George Takei and the Legacy of Star Trek

Neil deGrasse Tyson delves into the legacy of Star Trek with George Takei, who played Lt. Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise. In studio, co-host Leighann Lord and astrophysicist Charles Liu discuss how the series inspired the future.

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.

• 0:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist, right here at this museum where I also serve as director of the Hayden Planetarium. And we're here in the hall of the universe of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. And I'm gonna first introduce my co-host, LeAnn Lort, professional comedian.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Hey!

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome!

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Thank you!

• 0:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No stranger to StarTalk?

• 0:46Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, well today I want to talk a little bit about Star Trek and its legacy.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Yes!

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There she goes, yeah.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Sorry!

• 0:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I knew in advance you had some Trekkie flowing through you.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Just a little bit. Just a little bit.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You love you some Star Trek.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  I do, there's a couple of restraining orders out there.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you know who we're featuring my interview? George Takei.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  I know!

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah?

• 1:09Speaker 01

  I've seen it, I've seen it.

• 1:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I know some Star Trek stuff and, and, and not, not like what you do.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Oh no!

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But also, sometimes I gotta reach for my, my homie on this, okay? I've got a friend and a colleague.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who knows everything about everything that's not otherwise astrophysics, but he's also an astrophysicist.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's my go-to man for all these kinds of occasions. Give me some love for Professor Charles Lu, Charles Lu! There he goes!

• 1:35Charles Liu?

  Hi!

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's a professor of astronomy and physics at College of Staten Island, the CUNY system.

• 1:43Charles Liu?

  Yes, Neil, you have only the slightest inkling of how happy I am to be here today. George Takei is the man.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's the man.

• 1:54Charles Liu?

  He is the man.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The man.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, he came in my office. He comes in, you can't not talk, you try not to talk about Star Trek.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  You do?

• 2:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you have to talk about Star Trek.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He comes through town, you got him.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Yes! He understands that.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He understands that, but I didn't want to feel like I, I was just somebody else that just, just getting on his... I, I wanted to be different to him, but I couldn't.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  I don't even understand those words!

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want Star Trek! Dude!

• 2:22Speaker 01

  You can be different after you do Star Trek.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we get a little bit of Star Trek prehistory in this clip.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  It was a very strange interview. Because when you're going up for what could be a running part in the series, you have a whole group, a team of people interviewing you. Network people, advertising people, the studio-

• 2:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you're not a one-off character.

• 2:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're marrying you for this.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's the marriage-

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The tribunal.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  And I was prepared for that. When I walked into Gene Roddenberry's office, first of all, he mispronounced my surname. He called me Takei, but I corrected that. I said, "My name is pronounced Takei, but I don't object to Kai, because that's a Japanese word that means expensive." And he said, "Oh, my goodness.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  You're definitely Takei." And I told him, "Takei doesn't mean chief either."

• 3:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  Creator of Star Trek. Producer, writer, visionary.

• 3:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All-around creative guy.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  Creative guy, and with a vision of what we could be.

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think they sent his ashes to the moon or something?

• 3:42Speaker 03

  No, not to the moon, to orbit.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To orbit, so he's made it into space.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  He's still out there.

• 3:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's still out.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Jimmy Dune had his ashes sent out there, too.

• 3:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  But I guess he wasn't quite in orbit, because he fell back down to New Mexico.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Gene Roddenberry really deserves and should be up there. Because Star Trek was more than just- And he felt the television, you know, certainly it needs to be entertained, but it also needs to inform and inspire.

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you know this at the time? At the time, are you just doing television? Or are you saying to yourself, "This is some good shit going down here. This is, whoa." Because the show did get canceled.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  Right, right, but I knew that it was-

• 4:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Kardashians went longer than the original Star Trek.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, but on Star Trek, we had the Kardashians.

• 4:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. Forgot about that.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  We talked about books we had read, movies that we liked, current events, issues, you know. We had a wonderful, engaging conversation. He described the show, and it was thrilling. That vision that he had, Starship Enterprise, a metaphor for Starship Earth, and the strength of this starship lay in its diversity, coming together and working in concert.

• 5:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nobody was thinking that back then.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  Nobody was thinking. I mean, you know, minorities weren't...

• 5:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In anything.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  No, no. I mean, to have Nichelle as a chief communications officer, a woman, and a black woman at that, and Asian man, well, you know, there are Asian chauffeurs. That's, but nevertheless, a crack technician and a member of the leadership team, half-alien, pointeared, you know, bi-species, not bi-racial. That kind of vision of the future.

• 5:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There he is. He gets his gig after the interview.

• 5:55Charles Liu?

  You know, he actually was the helmsman of the Enterprise, so in a sense, he was the chauffeur.

• 6:03Charles Liu?

  I'm just saying.

• 6:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's his actual title. That was his former title.

• 6:06Charles Liu?

  Well, the bottom line is that even though there was an expansion of wisdom and understanding and diversity in that show, there were still some things that could not yet be broken at that point. Right around the same time the Star Trek was running, you know, one of its great competitors on TV, The Green Hornet.

• 6:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember The Green Hornet.

• 6:23Charles Liu?

  And guess who was the chauffeur?

• 6:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was...

• 6:26Charles Liu?

  Bruce Lee.

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bruce Lee.

• 6:28Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 6:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Asian chauffeur, but he could still kick your ass.

• 6:31Charles Liu?

  Oh, hey, that's one of the few things that Asians were allowed to do on TV back then. Right? Still? No, now we can solve astrophysics problems.

• 6:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What intrigues me is that the opening, the now-famous opening lines. Let me read them to you. Sorry, I don't have been committed to memory. "Space." With pantomime by Charles Luke. "Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission, to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

• 7:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So here's the thing. This is a five-year mission. The show only lasted three years.

• 7:16Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 7:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's up with that?

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Listen, if you don't ask, you don't get. They had to put it out there.

• 7:21Charles Liu?

  Roddenberry was trying for five years, I'm sure.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Hundred episodes? Who doesn't want that?

• 7:25Charles Liu?

  But you know what happened? He was beaten out by Batman, The Green Hornet, other shows that were more popular at the time, but didn't have the kind of lasting legacy that some far-looking, far-reaching show, like a science fiction show, would have.

• 7:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So one of the features of it, which you alluded to, but let's like get in there, was in spite of George Takei being the chauffeur.

• 7:49Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 7:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you had to be chauffeur, let it be of the Starship Enterprise.

• 7:53Charles Liu?

  Darn tootin'.

• 7:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying. There is this diversity of crew, a little bit from everywhere, essentially everywhere, or as everywhere as could possibly be represented in 1960s television. So this is an extraordinary construct, an extraordinary step to take.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  You know what's funny? You say it's extraordinary, but for me, this was normal.

• 8:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Which I guess means it did its job. Like, that's what TV's supposed to look like to me.

• 8:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that was very not what it was looking like.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Oh, I know.

• 8:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the day.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and I got that in retrospect.

• 8:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:25Charles Liu?

  And one thing we should all remember also was that Gene Roddenberry used a large number of excellent science fiction writers to write his scripts. Many of his plots were based on classic short stories in science fiction as well. So in a sense, he was looking forward, as science fiction often does, to a future which could either be much worse or much better than the present time.

• 8:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And part of this combination of ethnicities and skin colors, that's part of a philosophy that he put forth, that permeates through the scripts, through the casting, through everything. Even to the point where Spock himself is a half-alien, half-human.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Half-vulcan.

• 9:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is Vulcan not alien?

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you said it like it was a bad thing.

• 9:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Spock has a pin that he wears that is this combination of geometric forms and different material substances.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Different textures, yes.

• 9:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Different textures, which is the iconic emblematic representation of this philosophy.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Right, the idea is that when you bring in all these different elements, it creates something beautiful.

• 9:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And lasting.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  And lasting, so there's truth and beauty in that symbol.

• 9:38Charles Liu?

  By understanding that, we can slowly but surely bring ourselves to a better nature.

• 9:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there are Star Trek episodes, almost to a topic.

• 9:46Charles Liu?

  Absolutely. Oh, the famous one, "Let That Be Your Last Battleground," where there was one half of the face was black and the other was white, and they hated each other because one was black on the left side and one was black on the right side. Now, critics, like me, think that that was one of the...

• 10:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that was during the Civil Rights Movement.

• 10:02Charles Liu?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 10:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the Vietnam War.

• 10:04Charles Liu?

  Yes, extremely important. I have to tell you that was...

• 10:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What a backdrop this was. So if we're hardwired for stereotypes, that makes it very hard to overcome.

• 10:11Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 10:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you look at the struggles during the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Lib Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, each of these in some way represents...

• 10:20Charles Liu?

  An additional...

• 10:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Trying to overcome.

• 10:22Charles Liu?

  Precisely.

• 10:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Overcome what we somehow...

• 10:25Speaker 01

  We're constantly fighting ourselves.

• 10:26Charles Liu?

  That's right. It was a message that lasted, and that was Star Trek.

• 10:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Charles, Star Trek predates you as well. I'm an old timer here in the threesome.

• 10:34Charles Liu?

  Well, my first interaction with Star Trek was on reruns on Channel 11 at 5:00 PM before my father came home from work. And I never saw an entire episode because he would always come home before the end of the episode. But there were certain lines that I remembered that always stuck with me that I remember the most, and one of the lines I remember from George Takei was in the episode called "Mirror Mirror," where he says, "Regrettable, but it leaves me in command."

• 11:06Speaker 01

  I remember that.

• 11:07Charles Liu?

  From there, my Star Trek grew, expanded, and reached the point where it is today. Only a little bit. I couldn't claim to be a true Trekkie or a Trekker, but I do love it, and I have enjoyed it for many, many years.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  So wait, it wasn't the episode where Sulu, the naked episode?

• 11:26Charles Liu?

  Oh, the naked time, yes, where he comes around.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  It's all buff and swashbuckly?

• 11:30Charles Liu?

  Yes. They're around a star which somehow, through some way, makes people feel drunk, lose their inhibitions. What was interesting in that episode was, he became a swashbuckler, and they originally wanted him to go around with a samurai sword and whacking at people, and he said no. He would wanted to be...

• 11:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be too stereotypical.

• 11:47Charles Liu?

  Exactly.

• 11:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's Japanese, give him a samurai sword.

• 11:49Charles Liu?

  Precisely. And so he wound up going around with a rapier, dancing and quoting...

• 11:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me, rapier?

• 11:57Charles Liu?

  Wit?

• 11:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 11:59Charles Liu?

  Rapier?

• 11:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rapier.

• 12:00Charles Liu?

  A rapier, it's a sword.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Sword.

• 12:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me, I'm from the Bronx. We have switchblade knives, not rapiers, okay?

• 12:06Charles Liu?

  Go in with a rapier, and he was going "ha, hoo-hoo", like this. And that was cool.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  And he had the proper form. I mean, he was really...

• 12:12Charles Liu?

  He did. Very talented.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  And he was kinda shiny. They oiled him up. It was pretty insane.

• 12:16Charles Liu?

  He looked good.

• 12:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is like a little too hot and heavy here for me, so I'm sorry. That's a different channel, right?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  It is.

• 12:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, sorry. So, no, so we've all been touched by Star Trek. What I wonder, I mean, Star Trek is folded into some of your routines and comedy. You're a scientist, I'm a scientist.

• 12:33Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 12:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I sometimes wonder if it affects other people as well, whether or not they became scientists. Clearly it has, because, did you know next year is the 50th anniversary?

• 12:44Charles Liu?

  Oh, did we know?

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  I'm on the email list. What, are you kidding me?

• 12:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is Paramount's gonna make a 50th anniversary movie?

• 12:53Charles Liu?

  Yeah, well, they've got lined up for the future. Their alternate future Star Trek, of which now there are two movies, that Sulu does use a samurai sword.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:03Charles Liu?

  What does that say about the evolution of our society from that past to the present? Where it's now okay to glorify that stereotype in a positive way, whereas at that time, he chose to defy the stereotype in a different way.

• 13:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And so this whole thing about diversity is an interesting juxtaposition, because as you may know, he, at one time in his youth, was in a camp.

• 13:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the retention camps, in the, they're basically concentration camps.

• 13:33Charles Liu?

  They were.

• 13:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. Uh, for the Japanese citizens and, and immigrants during the Second World War. And when we come back, we're gonna learn of an episode in George Takei's past, in his childhood, where what he experienced was the opposite of all the messages that Star Trek wanted to convey to this world.

• 14:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk. Leanne Lord. Sir? Charles Liu. We're featuring my interview with George Takei. He came through town, I snared him, put him in my office, and we just talked. We, we were like old buds. We like went on and on and on, like about everything. We can't fit it all in, in, in the show.

• 14:33Charles Liu?

  You lucky man.

• 14:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we were totally chilling and talked about everything. So, during the Second World War, he was living in California with his family. And one morning, soldiers with rifles showed up on his doorstep and took him away with his family. Let's find out.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  I was a child of whom we were incarcerated.

• 15:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This was age four to eight?

• 15:02Speaker 03

  Uh, actually, five to nine.

• 15:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Five to nine.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, my brother was four to eight. But our-

• 15:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very formative years, my gosh.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Very, very formative. There were ten camps all together, in some of the most god-awful places in the country. Can you imagine the blistering hot desert of Arizona? No air conditioning. Right. We were in the sweltering swamps of Arkansas. Windswept, cold, high plains of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado. And two of them were in the most desolate places in California. But the actual incarceration for us as children, we didn't understand what it was all about. It's just life. It was just life. And, you know, everybody around us lived just like we did. We lined up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. We went to mass showers with our father.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  When I made the night runs from our barrack to the latrine, searchlights followed us. But, you know, as a five-year-old kid, I thought it was kind of nice that they lit the way for me to pee, you know? That was about the extent of it. It was coming out that was terrifying for us. Because we were literally penniless. They took everything from us. My father's business, our home, our freedom. And froze our bank account. We had nothing. And then the war's over, they let us go. Our first home was on Skid Row. And that, to nine-year-old me, or eight-year-old my brother, or six-year-old my sister, was terrifying.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  Living with derelicts and lunatics and drunkards. On one occasion, a derelict came staggering in front of us, fell down, and barfed. And my baby sister said, she screamed and said, "Mama, let's go back home." To the camp. Because that's all she knew. That didn't happen in the camp. That was our home. We didn't have alcohol. We didn't have derelicts. We didn't have, you know, lunatics. Well, we did have lunatics. People turned, went crazy, you know, under those circumstances.

• 17:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is. Now, originally, when I learned of this, just in American history, because they don't really teach it.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  I was about to say.

• 17:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta go, you gotta go get it.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And once you get it, I said, "Well, okay, they're being interned, not because they're Japanese, but because they're the enemy." But then I thought it through, the enemy during the war, then I thought it through. We didn't intern German people of German descent, even though we were at war with Germany, or people with Italian descent. So, so it was really just if you look like who bombed us in Pearl Harbor, and you're on the West Coast, you're going into the camp.

• 17:45Charles Liu?

  That's exactly right.

• 17:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's basically a racist conduct.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Basically, yes.

• 17:48Charles Liu?

  Correct.

• 17:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 17:49Charles Liu?

  There's no question about it. And only now, in the past several years or decades, have scientists tried to understand this concept of race. What is it actually? Even though it's so dominant in all human transactions, it remains a mystery scientifically. The reality is that we human beings, and you know this as well as I do, we are wired to discriminate.

• 18:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wired for tribalism.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:14Charles Liu?

  We are wired to discriminate between whether or not that rustle in the trees is a predator or whether it's a food source.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Or someone who's not well dressed.

• 18:23Charles Liu?

  Someone who...

• 18:25Charles Liu?

  We, we, when we find chairs, we don't have to test every chair to see whether or not it'll bear our weight. We naturally sit down because our brains have organized these things called chairs into things we can sit down on. And only very rarely will they break when we sit down on them. And so, when we translate that to the 21st century, our ideas of difference, our ideas of what are the same, what is safe, what we fear, they're all wired in thousands and maybe even millions of years of evolution. And it's a lot of effort to overcome that, even today.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  But there's so much...

• 18:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're victims of our own evolutionary past.

• 18:58Charles Liu?

  Very much so. And we have to be aware of that, right? Because 100 years ago, people who looked like me were stupid. We could only work on the railroad. Maybe we could wash your clothes.

• 19:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And now the stereotype is different, that Asians are great at math and science.

• 19:12Charles Liu?

  Right. How did we change so rapidly in 100 years, right?

• 19:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you good at math and science?

• 19:16Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 19:18Charles Liu?

  But the

• 19:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Case made.

• 19:20Charles Liu?

  But the point is precisely that, right? Now, the discrimination ironically is in the other direction. As it has now been shown that Asian people are discounted almost 150 points in their SAT scores in terms of getting into prestigious colleges compared to non-Asian students.

• 19:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they're so good at the test taking.

• 19:38Charles Liu?

  Precisely.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 19:39Charles Liu?

  Do you see how that switches? And it's easy to make that error.

• 19:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're saying we're all messed up, that's what you're saying.

• 19:44Charles Liu?

  We are, but the more we realize it, the more we can overcome it.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  See, but that's, that's where it gets a little confusing for me because the, the way America is set up, if you read the brochure and believe it, we had all these things in here that were supposed to prevent that. You know, when the Japanese were taken to the internment camps, there were two lawsuits. And both times, the Supreme Court stepped in and went, no, your case is turned away.

• 20:06Charles Liu?

  This is the exact opposite of what Star Trek tried to show in terms of diversity.

• 20:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Taken to a Japanese internment camp. When we come back, we want to look at technologies, ideas that pervaded the Star Trek storytelling, that at the time were way, that's way in the future, that actually became true on Star Talk.

• 20:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. Star Talk in the hall of the universe of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. And of course, I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Liu, Leanne Lord, thanks for being here, my co-host, my special guest.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're featuring my interview with George Takei, and we're talking about Star Trek. I was in traffic coming here today, and I say, it'd be great if I had a transporter to transport me to where I'm going, but then I thought, that wouldn't be the biggest use of the transporter. It would be transporting goods.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 21:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right?

• 21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't have to go to the store, just transport some milk into my refrigerator.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 21:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, think about it. Look at all these trucks I'm behind in traffic as they offload goods.

• 21:30Charles Liu?

  How about transporting a stent into your artery?

• 21:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good.

• 21:35Charles Liu?

  So you don't have to do any surgery.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Okay, you guys are like so missing the point. I'm just looking at this from a dating perspective. Like, I don't want somebody just popping up on my doorstep because their transporter's working. You know what I'm saying?

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 21:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somebody on the stand, isn't it?

• 21:50Charles Liu?

  Our colleague Lawrence Krauss wrote a book, The Physics of Star Trek, some years ago.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've had him on Star Trek.

• 21:55Charles Liu?

  That's right. And he once made a calculation that in order to get a single transport correct, you'd have to have 10 billion times the total computing power in the world today just to get one loaf of bread or a glass of milk.

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, we're almost there.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, what is that, an iPhone 16, 17?

• 22:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 22:11Charles Liu?

  That'd be nice.

• 22:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just aim the iPhone at somebody.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put it somewhere else. You got it.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  There's an app for that.

• 22:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's an app for that. Exactly.

• 22:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let's get back to the Enterprise.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 22:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember looking at all of these things that they had, the replicator and this thing that heated food fast and, and cards that they put in machines that had data on it. And I was thinking how impossibly far in the future that was. And I wanted to just get, I just wanted to sort of chill with George Takei and just get his reaction to the stuff that came through. Let's find it.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  We're putting a benchmark out in the future of what we could be doing. And that's a goal that we can reach today with our technicians, our researchers, our scientists, our innovators.

• 23:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the 1960s, we are going to the moon. And we know we're going to the moon.

• 23:08Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 23:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, no one is thinking that anything is impossible.

• 23:11Speaker 03

  And three years later, we did, in 1969. You know, and, and beyond that, we had this amazing device that was attached to our hip. And we would walk around with it all the time. And whenever we wanted to talk to someone, we'd rip it off, flip it open and start talking. At that time, it was an astounding piece of technology. Today, we've gone way past it.

• 23:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've even passed it.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  So, you know, uh... What's science fiction? Science fiction serves a good purpose. Because it sets those goals, those benchmarks out in nowhere. And we reach, we work toward that. And then now we surpass that. Because that communicator that we had now, we watch movies on it. We, we hear, listen to music.

• 24:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  None of us would want the Star Trek communicator. Because we had some better stuff.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I only pray for the early invention of the transporter. When we can just sparkle and pop out.

• 24:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a little scary to me, but. So of the.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  Well, it was scary to McCoy as well.

• 24:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they were a little afraid of the transporter. That's interesting.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, McCoy was, absolutely.

• 24:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I would not want to be the first one in the transporter.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't say first.

• 24:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Gizmodo published an article in 2013, estimating how expensive it would be to build the Enterprise today. And obviously, we don't have all the technology. So you get our counterpart to that technology.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the, you know, the engines, you put in some kind of engine fuel. For the weapons, you put in nuclear, nuclear weapons.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Instead of phasers and photons for people.

• 24:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you put lasers, maybe. So they did this. The size, the scale, came up to $476 billion.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Oh, that's cheap. Let's do this.

• 25:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so you think, wait, wait, that sounds like a lot. But, but actually, what do we spend on defense every year?

• 25:08Charles Liu?

  About a lot.

• 25:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or a billion? No, not four, excuse, 400 billion. Oh, 4 trillion, excuse me. Oh, no, well, if you add it all up, but just the Pentagon, Department of Defense. It's hundreds of billions of dollars a year. So you're just talking about a year and a half of, of defense money. And we could get a starship Enterprise.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Well, you also have to figure in that that's gonna go over budget. It's gonna double. Just saying, and we, you didn't even talk about Ten Forward. You gotta put in a nightclub.

• 25:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, all the rest. And nowadays, you gotta put in the holodeck.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  That was assumed.

• 25:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, of course.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Did I just go next gen and I shouldn't have?

• 25:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Star Trek involved many aspects of real science. And wormholes, warp drives, the warping of space and time. When we come back, let's talk the science of Star Trek on StarTalk.

• 26:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. It is our job to collide pop culture with science. If we don't do that, we're not doing our job. We've been featuring my interview with George Takei, Sulu, on Star Trek. Star Trek had some science in it, I thought. Or some science that had yet to come, that we have now and some other science we know we ain't never getting. Like, I like the warp drive. Who doesn't like the warp drive? Now, let me confess publicly right now. I have described the warp drive incorrectly in my past.

• 26:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's it. I'm sorry.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  I can't work under these conditions.

• 27:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. When I first knew of the warp drive from the original series, I'm thinking, well, they're warping space, just like I would fold this piece of paper. Just like, if you're trying to get across the galaxy, which is 100,000 light-years across, if it's our Milky Way, and so you warp the space like that, right? That is so wrong. But I'm sorry, I can't forgive this. You wrap the Enterprise in a subspace field and then you send it faster than light. Let me finish how wrong I was. So, so you warp the space, and then you travel through a little wormhole, and then you unfold it, and then... You get across the galaxy during the TV commercial and it wouldn't take 100,000 years. Can I? So then, so, so people must have been timid because I was saying that for years until some like,

• 27:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was at Comic Con and some Star Trek people met me in an alley. I can see it, I can see it! And they had the, what's the, the? Bat-let? What's that weapon that the?

• 27:57Charles Liu?

  The Bat-let.

• 27:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bat-let? Yeah, yeah.

• 27:58Charles Liu?

  Bat-let's the big one, the mech-let is the little one.

• 28:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Wow. Tell me how the warp drive works.

• 28:04Charles Liu?

  What happens is that the warp nacelles create a subspace field around the ship, which allows it then to slide through ordinary space faster than light. Okay, so the warp factors is how fast you're able to slide through this subspace stuff.

• 28:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how, what are they warping?

• 28:20Charles Liu?

  It's a complete fabrication.

• 28:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, at least mine had... Yours had a tie. This? You didn't use your tie. This is, this is real.

• 28:29Charles Liu?

  The warp thing is a bubble.

• 28:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At least I'm describing something that's real. So, and, so, so here's...

• 28:34Charles Liu?

  Of course.

• 28:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I was wrong about the show.

• 28:38Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 28:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I, and I beg forgiveness. But you look good doing it. But, if we ever gonna warp space, it's gonna be something like this.

• 28:46Charles Liu?

  Maybe.

• 28:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe?

• 28:47Charles Liu?

  What if we?

• 28:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah!

• 28:50Charles Liu?

  What if we use quantum wave technology?

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Quantum wave or, or quantum teleportation, whatever. I'm, I'm down with that.

• 28:56Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 28:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll do a whole show with that.

• 28:58Charles Liu?

  The, the point is that the idea that we can bend space easier than we can bend ourselves seems to me backwards. But that's just the physicist in me. What do I know?

• 29:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, George Takei, in my interview, asked me about the plausibility of wormholes. So I, so let's say, but, so, I like seeing this curiosity in folks, so let, let's check it out.

• 29:20Speaker 03

  What is your thought on wormholes?

• 29:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wormholes? You know, I, we're not going anywhere without them. Well, we haven't been there yet. What, no, what? Forget that we don't know how to make one yet. We know on paper we can do it, but not physically. And on movies, too. And in movies. We're really good in movies. Matthew McConaughey. Exactly. And it was a stunning. So, forget that we don't know how to make one. We don't have the command over space, time, matter, and energy, yet, to make one. And do you think we will eventually? I don't see why not. As the communicator became so many other things? Yeah, I don't see why not. Because what you want to do is be able to control the fabric of space and time.

• 30:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With matter and energy curve the fabric of space and time. Einstein tells us, and we can experimentally verify that that happens. So, right now, how much energy do we command? Not that much. How much mass can we manipulate? Not that much. We're not there yet. But the day we can, the day we can summon the energy of a galaxy, the mass of all the stars in the, in the supercluster, we can then tune it to bend space this way, that way, pry open, and use it almost as space-time sculptors. How many lifetimes, though, before we get to that point?

• 30:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I don't know if it's farther away than someone in 1900 saying, "Oh, we'll never get to the moon." And then 69 years later, we're leaving boot prints. I don't, it's hard for me to assess how far away it is. For me, the most important moment recreated in the, in the later-generation movies in the Star Trek series was when they went back to the guy who invented the warp drive. The warp drive is essentially manipulating the fabric of space and time. Without that, we're really not going anywhere. Even if you could go the speed of light. Even if you could go the speed of light. It's still 100,000 light-years across the galaxy. And you gotta really start folding space.

• 31:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I can imagine manipulating matter, energy, putting curved pockets within the fabric of space between you and your destination. And then the universe becomes a wormhole, Swiss cheese, set of highways. And then you go wherever you want and arrive instantaneously.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  You know, I do believe, because of our genius, that fiction can become fact.

• 31:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I tell you a quick wormhole story? I was in the airport. I think it was North Carolina, it was Charlotte. Ah. Charlotte. That, I had to, I had to change planes and I was like on one side of the airport and go to the other. I must have walked three miles. And I thought I'd be clever and I tweeted and I said, "I can't wait until there are wormholes. And that way, all gates can be right adjacent to one another through a chosen wormhole." And I thought I'm being clever and, you know. And then someone tweeted back, "If you had wormholes, then you don't even need airports." That's true.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  And yet somehow you'd still have to pay for your carry-on bag.

• 32:35Charles Liu?

  But, but the idea of traveling through the galaxy, even if we do only travel at the speed of light or a little bit less, as a species, it's only a matter of time before we spread out through the entire galaxy. Only a very short period of time.

• 32:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now, but the individual wouldn't do it, the species would, what you're saying.

• 32:50Charles Liu?

  That's right. And this might be something you want to think.

• 32:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you have to star hop at that point.

• 32:52Charles Liu?

  That's right.

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you, you percolate out like a, like a disease spreading in a Petri dish.

• 32:57Charles Liu?

  Yeah. And in that sense, we might ask ourselves if wormholes did exist and some engineering society already created them, why haven't we seen them already? Right? This is what Enrico Fermi asked the same question.

• 33:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's the Fermi paradox, yes. When we come back, let's talk about what kind of a hope Star Trek gave us all on StarTalk.

• 33:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host Neil Tyson. DeGrasse Tyson.

• 33:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charles Liu. Longtime friend and colleague.

• 33:48Charles Liu?

  Pleasure to be here.

• 33:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Astrophysicist. Par excellence. That's not why we have you here.

• 33:53Charles Liu?

  No?

• 33:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One day I'll bring you back because you're an astrophysicist. We have you here now because you're this all-around smart guy. Who knows everything about everything. Am I wrong on that, Leanne?

• 34:02Speaker 01

  He is guest extraordinaire.

• 34:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guest extraordinaire. I got Leanne Lord. Comedienne extraordinaire. Great to have you. Thank you. On the show. We're featuring my interview with George Takei. Now, I've told the story before, but now I just want to tell it again. I saw Star Trek in its first run. That's how old I am. Alright, and in the first run, I was actually accepting all of these things in the future. It is the 23rd, 24th century anyway. So, many, many years in the future. Sure, you'll have starships. Sure, you'll have photon torpedoes. Sure, you'll have transporters. But the one thing I said we will never have. Were doors that knew you were coming.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Oh my god, you were gonna say that!

• 34:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said, "No!" How does the door know? It can't possibly know you're... How does it know? There's no... And so, so, never come to me. To get me to predict the future. That's all I'm saying.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  You're saying you don't have shares in Amazon?

• 34:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was like the first thing that we made, were automatic opening doors.

• 34:59Charles Liu?

  When we walked to the supermarkets, right? But they found out we were there because you stepped on a pressure pad.

• 35:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You stepped on a pressure pad, right.

• 35:05Charles Liu?

  And then the pressure pads disappeared and there was that little infrared thing from the top.

• 35:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but I'm just saying, don't come to me to get me to predict the future. Because I failed that badly for the Star... in Star Trek, okay?

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Wow, so now we've got two things. We've got the warp thing and...

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I know. This is my confessional here. Yeah, yeah.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 35:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, so George was interested in other kinds of ideas and phenomena, technological phenomena. But he wasn't always happy about all of them. So let's find out what the next, next things that he was thinking about. In this Star Trek universe, we had warp drives, those are great, and transporters. Was there anything else that you really wanted that you thought might have been in the future?

• 35:45Speaker 03

  Anything else?

• 35:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How about that food, the thing that makes food real fast? That eats food, any of these things you were thinking, hey, that'd be cool if we had that? Or information on little disks that you pop into the box?

• 35:56Speaker 03

  I'm old fashioned when it comes to eating. You know, in Seattle, they have a lab that's working on haute cuisine, all done with technology.

• 36:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yes, I've read about that.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  Yes, at Microsoft, I think.

• 36:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very high physics, the physics food technology, yes, okay?

• 36:18Speaker 03

  I didn't like it.

• 36:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not so much.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  I love my good old enchiladas from East L.A.

• 36:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Off the street corner, right?

• 36:28Speaker 03

  I'm too much of a down-to-earth guy.

• 36:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, me too. I like, food should come from the heart, not from the lab.

• 36:37Speaker 03

  And you know who made the best enchiladas in all East L.A.?

• 36:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who?

• 36:40Speaker 03

  My mother, Mrs. Takey. She had a friend, Mrs. Gonzalez, next door, and they lived in each other's kitchens. And I grew up on my mother, Mrs. Takey's enchiladas and tacos.

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only in America can that even be a story to be told.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  And that's the strength of America.

• 36:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  That we are, we do have this diversity. Coming together without warring with each other, you know, without discriminating. Well, we do, but we're making progress.

• 37:11Charles Liu?

  Wow, well, I hate to break it to Mr. Takey, but all the food we eat is lab food.

• 37:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, of course, but he's referring to something different. Not the generation of the raw food stuffs, but the preparation of the dish that you're about to eat.

• 37:24Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 37:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, what goes into that? So, on our radio show, we interviewed Nathan Mervill, who, I don't know if we've aired that episode yet, but he's a physicist turned chef. And he's single?

• 37:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so when he looks at food, he's thinking of the physics of the molecules and the atoms and the flavors and, and he takes it to a whole other dimension. I happen to like wine. I accidentally asked him about wine. Oh my, OMG. So, here's what happened. You know how people will decant wine so that it can breathe? He said, "Well, if you're trying to let it breathe, why don't, let's do that in the extreme." And he takes wine and puts it in a blender and blends the wine. I, "No!" And so he did that and then gave it to expert tasters and, "Hey, this is, um, you must have, you know..." It improved every bottle that he did it to.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Really?

• 38:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. And then he told them that he put it in a blender, then all of a sudden they didn't like the wine.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  I need a blender.

• 38:20Charles Liu?

  Well, yeah. And, and anybody who has never-

• 38:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait. And so then, because he's a physicist and he's an experimental physicist, it's, well, is it that it got blended or is it that it introduced oxygen in? Is it the oxygen that's doing it? Exposure to oxygen? Or is there something dissolved in the wine that would then be released upon blending it? So, one time he blended it with just air, atmospheric air, 21% oxygen. The next one, he removed all the oxygen and blended it in a neutral gas. The wine tasted the same in both cases. So that in fact, it is not the oxygenation of the wine. It is dissolved gases in the wine, which when you swirl it is primarily what's coming out of the wine, thereby improving what remains.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  That's why people go drinking and dancing.

• 39:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just saying.

• 39:08Charles Liu?

  Aeration.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Aeration!

• 39:10Charles Liu?

  Right. And anybody who has ever had ice cream made by pouring liquid nitrogen on the stuff?

• 39:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a, there's a place in LA-

• 39:17Charles Liu?

  You'd never go back.

• 39:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you'd never go back.

• 39:18Charles Liu?

  You'd never go-

• 39:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a place in LA that did it. I, I forgot what it's called, but I like ice cream no matter where I find it. And I go in there and they just sit there with this big bowl, you dump in your ice cream batter, and they put in liquid nitrogen. When you pour liquid nitrogen, it's very cold. And it's so cold that it condenses moisture out of the air. And you see this cloud rise up out of it. It looks something very much out of Frankenstein.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 39:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But once you have this very cold liquid, you dump in your ice cream batter and you just stir it. It, it was the best ice cream I've ever had.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  I just had a-

• 39:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Physics!

• 39:49Charles Liu?

  Yes!

• 39:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And cooking, yes.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Oh, I, yeah, okay.

• 39:52Charles Liu?

  Physical cooking!

• 39:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, physics. No, physics, physics, physics does some badass things in the kitchen.

• 39:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we return, we're gonna go to Bill Nye the Science Guy. He's gonna share with us a vision of the future as seen through the lens of Trek. On StarTalk.

• 40:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, here from the Hall of the Universe, under the Hayden Sphere of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. You feeling the... I am feeling it.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  It's a nice place you got here.

• 40:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I gotta think, well, come by and visit sometime. So, Bill Nye took a minute to tell us what the future can be if it was truly inspired by all the great ideas of Star Trek.

• 41:02Speaker 04

  Science fiction is based on science and imagination. But right now, as an observer of the human condition, it looks to me that almost all of our science fiction is apocalyptic. It's about a future for humankind that kinda sucks. But on Star Trek, it's not like that. It's never like that. In all the versions of Star Trek, the future for humankind is optimistic. They've solved all the problems of food, clothing, and shelter. You know how they solved them? Through science. Not only that, in the Star Trek future, everybody gets along. People from the continent of Australia, from North Africa, South Africa, North Asia, South Asia, from Europe. Everybody gets along because they point out over and over again

• 41:47Speaker 04

  that we're more alike than we are different, that we are all in this together. Let's embrace that happy Star Trek future. Let's embrace the process of science for a better tomorrow for all of us. We can all, through science, dare I say it, live long and prosper, people.

• 42:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill Nye! Oh my gosh.

• 42:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a very hopeful future.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  It is. I drink that Kool-Aid all day.

• 42:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's something we can all aspire to, for sure.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 42:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Star Trek future. And, you know, of course, we were featuring my interview with George Takei. Generally, when I have sort of people who are best known for acting and other... Maybe they don't spend much time with scientists, so I try to give them a chance to sort of ask any questions that might be lingering within them, especially of the universe, because there aren't that many astrophysicists in the world.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  That you can just call?

• 42:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, just not that many.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  There are about 7,000 of us.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was about to say, and I know two.

• 42:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  So I'm doing pretty good here.

• 42:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you're doing real good, honey. Yeah, so there's about 7,000 professional astrophysicists and about 7 billion people in the world. So Charles, you do the math, what do you get?

• 43:05Speaker 03

  We are one in a million, everybody.

• 43:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Aww.

• 43:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you got two right here.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  We are one in a million, everybody.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  I'm feeling so special.

• 43:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so I try to give them that opportunity. So we closed out the interview. I just asked, you got any questions you got for me? Let's see.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  What are some of the achievable things in my life?

• 43:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to think that by the time you're 90, so next decade, decade and a half, we will know whether or not there's life elsewhere in our solar system. Whether there's life somewhere in the soils of Mars.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  Mars.

• 43:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Deep down. NASA's mantra is "Follow the water."

• 43:47Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because anywhere on Earth...

• 43:49Speaker 03

  And that's the exciting thing that's been found.

• 43:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's a completely reasonable thing. The most... One of the most famous Star Trek episodes was the one with the Horta, which is life not based on carbon, based on silicon. And that silicon wasn't pulled out of... The ether, silicon appears directly below carbon on the periodic table. And all the elements that line up above and below one another on the periodic table elements, they all form the same families of molecules. So if carbon can make life in all of its varied molecules, the suspicion was maybe silicon can just be swapped in for it. They have silicon-based life instead of carbon-based life. So that episode with the Horta was deeper than I think people noticed at the time.

• 44:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only later would we be searching for life and having to ask, what should we look for? Should we look for ourselves? Carbon-based life, silicon-based life, or some kind of life that we have yet to dream of? Energy-based life? So, um, it's one of the challenges. We know life does exist based on water, so that's a... We can start there, but we should not be too blinded by that. Because life, nature might be clever than we are.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  Fascinating, isn't it?

• 45:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 45:10Speaker 03

  I mean, here you took a fictional, uh, story.

• 45:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  The Horta, fictional creation. And there's a real possibility. You know, when I was a kid...

• 45:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's got people thinking. If it gets you thinking, there it is.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Again, you know, you have that benchmark that's unimaginable or imagined, but way up...

• 45:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just out of reach, but you can... You can create the path there.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  And then we start putting the bricks together.

• 45:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  This chunk of information, that chunk of information. You know, when I was a kid, I was thrilled when I went to see a movie titled Destination Moon. And now, we have our surrogate on Mars.

• 45:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  Roaming around, sending back information like the ones with which we now speculate on what might be up there.

• 46:04Charles Liu?

  That's great that you remember Destination Moon. That came out in 1950.

• 46:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 46:08Charles Liu?

  About half of the movie was about why we should go to the moon. And the other half was about an adventure where people actually went to the moon.

• 46:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why do you know all this, Charles?

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Because he's Charles!

• 46:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because he's Charles!

• 46:17Charles Liu?

  But that's great that he was inspired as a child through that, to the present day.

• 46:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I got a list of all kinds of life that appeared in Star Trek. So you had the humans, of course. You had the Horta. You had the Borg going through across next generations. Vulcans, Klingons, Romulans, the Cardassians. Not the Kardashian. The Cardassians. Interesting, even the Gorn. Think about it, they were all bipedal. Had arms, legs, and a head. So maybe as much as we celebrate the diversity of their aliens, maybe they're not actually all that diverse.

• 46:50Charles Liu?

  Well, the obvious reason they were like that was because they couldn't find actors that had six heads and three arms.

• 46:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's the blunt reason.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Well, and it's also, we tend to project ourselves into what aliens will be. You know, we just think it's a bad hair day and bad makeup and that's an alien. But Star Trek did, there were other aliens that weren't bipedal. What about species 85 something, the Flawedians?

• 47:12Charles Liu?

  8472.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  8472, that made their appearance in Star Trek: Voyager. You know?

• 47:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, the Horta was not bipedal. The Horta was not bipedal, it was a rock.

• 47:21Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Right, no, no, but I mean...

• 47:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A waddling rock.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  But that's, I guess, the contribution from the original. But, you know, that species, the Flawedians, because they were from fluid space, the only, by the way, only ones to actually beat the Borg, because they were so powerful. And how can we forget the best, absolute best alien? The Tribbles!

• 47:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh, the Tribbles! Oh, that's creepy.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  It's the only impression I can do!

• 47:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fuzzy things that brought out the kindness in us all.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Except for the Romulans.

• 47:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's an episode of Star Trek, The Chase. That was the attempt to spread human DNA all across the galaxy.

• 47:56Charles Liu?

  It was almost Star Trek's way of trying to justify retroactively why all the aliens we've ever seen on Star Trek had two arms and two legs and one head. It was kind of a backwards way of saying it. But in the sense, you're right. It's sort of the ultimate in diversity in saying that we are much more alike than we are different, even though we come from different planets.

• 48:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, people, this has been a wonderful hour

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Yes, it has.

• 48:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that we have spent together.

• 48:23Charles Liu?

  Thank you so much.

• 48:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dr. Charles Liu, friend and colleague.

• 48:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Leanne Lord.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Sir.

• 48:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My co-host.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for being on StarTalk. And I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And as always, I bid farewell, asking you to keep looking up.