StarTalk Live! Water World (Part 1)

Dive into the world of water, on Earth and in the cosmos, when Neil deGrasse Tyson and Eugene Mirman host Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Gyalwang Drukpa, Dr. Tess Russo and Jason Sudeikis at the Beacon Theater.

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.

• 0:21Eugene Mirman?

  Welcome to StarTalk Live, as promised. It is my incredibly great pleasure to bring out your host, our nation's greatest science communicator and director of the Hayden Planetarium and host of Cosmos. Ladies and gentlemen, the incredibly wonderful Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 0:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very warm welcome, Beacon Theater, thank you. Tonight is all about water. Water in the universe, water on Earth, is it clean, is it dirty, who's drinking it, who has it, who doesn't have it, what to do about it. And to start off that conversation, I have a hydrogeologist who will be joining this panel, and she is a professor in the Geosciences Department at Penn State University. Give a warm New York welcome to Dr. Tess Rousseau.

• 1:36Eugene Mirman?

  To join us on this discussion about water, I thought I'd bring a comedian who is on television and in movies and is 60% water, as we all are. Ladies and gentlemen, the incredible, the wonderful, Jason Sudeikis.

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hello. So, I want to lead off just to make sure we're all on the same aquatic page. So, Earth has water, it's a water world. What percentage of our surface is water?

• 2:17Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, I don't know that.

• 2:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, sorry.

• 2:20Eugene Mirman?

  You should ask, oh, that goes.

• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What percentage of our surface is water?

• 2:22Speaker 02

  About seventy percent.

• 2:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Seventy percent? But most of it is water, water all around and not a drop to drink.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, how much is there to drink?

• 2:30Speaker 02

  About three percent of the water on Earth is fresh water. But, most of that water is locked up in glaciers, in ice.

• 2:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we should melt the glaciers and get more.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  We are.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so, three percent is fresh water. What percent is in glaciers, about?

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Two-thirds.

• 2:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two-thirds of that. So, we are one-third of three percent of the total fresh water in the world is available to us to drink.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  More or less. So, the other third, most of that is underground.

• 3:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so you're talking about surface water?

• 3:02Eugene Mirman?

  A lot of fractions. How much water do we have? Yeah, yeah.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 3:05Eugene Mirman?

  One-third of a third of a half, that sounds like a test. The least common multiple.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  It's small. It's point-three percent of two-point-five percent.

• 3:16Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, like what I tip?

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:19Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, I got it.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  So, that's just the lakes and rivers.

• 3:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The lakes and rivers.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  It's very small.

• 3:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, because that comes from rainwater, and rainwater is drinkable most of the time.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Usually, yeah.

• 3:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When is it not drinkable?

• 3:30Speaker 02

  When it's been contaminated.

• 3:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I could have figured that out.

• 3:33Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, come on. Like, when you throw up in it?

• 3:37Speaker 02

  That's one, yeah.

• 3:38Eugene Mirman?

  What's a second example of contamination? Yeah. Other than people constantly throwing up in our water supply.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, water comes out of my faucet. That repository of drinking water, you're saying it's a really tiny, vanishingly small percent of the total clean water in the world?

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's not enough?

• 3:56Speaker 02

  No, it is, it is enough.

• 3:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, but there are people who don't have clean water?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what do we do about that?

• 4:01Eugene Mirman?

  Get rid of those people.

• 4:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no. That's not right. That can't be right. Is it, is it right?

• 4:07Eugene Mirman?

  With a slow-acting poison.

• 4:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 4:10Eugene Mirman?

  Called pollution.

• 4:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me back up a minute. I'll put a little physics in this. Water, as we know, comes in three phases. We have liquid water, with which we are most familiar. As correctly noted, we are two-thirds water. The life is two-thirds liquid water. And liquid water has some fascinating properties. Because normally, when something changes state to become solid, as water becomes ice, normally it shrinks. Cold things get smaller. So the properties of the water molecule are such that when it becomes solid, it freezes in such a ways where there are gaps between the molecules, where there weren't previously gaps when it was liquid.

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And those gaps make frozen water less dense than liquid water, creating what we all take for granted, the fact that ice floats.

• 5:06Eugene Mirman?

  It's one of my favorite things about it.

• 5:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ice floats. So for example, in the wintertime, it gets cold, you have a lake, the top surface gets cold. Cold water is denser than warmer water, we got that. That cold water will drop to the bottom. But the top water will freeze and not drop, thereby insulating the water below, protecting the fishes through the winter months.

• 5:35Eugene Mirman?

  Ain't that some shit?

• 5:39Eugene Mirman?

  You know?

• 5:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. It's a remarkable feature of water.

• 5:43Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  And it's really important for life.

• 5:46Eugene Mirman?

  For ice fishing. Yeah.

• 5:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there would be no such thing as ice fishing if ice sank.

• 5:52Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, or it would be boring. Right. You would swim to the bottom of a lake, drill, and die.

• 5:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So another interesting fact here. If you want to freeze water, it will expand. If you want to compress ice, you can't do it. The only way the ice can take up a smaller volume is if it becomes water again.

• 6:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you can take ice below freezing, squeeze it so hard, you can liquefy it from the act of squeezing it. And in fact, that is what enables ice skating. You are skating not on ice. Your blade is cut in such a way that your weight on top of that thin blade edge creates pressure on the frozen ice that the act of putting that high pressure melts it. So you are actually gliding on a smooth bead of water when you ice skate.

• 6:51Eugene Mirman?

  I can't wait till you're on TV insisting it should be called ice squeezing.

• 6:56Eugene Mirman?

  Really?

• 6:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what else goes on? Water can become gaseous. Clouds are really water vapor. When we think of gash, you want to think of a change of state and that would be steam. So these are three phases of water.

• 7:07Eugene Mirman?

  Why can't you have water plasma?

• 7:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Like slush?

• 7:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 7:12Eugene Mirman?

  It's probably a terrible question.

• 7:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no, yeah.

• 7:16Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 7:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So... Did I just say no, yeah? Did I just say yes? In its steam state, you will know if you've been to mountain tops that you have to adjust cooking times. Because the water boils at a lower temperature at high altitudes than it does at sea level. So it's not as hot. So if you're boiling an egg, you have to boil it longer because the boiling water is not as hot on a mountain as it is at sea level.

• 7:42Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 7:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, here's what's interesting. If you keep ascending in altitude, the boiling point of water continues to drop. There is an atmospheric pressure at which the boiling point is the same as the freezing point. And you can sustain simultaneously ice, steam, and liquid water all in one pool at the same time. It's called the triple point of water. And on Mars, if you put water there, you could sustain steam, water, and ice in the same bucket at the same time. Mars is in many places on its surface at the triple point of water.

• 8:25Eugene Mirman?

  The same water is all three states? Or it's all just hanging out?

• 8:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, so you can put an ice cube in it, it's happy. The water around the ice cube is boiling. Steam rises up, it's happy sitting right above the surface. Everybody is happy.

• 8:39Eugene Mirman?

  Wow. Sounds like a solution for the Middle East. We could just make them all into water.

• 8:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep.

• 8:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there was talk that maybe the water on Earth came from comets. We didn't know for sure. By the way, there's no shortage of water in the universe. So the issue is not, how do you get water? The issue is, of all the ways we could get water, what's the most likely? Now, Tess is a geologist. There's water coming out of volcanoes all the time, right?

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do the geologists think that we made all our oceans from water coming out of volcanoes?

• 9:11Speaker 02

  I don't know, but I'm gonna guess no.

• 9:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you need some of our comets.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  I think that's a great idea.

• 9:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, good. We checked some comets, and we noticed the water in those comets doesn't match the water that's in our oceans, and that got us worried.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  That's some CSI stuff right there.

• 9:29Eugene Mirman?

  This is a problem for actors.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:32Eugene Mirman?

  To solve.

• 9:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not all water is created equal. So it has to do with this, what we call an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium. You can make water out of a kind of hydrogen that's different from the water we're accustomed to drinking, and it's still water. And some of these comets have excess amounts of this. It doesn't match-

• 9:50Eugene Mirman?

  Could you drink that water?

• 9:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could. You would slow down, though.

• 9:54Eugene Mirman?

  Sounds fine. You wouldn't die.

• 9:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The water is more massive, so the water moving through your circulatory system would just be a little-

• 10:01Eugene Mirman?

  Viscous?

• 10:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Slower.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Have they tested that?

• 10:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's just, it's suspected. Well, surely there are some mice who know the answer to that question, is my guess. But then we did find a couple of comets that did match the oceans. But the jury is still out, just so you know. What is the origin of Earth's water? We know at least some came from volcanoes. We're pretty sure there's a class of comet that did not supply the water, and other classes of comets that might. By the way, if you're a comet and you hit the Earth, all your water vaporizes on contact. So you would become steam, and would have to condense back out later. Why is it that if it rains fresh water in the ocean, that the ocean is salty?

• 10:39Speaker 02

  So, the rain comes from evaporated water. When you evaporate water, it leaves the salt behind. It only picks up the fresh water. So then when it rains, you're raining fresh water back down onto this salty reservoir, salty pool.

• 10:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it doesn't do us any good if it rains in the ocean. You want the evaporated ocean, which has been purified of its salt, to then slide over onto land and rain there.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't it possible for a lake to become salty eventually?

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how does that happen?

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Well, so there can be salts from the rocks that the lake is sitting on.

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it just leaches it out of the rocks?

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Sure, it can be the minerals that it's sitting on. And then as you evaporate the fresh water out of that lake, it's like the same thing in the oceans. You're leaving behind the salty water, like the Dead Sea. As it's evaporating and evaporating, it's becoming saltier and saltier.

• 11:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, a lake that's big and old will be likely to be more salty than one that is small and recent?

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 11:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, just checking.

• 11:40Eugene Mirman?

  Is the Dead Sea really a lake, be honest?

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  Like it has rope swings and you can jump into it? Like it's like a proper lake with pontoon boats?

• 11:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What would be cool is if we got hit by comets all the time? And wherever a comet hit...

• 11:54Speaker 02

  What?

• 11:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, sorry. No, no, no. If whatever comet hit, it would just make a puddle of fresh water. You could like market that. So one person would be selling Perrier, and another person would be selling Halley's Comet.

• 12:05Eugene Mirman?

  People would definitely buy water from Halley's Comet.

• 12:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm thinking.

• 12:07Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. I'm one of those people.

• 12:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A recent comet, a few years ago, Comet Hale-Bopp. Yes, that was the name of a comet, named after its two discoverers. Alan Hale, and I forgot Bopp's first name. But it's an odd...

• 12:20Eugene Mirman?

  She.

• 12:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hale-Bopp.

• 12:22Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 12:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To have your comet named that. That actually set a record for the comet that was visible to the naked eye for longer in the sky than any other comet in recorded history. So it was a special comet, we all knew about it. I even saw that comet, it was bright enough to see from Times Square, New York.

• 12:39Eugene Mirman?

  Wow.

• 12:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was kicking comet butt among comet visibility.

• 12:43Eugene Mirman?

  It was very bright.

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we checked that comet and we saw that doesn't have the kind of water that matches our oceans.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  How are you checking these things?

• 12:50Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, be honest.

• 12:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 12:54Eugene Mirman?

  And don't say you're just in the Ferris wheel at the Toys R Us in Times Square and you look up and you're like, "Yeah, not the same."

• 13:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you do is, the comet as it nears the sun, the heat from the sun evaporates the ice, and it grows a tail. Among other things that evaporates, it bites with water, ammonia, this sort of thing. So, as it evaporates out, you can wait for light to pass through it from the sun, and see what those gases do to the sunlight. And if there's water there, it will grab certain light out of the sun's spectrum, and leave gaps in the spectrum that you analyze back here on Earth. And you say, "That's a water gap." That gap can only have been left by water. Here's another gap that can be left by cyanogen. In fact, Halley's Comet in 1910?

• 13:41Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 13:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was the first discovery of cyanogen in the tail of a comet, and we knew that Earth would be passing through the tail of the comet? And at the time, the gas chamber used cyanogen, derived gases. And people said, "We're all gonna die." The whole Earth is gonna die at the same time, because we are gonna plow through the tail of Halley's Comet. So what we had was charlatans selling comet pills to protect you from this gas.

• 14:10Eugene Mirman?

  You say charlatans, but we're all alive.

• 14:18Eugene Mirman?

  That's how science works, right?

• 14:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. So we had the comet pills, and people bought them, and some people got rich. But here's the problem, if you take all the gas of a comet's tail, which is, in some cases, a hundred million miles long, and made it into kind of atmospheric density, because it's very thin and tenuous, but compress it down to just regular air, a hundred million mile-long tail, it would fill a few suitcases.

• 14:44Eugene Mirman?

  I don't know how big your suitcase is. But it sounds like you mean small suitcases.

• 14:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Small suitcases.

• 14:49Eugene Mirman?

  That humans would use.

• 14:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So no, we clearly survived. But you can measure water, getting back to your question, Jason.

• 14:54Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You see the water. Now, if the water is a little heavier, it will leave features that are shifted slightly from regular water.

• 15:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you say, "There's the odd water."

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Gotcha.

• 15:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and it's deuterium, it's called heavy water.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So could you take us into the water cycle? What is that, and how does it work?

• 15:14Speaker 02

  Energy from the sun evaporates water off the ocean. It rises, forms clouds, sometimes moves onto land. Then precipitation rains out of those clouds. And that water can contribute to rivers and streams, and becomes that tiny fraction of surface water that we know and see. Or it can infiltrate into the ground, seeping down into the dirt and becoming aquifer water, groundwater.

• 15:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so when we drink water-

• 15:41Speaker 02

  And then it goes back to the ocean.

• 15:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We draw it from aquifers and from rivers?

• 15:44Speaker 02

  Typically, yeah.

• 15:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when we have farms, we irrigate, maybe?

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and why can't we use salt? Plants don't like salt water, I guess.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Not too salty. So there's a lot of research now on can we use treated wastewater? Can we use brackish water to irrigate? Like, what are the other options?

• 15:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brackish is salty.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Brackish is kinda salty.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  It's mixed.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  It's not as salty as the ocean, but it's not freshwater.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  That's why it's brack-ish.

• 16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's where freshwater and saltwater meet, to throw a party. So water is good for life?

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Necessary.

• 16:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me, yes, it's necessary for life. But in fact, we might word that sentence in reverse. It's not that water is good for life, it's that life is good for water.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, there you go.

• 16:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's not like we had life and said, "Gee, how can we improve it? Let's get some liquid water in us." No, we rose up, evolved, knowing that there's water available to move nutrients through our body, to help our circulatory system, to move through the foods that we eat. A water world is ripe for life as we know it, because life requires liquid water. Now, you know we got other places with water in the solar system? Mars, no water on the surface? We think there's water hidden below, in aquifers.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we got people wanna go check for microbial life there.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  Europa?

• 17:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Europa, I love me some Europa. Europa.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Europa Cafe?

• 17:10Speaker 03

  You gotta check out Pret. If you like Europa, you'll love Pret.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  What is Europa?

• 17:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Jupiter, of its many moons, one of them is Europa. It is well outside of the Goldilocks zone of our planetary system, our solar system. The Goldilocks zone is where water left to its own devices would remain in a liquid state. Not too hot. Not too close to the home star. It would evaporate. Not too far away, it would freeze. So Europa and Jupiter are outside of the Goldilocks zone. But Jupiter's gravity pulses the physical body of that moon in such a way it's pumping energy into it, melting that ice. And there's an upper layer of ice, but beneath ice floats. Beneath it is an ocean of liquid water that's been liquid for billions of years.

• 18:00Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 18:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to go ice fishing on Europa.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I always, I joke about this, but I'm mostly serious. If you find life on Europa, you'd have to call it European, right? I mean, isn't that, right?

• 18:12Eugene Mirman?

  And we would have to destroy what we now call Europe.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Or not.

• 18:18Eugene Mirman?

  I don't see another option. But flooding regular Europe to not have one word mean two things.

• 18:24Speaker 03

  It would be confusing.

• 18:25Eugene Mirman?

  It would be.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  I'm from Kansas City, and there's a Kansas City, Kansas, Kansas City, Missouri. It's a nightmare.

• 18:29Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 18:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Tess, let me ask you. So we hear that water is a universal solvent. Now, that sounds dangerous, that we just drink solvent. Right? So what's going, what does that mean?

• 18:41Speaker 02

  So the solvent is the word that describes the liquid or the matrix that something can dissolve into. So when you stir salt or sugar into water, the salt and the sugar is the solute, and the water is the solvent. And many things dissolve in water because it has this polar structure because of hydrogen bonding. Are we going to talk about hydrogen bonding?

• 19:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bonding, we can talk bonding. Have a hydrogen bond with someone, that's a good bond.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  Do it.

• 19:11Eugene Mirman?

  We don't mind.

• 19:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're saying hydrogen has the capacity to bond in ways that will grab more than one kind of thing into it.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that you can dissolve more things in water than in most other liquids.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which makes it a good cleansing thing.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I got something here and I don't want it there. I want to put it in the water, send water across it. It jumps into the water and you wash it away. Okay, so surely there are other solvents, though. Like, how about ammonia? I clean my windows with ammonia. So why isn't life based on ammonia?

• 19:45Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't study life.

• 19:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't study, oh, you study rocks.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  I study rocks.

• 19:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry. Okay.

• 19:51Eugene Mirman?

  But I know the answer, actually. That it would sting, it tastes weird, and it would sting.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So ammonia dissolves, so does turpentine. Can you imagine life based on turpentine?

• 20:04Eugene Mirman?

  I can.

• 20:07Eugene Mirman?

  All done.

• 20:09Eugene Mirman?

  It's eight feet tall.

• 20:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How about in the lab, in the bio lab, they have organs stored in formaldehyde.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? These are other sort of liquids that exist in nature, but we're based on water.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Maybe it has something to do with redox conditions?

• 20:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Redox conditions.

• 20:22Eugene Mirman?

  Redox conditions. Well, redox condition as you guys know, and I know. Scientific thing that I, that you guys.

• 20:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 20:31Eugene Mirman?

  It's a kind of dog. I don't really know what it is.

• 20:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's where, in the presence of some thing, you actually remove oxygen atoms from what's there.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 20:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The opposite is what happens when iron rusts, right? You're adding oxygen to it. But what I'd say, though, is water is one of the most common three-atom molecules in the universe. And because hydrogen is common, oxygen is common. And so when we say we're going to search for life as we know it, such as what NASA does, NASA follows the water, you might say, "That's kind of limiting. Maybe there's life based on, you know, methane or something else." But water is abundant everywhere in the universe.

• 21:11Eugene Mirman?

  What are the other two most common?

• 21:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The CO2 is very common. That's a three-atom.

• 21:16Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm. Good.

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Carbon and oxygen, very common in the universe.

• 21:19Eugene Mirman?

  Okay, just curious.

• 21:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except CO2 is a byproduct of our metabolism.

• 21:25Eugene Mirman?

  Of oxygen, yeah.

• 21:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of our civilization.

• 21:28Eugene Mirman?

  Ooh.

• 21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More on CO2 being a byproduct of our civilization disrupting the water cycle when we return in our second segment of StarTalk Live! Beacon Theater! Give it up!

• 22:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the subject of water, it's not only ever about science. It is the interplay of what we know as scientists regarding water. And then the efforts of people who are deeply committed to making water available to us all. And we have as a special guest this evening, a person who has committed his life, basically, to humanitarian causes. Including, in this long list of humanitarian causes, is what to do about water. Rivers that have been polluted, we need to clean them. Lakes that are dead, we need to fix them. People who don't have fresh water to drink, we need to supply them. Give a warm Beacon Theater, New York City, welcome to Robert Kennedy Jr.

• 22:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our next guest is another person deeply committed to the human condition around the world. We all take access to clean water and fresh air for granted. So much of the world cannot. And in this effort, we have brought with us to this stage His Holiness the Gyawang Juppa Lama. His Holiness.

• 23:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this stage is now sanctified, I think, by your presence here. Thank you for joining us, both of you. It's almost a lost art. I grew up in an era where humanitarian causes led all political discussion, all UN conversations. And it's refreshing to see that such an effort is still alive, with whatever struggles it may require in modern times. And I just want to applaud what is an extraordinary legacy that you're creating and the continuation of what your entire family lineage has been all about. So I just want to give a thank you.

• 24:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Bobby, can I call you Bobby?

• 24:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, good, good, thank you. Can you just tell me what your Water Keepers Alliance is? It sounds audacious.

• 24:24Speaker 04

  The first Water Keeper was started by a kind of a blue collar coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen who mobilized on the Hudson River back in the early 60s. They saw that pollution was destroying their livelihood. They had been to the government agencies, they were supposed to protect us from pollution, and they came to the conclusion that government was in cahoots with the polluters. They launched a boat on the river, they began suing polluters and collecting bounties. They discovered an old law, an ancient navigational statute called the 1888 Rivers and Harbors Act. 1888? It was a navigational statute that was written when people in New York were constructing the first large buildings, and they were taking the cellar dirt and dumping it into the water.

• 25:09Speaker 04

  They were also dumping dead horses and other things into the water that impeded navigation.

• 25:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. So, the urge to protect the river wasn't to keep it clean, just to keep it unobstructed by dead horses?

• 25:22Speaker 04

  Well, that's right.

• 25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just so I understand. When were they dumping horses in the 60s? No, no, no.

• 25:29Speaker 04

  That was the 1860s, but this was 1888.

• 25:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's fine.

• 25:34Speaker 04

  And actually, the reason that we ultimately saved the Adirondack Mountains was not because people cared that much about the mountains, but they found out when they cut down the forest that the sediment was running off the ground. And His Holiness now has 150 river keepers in Nepal and northern India, but He planted more trees than any other person in the world. And it was because...

• 26:04Speaker 04

  The reason the state legislature here in New York preserved the Adirondacks is because they found when they cut the trees, the sediment was washing off of the Adirondacks, landing in the Hudson River, and impeding navigation. So it was the Carnegie's, and it was the Rockefeller's, and it was the Whitney's, and the powerful families, the Livingston's, that controlled the navigation on the Hudson. They were able to influence the New York State Legislature to finally protect the river.

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So not all protect nature causes have noble origins?

• 26:33Speaker 04

  Well, usually our successes are driven by alliances with powerful economic interests. And today, the battle, for example, to transition to clean energy economy, it's a battle against the incumbents, coal, oil, the carbon cronies, and big nuke. But it's abetted by companies that are like General Electric, Siemens, Vestas, very, very big, powerful economic entities, that see that they have an opportunity to make money. And NRG, which is the biggest energy producer in our country, which see that we can actually produce electrons cheaper from wind and solar and renewables, and that if we have

• 27:14Speaker 04

  a level marketplace, that they can actually make a lot of money in that market displacing the incumbent. So we have them on our side, and that's one of the reasons that we're winning incrementally, bit by bit, this battle to transition to clean energy.

• 27:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that a change in tactics? Because there was a day when all corporations were enemies, and flower children were the future. But you've gotten kind of practical over the years, then. If you're saying, make an alliance with powerful people and get them to understand the cause, and then stuff can happen like that.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  You know, I think one of the things that environmentalists and people in the business community have come to realize, that good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy. If you talk to the big polluters, the Koch brothers, and...

• 28:01Speaker 04

  To end their indentured servants in our political process.

• 28:10Speaker 04

  They'll tell you that we have to choose between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental protection on the other, and that's a false choice. These are people who want to say that a good economy is to create a world where we can treat the planet as if it were business and liquidation and convert our natural resources to cash, make a few people billionaires by impoverishing the rest of us. And that's not good economy for anybody.

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to stick to water because there's a whole world we could get into here. But I noticed you're a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, and it says that you're the chief prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper. So if anybody messes with the Hudson, you're all over them.

• 28:55Speaker 04

  Right. We are always on the side of water against the guys who are trying to pollute it. You know, there's only one of the five boroughs of New York that are connected to the mainland of the United States. The rest of them...

• 29:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Bronx?

• 29:11Speaker 04

  The rest of them are islands in the Hudson River, and we are a maritime city. We're here because this was the greatest port in the world. And for many years, we couldn't use the water because it was so polluted.

• 29:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I grew up in that time. Tires would float up, and I knew I was in a different world as in the late 70s, early 80s, where I saw people fishing in the Hudson and keeping the fish that they fished out of it. I thought that was weird, and I didn't know you had been at it that whole time. Now, I'm intrigued by this tree cutting in the Adirondacks and that then affecting the fresh water. Because, His Holiness, your tree planting campaign, which my records show, made it into the Guinness Book of World Records. I didn't even know that was a record that could be made. So could you tell me what that record was? The tree planting record?

• 30:03Speaker 05

  It was, I think, the most tree was planted. I mean, the 100,000-something over tree was planted in a particular sort of short period. And by 10,000 people, something like that. So it was kind of amazing achievement for everybody. But of course, for me, it was very exciting to see because we were planting this tree in a desert, actually. And it was then more exciting is the next year. It was growing very nicely. Then it become like a bush and a forest.

• 30:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You created a forest?

• 30:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, just a forest.

• 30:41Eugene Mirman?

  Did you ask anybody?

• 30:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that allowed? Can you just create a forest?

• 30:46Eugene Mirman?

  Can we do it again? Yeah. Here? 100,001?

• 30:50Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 30:51Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. Can we pick like a restaurant? And just plant 100,000 trees?

• 30:56Speaker 04

  His Holiness has 30 million followers.

• 31:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On Twitter?

• 31:02Speaker 04

  A lot of them are bots. Person.

• 31:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Person. People, yes.

• 31:08Speaker 04

  He comes from the section of the Himalayas, northern India and Nepal. It's the headwaters for most of the fresh water in Asia. And the rivers, the Yangtze and the Ganges that flow out of his homeland.

• 31:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if it's most of the fresh water for Asia?

• 31:24Speaker 04

  Right.

• 31:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Asia is a fourth the population?

• 31:27Speaker 04

  By some estimates, his water goes to 4 billion, half the people in the world. I've heard His Holiness speak very movingly of the moral obligation that he has and that his followers have to make sure that that water makes it to those agricultural areas and makes it to the sea and feeds the fisheries.

• 31:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to clarify, this water would be melted glacial water from the Himalayas, right?

• 31:51Speaker 02

  So some of it's melted glacier water and some of it's monsoon water. So just straight precipitation that runs off into the rivers and then flows downstream.

• 32:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and so these trees are not only just a good thing, because more trees are better than fewer trees, but did that also protect the soil erosion? Is that a secondary goal here?

• 32:11Speaker 05

  Yes, yes. Everything is circulating, you know? So the tree gives oxygen and oxygen somehow brings the, you know better than I do, actually.

• 32:22Speaker 05

  But of course, then it gives water and all these things. So of course, the tree is very badly needed for the human being and for everybody to survive because of the oxygen. Oxygen is very much needed for us to sort of have a life.

• 32:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, did you know that some other team of people beat your Guinness record? Did you know this?

• 32:43Speaker 05

  I didn't know.

• 32:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, so now you gotta do it again.

• 32:48Speaker 05

  Never-ending. That's good. So then I'll be beating them next.

• 32:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, see, I mean, it's one of those things.

• 32:57Speaker 05

  And then somebody will beat me also.

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly, it's not like the hot dog eating winner. You know, there are a lot of weird things in the Guinness Book. They get much less noble than what you're describing.

• 33:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I also noticed that in many of the areas where this fresh water supplies, it's primarily women who retrieve the water from where it comes, is that correct? And so that creates a gender separation of tasks? So you're trying to combat that as well, is that correct?

• 33:30Speaker 05

  No, women knows much better about the water. And the men knows maybe better about the trees and a little bit like a more sort of other things. So the water, speaking about the water, the women knows much better. Why? Because the women always collect the water from the whales and then, you know, use. So women knows, women has a much more passion about the water and with the water.

• 33:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Water is very heavy. These are strong women, right?

• 33:57Speaker 05

  Yes, right, right.

• 33:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, now is it true that you taught Kung-Fu to nuns?

• 34:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That they're Kung-Fu nuns?

• 34:10Eugene Mirman?

  How do I become a Kung-Fu nun?

• 34:15Eugene Mirman?

  Isn't that where we get nunchucks? Yeah.

• 34:27Eugene Mirman?

  Let me throw this out there, willing to carry water.

• 34:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what was the motivation there? To teach martial arts?

• 34:34Eugene Mirman?

  To create an army of super nuns.

• 34:39Speaker 05

  The one of the main sort of target that I was doing, of course, gender equality. So, of course, gender equality is the more...

• 34:49Speaker 05

  Thank you, thank you.

• 34:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Apparently, I only heard women applaud that. Let's try that again. Say, "Gender equality."

• 35:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good.

• 35:04Speaker 05

  So, I am very proud of myself to be able to do that, actually. And also to hear your clapping, yes.

• 35:14Speaker 05

  So, this is the reason the Kung Fu came into this. And Kung Fu can give the confident and the defense. Not to harm others, of course. That is not my main aim, but to defend them.

• 35:26Eugene Mirman?

  But that's just the benefit of what you teach.

• 35:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, right.

• 35:30Eugene Mirman?

  Is that you could harm others, but that's not the main...

• 35:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, you could.

• 35:35Eugene Mirman?

  Cool, still into it, still wanna be a Kung Fu nun?

• 35:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, this is an extraordinary statement. Cultural statement that you have made. So, did you find resistance?

• 35:47Speaker 05

  Cultural revolution.

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Revolution, I understated it, yes. So, did you find resistance from men who didn't want to get their butt kicked by the women? Excuse me, I don't do it in your holiness.

• 36:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The progress of women in the world has not come easily because you have men who are resistant to giving up the power they have. One of which is the power of might over them. And so, was there resistance here?

• 36:16Speaker 05

  I could feel some resistance and some discomfort. But of course, now, they have to get used to it. Because, you know... Because I will not, I will not give it up. Anyway, I'll be, keep on doing it. And I will keep on dedicating my life for gender equality, you know? There is no...

• 36:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, the water keepers, they named you the guardian of the Himalayas. Could you explain that?

• 36:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, sure, Bobby.

• 36:52Speaker 04

  We have water keepers now all over the world. And we license each new keeper. They have to live on the waterway and they have to be willing to defend it.

• 37:00Eugene Mirman?

  Could I be the water keeper of Park Slope?

• 37:04Speaker 04

  I'm not far from the coannis.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  You already have one. There you go.

• 37:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I tried the coannis.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  And His Holiness had demonstrated a very, very strong devotion. You know, there's some other religions that have taken this on and some great religious leaders. In fact, there's a convocation on the Black Sea every year where Patriarch Bartholomew of the Greek Orthodox Church, who said this is the moral issue that faces our generation. But His Holiness, who has led these pilgrimages all across India, cleaning up the environment where people pick up trash, plant trees, and He's really made it the theme of His lifetime. And the water was an important part of that, and because the water is so important to all of Asia, He's really, even by people who are not among His direct followers, He is

• 37:51Speaker 04

  regarded as one of the great spiritual leaders in the world, and He has consistently made water the centerpiece of His moral cosmology.

• 38:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in speaking with His Holiness before we came on here, I asked at what elevation he lives in the Himalayas, and the elevation is?

• 38:10Speaker 04

  5,000 meter.

• 38:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, 5,000, this is America, so I have to translate. 19 Denvers. Is that even close? 5,000, you know, 15,000 feet or so, that's very high, right? And... Is it a walk-up? Walk-up? Probably not, right? Yeah, yeah. You have the literal and figurative high ground in these arguments, and that's a good place to be, because no one really has any other place to make an argument against what you're saying. And you are too far away for them to reach.

• 38:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go get him! Wait, where does he live?

• 39:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So here's a fact that we dug up for this program. United States residents, on average, use 150 gallons of water per day for our domestic and municipal purposes. 150 gallons a day, that's highest in the world. Compare that with the UK, which uses 30 gallons per day. And then I said, "How do you get that?" And then I was reminded that in America, we bathe more often than in many other countries. That's not the explanation. That's not the explanation.

• 39:56Eugene Mirman?

  We don't bathe five times a day.

• 39:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what it tells me is that different countries have different needs or wants, and if there's ever a redistribution of access to water, that could cause some conflict. So, Your Holiness, could you comment on ways, either historically or from what you have seen today, where there has been unrest regionally because of access to water?

• 40:27Speaker 05

  Normally, I always say that the people has to be educated more. People has to be more careful about preserving the water. Also, polluting water, less. I think the people can do a lot of contribution if they really educated and if they were told nicely in the school, and also the parents needs to be teaching them nicely and precisely and, you know, like fully, so that every youngsters and next generations will be very cautious about and be happy to sort of serve the whole world. Not only the whole world, but the generations and generations, they will be able to serve and they will be able to do a good thing.

• 41:12Speaker 05

  Otherwise, they'll mess up, they'll mess up whole world.

• 41:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Now, in terms of the use of the fresh water, in our first segment, we were discussing, where is the fresh water of the world? And... Okay, we might, in America, use 150 gallons, but that's not the bulk of the water that gets used. It's, uh, what's the number here? 70% is used by agriculture, just to grow the food that we eat. Is that the same fraction of the number all around the world?

• 41:43Speaker 02

  No.

• 41:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Tess, we use a lot, we irrigate, but other parts of the world, what fraction of fresh water do they use for agriculture?

• 41:51Speaker 02

  So, it's actually more in developing countries compared to developed countries. The US uses less than 70%.

• 41:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Less than 70%.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. We're using 60-ish, but if you go to India or parts of China, they're using over 90.

• 42:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Over 90% of all of their available fresh water for agriculture?

• 42:10Speaker 02

  No. 90% of the total water used goes to agriculture.

• 42:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And why do they use more water than we do? Do they have plumper melons?

• 42:18Speaker 02

  No, it's just that they're using less for industry. So, the US has developed its industry and we use a lot of water.

• 42:27Eugene Mirman?

  We wash a lot of cars. They mostly make apples.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  That's basically it.

• 42:32Eugene Mirman?

  And it takes less for apples. Apple's not the best example, but car's a great example.

• 42:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is there are fewer other things they use their fresh water for relative to their agriculture compared with us?

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Right, because they're just trying to get food security. That's the first priority.

• 42:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they got 1.3 billion people.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  Right. They need to eat.

• 42:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So Bobby, how do you distribute your energies versus where people use their fresh water? Are you primarily concerned about drinking water or agriculture as well? How does that balance out in your portfolio? By the way, just so you see it, you've got a book here, The River Keepers, written with James Cronin. Activists Fight to Reclaim the Environment as a Basic Human Right. So you're just at this at all angles, and so how do you budget your effort?

• 43:18Speaker 04

  Well, let me just answer the question that you asked a little bit earlier about the relationship between global and civil conflict and water shortages. Most geopolitical analysts agree, for example, that the conflict now, the civil war in Syria, was triggered by a massive water shortage that was associated with global warming between 2006, 2011. They had the biggest drought in the northeastern part of Syria in history. Almost 100% of farmers were affected. Three and a half million farmers lost 100% of their production. A million of those farmers migrated to the cities. And that's what triggered the civil strife. But also, throughout the Arab Spring in Tunisia and in Egypt,

• 44:03Speaker 04

  the bread prices were driven high, which is what triggered the revolutions in those countries. There's a lot of causes to those revolutions.

• 44:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the way, not all those causes. I made it into the news cycle.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  No, and the water shortage now is making it in as one of the primary triggers for those revolutions. But when you hear people on Capitol Hill saying, "Where's global warming? What does it affect us?" There are millions of environmental refugees every year throughout the world who are driven off of their land and who are creating civil strife and political strife and security problems that affect the United States because of water shortages. Now, in answer to your other question, the philosophy that kind of unites all the keepers is really an ancient philosophy, which is the water is part of the commons. Commons are those things, those assets that cannot be reduced to private property ownership. But by their nature are the assets of the whole community.

• 44:58Speaker 04

  The air, the water, the wildlife, the fisheries, the public lands, the wandering animals, and of course, waters and shorelines. And since ancient times, the Code of Justinian, the Magna Carta, and every state constitution, including here in New York, has a provision in it called the Public Trust Doctrine that comes to us from those ancient constitutions. And that doctrine says that water belongs to everybody. It doesn't belong to Congress, the Senate, big corporations. It belongs to all of us.

• 45:33Speaker 04

  Everybody has a right to use it. Nobody has a right to use it in a way that will diminish or injure its use and enjoyment by others. So everybody can use their share. Nobody can take more than their share. But every child in New York City, whether they're black or white, rich or poor, young or old, has a right to go down to the 79th Street Boat Basin or to go down to the East River on the FTR Drive, throw in a plug, bring out a striped bass, bring it home and feed it to their family with the security they're not going to poison somebody and with the security that the fish are going to be there.

• 46:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you telling me there's striped bass in the East River?

• 46:07Speaker 04

  There are a lot of striped bass in the East River, and there are a lot of mackerel, and there's shad, and sturgeon, and herring. There's shad in the East River that weigh 1,100 pounds, and have 200 pounds of caviar in.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  Can I walk into a bodega and grab a smart water and go, "Don't even try it, dude, this is mine."

• 46:26Speaker 03

  This is my smart water, probably not, right?

• 46:28Speaker 04

  You can't just steal water from the bodega. But you can steal it from the river. You could take some from the river, but I wouldn't advise it.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  Don't do it.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  I'd drink.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 46:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Bobby, I think what you described in some cases is a little oversimplified, because we have state boundaries, and there are some aquifers, if I understand correctly, that cross county boundaries and state boundaries, and you have multiple municipalities now competing, in a sense, for one repository of water. The water doesn't know the political boundaries, but people do, and so that would surely create strife if somebody's draining water faster than somebody else's.

• 47:07Speaker 04

  Well, here's the problem, the law is the same in the East. If there's water that flows from New Jersey to here, there are compacts between the states about how to allocate that according to the public trust doctrine. The problem is, the big place where you see water problems, we got a lot of water in the East, we don't have water shortages here. There's water shortages in the western states, and the western states' water was allocated the way that they allocate the water in Syria, where the governments wanted to get white men to move out into the western states, to settle the states, to take it away from the Mexicans and the Indians, and so what they did is they said, "If you come out here, you can own the water, and as much as you can use, you own it."

• 47:52Speaker 04

  And so there are very, very irrational laws out west, and incentivize people to use as much water as they can to grow rice in the desert, to grow alfalfa in the desert, and to grow cities like Las Vegas and Scottsdale, you know, and now, as a result of that, of course, the Colorado River dries up in the desert and never makes it to the sea.

• 48:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Another point to be made is, it's one thing to pollute water and not make it available, it's another thing for climate change to redefine what regions have water and what don't, or what now gets too much water, or what now gets too little, because we developed our civilizations based on some expectations of what kind of water supply would be available. So, let us bring this segment, the second of three segments, to a close. We're live at the Beacon Theater!

• 48:48Eugene Mirman?

  The