually do it yet.
It's like space travel. We know it can be done, we just haven't figured out how.
So, or that's how you leave people to come back for the next episode. It's the serial, uh, science serial of what it is. We're coming up on our first commercial break, but when we return, we're going to talk about black holes and other cosmic phenomena that can mess with your mind, body, and soul. We'll be right back.
Welcome back. Morgan Freeman, in studio with us. Welcome to StarTalk. You know, it's interesting, Morgan, if you, if, anything that comes out of your voice, out of your mouth, in your voice, is just true. It's just true no matter what. And that's a really powerful situation to be in. I mean, I've heard that, like, you've been saying things, you had some ideas about the universe, and you shared it with some scientists, and they said, "Wait a minute, I never thought of it that way. Maybe that might be true." So, did you realize what kind of responsibility you have?
Um, not, no.
No, okay, I'm just saying.
Well, I don't think of it as a responsibility. I mean, I have access to these people, and with that access, I'm back to my high school days. I'm just asking, you know?
Yeah, and you have a great lineup of guests that come on.
Great lineup.
Scientists, these are leading scientists.
Yes.
And earlier you and I had spoke, and you said you had plenty of questions when you were a kid.
Yeah.
That just about the universe, physics-style questions. And I'm just wondering if any of those questions have gurgled up, and now you're expressing those in your curiosity to make this show.
Uh, almost constantly.
Oh, well, there it is.
Yeah, because I have, you know, if you sit down with a scientist, particularly astrophysicists, and...
My people.
My peeps.
Your peoples. Um, uh, these, these questions, they just are there. Like, how, for instance, here's one for you.
I'm ready for you.
How, for instance, are we really going to get, uh, human existence on a planet like Mars, where we don't have much, uh, protection against solar energy?
I have the answer to that.
I bet you do.
We have no idea.
That's my answer.
Actually, no, no, the biggest, in the old days, it was, "We don't know how to do it." Today is, "We don't have the money."
Really?
That's a very different barrier than what previously plagued-
We have the money, we just won't spend it in the right place.
In the right place.
Yeah, we should be, we should be doing all kinds of research on space travel and space exploration. We should be doing that. We shouldn't be running around the world trying to control other people's lives. We don't need to have all this doggone war material. You know, we spend more money on war material than anybody else in the entire world put together.
Put together. I was about to say, not just it, but you put everybody else together-
Meanwhile-
And it doesn't approach the amount of money that we spend on war.
The universe beckons in the middle of all that.
And that's what I was gonna say, the cool thing is-
The universe beckons.
What a great term. Write that down.
The universe-
And you know what else beckons? Black holes. I want to play a segment from your show, through the wormhole, where we talk about black holes, because black holes and wormholes actually are related.
Let's check it out.
In 1931, a Bell Telephone researcher, Carl Jansky, was testing a new system for sending radio messages across the Atlantic to Europe.
He was plagued by background noise. After two years of careful work, Jansky stripped out most of the interference. But one strange signal never went away. It was loudest whenever his antenna was pointed at the constellation Sagittarius, at the very heart of the Milky Way.
It was a signal unlike anything a star would make. Astronomers began to wonder whether it might come from an object theorists had predicted, but never detected.
A black hole.
But there was no way to find out. The center of our galaxy is hidden from view by a thick veil of dust. Then, twenty-five years ago, a German astronomer, Reinhard Genzel, found a way to see through the fog. Infrared light with its longer wavelength is perfect for penetrating the veil, but it's terrible at getting through the water vapour in Earth's atmosphere. So Reinhard Genzel headed for the highest, driest place on Earth: the Atacama Desert of Chile. Beginning in 1992, he and his team at the Max Planck Institute began what would become an enduring campaign to find out exactly what was causing the strange noise
at the center of the Milky Way. Reinhard had a hunch that a black hole could be acting as a colossal center of gravity, causing dozens of stars to whirl around it. As the years went by, a striking pattern emerged. Stars were moving, moving really fast. This was something that no astronomer had ever seen before. A dozen, then twenty, then thirty stars, all swirling at breakneck speed around a central object that was completely dark and tremendously dense. Could this be the first proof that black holes existed? And if so, was there really one here? Right in the center of our own galaxy?
So these are the stars of the show. Here, at the very center here, is the radio source, which we suspect is the location of the black hole. This is our best star, which we followed for fifteen years to trace a full orbit.
This star, known only by the name S2, was moving at a phenomenal rate. At its closest approach to the dark central object, Reinhard and his team clocked it moving at eleven million miles per hour.
What we learned from this is that indeed there's only one central mass, right there, at the position of the radio source, and that has four million solar masses. There cannot really be any believable configuration which we know of, other than a black hole.
Don't mess with black holes.
No, no, you can, lots of bad things can happen.
That's right.
Well, we're not absolutely certain that the end result is bad.
Well, as Neil said before, there may be a correlation between black holes and wormholes.
And the wormhole. In fact, if he's, the man is right, Chuck. I thought you would have known this. No, I really, and I, you know, I know a lot about black holes, but not from a science standpoint.
You watch yourself.
Black holes. Holes. Holes. Okay. Yes, okay, so, here's a go, if you have a rotating black hole, and you go in at a particular trajectory, it actually opens up to another universe that is not ours. Really? Yes, it does. It's, it's a spooky, it's, the mathematics of Einstein's equations demonstrate this. Okay. But not only that, here's something that- What if you go in at the wrong trajectory? Uh, you'll be stretched-
Stretched out of shape.
The Turkish taffy. The tidal forces, where the gravity is stronger at your feet than at your head, will accelerate your feet faster than your head towards the center of that abyss. And as that happens, your body will stretch relentlessly. The first few moments, it'll feel good, who doesn't want a good stretch in the morning? But there comes a point where it doesn't stop, and the tidal forces exceed the intermolecular laws, forces that bond your flesh.
Did you say that in English?
And you snap into, likely at the base of your spine. And then those other two, those two parts of you will continue, they'll feel these same forces, and they will snap into, and everything will bifurcate all the way down. So I'll just keep snapping into until- And that's not even the worst part. Uh, you'll be funneled down to the point, and the fabric of space and time will narrow you from shoulder to shoulder as you get elongated. As we have a word for this, the act- Ouch. Out of dying. Is that the word? For the act of dying while you fall into a black hole, in this particular way, is called spaghettification. Spaghett- In case you didn't, Morgan, I didn't know if you didn't know that. I want to invent a new product, a pasta product, you know, sp, and this, you, you draw little eyes and
mouths, you know? Spaghettificationos? You can have that for dinner, your kids can have that. Now, here's something interesting. This, this, these are not the black holes that we had traditionally learned about, which are the endpoints of a star's life. These black holes are the centers of galaxies, and they have millions of times the mass of the sun. Now, here's what's interesting. We had discovered black holes in other galaxies. Before we found one in ours, our nearby Andromeda Galaxy, its black hole is a million times this of solar mass. In our own, it's only maybe about half a million.
So the people that have like black hole envy here, because our black hole is not as big as that of what you find in the centers of other galaxies.
And so, you know, it's, it's.
Something I'm well familiar with.
All right, so now you've opened up another can of worms.
What's that? What's that?
Colliding galaxies.
Ooh, we're on a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy.
And, and, and black holes.
And no one told me this?
You didn't.
We're speeding toward, towards our own peril and no one.
Not, not ours.
Oh, no.
No, no, you don't have to worry about it.
Chuck, I should've told you.
Hell, you and I gotta.
We gotta worry about it. We've gotta take a quick break, but more StarTalk when we return.
Welcome back. I've got Chuck Nice and Morgan Freeman with me in studio.
And.
Very cool.
I'm here because the man is doing science on TV.
On, on Discovery Channel's Science Channel.
The Science Channel.
The Science Channel comes on Wednesday nights. Every Wednesday night, check your local listings. It's there. You can find the man serving up the universe.
Through the wormhole.
Through the worm, through the wormhole. In the last segment, we left off talking about black holes. And Chuck, first, you didn't know that we have black hole envy compared to other galaxies.
You didn't know that a rotating black hole, we could go into another universe.
And at the right trajectory, pop out, bang, here you go.
You're in another universe and if you fall directly into a universe, you'll die. And that we have a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy.
And that was the most disturbing of all the things.
Morgan knew this. I'm disappointed. You didn't. I thought this was, everybody knew this.
Well, you know, see, the thing is, Morgan does a show on the Science Channel called Through the Wormhole. Chuck Nice does a show on True TV called World's Dumbest.
So I'm pretty sure we've seen how this is working out.
So, other subjects on Through the Wormhole, you know, nothing is outside of your reach there. You did a show on dark matter and dark energy. Now, had I done that show, I'm telling you, it would have been maybe thirty seconds long. Because dark matter, which is eighty-five percent of the gravity of the universe, and dark energy, which makes us accelerate against the wishes of gravity, we have no clue what either of them is. Right. And that would have been the end of my show. Well, you made a whole show out of it. I don't know how.
I think you just talk to enough people who say, "We don't know."
That's it.
That's a damn good thing.
Well, what do you think? Well, uh... I don't... What do you think? I don't know. What do you... Matilda, what do you... Have you thought about this? Yeah, so, there's a... What's great about the show is that you're going to the places where we don't know. And that's a different kind of science program on television than most science documentaries, which are focusing on what we do know. And that... That kid makes people think.
Yeah, and... And, you know, these shows, uh, we're highlighting scientists who like to think about these things.
And you've... And your shows, because they're... They're gle... They speak with glee.
When the microphone's in front of them.
And, what are you doing?
Oh, uh...
That's because nobody ever asks.
You put your show in front of them, they're like... They become... Like an eleven-year-old schoolgirl. Yeah, yeah. And so, not only that, the... Oh, just another couple of things, just because I have a feel compelled as, like, science educator here. So, dark matter, we've known about it since nineteen thirty-six. It is the longest-standing mystery in astrophysics. Okay. Where objects move according to gravity, whose source of gravity we haven't... We've never seen.
Now, Neil.
Yeah, yeah.
Come on.
What?
Dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter first.
First, that's what we discovered first.
You can't see it?
Can't see it.
Can't smell it?
Can't smell it.
Can't taste it?
Can't taste it.
What gives us the absolute certainty that it's there?
We see its effect on other things.
Hmm.
There it is.
Well, give me a... Give me a for instance.
Uh, for instance, do you know the movie Rebecca?
No, I don't, I, what is...
It was a best-selling Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Rebecca, and it was made by Alfred Hitchcock.
In this movie, Rebecca never shows up because she's dead. And yet, the title of the movie is Rebecca. You learn about Rebecca from what the butler says, her fiance, or her widow, her friends.
Retrospective.
All of these, her influence on others reveals itself in the unfolding of that plot. And Rebecca becomes the star of the show. And so, dark matter is like Rebecca. You see planets move in a way they're not supposed to. You see galaxies rotate in ways unexpected. And you say, "Something is making this happen, even though I can't see it, smell it, taste it, touch it." It is its influence on all that surrounds it. And it's its gravitational influence, and that's what we call dark matter. We don't even know if it's matter.
Okay, I was gonna say, because to me, that sounds a lot like Santa Claus.
We could call it Ted. We can call it Freddy. We don't know what it is.
All right, so now, that gives me a clue about dark matter. What about dark energy? Seems to me that it's one and the same.
Now, we see the universe is supposed to be coming back on itself from the collective gravity of all the galaxies. But it's not. It's accelerating, according to this term that showed up in an equation that Einstein wrote down in 1916. 1917, actually. And we don't even, we don't know what the physical mechanism is.
So, basically, what you're saying is, the universe would be like a soapbox derby car. It should be speeding up, but it's, I mean, it should, I'm sorry, I got it wrong. It should be slowing down, but really, it's speeding up.
That's the first analogy I've ever heard of the universe to soapbox derbies.
Wait, we gotta move on. So, the show also talks about the search for life in the universe and are we alone? This is a perennial topic. We've got a clip. Let's see what you say about it.
In 1948, mathematician John von Neumann imagined a machine so intelligent, it could make copies of itself. Each copy would improve on the previous model, much as nature continually improves on its designs. But this machine's evolution would take place much faster than biological evolution. Today, von Neumann machines exist, in crude forms. On a planet more advanced than our own, could they be the most intelligent life form? The dominant life form? Will our first contact be with a race of super-intelligent machines?
You're only gonna hear from a species that's at least as clever as we are. So what are the odds that they're within fifty or a hundred years of our level of development? Pretty slim. They're likely to be thousands, millions, maybe even more, years ahead of us. So if you think about that for a moment, you recognize that if we do find a signal, the odds are pretty good that that signal's coming from artificial intelligence, not some soft, squishy little gray guy with big eyeballs.
On some distant planet, the Book of Life may no longer contain any biological forms. And if mechanical life has enough power, there is no limit to how large or complex it can become.
Or maybe they've reorganized themselves so that they can share the thinking load amongst many members of this species, like distributed processing with computers. I mean, why should the aliens be content to be stuck with a kind of intelligence that can fit inside their heads?
Alien evolution could produce a living machine planet, throbbing with the combined intelligence of billions of alien minds. If such advanced life exists, how would we spot it? And should we even want to? Will aliens welcome us as friends? Or view us as threats? Or perhaps see Earth as a world to conquer? We wonder what aliens look like, but what do we look like to them? This woman has put herself inside their heads, and she believes she has the answer.
What's the answer? Why do we keep cutting off these clips? And we're left hanging on the answer?
I believe the answer is there are already, there are already intelligent, machine-like aliens. They are called Transformers. And their leader is Optimus Prime.
The truck that was a movie?
I've made my choice in beliefs. I'm sticking to it.
So Morgan?
Yes, Neil.
First of all...
What did you say this guy's name?
Chuck Nice. We just humor him while he's here.
Fine, that's fine.
For those StarTalk fans out there, actually, the voices you heard, which were not identified in that clip, it was Seth Shostak, who is an active member of this search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He was a guest on StarTalk Radio back in our episode called "Are We Alone?" And also, Michio Kaku made several appearances on your show, and he's a good friend of ours. In fact, he lives just up the street. So, let's get back to this bit about aliens and what kind of intelligence they would have. One of my great concerns is, we always think that they're the same, approximately the same intelligent as we are, intelligent as we are, so that we can have a conversation. Is there any species less intelligent than we that we can have a conversation with? I don't think so.
I believe you two have been doing that all show.
But Morgan?
You mean a philosophical conversation?
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Not just, "Here's food, eat it." Are you worried when the aliens come that they might enslave us?
No, I'm not worried about it at all.
Why?
Because...
Hawking's worried about it.
Well, Hawking's in a chair.
I don't know what the fuck to make of that.
Oh, he can't run? He can't turn around and run? Is that what you're...
Can't shoot a gun.
All right, now, you know what? I did like you, Morgan Freeman, until that comment right there, because I didn't think of it, and that was the funniest thing I said all show.
I don't, I don't think, personally...
That we need fear the universe.
Well, you know, even though I walk through the valley, I feel no evil. Well, I'm the baddest thing in the world.
That's a good point.
Ever though should be fair in me. So, okay, so when the aliens come, we will put you forward.
Well, you know, listen, we don't go out there with, you know, the, yo.
He's, he's doing, let the record show, he's doing the Vulcan sign.
Live long and prosper. How do you know that's not go, you know, F off?
Well, because.
To an alien.
As long as you've got an open hand, I think it's universal that, yo, I'm, you know, I don't mean you any harm.
We've got to take a quick break, but more StarTalk when we return.
This is StarTalk Radio. Welcome back.
I just want to clear out the alien part of our discussion before the break. The aliens, if they come and you're gonna like say hi to them, and you think they're gonna be nice.
No, I don't know what they're gonna be, but I don't, I'm not gonna imagine that they're gonna be hostile. It's just as easy to imagine that they're going to be beneficent, that they're going to be
Just people out exploring like we would do.
Okay, but our first explorers were not beneficent, were they?
Huh?
They were like totally tearing up the places they. Oh, you mean the explorers here on Earth? On Earth, yeah, yeah.
Well, uh, yeah. The Polynesians did a lot of explorations. I don't know if they killed everybody they met.
That's true. That's true. Well, they had to be just Northern Europeans.
Well, those, you know, it's people with hot blood.
Hot blood. Hot blood. So this segment, I want to talk about the end.
The end of the universe, the end of life. You know, the universe is just gonna expand forever.
Says who?
Forever. The data say that. That's what I'm saying.
The data said that we knew all of the, all of the matter. We had already mapped the universe and we knew what all the matter was until the advent of the Hubble telescope.
I think.
And all of a sudden, oh, wait a minute, we were wrong.
You, I think you want to be wishful that the universe goes through cycles. Is that, I feel that.
I don't want to be wishful, but I think that's a, that's a usable.
It could, it could have worked. It's just not, all the data don't show that, because if we expand forever, we continue to get cold. And the temperature of the universe, which is now three degrees Kelvin, will approach zero degrees. And closer and closer, and all physical processes in the universe will wind down. And as it winds down, there'll be no life, no stars.
You're holding forth here with some stuff that doesn't sound right to me. For instance, all of these stars, they're burning hot.
I don't care where they go, they're still gonna burn hot.
No, they run out of fuel and one day they stop burning.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They're being born every day.
Yeah, but.
Every day.
And then they're being born out of gas that is not in the star. And one day you run out of gas. So the last set of stars that made out of the last set of gas, when they burn out, that's all she wrote. And the stars will burn out one by one in the night sky. And what started out as a starry night will become an abyss of darkness.
How many years?
Have a nice day.
We got a clip from. That was the best bedtime story ever. Let's check out what Morgan Freeman and his folks say about the end of the world and what is death. Go.
Is death the end?
Eternal silence? Blackness? Nothingness? Or is there a spark inside of us that lives on beyond our physical selves?
Philosophers and scientists have puzzled over that question for thousands of years.
It's the great mystery. One that sooner or later, we all have to face.
One morning when I was six years old, my grandmother didn't wake up.
Then or ever again.
It was my first experience with death.
How could she be here yesterday, but gone today?
Was she gone forever? Or did some essential part of her live on?
Christians and Muslims believe in a heaven for the just and a hell for sinners. Other religions see death as a transition to an existence on a higher plane or to another life here on earth. All of these beliefs have one thing in common: the body is just a vessel for the soul and the soul is eternal. This is something many believe in their hearts, but is there a way to prove it or disprove it scientifically?
Damn, left it hanging again. Seems to be a theme. So Morgan, there's no...
You're doing.
Yeah, we did clip that for this show. So Morgan, there's no topic under, under any rock that you don't overturn in this show?
Well...
Because you're bringing philosophers into this.
Yeah, any philosopher who's willing to talk about a subject, we ask them about it.
So are you, deep down, a philosopher? Is that what you really, are you, are you a philosopher dude?
Can I put it this way? Philosophically curious.
Okay. Not a philosopher, but philosophically curious. I went through that stage in college.
You went to college?
I'm just asking. Man, that's, that's a diss if I ever heard one.
No, I'm just asking. Because I didn't. Well, I did for about 20 minutes.
Right, yeah. Yeah, so, so the end of the universe will, will, it's, it'll, it's this long, slow, eternal approach to absolute zero, where all processes will stop and all particles will decay. And some people are unsettled by that, but I actually find that thrilling, because that won't happen for a gazillion years into the future. It's a very long, slow death.
What you're saying, Neil, it's just not, it's not, we don't, there's no hope.
Hope for what?
Hope for eternal life.
Here's my hope, here's my hope.
As long as there's a universe, we can, we can expect to be in it somewhere.
Except if they...
You're telling me there's not going to be one, I might as well go out and stand in front of a bus now.
No, because... Here's what you do, okay? When I die, I don't want to be cremated because all of the calorie content of my body, which I have dined upon flora and fauna throughout my life. When I am buried, the energy content will be returned to the flora and fauna that gave themselves for my nourishment.
There is life everlasting. That is really life everlasting.
And that is the energy being passed back to the universe in a productive way.
Until the universe winds down to its inevitable demise where it becomes a black nothingness.
And by then, the sun would have burnt out, our galaxy would have collided with the Andromeda Galaxy, and all the stars would have been burnt out in the universe. All right, all right. We gotta bring this show to a close, but I want to thank my guests, and as always, I bid you to keep looking up.
Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
