StarTalk Live at NYCC 2019 with Neil deGrasse Tyson

StarTalk returns to the main stage in front of a packed house at NY Comic Con. Neil deGrasse Tyson, co-host Chuck Nice, and StarTalk geek-in-chief astrophysicist Charles Liu, PhD explore the science found in comics, sci fi, and popular fiction! (Warning: Adult Language) NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons and All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Thanks to this week’s Patrons for supporting us: Heidi Ritzel, Sydney Reising, Andy Green, Michael Brown, Victoria Delpiano, and Cesar Alban. Photo Credit: Knightmare6.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and beaming out across all of space and time, this is StarTalk, where science and pop culture collide.

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  2019 New York Comic-Con. We're back. StarTalk.

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we're gonna do some Comic-Con stuff tonight. I promise you, this theme for this evening is the science of pop fiction. And we have two scientists, myself included, and from the StarTalk stable of experts, we have our resident geek-in-chief. I'll introduce him in just a moment. But first, let me get my co-host, Chuck Nice. Chuck, come on out here.

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love you, man. Love you too, man. All right, Chuck Nice, go take a seat. And next up, we have a friend and colleague. He's an astrophysicist at the CUNY system, based in Staten Island. Come on up, Charles Liu. Charles.

• 1:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles, what was that about?

• 1:48Charles Liu?

  I'm just so excited to be at Comic-Con. New York Comic-Con is the best. It really, really is.

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. All right.

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Comic-Con rocks, man. So we've got three segments. The first one will be devoted to the topic of fictional elements.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What does that even mean?

• 2:07Charles Liu?

  Well, like, antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, rhenium.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Those are real elements.

• 2:15Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 2:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we're talking about fictional elements.

• 2:18Chuck Nice?

  Oh, look at that, somebody right away.

• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You didn't win anything, man, sit down.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Charles, what role do fictional elements play in the world of comics?

• 2:30Charles Liu?

  Fundamentally, of course, there are only a certain number of elements. Like, any of you count the ones that we have been able to create in a laboratory? Hundred, hundred twenty, hundred and twenty something, right? But we always have to-

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That means everything in the universe is made of a hundred and twenty things.

• 2:46Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 2:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 2:47Charles Liu?

  Well, we always have to have something that makes someone be able to fly, or stretch, or run really fast. So it's gotta be an element of some kind, right? Really, they're compounds, most likely. They might be alloys, they might be metals, but don't worry, elements are good.

• 3:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But in the comic books, they, generally, whatever they are, they're not common, they're rare.

• 3:08Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 3:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they have special properties, like you said, that they want. Usually, they're strong, in some kind of way.

• 3:14Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 3:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so one of the early one of these is Thor's hammer. Uru. Uru, is that how you pronounce that? Uru.

• 3:22Chuck Nice?

  And is, do you have to say it like you're taking a dump? Is that part of it?

• 3:28Charles Liu?

  I'd rather like to think of it as the Norse, Norwegian, stately, godlike Asgardian. Uru.

• 3:36Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 3:36Charles Liu?

  Oh, that was convenient.

• 3:37Chuck Nice?

  So it's an Asgardian dump, okay.

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so Uru is a, is a fictional element.

• 3:43Charles Liu?

  They don't have a lot of vegetables up in Asgard.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wolverine's claws, what are those?

• 3:48Charles Liu?

  Adamantium.

• 3:49Chuck Nice?

  Adamantium.

• 3:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Another element, and Wonder Woman's bracelets?

• 3:53Charles Liu?

  Feminum.

• 3:54Chuck Nice?

  Feminum?

• 3:55Charles Liu?

  Feminum.

• 3:56Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, that sounds malformed, because elements should end in I U M, except for aluminum. All the others are I U M.

• 4:04Chuck Nice?

  Femminium.

• 4:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That should be femminium.

• 4:06Charles Liu?

  Well, maybe if you're in Britain, right? Because you pronounce aluminum, aluminium, so this is feminium.

• 4:12Chuck Nice?

  I'm with Neil on this one. Femminium sounds so much better than, what's it called?

• 4:15Charles Liu?

  Feminum.

• 4:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Feminum.

• 4:17Chuck Nice?

  Feminum.

• 4:18Charles Liu?

  They're from Paradise Island, why do they care how we pronounce it?

• 4:22Chuck Nice?

  This is true. I'm just saying, you know, feminine sounds like something that you would use to, you know, get rid of like male toxicity.

• 4:33Chuck Nice?

  You know, it's just like, ladies, is your man an a-hole?

• 4:39Charles Liu?

  Well, the feminine name- So it'd be like a perfume that gets through-

• 4:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, you could either spray it on or give it to him in a pill, you know what I mean? Try new feminine.

• 4:49Charles Liu?

  Well, the term feminine came originally from a two-part episode called The Feminine Mystique in the original Wonder Woman television series from 1976 to 1977.

• 5:00Chuck Nice?

  Damn.

• 5:03Charles Liu?

  Featuring a young, 20-year-old Debra Winger, three-time Academy Award nominee, as Wonder Girl.

• 5:11Chuck Nice?

  Wonder Girl.

• 5:11Charles Liu?

  Priscilla. Yes, Diana Prince's fictional younger teenage sister. Wait, Academy Award or Emmy Award nominee? She was nominated for three Academy Awards.

• 5:21Chuck Nice?

  Debra Winger.

• 5:22Charles Liu?

  Officer in the general. Debra Winger, gotcha, gotcha. No, Lynda Carter, regrettably, has not yet been nominated for an Oscar.

• 5:28Chuck Nice?

  Hey, man, let me tell you something. If I didn't know and love you as much as I do, I would think you would have an unhealthy obsession with Wonder Woman.

• 5:35Charles Liu?

  Given what he knows about the situation. Guilty as charged. Awesome. So tell me more about the bracelets. What- Okay. Theoretically, the bracelets were originally a symbol from the ancient Greek days. This is based on the Wonder Woman sort of creation anthology back in the 1930s and 40s. So she's Amazon? Yeah, she's Amazon, but these bracelets were a symbol that they were subservient to men, that they had been captured by men, they were enslaved by men. But what happened was when Paradise Island was established and broke free, Aphrodite, the goddess of love, made them indestructible and a symbol of the great abilities and powers of women, specifically those Amazons on Amazon.

• 6:19Charles Liu?

  So turn it back, back on its, on its head. That's right. Right. And so what happened was that now they are bulletproof, and they were able to deflect bullets, and if you're skilled enough, you can block weaponry and so forth. And the pilot of the original Wonder Woman TV series, which I still can't find on reruns anymore. If any of you have a copy, let me know where I can get one. There's a scene where she is trying to make money.

• 8:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really? I'm just saying, why stand in the middle of bullets? You can pull a Matrix thing on it and do one of these.

• 8:59Charles Liu?

  There are two good reasons not to dodge, although you can do that, yes. One is that you protect the people behind you.

• 9:06Chuck Nice?

  But not the people on the sides.

• 9:10Charles Liu?

  And that-

• 9:10Chuck Nice?

  Everybody behind you is great.

• 9:12Charles Liu?

  And that was the second point. Just like in, um, let's see, The Phantom Menace it was, right? When it was first introduced that you could use your lightsaber to deflect blaster shots-

• 9:22Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 9:23Charles Liu?

  And use them as weapons against the people that were firing against you. Uh, Wonder Woman can now use those bracelets to attack.

• 9:30Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 9:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, because I was gonna say-

• 9:31Chuck Nice?

  In defense, in defense of the Jedi, when they use a lightsaber, they don't just deflect it, they send it back to where it came from, thereby rendering the shooter-

• 9:42Charles Liu?

  So, Wonder Woman-

• 9:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't that what he just said?

• 9:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Were you paying attention 14 seconds ago?

• 9:49Chuck Nice?

  I have a very short attention span.

• 9:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and one other bit of physics about blocking bullets. Um, handguns wouldn't, but a rifle shot is actually supersonic typically. So if it's, the bullet's moving supersonically, your hands would have to be moving supersonically as well to intersect them typically. So, so each hand would leave a little sonic boom behind. And so, and that, they didn't do that, so-

• 10:18Charles Liu?

  Well-

• 10:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They, they missed an opportunity.

• 10:19Charles Liu?

  That's true.

• 10:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, okay.

• 10:21Charles Liu?

  It could have been real science-

• 10:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all.

• 10:22Charles Liu?

  But also keep-

• 10:22Chuck Nice?

  I am sure they're losing sleep.

• 10:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, we gotta move on. Ch- Charles, tell people why metals are generally strong things. Because so many of these fictional elements are metals of some kind.

• 10:36Charles Liu?

  That's true.

• 10:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what is going on inside the atom and whatever lattice it's in that makes them strong relative to rocks or anything else?

• 10:44Charles Liu?

  Well, that's a complicated question, of course, right? All material science-

• 10:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, the question was easy, it's the answer you're saying is complicated.

• 10:50Charles Liu?

  That's a good way to put it, right.

• 10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was an easy question, I think.

• 10:52Charles Liu?

  Material science makes it very hard, right? Metals are essentially, you think of them as many, many atoms that together, work together to form like one atomic-like structure. That's why, for example, they conduct electricity really well. They do those kinds of things in general. But within metals, there's a lot of variation, right? And that's why alloys are very important. So for example, copper and tin are both very soft. If you actually had a tin foil, right? We use aluminum these days. But copper and tin are very soft. But if you can smelt them together, then you create bronze, which is actually very hard. And so the whole concept of the Bronze Age, right? Where for more than a millennium of human history, the fates of entire civilizations and cultures

• 11:37Charles Liu?

  were determined by whether or not you could get tin and copper together to make bronze. Was all about whether or not you knew metallurgy well enough. And the Hittites were very important also in smelting iron.

• 11:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Metallurgy?

• 11:51Charles Liu?

  Yeah, metallurgy. Metallurgy.

• 11:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Metallurgy, okay.

• 11:54Charles Liu?

  Oh, I see where we're going with this.

• 11:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I'm just trying to... I didn't know what you said, so I have to like translate it.

• 12:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I thought it was metallurgy.

• 12:02Charles Liu?

  Metalurgy.

• 12:05Chuck Nice?

  Metalurgy?

• 12:06Charles Liu?

  Metalurgy?

• 12:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like I said. Metalurgy.

• 12:08Charles Liu?

  I stand corrected.

• 12:09Chuck Nice?

  Okay. Metallica.

• 12:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so tell me about Iron Man. He's got...

• 12:23Charles Liu?

  Oh, no.

• 12:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's got palladium in there? What is that?

• 12:26Charles Liu?

  Yeah, okay.

• 12:30Charles Liu?

  All right.

• 12:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There could be some very serious Iron Man fans out there.

• 12:33Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 12:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That did not like that react. See? They're panning together now.

• 12:37Charles Liu?

  No, no, Iron Man is cool. I have no problem with Iron Man. It's the palladium part, okay?

• 12:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So palladium is one of the elements on the periodic table?

• 12:44Charles Liu?

  Yes, yes, yes. And this requires a little bit of history, okay? Back in the 1960s, when Iron Man was first created, the suit acted like a defibrillator or a heart helper, because he had that shrapnel in his heart. So it was none of this arc. Whatever, right? But actually, he occasionally would actually have to sit down in some room and plug in his armor chest plate, like into the wall, in order for it to get recharged enough to keep his heart beating. That is awesome. Okay, that was in the 60s. In the 80s, Marvel Universe, this is based on the Marvel Handbook of the 1980s, officially, his armor was solar powered. He actually had perfected an industrial strategy where you could put, like, little mini,

• 13:29Charles Liu?

  microbe-sized solar panel chips into the armor, which allowed him to charge from the sun and allowed him to have the superpower that way. That's brilliant. Yeah, it was really cool, right? But now there's palladium, and the reason that came about was in 1989, two scientists in America claimed, based on their experiments, that they had developed cold fusion through palladium. You remember this, Neil?

• 13:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember, and the stock price went through the roof.

• 13:55Charles Liu?

  Right, palladium futures went crazy, but what happened was they were trying to do these, what we now call...

• 14:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh wait, just a second. So cold fusion, normal fusion takes millions of degrees to slam nuclei together, which are positively charged. You want to overcome their electrical repulsion, because positive rejects positive.

• 14:15Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The opposites attract positive, the sames repel. So, if you can do this on a tabletop without requiring a million degrees, then you can produce energy by not having anything start out to be hot at all. So the claim was palladium was one of these ingredients that...

• 14:29Charles Liu?

  That's right. Hans Bethe, in the 1930s, who won the Nobel Prize for this, figured out that you could do nuclear fusion when you got so hot, not because it was so hot that it could overcome the electromagnetic pulsing, but you could create the environment for something called a quantum tunneling reaction, that would allow two protons to come together and become a deuterium nucleus. Now, what happened was that these folks...

• 14:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think Buckaroo Banzai, he tunnels through the mountain, doesn't he, in his car?

• 14:56Charles Liu?

  Yes, he does, yeah.

• 14:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do we agree on that?

• 14:59Charles Liu?

  Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. But what happened was that the palladium folks thought that they could create this quantum tunneling effect in palladium at room temperature, okay, or close to room temperature, instead of having to go to millions of degrees. And so they thought they did it. Sort of palladium 107 becomes palladium 103, plus a helium 4, plus a little bit of extra energy or something. For the next five years, huge amounts of time and energy and money were invested in trying to reproduce that experiment, and it never worked. So finally, by the mid 90s, people decided that this really wasn't mainstream. This was just an unfortunate or an accident or something that they did.

• 15:38Chuck Nice?

  Did anyone ever look into how much palladium these two dudes owned?

• 15:45Charles Liu?

  I do not know. But the answer is there are still plenty of people in the world today who think that there might still be something to that cold fusion thing. Nowadays, we call that low-energy fusion reactions or something, LEFR research. And so that's why palladium still holds a little bit of interest in the sort of fictional world of trying to create power, something from nothing.

• 16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's go straight to particle accelerators. If you're gonna make an element that you don't happen to have handy, so what do we do?

• 16:14Charles Liu?

  We take an atom and we bombard it with lots and lots of neutrons, okay? And in the proper circumstance, one of those neutrons will stick, or a few of them will stick, and then you create an environment where the new element is born, because neutrons will transform into protons through specific processes having to do with the weak nuclear force.

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So basically, in principle, we can make any element we want. So the whole dream of alchemy is real today.

• 16:43Charles Liu?

  It is absolutely real, it's just not economical.

• 16:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. We could make gold out of lead, but it's cheaper to just go buy it at the corner gold shop.

• 16:50Charles Liu?

  That's correct. And I will mention that, to this day, astronomers, we think that the best manufacturing of elements comes from stars. When, for example, a star goes supernova, the elements surrounding it are bombarded with so many neutrons, sometimes thousands of neutrons per second, that there are possibly quantum tunneling reactions that can happen that will create elements with atomic numbers in the 150s, even in the 200s, only they don't stay around in our universe for very long. They decay almost immediately.

• 17:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's go on to Thor's hammer. Ooh. Okay. Again, he's, he's still constipated. Yes, without a doubt. The hammer. Uh, so, I just wanna say that when I saw the Thor movie, the one that has Natalie Portman playing an astrophysicist. Um. You say that like you're angry about it. No, no, I'm just letting people know that my people, my profession shows up in movies. I'm just saying. Right on. In fact, there was, there was an astrophysicist

• 17:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in Top Gun. Kelly McGillis. Kelly McGillis was an astrophysicist? I don't know why. Cause she was an expert in the F-14 planes. And none of us are. But she was an astrophysicist, I'm just saying. That, and, well, you know, listen.

• 18:14Charles Liu?

  Danger zone.

• 18:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, um, Nicolas Cage was an astrophysicist in the movie Knowing. In the movie? Knowing. Okay.

• 18:22Charles Liu?

  Knowing.

• 18:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It really should've been called Not Knowing, actually, if you saw the plot, but, but, so, we, we out there. So, anyway, I'm watching the movie, and I'm thinking, gee, I wonder how heavy the hammer is? And there's a scene where his father talks about, about Mjolnir, the name of the hammer, right? And says, uh, there it is, forged in the heart of a dying star. And I said, I got this. It's made in a dying star. I, we, we know dying star, we astrophysics people. So, I went home, got densities of the densest dying star. So, I got a pulsar, dense pack of neutrons. And I said, I'm gonna make Thor's hammer out of neutrons. So, I got a replica of his hammer, measured the volume, figured out how many neutrons you could fit in it.

• 19:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then I tweeted how much that hammer would weigh. And I said, if Thor's hammer is made of neutron star material, as implied by legend, it would weigh the equivalent of a herd of 300 million elephants. Yeah. And, and. That's all. But, but, that's all?

• 19:27Charles Liu?

  No, if you take the hammer like that and you dropped it, it would fall through the earth as if it were not there. Cut all the way through the center of the earth, come out the other side.

• 19:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then come back?

• 19:38Charles Liu?

  And oscillate back and forth, ripping out the interior guts of the earth as we rotated.

• 19:45Charles Liu?

  It would not be cool.

• 19:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So then, you must know that what I'm about to say is true. Wherever you think you are in the geek spectrum.

• 20:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wherever you, if you think you are at the top, there is someone at Comic Con who knows more about it than you do. Okay? No matter who you are, it is like a semi-infinite continuum of expertise.

• 20:16Chuck Nice?

  And that's why I love Comic Con.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Within thirty-six hours.

• 20:19Chuck Nice?

  Yes. It's just a terrific place.

• 20:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Within thirty-six hours, somebody tweeted back.

• 20:25Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 20:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? "Dr. Tyson, you are wrong about Thor's hammer."

• 20:30Chuck Nice?

  It's three-hundred-and-fifty-six billion elephants.

• 20:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I was apparently really wrong.

• 20:36Chuck Nice?

  Really wrong?

• 20:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. So apparently, they cited a Marvel Comics trading card from the 1990s that said, "Munier is made out of fictional material, uru, and it weighs exactly six-point-two pounds."

• 20:55Chuck Nice?

  Six-point-two pounds.

• 20:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I'm saying, I like my answer better.

• 21:01Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but your hammer, you can't use it to actually do anything.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, well, except for...

• 21:06Chuck Nice?

  I mean, look.

• 21:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, I'm not done. Wait. So? So? Okay? So I, I, I mentioned this one time, and it had a, like, a superfan in the front row, and it said, "Six-point-two pounds." Did they say, "On which planet it weighs six-point-two pounds?" I said, "Oh, that's good." That's good. Mic drop.

• 21:30Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 21:32Chuck Nice?

  Yes. We are not worthy of that.

• 21:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can find the planet where the six-point-two hammer weighs three-hundred billion elephants.

• 21:40Chuck Nice?

  And then HGTV tweeted, "Is it a ball-peen hammer, or is it a regular hammer?"

• 21:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just saying.

• 21:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What can you build with this? So here's the problem. I thought it was made out of neutron star material. Okay. But that's not what he said in the movie. He said it's made in a neutron star, in the field of a dying star. And then they captured that in the...

• 22:07Charles Liu?

  Infinity War.

• 22:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, the guy, that's right, Infinity Wars. With that whole contraption. Right, there you go. They used the power of the neutron star to forge the... Gotcha. So, let me end this first segment. End this first segment, tell us about vibranium.

• 22:20Charles Liu?

  Vibranium.

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mmm, yes. Yeah. The black element.

• 22:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 22:41Charles Liu?

  Vibranium was introduced in Fantastic Four number 52, which came out in 1965.

• 22:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why do you know this stuff? How do you know?

• 22:50Chuck Nice?

  Easy, he's making it up.

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, this is the wrong audience to make that stuff up. That is so true. Yeah, you are right.

• 22:57Charles Liu?

  It's a thing.

• 22:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go.

• 23:00Chuck Nice?

  So go ahead, Fantastic Four number 52.

• 23:02Charles Liu?

  I own Fantastic Four number 52.

• 23:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice.

• 23:07Charles Liu?

  That's why I know.

• 23:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what does it do?

• 23:08Charles Liu?

  It's a beat-up old copy, it smells all moldy.

• 23:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not what does your comic book do? What is vibranium do?

• 23:13Charles Liu?

  This is Comic Con.

• 23:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 23:15Charles Liu?

  This is Comic Con. Don't you share the love of a beat-up old 1965 comic book. Thank you.

• 23:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me about the properties of vibranium.

• 23:25Charles Liu?

  Originally, when it was designed, vibranium was just able to absorb any kinetic energy. In other words, it just magically dissipated. So any impact on vibranium made it as if it were never there.

• 23:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Be like Kevlar.

• 23:41Charles Liu?

  Yes, but better.

• 23:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 23:42Charles Liu?

  I mean, so good.

• 23:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's vibranium.

• 23:43Charles Liu?

  Right. And in fact, the Super Society of Wakanda, which again was introduced at this time in 1965. I mean, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were so ahead of their time, right? This super society in the middle of Africa. But at that time, the black... Black Panther was not spiritual in the sense that he is now that he has like the powers of the ancestors and so forth. He was just so well-trained.

• 24:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 24:07Charles Liu?

  And so smart that he was a superhero and he had great technology and he was really talented in that way. But he had problems with this guy named Irving Claw, who had killed his father, in a much more elegant way than it was done in the movies. Although it was okay in the movies too, I guess.

• 24:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Am I right that the movie Black Panther had two hobbits in it?

• 24:29Chuck Nice?

  Hobbits?

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 24:30Chuck Nice?

  You mean from Middle Earth?

• 24:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 24:33Charles Liu?

  I missed them.

• 24:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think I'm right there.

• 24:35Charles Liu?

  I missed them. Yes.

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 24:37Chuck Nice?

  Okay, now you can't just go.

• 24:41Chuck Nice?

  You can't be dropping hobbits in the middle of Black Panther? And then just try to go on with the show?

• 24:49Chuck Nice?

  How the hell are there hobbits in Black Panther?

• 24:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it's the actors who played hobbits.

• 24:54Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 24:57Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay, that's cool.

• 24:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's different.

• 25:00Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 25:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's different, okay.

• 25:02Chuck Nice?

  What about second breakfast? Okay.

• 25:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Second breakfast.

• 25:06Charles Liu?

  They're taking the hobbits to Iceland.

• 25:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me about vibranium.

• 25:12Charles Liu?

  So vibranium later on was actually mixed into Captain America's shield from the 1980s. So it was a mixture, an alloy, of vibranium and adamantium, which made it even stronger than pure adamantium, which is what Wolverine's claws are made of and Ultron's body, etc., as you well know. So modern vibranium, as done in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, right at the very beginning, it's claimed as the world's hardest metal, right? The world's strongest metal. It turns out that the strength of it is completely secondary to this amazing ability for it to absorb kinetic energy. That's what made it special. So vibranium is cool, but it was not because it's hard, but because it's literally soft power.

• 25:55Charles Liu?

  The ability to take whatever it gets and be able to spread it out and produce this, both marvelous technology and also incredible weapons of war.

• 26:04Chuck Nice?

  Wait, wait. If that ain't a black man, I don't know what is.

• 26:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so it doesn't just only absorb it, it keeps the energy and you can do things with that energy later?

• 26:15Charles Liu?

  Correct.

• 26:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so it's an.

• 26:16Chuck Nice?

  As evidenced in the movie.

• 26:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Energy storage device.

• 26:19Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 26:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Very cool.

• 26:21Chuck Nice?

  Is there anything on Earth that we know of? That actually can mimic that in some way. In any way.

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A storage battery.

• 26:30Chuck Nice?

  Yes, that can take.

• 26:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all we got. We're very primitive.

• 26:33Chuck Nice?

  That can take kinetic energy, turn it into potential energy, and then put it back out. Yeah, a rubber ball.

• 26:43Chuck Nice?

  Right? You know what, man? You ain't have to be an a-hole about it.

• 26:48Chuck Nice?

  You know, I'm just saying.

• 26:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna end the first segment on the a-hole comment. You are participating in StarTalk Live New York Comic Con.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  Bringing space and science down to earth. You're listening to StarTalk.

• 27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are back, New York Comic Con 2019.

• 27:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck Nice, co-host.

• 27:41Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, sir.

• 27:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tweeting at ChuckNiceComic.

• 27:43Chuck Nice?

  At ChuckNiceComic.

• 27:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Charles Liu.

• 27:46Charles Liu?

  Hello.

• 27:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you tweet?

• 27:47Charles Liu?

  At Chuck Liu, C-H-U-C-K-L-I-U.

• 27:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're both Chucks?

• 27:51Charles Liu?

  Yeah, but he's the real Chuck.

• 27:53Chuck Nice?

  No, no, no, we're both Chucks.

• 27:55Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 27:56Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 27:56Charles Liu?

  We're like two Chucks.

• 27:58Chuck Nice?

  I'm a... okay.

• 28:01Charles Liu?

  That's how many Chucks.

• 28:01Chuck Nice?

  I knew somebody was gonna do it in a second, you know? But this is how many Chucks it takes to chuck that wood, sir.

• 28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so let's talk about how you get around the universe. Oh.

• 28:17Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 28:19Chuck Nice?

  Oh, God.

• 28:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's talk about how you get around the universe and the technologies that empowered it. So, we've got, obviously, the warp drive.

• 28:28Charles Liu?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, so, just to put some reference frame here. If, in Star Trek, they did not have warp drives, and they were constrained to just the speeds that we currently achieve with our fastest rockets. These are the ones that don't even have people on them, right? The fastest rockets, it would take them 100,000 years to get from our solar system to the nearest star system. About 100,000 years, which greatly exceeds the life expectancy of human physiology.

• 28:57Charles Liu?

  Unless you travel at almost the speed of light. In which case, everyone else would die, but you'd be just fine. That's another time.

• 29:04Chuck Nice?

  Stardate 4372. Everyone on Earth is dead.

• 29:14Chuck Nice?

  Picard will never die!

• 29:19Chuck Nice?

  Picard will live forever!

• 29:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How is it that, in the series, he's 50 years old, but had the body of a 25-year-old, speaks with a British accent but had a French name? What's that? What is that?

• 29:33Chuck Nice?

  That is the beauty of Jean-Luc, baby.

• 29:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, today, we would call that cultural appropriation.

• 29:40Charles Liu?

  No.

• 29:41Chuck Nice?

  No!

• 29:41Charles Liu?

  If you do it respectfully, and if everybody is together in peace and harmony like they are in the 24th century, I don't consider it appropriation.

• 29:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 29:49Charles Liu?

  That's a, that's a cultural harmony.

• 29:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you waiting till 24th century? We'll find out.

• 29:53Charles Liu?

  Right, yeah.

• 29:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what is warp, what is going on in a warp drive, in a warped speed?

• 29:58Charles Liu?

  Most of you in there probably know better than we do. But, basically, the dilithium crystals create a reaction through the warp nacelles, which creates a warp bubble, which allows the object within the bubble to travel through what's called subspace, which is a sort of a higher-dimensional construct that our spacetime lives in, allowing us to travel from one point in our space to another point in our space faster than light would be able to travel at that same speed.

• 30:27Chuck Nice?

  But you're not really traveling faster than light. You're within this little warp shell.

• 30:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the authenticity of the science of Star Trek.

• 30:35Charles Liu?

  Right, yes. The, the only problem is, of course, then you have to be able to communicate. In subspace, subspace communications. Presumably if you're sending a radio signal, that's traveling at the speed of light. And if you're traveling faster than the speed of light, you get there before Uhura tells you there are Klingons on the starboard bow. That doesn't work so well. So they had to create this subspace communication thing, too.

• 30:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would get there faster than they would during warp speed.

• 31:00Charles Liu?

  Right, so there's-

• 31:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise you beat the signal, and what good is that?

• 31:03Charles Liu?

  Exactly. So that's not talked about very much, but it's a big-

• 31:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's not. Okay, so how would you contrast Star Trek faster-than-light travel to Star Wars faster-than-

• 31:13Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 31:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, make him do that. Number one.

• 31:17Charles Liu?

  Okay. Star Wars travel-

• 31:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One is number one. The other is number two.

• 31:26Charles Liu?

  Maybe number seven. The situation with Star Wars travel, right? The overall Star Wars light-speed jumps and so forth. Unfortunately, there's a lot of inconsistency in how Star Wars moves from place to place.

• 31:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You think?

• 31:40Charles Liu?

  Star Trek purposely made this warp bubble thing to make things as causally reasonable as possible. For Star Wars, I think they just punted. It's really hard to imagine a way where you can, for example, fire a planet killer, for example, in one solar system, send it all the way to another solar system instantaneously, pass a third solar system as you're watching it go by in the sky, and then destroy five planets in a fourth solar system. Right? It's just, I mean, how are you getting there that fast?

• 32:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People complain when I talk about movies that way.

• 32:15Charles Liu?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm sorry. And, and, look, we are not even gonna talk about The Kessel Run. Okay?

• 32:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't get me started.

• 32:21Charles Liu?

  Not e-

• 32:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hold me back.

• 32:23Charles Liu?

  Not even gonna talk about The Kessel Run.

• 32:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They make a mistake calling time a distance, and then they double down on it in sequels?

• 32:32Charles Liu?

  Well, okay.

• 32:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did The Kessel Run in thirty par- how many par-?

• 32:34Charles Liu?

  Twelve.

• 32:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Twelve parsecs?

• 32:38Charles Liu?

  Oh my god, we really are at Comic Con. It's eleven point something. Under twelve, so it's eleven point something.

• 32:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Under twelve, yeah, it did it in under twelve parsecs. Under twelve parsecs, which is a unit of distance.

• 32:51Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 32:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm angry.

• 32:52Charles Liu?

  That, you know, it's okay.

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, let's skip this. No, I'm not even going there. No, here, I'm old enough, because I'm older than both y'all, to remember seeing Star Wars in first run, Episode One, which became Episode Four.

• 33:06Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 33:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When he jumped to light speed, that was frickin' awesome.

• 33:11Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 33:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one had done that before. And you had the blur of the stars, like, whoa. And then when the first Star Trek movie came out, then they just copied that. Because they didn't do that in the series.

• 33:24Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 33:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 33:25Charles Liu?

  Well, they did better than that. They wound up with the wormhole effect.

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, they thought it up a bit. But just a visual effect, so I give him that.

• 33:31Charles Liu?

  That was a very good one.

• 33:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know the only other scientific fact I'm gonna give Star Wars?

• 33:34Charles Liu?

  What?

• 33:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Luke sees the double sunset. Because we know astrophysically that more than half the stars you see in the night sky contain at least two stars in orbit around each other.

• 33:46Charles Liu?

  Finer star system?

• 33:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some are triple star systems, some are even more. And that was never portrayed in fiction.

• 33:52Charles Liu?

  But you know the problem with Tatooine's double star system? If you take the geometry of the sunset and where those stars were, the temperature that they obviously do, Tatooine and so forth, and you watch the planetary orbit, that orbit would have been unstable. Tatooine was ejected.

• 34:08Chuck Nice?

  You know what, I'm gonna tell you something. It's so funny, when I was watching that scene, I felt the same way.

• 34:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, Charles.

• 34:16Chuck Nice?

  I was like, there's no way that's a sustainable gravity field. No way!

• 34:22Charles Liu?

  It's not.

• 34:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, but Charles, I thought about that. And I thought that they look close enough in the sky so that that planet's orbit would be sufficiently far that it wouldn't go into a chaotic spiral out of control.

• 34:32Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna tell you right now, if George Lucas were here, he would kick you both in the testes.

• 34:39Charles Liu?

  But it was beautiful. And in fact, there was an astrophysical journal article written around 2005 or so called "Two Suns in the Sky", and that was an early attempt to do a census of stars and exoplanets that had double star systems.

• 34:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To have a double sunset.

• 34:55Charles Liu?

  That was actually a very, very good paper, yeah.

• 34:56Chuck Nice?

  Ooh, double star system.

• 35:04Chuck Nice?

  What about the what?

• 35:08Charles Liu?

  Oh, triple stars. Quadruple stars. Yeah, they exist.

• 35:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're plenty. You just have to be orbiting really far away. Otherwise, as you orbit, your gravitational allegiance continually changes.

• 35:19Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Depending on which star you're closest to at any given point. And that can wreak havoc not only on the stability of the climate on the planet you're on, but also on its very orbit. And when an orbit goes unstable, it'll either fall into one of the stars or get ejected from the solar system entirely. And in fact, if you do simulations of the formation of solar systems, you can give a solar system like forty planets, and it'll settle out over time, kicking planets out, eating other planets down to some stable set of planets. We think our solar system, with its eight planets, might have had... don't... don't even... just... don't even get me started here.

• 36:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, all I'm saying is it may be...

• 36:11Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 36:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That there are more planets rogue-moving between stars than there are in orbit around stars themselves, ejected from the formation process of solar systems themselves.

• 36:24Chuck Nice?

  Nomad planets? Planets without a solar system?

• 36:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's that?

• 36:28Chuck Nice?

  Nomad planets.

• 36:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 36:30Chuck Nice?

  Planets without a...

• 36:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Homeless planets.

• 36:31Chuck Nice?

  Homeless pla...

• 36:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's correct.

• 36:33Chuck Nice?

  Hi, I'm Sarah McLoughlin.

• 36:42Chuck Nice?

  You know where the rest of the bit goes. We don't have time for it, but...

• 36:48Charles Liu?

  Our astronomical technology has gotten to the point where...

• 36:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One last, one last thing about those planets? Oh, wait, wait.

• 36:53Charles Liu?

  No, where we can actually see these interlopers coming through the solar system. You may have seen in the news that a second such asteroid-like product, an interstellar object, they're calling them, ISOs, coming through the solar system at a weird angle. And we can watch them go by, sometimes even just for a few days. But they certainly exist. And so I expect to see many, many more of those as the years go by and our technology improves.

• 37:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And another interesting thing, they could actually possibly have life. Because we know on Earth, Earth still has retained heat from its formation. And there are life forms thriving on geochemical energy at the bottom of the ocean, where they've never seen sunlight. So if you have a rogue planet, there could be an entire biosphere beneath the surface that cares not a whit that it isn't orbiting a star.

• 37:41Chuck Nice?

  Yo, that's dope.

• 37:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's dope.

• 37:43Chuck Nice?

  That is dope.

• 37:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles, at our next conference, we have to say, "That's dope." Right after a fancy talk about that. We're gonna end that segment and go into our third segment. Give it up, New York Comic Con!

• 38:08Chuck Nice?

  Time to give a shout out to our Patreon patrons, Heidi Ritzel, Sidney Rising, and Andy Green. Thank you, guys, so much for helping us make our way across the cosmos. And if you would like to support us on Patreon, go to patreon.com and do so.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  This is StarTalk.

• 38:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  New York Comic Con 2019! Yes!

• 38:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, uh...

• 38:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta go there, Charles.

• 38:55Charles Liu?

  No.

• 38:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This whole segment-

• 38:57Charles Liu?

  Anywhere but there.

• 38:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's, uh-

• 38:59Charles Liu?

  No!

• 39:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have to explore whatever science we can find in Star Wars.

• 39:08Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 39:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? So how about, but let's, let's, let's give it a scientific grounding. Let's talk about the planets that they find them on. So there'd be exoplanets we're looking for, as well as aliens that they encounter. Like the famous bar scenes. Exactly. So what's your judgment of how well they did the aliens in that?

• 39:26Charles Liu?

  Aside from the fact that almost all of them have two arms, one head, and two legs, and one torso, they did a pretty good job.

• 39:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're actors that have to get a paycheck.

• 39:36Charles Liu?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really hard to do otherwise, although with digital technology now, uh, what's his face? Jabba the Hutt has a tail, right?

• 39:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 39:45Charles Liu?

  Things like that. So, yeah, they're doing better and better. I think more and more people are recognizing that alien life forms are not limited by the imagination that we human beings have. The, the panoply of life that could exist is far beyond our own imaginations to be able to imagine them.

• 40:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I, I would make a stronger statement than that. If you look at other life forms on Earth.

• 40:06Charles Liu?

  That's true.

• 40:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Most of it does not look humanoid.

• 40:09Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 40:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With a head, two arms, two legs. Earthworms, oak trees, octopoids. Uh, I said that right? You said it right. Octopoids. Octopoids. Uh, most life on Earth.

• 40:20Charles Liu?

  In the Star Trek.

• 40:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Looks less like humans.

• 40:22Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 40:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Than the aliens in the bar scenes of Star Wars.

• 40:25Charles Liu?

  That's right. Well, in Star Trek, uh, The Next Generation, season seven.

• 40:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're talking about Star Wars right now.

• 40:29Charles Liu?

  Oh, sorry. But in the season seven, episode, The Chase.

• 40:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go.

• 40:35Charles Liu?

  In the season seven, episode, The Chase, they sort of tried to explain why maybe every humanoid species looks humanoid, right? There's a species that predated all of us, that seeded.

• 40:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That seeded everything, right.

• 40:48Charles Liu?

  So that could have happened.

• 40:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they're self-aware of how unimaginative their aliens were.

• 40:53Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they backed into an explanation for it.

• 40:55Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In ways that no one would have ever thought to do for Star Wars.

• 41:00Charles Liu?

  But, you know, for Star Trek, the Andorians were very clever. They, well, I'm sorry, we're talking about Star Wars, aren't we?

• 41:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 41:07Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 41:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, so, so, tell me about the exoplanets that they land on. Why is it that no one ever needs a space suit when they land on a planet?

• 41:15Charles Liu?

  I think it's because they're so capable of going at their purported light speed thing to anywhere in the galaxy at any arbitrary speed, that they can just find enough planets that everyone lives perfectly and they don't have to have space suits. They don't need to go to the ones that they need space suits for, right?

• 41:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why would you?

• 41:33Charles Liu?

  Yeah, there's no point, right?

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's like. You can pick and choose.

• 41:36Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 41:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is what you're saying.

• 41:37Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 41:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, here's something that I thought was true and I'd later. Learned wasn't.

• 41:41Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 41:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That you can find a planet that has nitrogen oxygen atmosphere, so you don't need a thing. And you realize, no, it's not that planets have this random combinations of gases, and you find the one that you could survive on. We have oxygen in this atmosphere because we have life.

• 41:58Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 41:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you find a place with oxygen, given our current understanding of things, it probably has other life there as well.

• 42:04Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 42:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 42:05Charles Liu?

  That's a great point. That's actually a really good point.

• 42:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. You're not looking for planets at random in that regard, because oxygen is chemically unstable. So if you have stable oxygen, it means it's constantly being regenerated. The stuff that pulls out, others get added to it.

• 42:18Charles Liu?

  Great point, yeah.

• 42:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So can you muster any other thing about Star Wars?

• 42:25Charles Liu?

  Well, X-wings, they can't fly.

• 42:33Charles Liu?

  They just can't.

• 42:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 42:35Charles Liu?

  Tie fighters, they can't fly either.

• 42:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. Plus, if tie fighters are moving in the vacuum, why do they need wings at all?

• 42:44Charles Liu?

  Well, that's the point.

• 42:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they look. Wings are completely useless in the vacuum of space.

• 42:52Charles Liu?

  But I think that what we're seeing in that environment is that the propulsion systems in Star Wars have somehow tapped into something that's not in our galaxy or universe, maybe a force of some kind that we don't really understand. That might allow things that otherwise could not fly to fly. But what force that could be, I just don't know. It's a... I don't want to force that explanation too much. You don't want to be too forceful about that.

• 43:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So a couple of other things, if you're moving through the vacuum, your ship will not bank a turn.

• 43:33Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 43:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not how you turn in a vacuum.

• 43:35Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 43:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm not even commenting on all the sounds and explosions in space.

• 43:40Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 43:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a...

• 43:41Charles Liu?

  That was good.

• 43:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was good.

• 43:42Charles Liu?

  I'll bet you do Wookiee really well, too.

• 43:50Charles Liu?

  Now do a Wookiee banking through space.

• 43:58Charles Liu?

  Let's give it up for this guy. That was awesome. Awesome.

• 44:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Charles, what I think happened there is with the aliens.

• 44:07Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 44:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that anything that sort of looks a little different from human is, that's not from Earth, it counted as alien for so many decades in people's imaginations in science fiction. Give it a third eyeball, or give it an antennae, or make it green.

• 44:23Charles Liu?

  Or look like a gorilla.

• 44:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, just put some other feature on it where it's intelligent, but clearly not human, and that's to satisfy people's need for what, how different an alien might look.

• 44:36Charles Liu?

  The otherness of what was on the screen that mattered, not so much.

• 44:40Chuck Nice?

  Or sometimes it's the familiarity of what's on screen. I mean, when you look at the abominable snowman that, you know, tied Luke up in the snow cave.

• 44:50Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 44:50Chuck Nice?

  That's just an abominable snowman. That's not like, that's not like, you know, an alien. We all, like, seriously, that, it belonged on the Island of Misfit Toys with a dentist.

• 45:02Charles Liu?

  With Rudolph, yeah.

• 45:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 45:03Charles Liu?

  You know, that's a really good point, you know? The idea that aliens in movies have to be different, but not so different as to be unrelatable to us. That's a great point.

• 45:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See.

• 45:14Charles Liu?

  Right? If on the ice planet Hoth, Luke Skywalker were dangled by some amoeboid-like thing, I guess we wouldn't feel so scared of it, right?

• 45:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. So, I agree with you, but I don't agree with you. So, in other words.

• 45:27Chuck Nice?

  That means you don't agree with me.

• 45:28Charles Liu?

  That means you're neutral.

• 45:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, what it, what it means is, you are right. The alien has to have something you can relate to, otherwise you can't relate to it. Like ET, right? ET even spoke a little English, okay?

• 45:42Charles Liu?

  Right. Ouch.

• 45:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Both of y'all scare me sometimes. Did I tell you that ET is actually a vegetable? Did you know this?

• 45:51Charles Liu?

  Oh my god. Because it can turn plants?

• 45:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, well, so, that accounts for why it has such a good relationship with plants.

• 45:57Charles Liu?

  Because it touches a plant and the plant grows.

• 45:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Now, someone said, "What? What?" Can I tell you how I know this?

• 46:01Charles Liu?

  Please.

• 46:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, not, just, okay. Steven Spielberg visited my office.

• 46:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we talked about ET. And I said, "Look, the thing is, it's got two arms, two legs, fingers, a head, eyes, nose, mouth, it's human." And so actually, he conceived it to be a vegetable.

• 46:22Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is Steven Spielberg communicating directly to me. I don't know if he-

• 46:26Chuck Nice?

  Firsthand knowledge.

• 46:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For what?

• 46:28Chuck Nice?

  Firsthand knowledge, not hearsay.

• 46:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can't get more firsthand than that.

• 46:30Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So-

• 46:32Charles Liu?

  But wait, would that mean it'd be moral to eat ET?

• 46:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, so would a vegetarian eat ET?

• 46:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 46:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the question.

• 46:41Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, he sent you in. Well, I'm gonna tell you this. Many years ago, there was a comedian named Paul Mooney.

• 46:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember him.

• 46:47Chuck Nice?

  And he used to do a joke, he was like, "ET, he better be glad he didn't show up in the ghetto. They would've put him in a pot of greens and ate his ass."

• 47:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've gotta end it there. Join me in, join me in thanking Charles Lu.

• 47:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our resident geek in chief. Chuck Nice.

• 47:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And as always, I bid you to...

• 47:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's try this again. And as always, I bid you to-

• 47:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, all 14 of you, if you knew that. Thank you. If I may, take liberties, it, may I read a letter to you? If I may. Thank you.

• 47:48Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's so funny.

• 47:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, thank you, you remembered. Yeah.

• 47:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm born October 5th.

• 47:57Chuck Nice?

  Happy birthday-

• 47:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, stop!

• 47:59Chuck Nice?

  -to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Happy birthday to you.

• 48:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know why they planned Comic Con on my birthday. I don't know how they did that. So, at the risk of sounding like it's a shameless plug, I have a book coming out on Tuesday.

• 48:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's called Letters From An Astrophysicist. And it contains correspondence I've had over the years with the public on all manner of very personal, private things that I just never talked about on YouTube videos or on shows such as this. And you've never seen me debate a creationist, for example, or a ufologist. I'd never. They're in here, okay? I have conversations with them in this book. Someone asks, "Is there a large hairy ape wandering the Pacific Northwest?" I engage that person in this book. Three letters are from prisoners.

• 49:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One who's serving time and he won't be able to watch his kids grow through their teenage years wrote to me and said, "I just learned that they like science. Is there any advice you can give me that I can share with them to reassure them that I still love them?" I mean, there's some heart-wrenching stuff in here. What I want to do is read to you the epilogue, if I may. It's very personal, but... So, the epilogue. I know, I might. There's some demanding people out there. Read it. Don't do this. Read. Okay. Damn, y'all. Okay, I gotta put on my old people glasses, so hold on.

• 50:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do I have them? Because I'm an old fart.

• 50:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm probably 60% gray, and it's all tinted now, because it's like... Yeah, in a couple of years, I'll come out all gray and I'll be with y'all. I see some gray folks out there. Right there, okay, I'm with you, okay? By the way, Neil, we call that hair color. Hair color, okay. All right. Epilogue. A eulogy of sorts.

• 50:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A letter to Dad.

• 50:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Saturday,

• 50:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  January 21st, 2017. Based on a eulogy I delivered to friends and family here in New York City, at the Holy Trinity Catholic Church.

• 51:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dear Dad, Thank you for a lifetime of wisdom you've bestowed upon me, drawn from moments, circumstances, and incidences in your life. With your permission, I'll share a few of that, which for me, rise above all others.

• 51:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've never forgotten the story of your high school gym teacher, who highlighted your body type as one that would not make a good runner in the track and field unit of class. Your reaction? "Nobody's gonna tell me what I cannot do with my life." You immediately took up running. You also ran in Hitler's Berlin Stadium for the 1946 G.I. Olympics. The post-war world was not ready for a traditional Olympics. So this special event contested soldier athletes

• 51:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  of the various theaters of conflict around the world. And by college, you became world-class in middle-distance races, at one time capturing the fifth fastest time in the world for the 600-yard run. Drawing upon that example for inspiration, I have overcome the most negative societal forces on my life's ambitions. I've never forgotten the story of your best friend Johnny Johnson, also a track star, competing in a meet against the New York Athletic Club. In the day, they of course admitted only WASPs. So athletic blacks and Jews instead competed as teammates for the Pioneer Club,

• 52:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  founded for that purpose. As Johnny came around the last turn in the quarter-mile, he was ahead of the New York Athletic Club runner by several strides when he overheard the fellow's coach audibly yell to his runner, "Catch that nigger."

• 53:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Johnny's reply to himself was simple and direct. "This is one nigger he ain't gonna catch."

• 53:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And lengthened his lead to the finish line. What today might be called "microaggressions", back then were parlayed into "forces of inspiration to excel". From that example, I've used such occasions in my life to excel beyond even the expectations I held for myself.

• 53:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You told of immigrant grandma's work as a seamstress. Grandpa's work as a night watchman for the food service company Horn and Hard Art. A good thing, because he would occasionally bring home leftover food when the money was tight. Your stories of strife were never hate-filled, never bitter. Instead, they were hope-filled and inspirational, conveyed with tentative confidence that the arc of social justice will continue to bend towards righteousness. I carry that vision for society's future into every day of my life. You studied hard in school and took your interest in social justice all the way to your appointment

• 54:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  as Mayor Lindsay's commissioner of New York City's Human Resources Administration. Journalists don't write articles about news that does not happen. But the programs you enabled in the inner-city, empowering the youths during the powder keg years of the late 1960s, ensured that any unrest or disturbance would be mild. Sure enough, New York was calm compared with what went down in Watts, Newark, Detroit, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and especially in Chicago, Washington DC, and Baltimore, for which federal troops were called in to quell the violence. You worked behind the scenes on this

• 55:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  with your only reward, the quiet knowledge that the nation's largest city did not burn during the most turbulent years of the most turbulent decade in American history since the Civil War.

• 55:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Striving to do what is right, without regard to who takes notice, should be a model for us all. Your stories and perspectives have got navigating, people, politics, funding streams, and the legacies of institutions, deeply informed my successful efforts to create from whole cloth a brand-new Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. You taught me that in life, it's not good enough to be right. You also must be effective. For that, I now count the formation of that department as one of the highest achievements of my professional career. So Dad,

• 55:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  this "thank you" is simply public notice of what I have already thanked you for in life, bestowing upon me guiding principles for living my life to the fullest, and along the way, when possible, lessening the suffering of others. I know I will miss you, because I already do. Cyril deGrasse Tyson, rest in peace. October 1927, December 2016.

• 56:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, listen all. We love you. Comic-Con, there's nothing like a Comic-Con community, a Comic-Con audience, where the biggest fight anyone gets into is whether your cosplay was authentic. And, if the world were run by Comic-Con attendees, it would be a peaceful place, and we'd have technology taking us into the future. So... Yes, it will be. Who would have ever thought that the geek set, who was pummeled and bullied in school, would become one of the most strongest economic forces of the land, as well as the people who everyone else comes to to fix their computer?

• 57:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I just want to say, the Comic Con community is a very special community. I don't want any of you to forget that, surely you won't. Thank you for indulging me in this letter to my father. He was 89, so his death was not tragic. But I miss him, as we miss so many loved ones who have passed. But you can tell, if you speak of a loved one, you bring them back to life. And this is part of what it is to carry wisdom, insights, and love from one generation to the next. Comic Con, thank you, have a good night.