Season 5 Time Capsule (Part 1)

As Season 5 draws to a close, join astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in looking back at the brightest moments of a year brimming with science, comedy, urban legends, the COSMOS and even God.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host. I'm an astrophysicist and director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium. The following show is our annual time capsule, a collection from our fifth season, selected by you, our audience, as your favorite shows of the year. First up, a conversation with the one and only Seth MacFarlane. In addition to being the writer and director of the hit TV series Family Guy and of the movie Ted, he was an executive producer for Cosmos, a space-time odyssey, the continuation of the original journey begun by Carl Sagan back in 1980, and which I had the privilege of hosting this time around. Do you remember when we met?

• 0:58Speaker 01

  It was at that seafood... Well, we met at the Science... That's where we discussed Cosmos.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we met...

• 1:04Speaker 01

  At the Science and Entertainment Exchange.

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, evidence that there's a science thread running through Family Guy is that you're like a founding advisor to the Science and Entertainment Exchange. This is crazy. It's crazy good.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  It's an honorary title of sorts, but...

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you have to have some energy to try to join the two.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love the idea because, you know, well, first of all, everyone in Hollywood is also very interested in science. These are people who are...

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're educated and...

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're creative by nature, curious by nature, and they want to know. They don't want to settle for what the most comfortable illusion is. They want to know what science can tell them.

• 1:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you and some of your pals, who else is in this...

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Well, Jerry and Janet Zucker founded it.

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Jerry Zucker of Airplane...

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Airplane, Naked Gun.

• 1:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Naked Gun, that whole series.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Top secret.

• 1:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a way for writers, producers, creative Hollywood types...

• 1:52Speaker 01

  To connect with scientists.

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To connect with scientists. And it's a branch of the National Academy of Sciences.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think the thinking was that, well, look, Hollywood wants to get its science right because it just makes us look like we've done our homework. And it's in the interest of the scientific community because the entertainment industry is so widespread. And when they see a... Forensic show, or a space show, or a medical show, or a show that deals with any branch of science, audiences assume that we've all done our homework, and we almost never have. Unless you have a science consultant on staff. We've almost never done our homework.

• 2:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look at the success of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory. They have a physicist on staff. Who changes the whiteboards every day with a new equation, relevant to what's going on in that show. And then it gets talked about in the blogosphere. So it's a very rich thing. To my surprise, after we had lunch one day, all you did was ask me questions about the Big Bang and the early universe. So I say, yeah, this guy's like, he's all there. Yeah, yeah. And then nothing else was spoken, and you walked away into the mist. And eight months later, six months later, Stewie visits the Big Bang in his time machine. Now, I didn't see that episode when it aired, but my cellphone started lighting up. There it was, a full-screen

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  credit, Neil deGrasse Tyson, "Science Consultants."

• 3:10Speaker 01

  I'm trying to remember, did we ask you if we could do that?

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, not at all.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  I was just, I was being extraordinarily presumptuous, trying to legitimize ourselves. This'll get the critics on our side, damn it all.

• 3:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But how many cartoons get to cite "science consultant"?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 3:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it was good. I recommend anybody, you can probably get it on Netflix or wherever. It's the episode called "The Big Bang Theory." Stewie uses his time machine to go back to the Big Bang, and he's outside of the space-time continuum.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With Brian. That was brilliant. It was brilliant. Not just because I inadvertently advised on it, but I think it was very well done. In my world, everybody's favorite scene in Family Guy is when Peter wants to become a redneck.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And take on the culture.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guess the hat, guess the boots, they move south, and he turns on the TV.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Cosmos.

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me what went through your head there. What is that?

• 3:57Speaker 01

  It's an illustration of the modern-day clash between science and religion. And I don't remember who wrote that gag, but it was in one of our cutaway rooms. We have these satellite rooms that go off the main room, and they come back with a series of gags, and we'll pick the best one. So, you know, I'm not the only Cosmos fan on that staff. I did do the voice of Carl Sagan, though.

• 4:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me hear, let me hear something, Carl.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  It's just a slightly, slightly altered Kermit the Frog.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  I feel terrible. He's one of my heroes. But it was, he had a very distinctive voice.

• 4:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so in that scene, in case you hadn't seen it, there's Carl Sagan delivering some lines from the original Cosmos, and it's edited. And Peter says, "Honey, look, it's Cosmos edited for rednecks." And he says, "In the beginning, there was the Big Bang." God.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, they gotta stretch it all out, because that's...

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the universe is 13 billion, 6,000...

• 4:54Speaker 01

  You know, it's interesting, and I do try, and I know you do as well, to try to talk about that without succumbing to the temptation to say, "Come on, there's just no evidence." I mean, the Earth cannot be 6,000 years old. It just can't. I mean, it's not a matter of your beliefs versus my beliefs. It just can't.

• 5:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But there aren't many cartoons that address this. That's my point. So I tip my hat to you. Our live shows are always extremely popular, and this year proved no exception. You selected Big Brains at BAM as one of the top picks of the season. Recorded live at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, my co-host Eugene Mirman and I were joined onstage that night by, get this list, Bill Nye the Science Guy, neuroscientist Dr. Heather Berlin, the actor Paul Rudd, comedian Michael Ian Black, and the star of the TV hit series Big Bang Theory, Mayim Bialik.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  BF Skinner's idea was that we're born sort of tabula rasa, blanksly, and you can make anybody into anything just by training, by giving them rewards and punishments and modifying their behavior accordingly. What we know now is that we're born with certain genetic predispositions to behave in certain ways, and then you can modify behavior within a range that you're given biologically. So for even something like intelligence, for example, you can be born with a genetic predisposition to be within a certain, let's say, IQ range. Then your environment can push you sort of towards the top end of that range or maybe, you know, towards the low end of that range. Then we're knowing now from mapping out the brain and looking at the genome that what seems to be most affected by the environment is the way the brain is wired. So you're born with certain genetic predisposition in terms of the structures of the...

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But let me just ask you. Can you teach someone math faster by giving them candy than just by teaching them? I mean, I'm just wondering...

• 6:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, actually, yeah. ...for holding them underwater and being like, "Learn it! Learn it!" And then raise... Waterboarding, I guess I'm describing waterboarding. A towel on the face, a little bottle of water, and some math.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Well, we know that people discount delays with rewards. So if you give someone like a reward right away, they'll put more emphasis, they'll want that rather than waiting for a reward later.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  Well, I think the issue there is motivation, and not necessarily a skill set and a cognitive ability, or a technical ability. So the fact is, yes, candy makes everything better, no matter what you're trying to learn, because it's a very strong motivator, and it's a potent motivator.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  It might not make you better at math, but it might make you study for longer, for example.

• 7:14Speaker 05

  What will cocaine do for my math skills?

• 7:21Speaker 03

  A kid could learn French in a week on heroin.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Now, that's a reward.

• 7:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  OK, so a little of both might help, I guess. I mean, this is the gold star that children get in elementary school, right? That's the...

• 7:36Speaker 02

  I mean, it does work to a certain extent. As I said, it'll help motivate behavior, but it won't give you a skill set that you don't have.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  Well, and I think also, as parents, it's one of the early things we learn when we're talking about how we discipline children. And waterboarding, joking aside, threats and fear and punishment and pain are very, very strong motivators to change behavior. The "do you want to condition a child with fear?" is a much larger question, which is probably not funny at all, and I won't go into it.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  There's positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. There's also taking away of a positive, which can be another way to help somebody learn. So there's a whole variety of ways you can model behavior.

• 8:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought about taking away... So if someone lives with a positive, you threaten to take that away.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Like a finger.

• 8:19Speaker 03

  Don't tell me it's not a positive.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  I don't have a child, so it's fine that I'm saying all this.

• 8:27Speaker 05

  I have two children, and it's fine that you're saying this.

• 8:32Speaker 05

  You see certain populations, like people from the Dominican Republic, which is such a small country, but have a large portion of people entering the major leagues of baseball. Is it because they have peer...

• 8:42Speaker 04

  This is such a dangerous question we know you're about to ask. It's so dangerous.

• 8:47Speaker 05

  I was not going into racism, although I will if you want me to.

• 8:51Speaker 05

  No, it was about something somebody else asked, about observing other people in peer groups ascending to higher levels, and therefore seeing firsthand what's possible. Does that make you more susceptible to those possibilities?

• 9:02Speaker 04

  I think that's a huge sociological, environmental, behavioral influence, but I don't know...

• 9:08Speaker 05

  I know, I'm writing my dissertation on it.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  Sorry.

• 9:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have they found a gene for baseball? That's really what they're asking, right?

• 9:15Speaker 02

  You're born with certain genetic predispositions towards, you know, maybe better athletic prowess, but it gets dangerous.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  Different distribution of muscle fibers, for example, in runners.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  The thing we're dancing around is it can be very controversial. There was a book written called "The Bell Curve" about intelligence, and it said, "We did this whole study and looked at populations, and X number of people from a certain type of background have the highest IQ and others don't." And it really can lead to...

• 9:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ashkenazi Jews.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  It was, happened to be Ashkenazi Jews, but it was... Who have the highest IQ? Yeah.

• 9:45Speaker 06

  Wait, wait, me too, me too. That's right.

• 9:49Speaker 07

  Another factor, as a baseball fan, another very strong motivator in those countries is you can play baseball all year. I was just in Minneapolis this morning. Very challenging, and that's because the snow is white, the ball's white.

• 10:06Speaker 07

  And then you also have this...

• 10:07Speaker 05

  Now who's being racist?

• 10:11Speaker 07

  You also have this extraordinary motivation of money. You can make it in the big leagues. And have you ever seen the World Baseball Classic?

• 10:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Yeah, mostly Latin American.

• 10:20Speaker 07

  Extraordinary players.

• 10:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 10:22Speaker 07

  But it's one more click to hit it.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  I'd like to change the topic.

• 10:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, well, go on.

• 10:26Speaker 04

  To anything.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  To ice hockey?

• 10:28Speaker 05

  Let's talk about eugenics for a moment.

• 10:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Science that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. That's the Ig Nobel Prize in a nutshell. Comedian co-host Leigh Anne Lord and I spoke with the founder of the prize, Mark Abrams, and we learned about some unusual but highly amusing research that scientists have pursued over the years.

• 10:55Speaker 08

  This report is the first scientifically documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck. Okay.

• 11:08Speaker 09

  My blood just ran cold. Did anybody else? Because somebody's watching this.

• 11:13Speaker 08

  I would be happy to give you more detail if you would...

• 11:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, how much more detail does one need than homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck? That title has all the detail you need.

• 11:24Speaker 08

  Neil, it's seldom a question of need.

• 11:28Speaker 08

  It's a matter of desire.

• 11:30Speaker 09

  Yes, yes, now it's a car accident, now I gotta stop and watch.

• 11:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, very interesting analogy.

• 11:36Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's rubbernecking on what's going on on the side of the road.

• 11:40Speaker 09

  I am indulging in my natural human instincts, I am not rising above them at this moment. I need to know about the duck.

• 11:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what motivated this research?

• 11:50Speaker 08

  Well, first of all.

• 11:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you get to know that even?

• 11:52Speaker 08

  First of all, I should not exactly correct, but channel what Leanne just said. You need to know about the duck, you said. There were two ducks involved in this.

• 12:04Speaker 09

  Uh, yes.

• 12:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the dead one and the live one, I would presume.

• 12:07Speaker 08

  Yes, would you like to hear the story?

• 12:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 12:09Speaker 09

  I have to, I'm sorry Neil, I have to.

• 12:11Speaker 08

  The paper was written by a man named Kees Mulikker, he's Dutch. He is the curator of a museum in the city of Rotterdam, it's the Natural History Museum in Rotterdam, a very nice museum. A few years ago, they put up a new wing with all glass walls and from the very beginning, birds every day slam into that thing, they don't see it certain times of day, depending on the light. And the people who work there got used to the, they pay very little attention, but one day Kees Mulikker was sitting there.

• 12:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. So the sound of birds snapping their neck, flying into a window they don't see.

• 12:53Speaker 08

  They don't all snap their neck.

• 12:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Became the natural din of sounds in their day.

• 12:57Speaker 08

  If this happened several hundred times a day where you work, you would get used to it very quickly.

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I would stop it from happening, I'm sorry.

• 13:04Speaker 09

  No, no, you would adjust, human beings adjust to all sorts of things.

• 13:08Speaker 08

  You would see if you could find a way to stop it, but back to the case of the, one day he was sitting there, Kees Mulikker was, and he heard an especially loud. And he was curious, so he went and he looked out the window and he saw that there was a mallard duck on the ground that pretty clearly had just slammed into the building at very high speed, broken its neck and was dead. While he was watching, a second mallard duck flew in, landed next to the dead one, and began engaging in activity with the dead one. Now, Case-

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Freshly dead.

• 13:46Speaker 08

  Yes, freshly dead if you want to think of it that way.

• 13:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 13:49Speaker 08

  You know, Case studies birds and he realized quite quickly, he had never heard of anything quite like this happening, so he decided to, and he did, get his notebook and his camera and he moved a little closer to that spot. He sat there taking notes while this was happening.

• 14:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As any good scientist would do.

• 14:08Speaker 08

  Yes, or at least many. And he continued taking notes as this unfolded over the next 75 minutes.

• 14:16Speaker 09

  So clearly, these weren't resuscitation efforts.

• 14:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Apparently not.

• 14:22Speaker 09

  Mallard duck, mouth to mouth.

• 14:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scientists from the Czech Republic, Japan, India, and the United States investigated whether it is mentally hazardous for a human being to own a cat. That got an Ig Nobel Award.

• 14:39Speaker 08

  Oh, yes, that was this year, 2014.

• 14:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  2014.

• 14:42Speaker 08

  And the prize was split between two different teams, one of them based in Europe, one of them based here and in India. The Europe team is really headed by a colorful guy, you should look this guy up on the internet, he's the most interesting-looking person you have ever seen. His name is Jaroslav Flegar, F-L-E-G-R, he's from Czechoslovakia.

• 15:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A name like that, you gotta be interesting-looking, right?

• 15:07Speaker 08

  And he, for 20 or 30 years, has been looking at a particular parasite called toxoplasma that pretty commonly lives in cats.

• 15:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a natural parasite to a cat.

• 15:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, yep. And it's easily transmitted from cats to people who hang around the cats. And what-

• 15:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, if a cat has this parasite, the cat is not sick.

• 15:32Speaker 08

  Right.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just normal for a healthy cat.

• 15:34Speaker 08

  Right.

• 15:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 15:34Speaker 08

  Right.

• 15:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha.

• 15:35Speaker 08

  Well, in some cases, and nobody understands why sometimes it goes one way, sometimes the other, that sometimes the cat seems to behave just like a normal cat, but sometimes because it has this parasite, the cat will start behaving in ways that are very destructive to itself.

• 15:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That are toxoplasmic to itself.

• 15:54Speaker 08

  Yes, toxoplasmosis is the disease. And sometimes, apparently, that happens to humans. And these people are now wondering, well, have been for a while, and other people, that you've heard the phrase "cat lady",

• 16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 16:08Speaker 08

  of somebody who owns hundreds of cats and behaves in a very, very eccentric way, that maybe a lot of those people are infected with this parasite.

• 16:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does part of the manifestation of that infection make you want to acquire more cats? Because the old cat lady never has just one cat.

• 16:26Speaker 08

  Well, no. Well, that's the thinking that this probably happens.

• 16:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is a way for the parasite to reproduce itself?

• 16:32Speaker 08

  Yep.

• 16:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By getting you to want more cats that contain the parasite?

• 16:36Speaker 09

  I'll go with it.

• 16:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a brilliant parasite.

• 16:38Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 16:38Speaker 09

  All this time, I thought it was the cats that were in charge.

• 16:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all about the parasite.

• 16:42Speaker 08

  And there are other parasites that behave in similar ways in other animals.

• 16:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what are some of the disorders? I mean, when I think of a cat lady, they're a little odd, but a lot of odd, older people. So I never uniquely implicated the fact that it's a cat lady.

• 16:56Speaker 08

  It's not always a cat lady, and it's not always a lady.

• 16:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 16:59Speaker 09

  Yeah, they're crazy cat dudes.

• 17:01Speaker 08

  There are a whole range.

• 17:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really? Wait, wait, wait. Pause. How many crazy cat dudes do you know?

• 17:05Speaker 09

  I'm dating. There are lots of crazy cat dudes out there.

• 17:09Speaker 08

  Okay, fine. And you find yourself especially attracted to?

• 17:15Speaker 09

  No, not at all.

• 17:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 17:16Speaker 09

  No.

• 17:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was gonna ask that.

• 17:18Speaker 09

  What happens is, they hide the cat, and then I find out there's a cat.

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 17:21Speaker 09

  You know, because you don't necessarily, the first date isn't necessarily at their apartment.

• 17:24Speaker 08

  How does one hide a cat?

• 17:25Speaker 09

  Well, it doesn't, it's not, you don't lead with the cat.

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She doesn't go home with the first date.

• 17:30Speaker 09

  Right.

• 17:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every night.

• 17:30Speaker 09

  And it may not, it's not something they might not lead with, like, "Hi, my name is so-and-so, I have a cat." You know, that would be a little off-putting.

• 17:37Speaker 08

  If you've had so many bad experiences, I would expect that by now, you lead with the question, "Hi."

• 17:41Speaker 09

  Like, "Terry, do you have a cat?"

• 17:42Speaker 08

  "Hi, I find you very attractive, do you have a cat?"

• 17:44Speaker 09

  Not even, "Do you have a job? Is your mom crazy? Do you have a cat?"

• 17:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I'm looking at these symptoms. You've got obsessive-compulsive disorders, schizophrenia, and that leads me to wonder whether these legends of cat people...

• 17:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are people with multiple personality disorders. Catwoman. You, uh, what's, uh, and the Natasha Kinsky film Cat People. Well, I, I think there are more than one version of that film. Her, the one she's in is the one I remember. These are people.

• 18:11Speaker 08

  I wonder why.

• 18:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are people who, who the cat manifestation interferes with their psychological state.

• 18:19Speaker 08

  I heard you.

• 18:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you think this might go way back?

• 18:20Speaker 08

  I heard you laugh when you first brought up this topic and now I hear you asking very good questions thinking about it.

• 18:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I'm not crying yet.

• 18:27Speaker 08

  That's why we gave a class.

• 18:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll be crying soon when it's, when we're done.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. In this time capsule show, we're featuring fan favorites from season five. Next up, a conversation with Anne Druyan, the co-creator, writer, director, and producer of Cosmos, a space-time odyssey. She also was one of the original writers of the original Cosmos with Carl Sagan. Hyper literate people often, to my disappointment, say, well, I was never good at science. I was never good at math.

• 19:20Speaker 10

  Right, right.

• 19:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And use that as a reason to not learn more.

• 19:22Speaker 10

  Right.

• 19:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And clearly that wasn't the case with you. So what happened there?

• 19:26Speaker 10

  Okay, so as a child of the sixties, I was hungry for a way to understand the world that could cut through deceit and lies. And, you know, if you think of the sixties as a moment when the great middle, including me, of the American people began to realize that they couldn't trust the government after a years of, you know, during the Second World War, whose total faith and credit, the government was beyond reproach. And in the sixties, this edifice starts to crumble. And so.

• 19:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the first time, right? In America.

• 19:59Speaker 10

  See, I don't know what was happening a hundred years before, but certainly in modern history. And so I was hungry for a way to know what's real.

• 20:10Speaker 10

  And I looked everywhere and I found it in the pre-Socratic philosophers, the ancient Greeks who invented science. And I suddenly realized, oh, Jesus, I was such an idiot. I didn't really pay attention in science when it has this error correcting mechanism that nothing else has. And so that's what attracted me to science.

• 20:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The urge to know the truth in anything.

• 20:33Speaker 10

  Nothing absolute, but just give me some truth, is John Lennon famously saying.

• 20:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We spend 13 episodes teaching you about the universe and why it matters and what it feels like and what it means. And then you give us a little space at the end to emote.

• 20:48Speaker 10

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, there's some passages I couldn't keep a dry eye while I was reading them.

• 20:53Speaker 10

  I know, I was choking up. Every time I would be sitting in the editing room and the editors too, and the assistant editors.

• 21:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is a place where you hear the same damn passage 100 times in a row.

• 21:02Speaker 10

  100 times. People start welling up. Someone asks someone a question, there's no answer. Well, the guy sitting in there in the dark with you, what's up? And didn't you hear me? And it's like, I can't talk, I'm just gonna cry. So I feel like the case for science, which was at the nucleus of the dream of cosmos, is being made. And finally, we get to tie it all together with your amazing performance and astonishing visual effects and the script. You know, what really gets me and why we all cried, like 30 of us in this screening room who had worked on it for years, was when you let that ship go and the chair is

• 21:47Speaker 10

  empty. People in 180 countries around the world have seen this case for science, have seen what we have to show about the universe. The dream that all of us could be changed sufficiently so that we could awaken from our stupor and act in defense of the planet and science and demand our governments to be more scientifically aware of the needs and challenges of our planet, but also of the promise of the cosmos.

• 22:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Show me your file cabinet in your home. Just stories in progress that are not yet realized.

• 22:33Speaker 10

  Yes, I'm so thrilled. I mean, if you see Jan Ort and Edmund Halley trending in the top three subjects on Twitter, you know that you have struck a chord. And there are so many other stories. I mean, why not make heroes of the people who've brought us knowledge instead of heroes of the people who have the best stylists? Or the people who spend the most money? Or the people who have a mask?

• 23:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who drive the fanciest car.

• 23:07Speaker 10

  Yeah, why? I mean, do we want our kids to be scientists? Or we want them to be clothes hangers? That's the question.

• 23:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've had a lot of amazing guests on StarTalk over the years. But this season, we got the ultimate interview with God. Yeah, you heard me. God. I first ran across God through his "The Tweet of God" postings on Twitter. And although he's a very busy entity, he spared an hour of his time to answer some of my burning questions about life and everything else under the sun and in the universe. When were you born? And where were you born?

• 23:47Speaker 11

  I was born an infinite number of years ago. It was October 8th. Negative infinity.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Born to whom?

• 23:58Speaker 11

  I was my own father. And then I never knew my mom. She left me when I was about eighty-seven trillion, so I was still very young. And has that scarred me? Some have argued it has, and perhaps it has. I don't really know. But I learned very early on that anything I was going to have in this existence, I would have to create for myself. And so that's what gave me the idea to create the universe. Because I thought if I create the universe, I'll have something that I can call my own. And I think that was important to me. That was a turning point in terms of my own self-esteem.

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our best thinking today about the universe tells us that maybe this is not the only universe, that there could be a multiverse, an infinitude of other universes out there. Yet I've got you sitting next to me in a StarTalk interview in this universe. Do the other universes have their own gods?

• 24:53Speaker 11

  No, I am the god of all the other universes.

• 24:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, how do you even know that? Oh, I'm sorry, you're god, sorry.

• 24:59Speaker 11

  There are six different other universes, six universes total.

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's not infinite?

• 25:03Speaker 11

  No, just six. The only difference is which of the characters from Friends goes on to be the biggest star after the show. Everything else is exactly the same, but in one universe, Lisa Kudrow is the big star, in one, David Schwimmer is the biggest star, in another one, Jennifer Aniston's the biggest. So those are the only six universes that there are.

• 25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How about the laws of physics within those universes?

• 25:25Speaker 11

  Oh, same, same.

• 25:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Same? Yeah. That's no fun.

• 25:28Speaker 11

  I settled on these constants for a good reason. Every mathematical constant in the universe is there for a good reason.

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we've got the speed of light, that's a good one. That one is same everywhere. We've got Planck's constant, the gravitational constant.

• 25:40Speaker 11

  Yes.

• 25:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why not experiment with some more?

• 25:43Speaker 11

  I'm very happy with those. By the way, it's not just mathematical constants, there's also other, well, Murphy's Law. That's a constant. That's a constant as much as any of the ones you mentioned. Anything that can go wrong will, that is a universal law.

• 25:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's with the commandments? Why are there only 10? I keep thinking we need more instructions than that.

• 26:05Speaker 11

  There should only be one commandment, really. And the only commandment that was necessary, and I realize this too late, is just quit being a dick. That's the one commandment, that's really the only essential one for life. Just quit being a dick. And looking back, that's the one I would have.

• 26:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that covers all of them.

• 26:25Speaker 11

  That covers all of them in its way. I believe, when loosely interpreted, the quit being a dick rule will cover any moral situation.

• 26:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In this live show, recorded at Sketch Fest in San Francisco, Bill Nye the Science Guy sits in for me, along with co-host Eugene Mirman and comedian Dave Foley, where they talk about the possibilities of alien life, with SETI astronomer Seth Shostak.

• 26:54Speaker 07

  Astronomers have been looking at the heavens for a long time. You guys have been looking at the heavens for 60 years. Is that accurate? 50-something years? Mm-hmm. And you haven't heard a thing? And this gets back to Fermi's paradox. If they're out there, why haven't you heard from them?

• 27:11Speaker 12

  Well, I don't know if everybody in the audience knows Fermi's paradox, unless they're related to the guy. But Fermi was having lunch with a couple of physicists, and at some point, between two bites of a tuna fish sandwich, he says, "So where is everybody?" And he wasn't referring to the lack of company at the lunch. What he was referring to was the fact that the time that it would take to colonize the galaxy, if that's on your agenda. If you're the Klingons and you decide you want to colonize the galaxy, and even if your rockets aren't all that fast, but if you stay at it, you can do it in, you know, a few tens of millions of years, maybe 30, 40, 50 million years.

• 27:43Speaker 07

  It's like that.

• 27:44Speaker 12

  That's a long time. Yeah, that's a long time for you waiting for a bus from San Francisco. But that's not very long compared to the age of the galaxy. So what he was saying is, if there really are advanced societies out there, some of them, one of them, would have colonized the entire galaxy by now. We see no evidence of that, and that's why I said, "So where is everybody?", at which point he let the subject drop. And ruined lunch.

• 28:08Speaker 07

  You guys, it's extraordinary, but it's not crazy to suggest that life started on Mars when Mars was very wet. And then they got hit with an impactor. I mean, I'm sure it was excited also.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  You are all a bag of perverts!

• 28:32Speaker 07

  I didn't know science was so dirty.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  Any chance, any, tiny!

• 28:40Speaker 07

  That's your problem.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  Yes, I know!

• 28:43Speaker 07

  Okay, so, this thing is, uh, it gets hit with an impactor, three billion years ago. Stuff's thrown into space, it gets in, a few bits of it get in this extraordinary mathematical thing called a home in orbit, yeah? And, except it's in outer space, so it goes, and lands on the Earth. And you and I are somehow descendant from a Martian microbe. And let me just say, it would be an extraordinary discovery about the course of events. It would really be something. And so, along this line, if we are all descended from a common ancestor, which seems a reasonable conclusion when you look at your DNA and all those, uh, the primitive life forms, like, anyone?

• 29:28Speaker 07

  My old boss?

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Ted Cruz!

• 29:34Speaker 07

  And so, so, it is another question, though, could have life started a second time, or the time before us, here on Earth? And it's, if we just had the right place to look, we would find the so-called second genesis. We are the aliens we're looking for.

• 29:53Speaker 03

  Boom!

• 29:57Speaker 07

  And that theory has, is called, what is it called? Second genesis? No, this theory that, that life came here from, uh, from space. Pan-fermia. Trans-fermia. I know!

• 30:15Speaker 07

  We have, we have modern telescopes. And people look out there and they, they observe planets. And they can infer from here that these places are probably inhabitable. But what does it take to be habitable?

• 30:29Speaker 12

  Well, that's actually a good question because all we know is what it takes for life like our own to be habitable. So you have to start there because you don't have any other data points. But that means, yeah, maybe something to breathe, but not necessarily. I mean, if you dug a hole one mile deep here, it'd take you all night. But if you did that and you pulled up the muck at the bottom and put it under a microscope, you'd see, you know, microbes.

• 30:50Speaker 07

  That don't need air to breathe.

• 30:52Speaker 12

  They don't need air. They don't need, they don't need sunlight, no photosynthesis. I mean, they're alive, but they're down there. So, there's no good definition of life, right? You might think of Justice Potter talking about pornography. "I'll know it when I see it." Life is kind of the same way, right?

• 31:05Speaker 03

  It can definitely high-five. I think we can all kind of agree that it's not life if it can't go "Yeah!" But what else? And you know what? And if, and if it leaves you hanging, it is dead to me.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  Other than, of course, high-fives, what are some of the, what are some of ways that you could categorize something being alive?

• 31:30Speaker 12

  It's, it's actually quite hard to do. I mean, you can see, if you pick up your 10th grade biology book, if you still have that, and you open it up, it starts out with a definition of, "Well, life has metabolism and life reproduces."

• 31:41Speaker 07

  Homeostasis.

• 31:42Speaker 12

  There's all this stuff. Yeah, whatever.

• 31:44Speaker 07

  Keeps itself.

• 31:45Speaker 12

  But it, you know, you can, you can think of examples of things that fit the definition but aren't alive, right? Things like mules, they don't reproduce, it turns out. But they're, you wouldn't, you know, contest the fact that they're alive, right? Fire reproduces, but it's not alive. So there's no good definition for life. The current working definition? If it evolves in a Darwinian fashion. What?

• 32:06Speaker 03

  That isn't even true.

• 32:09Speaker 12

  Probably not.

• 32:10Speaker 07

  What if it's in a Freudian fashion or?

• 32:12Speaker 12

  Yeah. So that makes it hard to build an experiment to look for life.

• 32:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. This time capsule show is a collection of fan favorites from season five and one of your favorite interviews with Cassini imaging scientist Carolyn Porco. She's not only responsible for that mission's stunning images of my favorite planet Saturn and its many moons, but she has a compelling life story that resonated with many of you. So how early did you know you wanted to do this?

• 33:07Speaker 13

  So I got into astronomy the backdoor. I was attracted more from my spiritual questioning when I was just a young teenager. I was like 13 going on 80. And I was thinking things like, what am I doing here? What is the meaning of life? You know, I was probably very depressed. That's probably why I was thinking these things.

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you had existential angst at age 13?

• 33:30Speaker 13

  I had enormous existential angst.

• 33:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is the beginning of a troubled teenage.

• 33:33Speaker 13

  I know. And I read about Hinduism. I read about Buddhism. I read about...

• 33:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you were totally messed up?

• 33:40Speaker 13

  I was totally messed up. I even for a while got very, very serious about my religion, Catholicism. And for a period of about four months, I went to church like four times a week and I did all the indulgences.

• 33:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're still around 13?

• 33:53Speaker 13

  Yeah. And I thought that just didn't cut it for me. I even did read about existentialism and that was really depressing. But, you know, thinking about what is the meaning of life? And, you know, who am I? Where am I? Got me thinking, all right, where am I? Well, you know, where is where?

• 34:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Beyond just being in the Bronx.

• 34:11Speaker 13

  Yeah, really.

• 34:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you ask anyone, you're in the Bronx right now, man.

• 34:15Speaker 13

  The ultimate existential question, is there anything outside the Bronx? So I started reading about the universe and about galaxies and stars and so on. And that's how I became interested in astronomy.

• 34:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the first that I've ever heard.

• 34:29Speaker 13

  Well, you know, most males, I don't know if this worked for you, most males seem to get interested in astronomy by doing things like grinding lenses and building telescopes. I was never a tinkerer. I was a seeker. That's how I described myself. I was a seeker. And I thought the answers to the question of the meaning of life, you know, lay in the universe.

• 34:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if this were a few thousand years ago, you could have been a prophet.

• 34:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Think about it, because if you're young and you're having these kinds of questions, most adults don't even think that way. So you would have been labeled as someone with a search for wisdom, and then you'd acquire it and share it with others.

• 35:03Speaker 13

  And they probably would have like hung me for it.

• 35:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, burned you. You're a girl. They burn girls and they hang boys.

• 35:08Speaker 13

  They hang boys, they burn girls. This woman, her name was Carolyn Neathammer, wrote, "I thought a very good article about me." It was the Scientist at Work series in the New York Times.

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what year is this now?

• 35:21Speaker 13

  1999.

• 35:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's not that long ago. It's not like in the 80s or the 70s.

• 35:26Speaker 13

  No. It was done to be coincidental with Cassini's flyby of Earth, which happened in 1999. And then, you know, there was a lot of hoopla about whether or not the radioactive material on Cassini was going to destroy the Earth.

• 35:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it flew by Earth to gain some extra orbital energy to get out to Saturn?

• 35:41Speaker 13

  Yes. That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you didn't have enough fuel to get it there on its own?

• 35:45Speaker 13

  No.

• 35:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You had to like borrow orbital energy?

• 35:47Speaker 13

  Oh, we borrowed a lot. We're in debt after all these years.

• 35:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So what planets did you take orbital energy from?

• 35:53Speaker 13

  We took it from Venus twice, would you believe?

• 35:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Twice? Oh, poor Venus.

• 35:56Speaker 13

  Poor Venus. It's still there, though.

• 35:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's still there, alright.

• 35:59Speaker 13

  And one from Earth. And then we slipped closely by Jupiter. That really helped a lot.

• 36:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, of course. Yeah, alright. And that got you to Saturn. Alright, sorry. But we digress.

• 36:08Speaker 13

  So August 1999, this article is being written, and the woman says truthful things, good things and bad things or whatever, and she submits it to her editors, and they come back and say, "Find out why Porco's not married." And I said to her, "You see? I told you so. I knew this kind of thing was going to happen because I knew they would be very sexist."

• 36:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it's not only not married, but never married.

• 36:31Speaker 13

  Never married.

• 36:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the real issue. There are plenty of not-married people who have been.

• 36:34Speaker 13

  Yeah. How old was I then? I was 40-something.

• 36:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In your 40s, okay.

• 36:38Speaker 13

  Yeah. So I gave her two responses to use because I was kind of pissed. The first answer was something like, "Well, just tell them I have a different man every night and I like it that way."

• 36:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 36:48Speaker 13

  You know? And then the other answer was, "There are no high-maintenance items in my house of any kind, pets, plants, or husbands." And Carolyn Neathammer, in her discretion, used that one.

• 37:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She used the second one rather than the first one.

• 37:01Speaker 13

  Yeah. And actually, I got a lot of fan mail from that. People write to me, "Oh, my 17-year-old daughter thought that was the greatest thing she ever heard. My advanced age, there are still no high-maintenance items in my house of any kind, pets, plants, or husbands."

• 37:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's this about you trying to get everybody to smile?

• 37:18Speaker 13

  Ah, that was probably the greatest thing I've ever done. I think...

• 37:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll be the judge of that, okay?

• 37:26Speaker 13

  Well, let me back up. There have been other pale blue dot pictures taken by other missions, right? Mars missions probably took many pictures of the Earth from Mars orbit.

• 37:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because Earth shows up in the Martian sky.

• 37:37Speaker 13

  Yeah, and people, of course, they got moved by the first pale blue dot. They wanted to do it over again, too. So I'm thinking, not only would ours be even more gorgeous, because we're going to see Saturn in the field with Earth...

• 37:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Saturn is unimpeachably beautiful in any shot.

• 37:51Speaker 13

  Right. But I thought, wouldn't it be fabulous if in...well, let me back up. In all those previous...

• 37:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the second time you've backed us up. I don't know where I am now.

• 38:02Speaker 13

  In all those previous pale blue dot images, the picture was taken, and then afterwards, people were told, "Look, here was the Earth taken three weeks ago." And I'm thinking, well, why don't we tell people in advance, "Your picture is going to be taken from the outer solar system from a billion miles away." And I wanted to use this as an opportunity for people having a communal feeling with the universe.

• 38:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is the spiritual side of you showing up?

• 38:28Speaker 13

  It is, I'm sorry.

• 38:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're going up.

• 38:30Speaker 13

  And I thought it would be just fantastic. People could feel a sense of unity with the cosmos. They could feel a sense of unity with their fellow human. And they could also appreciate, at that moment, their pictures being taken from a billion miles away. How better to let them know how far humans have come in the exploration of the solar system. It becomes something personal to them.

• 38:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're telling me you actually got people to go outside and look up at Saturn in the sky and smile at it?

• 38:58Speaker 13

  Well, I...no, no, here, even the people on the other side of the planet smiled, because the idea was to smile in celebration, to get this communal feeling out of people, this kind of cosmic love. I was after cosmic love.

• 39:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where were you in the 60s? We needed you there.

• 39:14Speaker 13

  What do you mean? I was about 16 years old, smoking dope. What were you doing?

• 39:19Speaker 13

  I can say that now, because it's legal in my state.

• 39:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Colorado, yeah, you're from Colorado.

• 39:24Speaker 13

  So anyway, I was after cosmic love and it worked and I was so proud.

• 39:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There was quite the social media attention given to it in blogs and in the Twitter streams.

• 39:33Speaker 13

  It ended up not being announced as early as I would have liked. We should have done it a year ahead for various reasons I won't go into. It didn't get announced until a month ahead, so there wasn't really as big a campaign and as big an announcement as I would have liked. But nonetheless, we got comments from people that were just beautiful. People saying, "My God, I've never felt a feeling like this." You know, for once, I felt so united with everybody around the globe. And one person wrote, "You know, darn it, we may be floating around on a dustmote. We may be transient, but for 15 minutes, we were there, we were aware, and we smiled." And that's exactly the kind of feeling I wanted people to have.

• 40:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's beautiful.

• 40:13Speaker 13

  Oh, thank you, Neil. And I have to say this. For me, it was the same thing. I mean, I'm the one who started this whole thing, but the 15 minutes that it was happening, and I'm looking where Saturn is, and I'm thinking, "Wow, there's a camera there taking our picture." And knowing that people all over the world were doing the same thing, it was fabulous. It was so fabulous. So I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out. By the way, I called the whole event "The Day the Earth Smiled" because that's what it was.

• 40:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that photo made page one of the New York Times.

• 40:45Speaker 13

  Oh, man, was that cool.

• 40:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back on November 13th, 2013.

• 40:49Speaker 13

  November 13th?

• 40:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  13/11/13.

• 40:51Speaker 13

  That was the very day that I got the phone call from NASA headquarters that I was made the imaging team leader. Is that cosmic or what?

• 40:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The day of the year, not, I mean, in what year?

• 40:59Speaker 13

  1990.

• 41:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  1990, okay. So there is cosmic alignment.

• 41:02Speaker 13

  Cosmic love and alignment, Neil. Right here on your show.

• 41:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're wrapping up our season five Time Capsule Show with Adam Savage and Jamie Heineman, stars of the hit TV show Mythbusters.

• 41:18Speaker 14

  Actually, we were hired talent at the beginning. We had nothing to do with the pitch for Mythbusters. I won't say that we had nothing to do with the creation.

• 41:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you were pretty faces, is what you're saying?

• 41:28Speaker 15

  Well, it was just a job, you know, we gotta pay the rent.

• 41:31Speaker 14

  Somebody contacted Jamie, said, "Do you wanna do this show called Mythbusters?"

• 41:35Speaker 15

  And I'm like, "Like, that's ever gonna happen." But just as a matter of principle, I went ahead and tried it, because you gotta try things, or you're never gonna... Tried, you mean, screen test, or you tried it?

• 41:43Speaker 14

  Well, actually, yeah, so he called me up and said, "Listen, I got this call from Discovery about this thing. I don't think I could do it on my own, but you're a ham, so you wanna shoot a demo reel together?"

• 41:52Speaker 15

  I had to think of who's a ham that I know, but also somebody that's good at doing what we do, because it wasn't just about talking, it was about replicating urban legends, and the fact that we were guys that build things was part of this premise, that we would actually replicate these things. So you become a participant in the test, not just an observer of something, some other effort?

• 42:12Speaker 14

  Exactly, and in terms of, you know, being freelancers, where we're always trying to look at what the next avenue is, I had actually just bought a laptop, the first power book that you could edit digital video on, and I was teaching myself...

• 42:23Speaker 15

  Way back in the day.

• 42:24Speaker 14

  Way back, the Pismo, and I was teaching myself digital video editing. And so when Jamie called, I had all the equipment necessary, and we shot what ended up being a 14-minute demo reel, and they ended up kind of building the backbone of the show off of that demo reel.

• 42:36Speaker 15

  So you got to shape the profile of the show based on how you expressed your talents?

• 42:40Speaker 14

  No one told us that we had done that for several years.

• 42:43Speaker 15

  Yeah, well, and you also have to understand a little bit of the background. Adam and I, we're not exactly friends, but in fact, we don't get along very well at all.

• 42:52Speaker 14

  In 21 years, we've never had dinner alone together.

• 42:54Speaker 15

  Yeah, but we have common interests, and I would call Adam up and, "Come down and check this out." I'm tinkering in the shop on the weekend.

• 43:01Speaker 14

  We were professionally interested in what each other was doing.

• 43:04Speaker 15

  Yeah.

• 43:06Speaker 14

  The third time, we revisited the rocket car. It's an original Darwin Award myth, where a guy strapped a military Genesee to take off rocket to his Impala, and supposedly flew a mile through the air, embedded into a mountain, and they pulled his teeth out of the wreckage to identify him. That was actually our very first episode of Mythbusters.

• 43:22Speaker 15

  So you wanted to redo that?

• 43:23Speaker 14

  Well, we did it first, like, 10 years ago.

• 43:25Speaker 15

  Yeah, that's something I wanna do.

• 43:27Speaker 14

  Then we did it a second time, where we got these really powerful rockets that blew up on the stand. So we spent 20 grand on these rockets. Everything we did worked perfectly, the rockets blew up. Took us another five years to give us discovery, to fork over enough dough to do it for real. And this time, we did two launches last summer in the Mojave Desert. One with a car hitting a bump in the road and the other with a real straight-up ramp. But why is that interesting? Sure, I put rockets on my car, I fly. Well, there's two things to this. The first- It's the car's version of a jetpack. Essentially, except that rockets aren't shaped like cars for a very good reason. And so, the first time we did it, we put the normal J dough amount of power on the car, and it only accelerated the car to 150 miles an hour. And traditionally, on Mythbusters, when we get to a place like that, we want to find out what would it take to replicate

• 44:11Speaker 14

  the behavior that is stated in the myth? To get the car to accelerate to 350 miles an hour and fly perhaps roughly a mile through the air. 350 miles an hour, you go backwards in time. With the red shifting. Marty! So then we- It's the flux capacitor. The math said to get the car up to that speed, and we attempted to balance correctly using, you know, model rocketry formulas to get the rockets in the right place. The question is, is if you have the car balanced, and the rockets in the right place, and they have enough power, will they actually make the car fly straight and true? And that was the answer we hadn't fully come to as the second part of the story. That was half of the design concern in the Apollo era. Have you have a straight rocket, how do you point it? How do you aim it?

• 44:54Speaker 15

  Yeah, well, we, of course, could have gone to a place where we start to add fins and do other things to this car.

• 45:01Speaker 14

  We get people that say, "Why don't you just put fins on the thing or wings?" And we say, "That's a car-shaped rocket. We want a rocket car." Gotcha. For us, there's an ethical difference. Your formula said that you'd be able to fly at 350 miles an hour? Yes, according to the amount of rocket power. So, did it? It never really got to chance to.

• 45:20Speaker 15

  They were so unstable that they-

• 45:22Speaker 14

  So, the answer is no? The answer is no. Say no. Let me hear you say it. Did it work? The scientist even wants to say, "I guess on an infinitely straight track, maybe, but with us, going off a bump in the road, it's too unstable, and they bounced after about 300 feet."

• 45:35Speaker 15

  They did what I was talking about, which is they interact with the ground rather quickly.

• 45:39Speaker 14

  You guys have a whole euphemistic vocabulary.

• 45:43Speaker 15

  The other favorite term is catastrophic failure.

• 45:46Speaker 14

  That is my favorite engineering term.

• 45:48Speaker 15

  Yeah, we use that all the time on the show.

• 45:50Speaker 14

  Or, in rocket propulsion lore, there are rocket launches that succeed, and others that are rich in learning opportunities.

• 45:59Speaker 14

  What is the weirdest urban legend that turned out to be true? Elephants are afraid of mice. No, don't say that. We were in South Africa filming with sharks and bad weather kept us off. Wait, because everyone for Discovery Channel has to do sharks at some point. Yeah, we've done Shark Week twice. Three times. This is rice of passage. Oh, yeah, but bad weather kept us off the water, which was a disaster from a production standpoint. So we went in inland and thought, well, let's just produce five minutes of filler. Let's do elephants are afraid of mice. So we found someone with some mice. We found a nature preserve with some sad elephants and we set up a procedure.

• 46:33Speaker 15

  We got a big ball of dung. Elephant turds are like basketballs and we hollowed out a space in the bottom of the turd.

• 46:39Speaker 14

  Big enough for a very unhappy mouse.

• 46:41Speaker 15

  Yeah, one very unhappy mouse in there, tied monofilament onto it and went hid behind a bush. And the people at the game reserve opened the fence. They knew.

• 46:49Speaker 14

  Elephants walk on paths that are predictable.

• 46:51Speaker 15

  Yeah. And we thought this was a fluff piece. The elephant's not going to be able to see what the little mouse or.

• 46:56Speaker 14

  We thought our biggest problem was going to be what do we do when the elephant steps on the mouse? Do we film it? Show it? It's Bambi meets Godzilla.

• 47:03Speaker 15

  Yeah. So the elephant comes out on cue and darned if it didn't come screeching to a stop once the mouse came out.

• 47:11Speaker 14

  A cartoon.

• 47:11Speaker 15

  Yeah. And it very carefully, almost tiptoed.

• 47:14Speaker 14

  No. Totally, totally, totally. No.

• 47:17Speaker 15

  And.

• 47:17Speaker 14

  Like Disney style tiptoeing around a mouse. So then we're thinking, well, maybe the elephant's never seen its own dung roll by its own accord. Maybe it's afraid of its dung. So we removed the mouse. We had another elephant come through. We moved the dung. Elephant didn't do a darn thing.

• 47:31Speaker 15

  Yeah. And then we repeated.

• 47:32Speaker 14

  This is the control that you're trying to put into the thing. We posited that that must be a control. Then we added another mouse and did it with a different elephant.

• 47:39Speaker 15

  And the same thing happened.

• 47:40Speaker 14

  Got the same. So it wasn't just a neurotic? Not a neurotic elephant. We did have, and this is another thing that I love. We were doing an appearance at a college a few years ago and this eight-year-old girl raised her hand. She was like, I wanted to know why you used a white mouse in the experiment. Elephants are afraid of mice because they're not very natural. And why didn't you use a more natural colored mouse? And I said, you're absolutely right. It's because we weren't thinking far enough ahead. We thought we were doing a fluff piece and we were just wanted something that was bright on camera. She was all over that story. She was totally all over it. More power to her. A future scientist. We failed.

• 48:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, and as always, I bid you to keep looking up.