Extended Classic: Time Lords: The Science of Keeping Time with Chris Hardwick

Travel back in time to Season 2 as Neil Tyson and Chris Hardwick take a mind-bending journey into the science of time, from relativity and leap seconds, to neutrinos and time-telling oysters. Now with 12 new minutes of Neil, Bill Nye and Steven Soter in the “Cosmic Crib!”

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.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium. Joining me this week, I have two guest hosts. I've got Chris Hardwick. Chris, welcome to StarTalk Radio.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me on StarTalk Radio. It's an honor.

• 0:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have a huge following because you're like the host of Nerdist.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Yes, sir.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not nudist, Nerdist.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Nerdist, yes.

• 0:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nerdist. Different demographic. And I caught you on the east coast. You're here in New York City and you brought one half of your other Nerdist team.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Please introduce him.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  This is Matthew Myra. Hello. One of my two co-hosts and NASA fanatic and Neil deGrasse Tyson enthusiast.

• 1:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, as I learned earlier, he was reciting my biography, chapter and verse. And is he a fan or is he a stalker? Which is it?

• 1:06Speaker 01

  He's a stalker fan, so he'll hug you to death. I am a fan of yours. With a pillow over the face, right? Matt will, he wants to own your skin, but I really appreciate what you do.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your podcast, The Nerdist, is one of the top 10 comedy podcasts on the list.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do pretty well. It's fun. It's a lot of fun.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Congratulations for that. And your TV show filmed in LA is carried on BBC America.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. We did a, we shot a TV version of the podcast and that's, that's been a lot of fun, too.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Well, I'm happy to have you on here. You know what we're going to talk about. We're talking about time.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Time in all its concepts. And you're like a Doctor Who fan.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Huge Who fan.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Time is, if it's anything, it's about anything. It's about time.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Doctor Who. So, uh, let's see how you plug into the flow of this program.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  I'll do my best.

• 1:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, before we begin, you know, Bill Nye is a big fan of StarTalk Radio and he had the urge to want to give us his famous Nye Minute.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Fantastic.

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's check it out.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill Nye for StarTalk Radio.

• 2:01Bill Nye?

  During the day-to-day, or even during this broadcast, take some time, a few seconds, say, and notice how often we use the word "time." It's time to go to school, it's time to turn our clocks back, it's time for the show. We refer to time so often because time is so important. Clocks have affected our day-to-day lives more than the invention or discovery of wheels and rolling round things. See, timekeeping starts with astronomy. It started based on the Earth's one-year-long orbit of the Sun. We can watch the shadow of the tip of a stick, or gnomon, and sundials are all over the world. We've even got sundials on Mars, with a third one landing there in August 2012. In ancient times, humans, or proto-humans, accounted large lengths of time, seasons

• 2:46Bill Nye?

  and years. Nowadays, I mean, at this time, we've almost stopped thinking about orbits. We divide the old year 31,556,926 ways into seconds, and now fractions of seconds, reckoning tinier and tinier packets of time. That way, we can tell who won a ski race, or the transit time of a navigation satellite on the spinning Earth. For us northern hemispherians, it's not only a good time of year to turn our clocks back to standard time, for me, it's a good time to ponder this fourth dimension. Oh, look, it's time to fly. For StarTalk Radio, I'm Bill Nye the Science Guy.

• 3:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotta love me some Bill Nye.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  I mean, this is actually, makes a lot of sense with the Bill Nye sundial that I'm constructing in my backyard.

• 3:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you have a Bill Nye commemorative sundial, is that right?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Yes, a Bill dial.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  I'm imagining he was wearing a bowtie the whole time.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  He has to be wearing a bowtie.

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this how you think of him, in your dreams?

• 3:41Speaker 03

  Constantly. I fixed his computer once, actually, at the Apple Store.

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you? That is, that, oh, were you a genius?

• 3:46Speaker 03

  I was, yeah.

• 3:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh, maybe he remembers you.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  He didn't, he didn't take any, any stuff off the hard drive, though.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  All of it.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  I have my own copies.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  He'd make a great doctor, Bill Nye.

• 3:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in this show, there's a lot to talk about here. You know, time, Einstein defined time as that which is required to make motion look simple, which I thought that was a good, that man is into time. Typically, though, we think about time as one event follows another and you measure the interval between the two.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  So it's a distance, a measure of the between two events?

• 4:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a distance, it's kind of a time distance, if you will. You measure distance on an x-axis or y-axis, measure the distance between two points in time, we just have a different unit and we call it time. And, you know, calendars have been around ever since there's been recorded history. And the easiest way to keep track of time, people just counted moons, you know, I mean, even the Native Americans, how many moons ago was it? Why not? It's cycled.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  It was many.

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was many.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Eh, just a couple moons. Wasn't that many moons, really. Maybe a moon, about a moon ago.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Moon ago. No, it was a moon and a half.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Moon and a half, I'm sorry.

• 4:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, the concept of a half took a while to even develop later on. So calendars have been around for a while. I think the most familiar, the one that preceded the one we now use internationally, the Gregorian calendar, it was preceded by the Julian calendar, put in by Julius Caesar back in 45 B.C. That one, in fact, had a leap day.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 5:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was the first leap day, and they based it on the sun. Because people realized that you really didn't care about the moon, you cared about when it was spring and when it was fall.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the moon didn't care when either of those are, but the sun does. And so, once you attach it to the sun, then your culture gets linked to the seasons. That's how it ought to be. And it turns out that that leap day in the Julian calendar was not enough to completely match the time you reckon on Earth with what the Earth was actually doing around the sun.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 5:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it turns out it overcorrected. It overcorrected. And so, spring started shifting in the calendar, becoming earlier and earlier in March. And one day, it showed up on March 10th, and Pope Gregory in the 1500s said, "We gotta do something about this."

• 5:47Speaker 01

  He was like that.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Greg, I mean, he was very serious, but at a party.

• 5:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At a party, he was totally rocking it.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, watch me turn this to wine. Like, you're like, I get it, I get it.

• 5:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Later on, we would build mechanical clocks that would ultimately be more accurate than earth-based clocks. So this, it's a fun history, and I was not going to rely on just the two of you to support this.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  A wise move.

• 6:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just, just, I don't, I don't mean offense here.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  No, I would have suggested it if you had not.

• 6:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had to call up my man up in Colgate University, Tony Avanti. Tony, thanks for being on StarTalk Radio.

• 6:18Speaker 04

  Delighted to be with you.

• 6:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You are professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University, upstate New York, and that means you care not only about how we keep time, but how cultures have kept time throughout history.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  That's correct. I started out at Kit Peak, and here I am in the ancient past.

• 6:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Kit Peak, the observatory, Kit Peak in Arizona, that's a great place to get a little closer to the cosmos. But I noticed that you'd had a book out for a while, but it's becoming more and more relevant. What's the exact title of that book?

• 6:46Speaker 04

  It's The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012. And yeah, the time is getting ripe because we're just a little over a year from the turning over of the biggest cycle of Maya time, started back in 3114 B.C., and it's gonna run out in just a year.

• 7:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. So, so apparently a lot of people are concerned about this, but you're not, I presume?

• 7:09Speaker 04

  Well, I think that whatever the Maya message is, I'm not sure it was really intended for us, and I think there's a lot of romancing of the Maya going on now, just as there was of the Egyptians back in the 1920s.

• 7:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why do people always think that civilizations centuries and millennia ago were somehow smarter or more technologically able than we are today? I don't get it. You study cultures, it's your fault.

• 7:31Speaker 04

  A little bit of an inferiority complex going on there, huh?

• 7:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, because maybe because they built the pyramids, and you don't know how to do that.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  I just hope that it doesn't run out.

• 7:38Speaker 04

  Go ahead.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  I don't know what to do with my 2013 Mayan kitten calendars that I have printed, and if time ends.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  Well, you know, we, I think the problem is technology, and I love all you guys for being techno freaks, but we get, we get so used to technology that we think after a while that to keep time, to build a pyramid, to do anything, requires a super technology, and with the Maya and all these other people, it didn't.

• 8:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, if they can take something that's longer than your lifetime to build, they didn't care.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  Right, for us, I mean, we're able to do it.

• 8:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For us, a slow project takes maybe a decade.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  Does anyone propose the theory that maybe they just got bored and were like, "We'll finish the calendar later."

• 8:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  "Oh, man, our civilization's over."

• 8:16Speaker 01

  "I better go back to finishing this calendar, heart attack."

• 8:18Speaker 04

  They did put things off, didn't they? But, uh, but people get excited about it. I think one reason is that, uh, Americans now, particularly the world being the way it is, are in a state of stress and they're looking for solutions to problems from far away, and not just as far away as the Maya, even to the aliens, to give us direction and give us guidance. So, that's why the Maya is so popular.

• 8:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You start adding aliens with the Mayans in 2012, you know, there's a movie in there somewhere, I think.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Doctor Who.

• 8:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doc, you're a Whovian, that's right. I forgot all about that. Doctor Who plays with time.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll get back to that in just a minute. Uh, so, let me just, so with Maya, so are you, you're gonna put all, everyone's concerns at ease, you're saying? The Mayans didn't know anything about the future, certainly nothing about 2012. And, so, in your book, you, you detail this, but it's a scholarly book, right? It's got footnotes and things.

• 9:05Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I mean, I'm trying to show that the Maya, if you, if you look at the evidence, you look at the carved monuments, what's written on them, you look at the books, the manuscripts, these people are concerned about reflecting on their roots in deep time. The dynasty wants to show that its history is embedded in deep time. So, in other words, they're really backward-looking, they're not forward-looking, they, they don't really say very much at all about what's gonna happen thousands of years in the future. But, we pick up on these little cherry pick, these little bits and pieces, and, uh, and that's why you've got so many popular books about it and a scare about it. I dedicated my book to a high school student from Canada who told me he and his friends were concerned about the world coming to an end, what should they do? It's, it's a lot of scare stuff, I think.

• 9:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, plus, it scare, that, that people, I have found that humans are only happy when they think the world is gonna come to an end. That's, I don't, I don't understand it, it sells movies.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  We like finality. We're fear-driven species.

• 9:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess so.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  Lights a fire under us.

• 10:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It lights a fire towards action, I guess.

• 10:04Speaker 04

  Well, you know, to be honest, I think it comes from religion, I think American religion, very, very, uh, much oriented toward the idea of the second coming, cataclysm, apocalypse, it really goes back to the purity. You know, who came here because they were a cult of people who were pretty far out on the fringe. They were looking for an immediate second coming. Even Columbus, when he came here, talks about coming here because this will be the place in the world where Christ will descend. So there's a long history of American religion being involved with apocalypse.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  And where did religion come from? OCD. If I perform these rituals, we won't get hurt. If I perform these rituals, everything is fine.

• 10:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you have it. So I'm curious about something. The Mayans, the people think they could predict the future, but if they could, you think they would have predicted the end of their own civilization. And to that they failed. So that gives me very little confidence.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Well, there's a different guy working on that.

• 10:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a different guy. You know, I was at a conference in Philadelphia just recently, and there's no other way to call them. It was the Time Lords assembled. These are people who are keepers of calendars and clocks, and they decide when they're leap seconds and when they're not. And they decide-

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Which cat's gonna be February?

• 11:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which, which-

• 11:15Speaker 01

  In the calendar.

• 11:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yes.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  They keep all time.

• 11:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know if they had calendars. I'm not sure. One of them is a gentleman named Frank Reed, and I just chatted about how far we've come and what affects the rotation of the earth and what we now know controls our reckoning of time. Let's see what he had to say.

• 11:34Speaker 05

  Things that change the motion of the earth, primarily it's the gravitational pull, the tidal effect from the moon.

• 11:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so moon is number one. Okay, the tidal sloshing on the continents. Okay, what else you got?

• 11:43Speaker 05

  The earth's atmosphere itself, the jet stream in particular, as the jet stream snakes around and moves about, the total amount of angular momentum that's in the atmosphere changes, and it has to go or come from somewhere. So if the angular momentum of the atmosphere goes up, the angular momentum of the earth goes down, so it would slow down a touch.

• 12:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so who would have thought that moving air has any effect on the rotation of the earth at all? Because we don't think of air as being something significant.

• 12:11Speaker 05

  It's a big deal and it turns out just in the past 10 to 15 years that the people who study this have gotten to the point where they can really predict the rotation of the earth, how it's going to change over the course of a week or two, based on modeling the weather.

• 12:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, so this effect doesn't accumulate, it just fluctuates it up and down seasonally?

• 12:29Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 12:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's cool. And how about ice flows? What's going on there?

• 12:33Speaker 05

  The earth's crust has been rebounding since the last ice age, so that means the earth is getting rounder, more spherical, it's changing shape, and as it changes shape, it necessarily changes rotation, just the conservation of angular momentum.

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's changing from the lost weight of glaciers, is what you're saying?

• 12:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's been squished. It's like one part has been pushed down where the glaciers used to be, other parts have been pushed up, and it's now going back to a rounder shape. So for example, the area around Hudson Bay and the area around the Baltic Sea, they're still rebounding, which means that land is coming up from beneath the water, and you can see this on a time scale of a decade or two, you know, there are more rocks in the sea off Sweden than there were 10 years ago.

• 13:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More rocks off of Sweden?

• 13:15Speaker 05

  That is, on the coastline, you have more rocks sticking up out of the water, because the sea level's going down up there.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Relative to the land coming up?

• 13:21Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 13:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I didn't know that. And so now you're changing the shape of the earth, and necessarily the earth has to spin at a different rate in correspondence with that new shape?

• 13:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what you're saying is earth sucks as a timekeeping device?

• 13:34Speaker 05

  It does, but you know, it was so good for such a long time, it had a good, long run.

• 13:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're coming up on our first break. This is StarTalk Radio, I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. I've got Chris Hardwick here, and Matt Myra, Matt Myra, he's a star named after that. And we've got Anthony Aveni, Tony Aveni, in studio. We'll come back in just a few minutes. StarTalk Radio, talking about time.

• 14:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. Joining me this week as a special co-host is Chris Hardwick.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 14:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Host of The Nerdist, one of the greatest comedy podcasts there ever were, I'm told.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Let's say that. Sure, let's go with that.

• 14:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you've got one of your favorite co-hosts from that show.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matt.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Your favorite.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  My favorite.

• 14:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His very favorite.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  I can't pick favorites.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  Matt Murray's a favorite.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Okay, Matt Murray.

• 14:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You guys on the East Coast, visiting here from LA. And I thought I'd nab you for an episode of StarTalk.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 14:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for coming in.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  And thanks for doing The Nerdist as well.

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. Oh, yeah, yeah. Just before this, I was a guest on The Nerdist. Happy to have been there. So we've also got Tony Avani. Tony, you're an expert on time, on cultures, on calendars. How have people reckoned time from one culture to another? There's differences out there, right?

• 14:54Speaker 04

  Well, you know, Neil, listening to the conversation about the moon perturbing the Earth reminds me that in ancient Babylon, you would figure out when to pay your rent by whether or not you saw the first crescent moon. And you'd figure out when to go to work in medieval times by whether you could tell heads from tails on a coin. So we're really talking about systems of time that are very, very low-tech. And I think once we stuck that stick in the ground to make the sundial, then we started with the techno-revolution and moved on from there.

• 15:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you're telling me a stick in the ground was the beginning of tech timekeeping?

• 15:30Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Bill Nye would say so. He loves sundials.

• 15:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill Nye would say so, for sure. Okay, so now we got a sundial, but that now connects time to the sun, correct?

• 15:38Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 15:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that presumably was transformative to culture.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  But not just the sun. I mean, time is connected to the human body. In the Maya world, for example, the 260-day calendar comes from the gestation period of the human female. And they married together two exquisite cycles to get to that. Twenty, which is the number of fingers and toes on the human body, and thirteen, which is the number of layers of heaven. Thirteen times twenty equals 260. So time is what I call ecogenic. I mean, it really comes from nature, which of course astronomy is part of nature.

• 16:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ecogenic.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  I love that word.

• 16:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  I'm curious, are we on the... Do we have the most efficient calendar we should have in modern days?

• 16:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think so. Tony, isn't the Gregorian calendar the most accurate calendar there ever was?

• 16:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Gregorian calendar is about as accurate as the perturbations in the Earth's orbit that caused the changing of the time. We nailed it, you guys. It's definitely accurate. Thanks, monks. It's the most accurate in the world.

• 16:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but the problem is, of course, it's still based on the rotation of the Earth and Earth's time around the Sun. But over the years, in particular the second half of the 20th century, technology advanced really far from the stick in the ground. And when you start keeping atomic time, that's where you discover that Earth is not as good a timekeeper as you might have wanted. In fact, back in this conference I attended of the Time Lords, who are the keepers of leap seconds and things, I caught up with a guy named Rob Seaman. He's one of these people who worries about whether there are leap seconds or not in the calendar and how they get reckoned. We'll talk about leap seconds more later, but let's check out what Rob Seaman had to say.

• 17:11Speaker 06

  If you look at a sundial, the sundial keeps the apparent solar time, where the sun is in the actual sky. Through the course of the year, it varies by about 20 minutes one way or the other.

• 17:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in other words, what your watch would say was high noon, your sundial would disagree with that by about up to 20 minutes.

• 17:31Speaker 06

  That's right. The actual length of each day is much closer together because this accumulates during the course of the year. The days through the course of the year only differ by about half a minute or a minute.

• 17:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But those add up each day?

• 17:44Speaker 06

  They do add up each day, but every day is very close to this mean solar day.

• 17:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mean meaning average solar day.

• 17:51Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we're at a conference in Pennsylvania to discuss the future of timekeeping and whether it should be linked to the Earth or not. What I want to understand is, if you do not link it to Earth, what are the consequences of that? What happens? Midnight ends up at sunrise and noon ends up at sunset?

• 18:10Speaker 06

  Well, that's literally true. If you cease issuing leap seconds and do nothing else, then eventually noon will turn into sunset and people will eventually notice.

• 18:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is that the 24-hour clock ends up migrating through the solar day?

• 18:31Speaker 06

  That's exactly right, and by analogy, that's similar to the Gregorian calendar.

• 18:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The one we all use now, yeah.

• 18:36Speaker 06

  Exactly, was fixed such that it didn't migrate through the course of the year, such that harvest time remained at harvest time every year.

• 18:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the calendar, right, because at that time, by 1584, the spring equinox, which typically happens around March 21st, was happening about March 10th, and so they just fixed that, right? They took out 10 days, put in corrective devices, so that'll never happen again.

• 19:01Speaker 06

  Well, it caused quite a hubbub and shenanigans at the time.

• 19:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But back then, the hubbub was over days, whereas now the hubbub is over seconds.

• 19:10Speaker 06

  That's exactly right. For some purposes, this is a much more minor effect. For other purposes, it is larger, because we live in this technological world, precisely where seconds matter. I mean, your cellphones, your computers, every device we use.

• 19:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Telecommunications, I guess, that matters to them?

• 19:27Speaker 06

  That does, and the telecommunications folks are in favor of ceasing leap seconds. I think some of us have the point of view that that's a bit short-sighted. There are serious consequences for astronomy and related fields, and there are potentially subtle consequences for a wide range of situations that are of interest to everybody, such as flying.

• 19:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, flying. Will the planes stay in the air?

• 19:54Speaker 06

  Exactly, and will they run into each other in the sky?

• 19:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, because where they are is a measurement, right? So you could have two different planes on two different timekeeping systems. If they have two different times, then the planes won't know where they are relative to each other on Earth.

• 20:10Speaker 06

  That's exactly right. It's very much about the way the network works, how multiple devices, multiple systems, multiple people talk to each other.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 20:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, yeah, so these guys, they're...

• 20:24Speaker 03

  Those technology jerks don't want leap seconds.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  That's the TARDIS.

• 20:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that how you arrived in New York?

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, but from 10 years ago.

• 20:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From Whovian fans, yes, okay. That's the sound of the TARDIS arriving with its brakes on.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Time and relative dimensions in space, that's what TARDIS stands for.

• 20:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, just in case you didn't know what a leap second is, you may not have known that Earth's rotation rate is not constant, and it's being influenced by so many factors, primarily the moon. With the moon affecting the tides of the oceans, sloshing back and forth on the continental shelves, this is actually slowing down the rotation of the Earth.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  The moon giveth and the moon taketh away.

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mostly taketh away.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Also, thanks for the werewolf's moon.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  They're the worst.

• 21:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, what you have here is, if you want to make sure your 24-hour day of your clock matches the rotation rate of the Earth, you gotta compensate for this.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  See, I deal with this, because my watch is automatic, but it loses like 5 to 10 seconds a month.

• 21:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so those are mat seconds? Yes, yes, yes, you want leap seconds.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  That's why I'm kinda late, guys.

• 21:26Speaker 04

  I was just wondering whether any of you guys think that what an archaeologist from another world would make of a digital watch, say that he excavates in 10 million AD on the surface of the Earth, would that archaeologist ever connect that watch with the sun and with the Earth and with the movement in nature?

• 21:44Speaker 03

  If it's solar powered.

• 21:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it's solar powered. He'd probably say, "Look at this primitive device I just pulled out of the Earth, you know, what is this?"

• 21:53Speaker 04

  Maybe the hour hand, maybe the hour hand might give a clue if it weren't a digital watch, but would the alien ever figure that out?

• 21:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, plus, and it's in base 60, too. What's that about?

• 22:02Speaker 04

  What's that about?

• 22:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's going on there?

• 22:04Speaker 04

  Some wise guy timed 360 days for the revolution of the Earth around the sun and figured it was convenient to make a sexagesimal system, which, of course, has nothing to do with sex.

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sexagesimal, that's in the know. That's base 60's sexagesimal.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  Base sexy time. I base everything on sexy time.

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you know, since 1972, there've been 23 abrupt leap seconds added to the calendar.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  And no moon landing since 1972.

• 22:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, you know, I hadn't connected those two. Are they correlated? Cause and effect? I've got another clip with, I was at, from this conference, Frank Reed, getting back to him. He teaches celestial navigation at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, actually. And I was just asking him about the impact of leap seconds on modern technology. Let's see what he tells us.

• 22:46Speaker 05

  There are some big issues and the primary one is that an enormous amount of software has been written that limits the difference between the time by the sun and the time by the stars and the cosmos to a limit of one second. And all that software will have to be changed and it's a really big deal. The entire GPS system, which now drives 500 million smartphones, is dependent on all of this. And if we change the definition of leap seconds, or if we eliminate leap seconds and that gets bigger than one second, it's a huge amount of work to fix it.

• 23:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so how much should we care about the workload of programmers? We're talking about a huge definition now-

• 23:25Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 23:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -that'll affect the entire planet. And do we care about whether a few programmers have to work overtime?

• 23:31Speaker 05

  No. And I'd rather pay them now, put them on contract to do this, than wait for something to go wrong.

• 23:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stuff like Y2K where we knew it was coming, so everybody worked overtime. All the programmers were called in late at night to fix that one.

• 23:44Speaker 05

  That's right, because the bug that hasn't happened yet is the one that's really gonna bite us. The global economy now depends on time synchronization and it's nothing to sneeze at.

• 23:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Synchronization is something else. You know, before anyone talked to each other, who cared that anything was synchronized?

• 24:00Speaker 04

  Well, again, it started with religion. I gotta tell you, this is back in the 6th century AD when clock bells were first invented. I mean, the first clock was just a mechanical series of bells that would tell people when to pray during the, during the middle of the night.

• 24:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All at the same time.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  And during the daytime hours, if we don't pray together, God's not gonna hear us.

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, all at the same time, so the first need for synchronicity there.

• 24:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's the synchronicity started. You remember Frere Jacques? Dormez-vous, dormez-vous? I'm not gonna sing, I got a terrible voice. This is the guy who-

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like Brother John, Brother John, are you sleeping? Are you sleeping?

• 24:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, Brother, are you sleeping? And he wasn't answering his matin, his clock bell that was ringing. So he's the first person to be beguiled by the tyranny of the clock, if you will.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't bring my prayer bells.

• 24:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She didn't know that. Oh my God.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  And they put a face on it and, you know, it became the clock.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  But we have a weird perception of time even with technology. It's the idea that when you're downloading a file and it says like, "A minute, 20 seconds, an hour." Like, we don't even perceive time the same way anymore.

• 24:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, it's just whatever the download time says. Whether or not it's real.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:59Speaker 04

  It's a Western obsession, though, clearly. All the other cultures of the world are not- At least in the past, we're not concerned about this. And I recall an anthropologist telling me once about this tribe in southern Ethiopia, and he said, "They don't seem to be concerned or harassed by time." And then he says, "They're so fortunate, they're so fortunate."

• 25:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back from our break, we're gonna take time to another dimension and bring in relativity to find out what that has to say about it. We'll see you in a moment. This is StarTalk Radio.

• 25:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host. And I have two special guest co-hosts with me, Chris Hardwick of The Nerdist.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 25:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Nerdist, popular podcast and TV show airing on BBC America.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, can I plug my book? I wrote a book.

• 25:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Plug my book, that's it.

• 25:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I bet it's called The Nerdist.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  It's called The Nerdist Way. We don't have to linger on it. It's a productivity book for nerds. I'm franked in the last page, so please put there. That's Matt Myra, one of my co-hosts.

• 25:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matt Myra, who they were visiting the East Coast, and I snatched them for this program. Thanks for joining us on StarTalk Radio. Do you really think nerds need help being productive?

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Yes, they need help focusing, they need time management as well.

• 26:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Time management.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Speaking about time.

• 26:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the computer games distract them.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  I know you're talking about like, an absolute idea of time, but I think perception of time is also very important. And I feel like what I've heard a lot of people say in the last two years is, "Where did the last year go? It's flying by." And I feel like our attention is so focused on...

• 26:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If the person who says that is the only person who thinks that way?

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have a different word for what happens. Psychologists have words. If you're the only one experiencing that time phenomenon?

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a different problem.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Then you're special?

• 26:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, you're special. The point of science is to find out what is going, apart from, you know, what is true beyond just your perception.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  But isn't perception important with time? Because it does affect how we... Yeah, on a different show, this is time time.

• 26:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Aw, dang.

• 26:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is real time.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  That just slapped me.

• 27:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tony, Professor Colgate, this is your expertise, calendars, clocks, time. But you have a deep anthropological dimension to your studies. Do you ever get to care much about emergent timekeeping ways and what its effect is on modern culture?

• 27:16Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. And I devoted a section to my earlier book, Empires of Time, to that discussion. And I'm just quite taken with this obsession that Western culture has with time. You started out by talking about the Roman calendar, and of course, before that, and that was precise enough, but before that, did you know that the year was based on the gestation period of cattle in the pre-Roman Empire? Three-hundred-and-seven-day year. It all goes back to this ecogenic thing that I'm going around preaching here.

• 27:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ecogenic, that's a cool word. So, we've been like worshiping cows for quite some time.

• 27:50Speaker 03

  Oh, they're delicious.

• 27:51Speaker 04

  Well, if you hang with cows, you know, you've got the meat, and the milk, and the blood, and...

• 27:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a machine for keeping humans alive.

• 27:58Speaker 04

  Cow calendar.

• 27:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A cow is a machine for keeping humans alive.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  So, basically, our calendar is built around a burger.

• 28:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A burger.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  That's really...

• 28:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I like about cows is you just put grass in on one end, and then your T-bone comes out the other.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  Perfect, perfectly cooked.

• 28:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so what we have is, time is not only a perception. We've got the Einstein, there's relativity. Time is relative. It's the rate of time that's relative, that's what that means. And if you go fast, many listeners already know this, if you're any kind of fan of physics, that if you go fast, your time will tick slower for you compared with others in observance of you. And so, if you want to go to another planet, another galaxy, and travel fast enough, you can travel arbitrarily fast, and you'll age arbitrarily slowly. The problem is, when you come back, thousands of years have gone by, and everyone would have forgotten about you.

• 28:47Speaker 04

  Ah, the twin paradox.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  You get Twilight-zoned.

• 28:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get zoned, I like that.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  You got zoned.

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get Twilight-zoned. But it's important to note there that that's not a perception of time, that's the actual flow of time. Particles know this, your biology, as a consequence of being composed of particles, knows it, your brain is all part of this conspiracy to have your time tick more slowly.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  So, how do they get around this in Star Trek, when they're traveling faster than light?

• 29:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, so they've got the warp drive.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Yes, warp space.

• 29:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And space, and then they cheat, and they cut a hole between the two corners that are now close to each other.

• 29:20Speaker 03

  They're enveloped in a static warp shell, everyone.

• 29:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that how you call it?

• 29:24Speaker 04

  But even the winner of the Indianapolis race aged less by 10 to the minus 27 seconds than his audience.

• 29:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they're competing for more than a trophy?

• 29:33Speaker 04

  He does look great. He looks great.

• 29:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just nerded us out there. You just out-nerded all three of us. So, so the winner of the Indy 500, by virtue of their speed, 200 miles an hour or so, for that long, ends up how much younger when they come back?

• 29:44Speaker 04

  Well, it's by virtue of the acceleration, actually.

• 29:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 29:47Speaker 04

  Something like 10 to the minus 27. Whenever you accelerate relative to the rest of the universe, your aging is different from the rest of the universe.

• 29:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not just speed. It's not just speed, it's the acceleration. In that case...

• 29:58Speaker 04

  So in effect, you control your own age, don't you? I mean, we're all controlling our own age by accelerating.

• 30:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So 7 billion people are aging slightly differently? Uh, well, because people on the equator are moving faster, being brought around in the full circumference of the earth than Santa Claus is. So, so Tony, you're saying that the Equatorians... That's why Santa lived forever. The Equatorians are, are, they're aging a little more slowly than Santa Claus.

• 30:20Speaker 04

  That's why I have an apartment in Quito.

• 30:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. I love Tony. And give me that time again that the Indianapolis 500 winner has aged less.

• 30:29Speaker 04

  I'd have to go back and calculate it. I did assign it as a physics problem once. I think it's something like 10 to the minus 27, but you better work the calculations again. It's pretty simple to work out.

• 30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  10 to the minus 27 seconds.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  Seconds, yeah.

• 30:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be a...

• 30:41Speaker 04

  That would be per race.

• 30:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A billion, billion, billionth of a second.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  Down under the femtos.

• 30:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every billion, billion, billionth of a second counts. Counts. Seriously.

• 30:50Speaker 04

  Until we've learned. It's kind of a good commercial for jogging, isn't it?

• 30:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, you know, so there's the, people talk about the biological perception of time. Chris, you would mention this earlier. What does it feel like? And, yeah, if you're in a hot room, it can feel like time is moving more slowly. So surely there are perceptions of time. But, science at its best, does its best to remove your perceptions from the, from your attempt to understand the natural world. Of course, it matters to psychologists. I'm not, I'm not saying it shouldn't matter. But, uh, it's, just because you think an hour passed, but actually six hours passed, I can't help you there. I'm having fun on StarTalk, so it's flying by. Okay.

• 31:27Speaker 04

  I think that's because we perceive nature as being something apart from our lives and ourselves, whereas the other cultures didn't. I mean, in most other cultures of the world, time is the activity itself, which is why you have harvest moon, hunter's moon, or you point your hand at the place in the sky. So I think that's, that's, that's definitely a factor that, that makes us different.

• 31:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and so that's, uh, it's interesting because in a day when we would connect ourselves to nature, now nobody's connected to nature.

• 31:54Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 31:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent point.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  We're connected to technology.

• 31:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Technology is our god.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  It's like this techno-nature that we live, this like cybernetic organism that is becoming the earth.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  And that in effect is what takes you back to this end of the world stuff, you know, because we don't, we're so dependent on the technology that we can't imagine doing anything without it. When I teach astronomy, I have my students measuring the positions of the stars using their hands and their arms and their legs.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  You jerk.

• 32:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Look, just pull out your iPad and there's the app for that.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, Pocket Universe, it's a piece of cake.

• 32:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tony does an app for that, okay? Get with the century.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Although, I like Tony, I kinda want Tony as a teacher now.

• 32:32Speaker 04

  You want me on your show, I know. You gotta plug my book.

• 32:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you know, if tech, if technology is guiding our time, we can't go without mention of the misbehaved neutrinos that the CERN supercollider found coming out of their machine. These are neutrinos they passed from Switzerland to Italy, they timed it, they got the GPS timings perfectly, and they found out that neutrinos were going faster than the speed of light, 10% faster.

• 32:58Speaker 04

  I got my nickel bet on Einstein, I'm sorry, I'm not ready for that.

• 33:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, my, my bet is on that, it's just a blunder. And I bet, I can bet more than a nickel too, I'm totally, yeah, it's probably a blunder because...

• 33:08Speaker 04

  I'm gonna bet they'll retract it within a couple of months, like, like a lot of things.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Oh, they got those Vespa's in Italy?

• 33:14Speaker 04

  The consequences are, are extraordinary, I think.

• 33:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and that would be fun if they, if it were that, but I, I remain unconvinced, actually.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  You guys just aren't ready for the future, that's all.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  No! Change is good.

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, is there a, um, you know, when you look at cycles, why, Tony, why are we so connected to cycles? Why do we even care?

• 33:38Speaker 04

  Well, day follows night, winter follows summer. I mean, I think, again, nature intrudes itself upon us and suggests that everything is cyclic. And so, we just cop the beat of nature. We cop the rhythm of nature. We start carving it in stone. We start making artifacts and so on out of it, and calendars is one of them. So, we take the cue from nature. And it'd all be different if we were on a different planet, of course.

• 34:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's right. And there's circadian rhythms. There's female gestation.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  I take melatonin when I travel to level out, you know, the amount of melatonin in my system for the circadian rhythm.

• 34:13Speaker 04

  Does it work? It doesn't work for me.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it works for me. Works for me. It's in your head, Chris. If that's all that matters to me, if it works in my head, then it still works.

• 34:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, Tony, I'm worried about something. I remember studies that show that if you took people into a basement and didn't show them any daylight or nighttime.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  What else do you do to them?

• 34:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let them take on their own cycle of sleep and awake. That they naturally migrate to a longer day than the 24-hour day.

• 34:39Speaker 04

  They do. And I think that maybe that's why we're so tired at night. You know, we'd like to have a longer day. There is a change.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, forget the sun.

• 34:47Speaker 04

  Still, I think, you know, it's interesting. You can't control. I know a biologist who can control the gestation period of women and the period, the interval between menstrual cycles, by putting them in a dark room. And I'm not telling you his name, because he'll get arrested.

• 35:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not his fault. It's the women who agreed to do that experiment.

• 35:08Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, they agreed. It's a psychological test that they do.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  I think you're talking about Buffalo Bill. That was a...

• 35:13Speaker 03

  Wait, guys. What happened to me in the basement?

• 35:15Speaker 04

  He was controlling the buffalo.

• 35:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Matt is still concerned about being in the basement. So, if our day is longer than the 24 hours, so that means our natural biology is fighting solar rhythms. That's what that tells us.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  So, you're saying that I could have a cycle that may last 36 hours or something?

• 35:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think typically, the average has been up around 28, 29, 30 hours.

• 35:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's in the 20s, upper 20s, 25, 28, something like that.

• 35:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Certainly not...

• 35:36Speaker 03

  I sleep longer than you guys.

• 35:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's certainly not 24. So, what that means is, as the moon continues to slow down the rotation of the earth, there will come a day when a day on earth actually matches. The cycle that is natural for the human body. Ooh. Someday. Someday. I could, that'll probably be in like a billion years, so.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  But like on a Thursday. I just need a plan.

• 35:56Speaker 04

  Then, of course, there is the story of the oysters who were taken out of New Haven Harbor.

• 36:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that story. Tell it.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  You know that?

• 36:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, tell it. I love it. Tell it.

• 36:03Speaker 04

  Well, it's interesting because they could, they could time the, the opening and closing of the valves of the oysters and, and, you know, according to the tide in New Haven Harbor. When they moved them to Northwestern, the Midwest, the oysters, low and behold, migrated. Uh, their opening and closing of valves to a cycle that matched what would be high and low tide, uh, somewhere near Chicago.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 36:27Speaker 04

  That's, that's pretty astounding. And, and nobody's ever explained why that's true. Oysters maybe have a memory of their own.

• 36:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oysters are happening. That's what that is.

• 36:35Speaker 03

  We just eat them.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  But they're, they're doing the same thing we did. I mean, they're just copying nature's rhythm.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  What if I put an oyster in a basement?

• 36:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's, you, you have a basement fixation. I'm not going into your basement.

• 36:44Speaker 04

  There's Tabasco in the basement.

• 36:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They have, they have movies about people with stuff in basements. When we come back to StarTalk Radio, more on this special edition that's all about time. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 37:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. You can find us on the web, starTalkRadio.net. Also, StarTalk Radio tweets. Guess what the Twitter handle is? StarTalkRadio. I too tweet at Neil Tyson if you want, not to know where I am or what I'm eating that day, but just you want some brain droppings of the cosmos. That's what comes out of me daily. My two, I have two special co-hosts. They, they're actually co-hosts of their own show, The Nerdist. Chris Hardwick, welcome to StarTalk Radio.

• 37:35Speaker 06

  Thank you very much.

• 37:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Matt, Matthew Myra, welcome to StarTalk Radio.

• 37:40Speaker 03

  That's very formal, but I'll take it.

• 37:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. And Tony Venney, professor of astronomy and anthropology, Colgate University from upstate New York, and author of the book, The End of Time, The Mayans.

• 37:51Speaker 04

  He's being here.

• 37:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, thanks. Thanks for coming. Uh, The Mayans in 2012, so we'll make sure we put that on our shelves to.

• 37:58Speaker 03

  Guys, the Mayans are, don't worry about that.

• 38:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They were clueless.

• 38:00Speaker 03

  They invented sideways basketball.

• 38:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Completely clueless.

• 38:04Speaker 04

  Don't you diss my Maya.

• 38:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that. So let's put that on a bumper sticker. Don't diss my Maya.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  I like sideways ball. We're gonna sell exactly one, and it's to Tony.

• 38:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you know, the, I want to just spend a couple of seconds on, on, on time zones. We've got, in principle, the sun is in a different place for every longitude on Earth at all times. So, everybody has a different local noon. Just to be convenient, we said, let's just bunch everybody up into one-hour increments. And so, we, we allowed ourselves to be binned this way. And so, technically, the Earth would then have 24 time zones. But, of course, politics gets in the way. Some countries like being different.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Arizona.

• 38:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Arizona doesn't even have daylight saving time.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Don't even talk to me about the central time zone, an hour programming earlier every night.

• 38:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a complete, and, and so, what it says is, an hour is just slop in our timekeeping. That's what it really says. And, I like these, some places or countries that, that, they're on the half-hour. I think they're just trying to be different, you know?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that sounds Euro to me.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  But you gotta blame it all on high-speed travel, don't you? Not, not Einstein kind of high-speed, but the railroads, traveling in longitude, you change time, so the time inside the train is different from the time outside the train, and that's where we got the zones from.

• 39:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, yeah, so, it's not only time zones, but we also have this funky thing called daylight saving time. And, I always liked the apocryphal story about the farmer who didn't want to switch because his crops needed the sunlight in the morning, rather than at the end of the day. And so, he said daylight saving time wasn't for him. I, I, I've always enchanted by that story.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Now, why do people get wonky when you cross several time zones? Like, why don't they just feel like, oh, this is the normal, I'm, I'm six hours later here?

• 39:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I do. I, I don't, I don't try to adapt to what everybody else is doing, I just...

• 39:51Speaker 04

  Well, it's because they don't take melatonin.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Yes, Tony, you're right. I'm in agreement with you 110%.

• 39:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all about the drugs. So, we have these time zones, but maybe, you can imagine an Earth where everyone just keeps the same time.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  I don't like that Earth.

• 40:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where, you don't like that Earth?

• 40:04Speaker 04

  Well, we do. I mean, universal time, of course, is the time all astronomers keep, but, um, that's, that's a minority.

• 40:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why the astronomers are like a tight group, because we all know what time to tell each other.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Do you guys hate Greenwich Mean Time, or do you love it?

• 40:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I like Greenwich Mean Time. That's the time through Greenwich, England, where they kept, they're the keepers of...

• 40:22Speaker 01

  GMT, guys, GMT.

• 40:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  GMT. That's the east-west boundary. You know, going back to my, my little workshop that I attended in Pennsylvania on time, on the time lords of the world.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  How did you get invited and why didn't I get invited?

• 40:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not divulging that. I have secret ways. I have access to the time lords. Uh, Bob Seaman talks about 500 years ago and 500 years from now and just how time reckoning mattered then versus how it might matter in the future. Particularly if you accumulate these leap seconds we were talking about until they themselves accumulated an hour. Let's find out.

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the rate we've been accumulating leap seconds, how many years into the future would you project that we would have accumulated an hour's worth of leap seconds?

• 41:04Speaker 06

  Uh, perhaps 500 years.

• 41:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only 500 years?

• 41:07Speaker 06

  Only 500 years. That is the right...

• 41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not that far. That's not that far.

• 41:10Speaker 06

  I agree. To an astronomer, that seems like tomorrow.

• 41:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, now 500 years ago, they were still trying to map the Earth. So is it audacious of us to think that our software that we're writing today is gonna matter 500 years from now?

• 41:24Speaker 06

  Well, some sort of software will matter 500 years from now. Of course, 500 years ago, clocks didn't exist as we know them. So this has happened entirely in this frame of time.

• 41:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so 500 years from now, they're saying, "Our ossaglop didn't exist back in the 21st century."

• 41:44Speaker 06

  You'll have to define that term for me.

• 41:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just some thing that they invent where it solves everything. And they'll look at how quaint our debates were about leap seconds. I think it's a little bit hubristic to imagine that 500 years from now, they will be running systems that use code that you're writing today.

• 42:03Speaker 06

  Well, what they will be using in 500 years is the Earth. The Earth will still be rotating, one certainly hopes, in this quirky fashion.

• 42:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we have geoengineering, we will just change the rotation of the Earth so that we wouldn't have to mess with our atomic time.

• 42:20Speaker 06

  That's actually been suggested and you can...

• 42:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa, you guys actually talked about this?

• 42:24Speaker 06

  Well, you know, over a beer.

• 42:28Speaker 06

  In addition to, you know, George Jetson ideas of putting rocket engines on the equator, you can see the signature of the ice caps melting, you can see the signature of water being impounded behind dams.

• 42:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you're saying is, as mass redistributes on Earth's surface, as glaciers melt into the ocean, that sort of weight used to be on land, now it's flowing in the waters, right? And you used to have a river, now you dam it, and you accumulate extra weight behind the dam. So this changes where the mass is on Earth's surface, and we learn in physics, that'll change the rotation rate of the Earth.

• 43:05Speaker 06

  That's exactly right, and not necessarily in ways that are obvious, because the ice caps are at altitude, so you're bringing the water closer down, the water tends to flow towards the equator because of centrifugal force, and personally, I couldn't tell you which, whether it would speed it up or slow it down.

• 43:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so like the ice skater, that's an obvious one, where the ice skater brings in the arms and they spin faster. It's a much more complex version of that problem.

• 43:29Speaker 06

  Yes, plus if the ice caps melt, the ice skater won't have anything to skate on.

• 43:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 43:33Speaker 06

  Burn.

• 43:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. So, that was Rob Seaman. Geoengineering. Geoengineering is really cool, I like the concept, because it means you're in control of your planet. Sure. You're not running from earthquakes and hurricanes.

• 43:47Speaker 04

  But in the, in the long run, though, the Earth is slowing down, the rotation is slowing down, and there's nothing that's gonna stop it.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  Rockets on the equator.

• 43:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tony, Tony, rockets on the, please, rockets on the equator, or we can arrange for there to be an earthquake, to redistribute the mass, so that it speeds up again.

• 44:03Speaker 04

  This sounds like a grassroots conspiracy to get out of having a longer show. I mean, face it, your show is gonna be longer if the day is long.

• 44:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, there you go, we can double up the time.

• 44:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're listening to StarTalk. Stay tuned for another segment.

• 44:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk Radio and this is the Cosmic Crib section. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm here with Steve Soder, friend and colleague, and the one, the only, inimitable, Bill Nye, the Science Guy.

• 44:44Speaker 07

  Good to be here.

• 44:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for the crib. And the crib part of StarTalk, we're just chilling. That's all we're doing.

• 44:49Speaker 07

  Chilling in the crib, which is a very nice crib.

• 44:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the crib is my office, basically. It's cozy, incandescently lit, and so...

• 44:57Speaker 07

  Hold on, hold on. These are mercury vapor fluorescents.

• 45:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, sorry.

• 45:02Speaker 07

  Engineers get no credit in this place. This is all we can do.

• 45:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Steve, you taught a class on climate change at New York University. And so you've become quite informed on this topic. You even thinking of writing a textbook on it, is that correct?

• 45:18Speaker 07

  Well, not a textbook now. I think it's going to be more a popular book.

• 45:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A popular book, okay. And so, tell me, what's going on?

• 45:27Speaker 07

  The Earth is getting warmer.

• 45:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, thank you. We're done with the climate change.

• 45:33Speaker 07

  You know, the correlation is somewhat, by many reckonings, a little stronger than the correlation between cigarettes and cancer.

• 45:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stronger, so that's good.

• 45:42Speaker 07

  The correlation between carbon dioxide emissions and warming. And humans caused carbon dioxide.

• 45:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's the best way to lay out this information to show to a class that you're teaching that this is real and they should be worried about it?

• 45:55Speaker 07

  Well, most of the warming is actually going into the ocean. Turns out only a few percent is warming the atmosphere. The atmosphere is kind of the tail wagging the dog, so it fluctuates from time to time. But the oceans are showing a steady increase of that heat, and that's eventually going to show up in the warming of...

• 46:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why isn't it showing up now?

• 46:13Speaker 07

  Well, some of it is.

• 46:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Why isn't all of it showing up now?

• 46:16Speaker 07

  Because the oceans have a huge capacity to hold heat, and the atmosphere doesn't.

• 46:20Bill Nye?

  If there are photon coming from the sun.

• 46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A photon of light.

• 46:25Bill Nye?

  Yes, it's a good chance you'll end up in the ocean.

• 46:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So the ocean is a repository.

• 46:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of this heat and drives a lot of the what goes on in the weather.

• 46:35Speaker 07

  Right, and also it's warming of the oceans is accelerating the warming of the ice caps.

• 46:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So oceans can also store carbon dioxide, can't they?

• 46:44Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 46:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is it doing...

• 46:45Speaker 07

  About a third of the carbon dioxide we're putting into the atmosphere goes into the ocean.

• 46:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So ocean's not only storing our excess carbon dioxide, it's also storing the heat.

• 46:53Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 46:53Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 46:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the ocean is like ready to, ready to blow.

• 46:57Bill Nye?

  Well, there's also, there's a lot of trouble with it. Uh, there's, you just don't realize how many organisms we depend on that live in the ocean when you change their ocean temperature.

• 47:07Speaker 07

  Well, it's not just changing the temperature, the, the added carbon dioxide in the ocean is also increasing the acidity of seawater.

• 47:13Bill Nye?

  Carbonic acid, which is what you get in your Coke bubble, Coca-Cola bubbles.

• 47:17Speaker 07

  That tends to dissolve shells, and so coral organisms and other shell-making organisms are going to be having increasing difficulty.

• 47:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Bill, you tell me if I put a seashell inside my Coke bottle and I come back tomorrow, it's gone?

• 47:30Bill Nye?

  Or come back after the weekend, yeah.

• 47:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, not tomorrow, the weekend?

• 47:34Bill Nye?

  You have never done that?

• 47:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'm sorry, I don't do this with my Coke bottles, no.

• 47:38Bill Nye?

  No, you put a piece of chalk in a soft drink.

• 47:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Limestone, chalk is limestone, you put it in a soft drink, it won't happen.

• 47:43Bill Nye?

  And come back in a couple of days, it's not there.

• 47:45Speaker 07

  That's what an antacid is, that's a, you know, Tums and those, you know, the petobismal, you put those in the acid and they dissolve, and they neutralize the acidity.

• 47:54Bill Nye?

  But this carbonic acid is a mild acid, but it's an acid.

• 47:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:59Bill Nye?

  And Steve, I'd love for you to comment on this. For me, as a, an interested student and then as a science educator, this stuff goes back to the original models of atmospheric trouble, which Carl Sagan pushed real hard with Nuclear Winter.

• 48:18Speaker 07

  The computer models are...

• 48:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me ask that another way. At what point did we start thinking of a global climate rather than local weather? At some point, we would have had the power to calculate...

• 48:29Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 48:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And was that a lot of that triggered by the global warming?

• 48:32Speaker 07

  No, actually...

• 48:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or by the nuclear winter episode?

• 48:34Speaker 07

  No, it goes back long before that. It was the discovery of the ice ages in the 19th century. It became clear that the climate had been much different in the past. That there were vast ice sheets that were covering much of Europe. And even where we are now in Manhattan, there were glaciers.

• 48:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there's remnants in Central Park.

• 48:52Speaker 07

  No.

• 48:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where the outcrop has whole striations right through it.

• 48:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. So people said, "How, what's going on? The climate hasn't always been the same. It's been changing." And one of the earliest hypotheses in the 1890s, beginning in the 1890s, was that it could be increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

• 49:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then what about the sun? We got, the sun goes through cycles. Solar flares. It heats up, it cools down a little bit.

• 49:18Speaker 07

  People looked at that, too. And in fact, probably variations in the sun have caused climate changes in the past, but it's not responsible for the one we're seeing now. Because we're watching the sun very closely from satellites above the atmosphere.

• 49:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we can watch that sun better than ever before.

• 49:32Speaker 07

  Yeah. And it's not doing anything that would account for the warming that we're seeing.

• 49:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:36Speaker 07

  But...

• 49:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the sun is not misbehaving. We are.

• 49:39Speaker 07

  No, we are. Exactly. We know how much carbon dioxide we're adding to the atmosphere. We can calculate how much warming that should be making of the oceans and the atmosphere. We observe the warming of the oceans and the atmosphere.

• 49:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What about...

• 49:49Speaker 07

  It tallies.

• 49:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What about the mini-ice age that happened in Europe? In the, what was it, the 1400s or 1500s?

• 49:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, there was a cooling period around that.

• 49:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What they call the mini-ice age?

• 49:57Speaker 07

  The little ice age.

• 49:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The little ice age.

• 49:59Speaker 07

  Yeah. It's, it may have been...

• 50:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, was it that way all around the world or just Europe? Europe is very Eurocentric.

• 50:05Speaker 07

  I think the best data are from the northern hemisphere, but it seems to have been having some global impact.

• 50:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 50:10Speaker 07

  And it turns out that one of the things that was happening then was a slowdown in solar activity.

• 50:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the what? The sun was...

• 50:17Speaker 07

  The sun may have been partly responsible for that. There were also increasing number of large volcanic eruptions during that time. And they put sulfuric acid into the stratosphere where it makes haze that can reflect more sunlight. So these kinds of effects, and acting together, might have been responsible for the little ice age.

• 50:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so... But here's the thing of it. The thing of it is what? About it? This analysis is wonderful, and we need to keep it up.

• 50:44Bill Nye?

  Using space assets, especially satellites, buoys that record ocean temperatures and so on.

• 50:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, and height, too.

• 50:52Bill Nye?

  Depth, yeah.

• 50:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of depth, yeah?

• 50:54Bill Nye?

  Yeah. But humans are making the, the world heat up, and we've got to get to work on solving this problem as fast as we can. That's the top, middle, and bottom lines. And so this...

• 51:05Speaker 07

  There's been natural climate change, but it's usually been slow, over hundreds or thousands of years. It's the speed, it's the rate and the magnitude of the, of the forcing, that's what climatologists say, that we're exerting on the atmosphere.

• 51:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so a change of climate is not in and of itself bad.

• 51:23Speaker 07

  No.

• 51:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just that we created civilization under a certain kind of climate.

• 51:27Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 51:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And now we are responsible for changing that climate.

• 51:30Speaker 07

  Well, for the last 10,000 years, the climate has been unusually stable, if you look at the entire record.

• 51:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you had to pick a climate, would you prefer global warming or Ice Age?

• 51:38Speaker 07

  Well, with our civilization is adapted to the present climate, so we don't want to mess with that.

• 51:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't want either?

• 51:45Speaker 07

  Right. I mean, Ice Age would be bad news, too, but it would come on very, very slowly. It takes a long time to accumulate giant ice caps, winter after winter.

• 51:56Bill Nye?

  So, the thing is that we're going to displace enormous populations. Now, in the developed world, we have highways...

• 52:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The ones that are along the coastline?

• 52:02Bill Nye?

  Yes, where most people live.

• 52:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 52:05Bill Nye?

  And, uh, when the developed world, we can do that, albeit expensively, but in the, in the developing world, it's just nothing but trouble.

• 52:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, human evolution?

• 52:15Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 52:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Uh, how much has that been influenced by any shifts in climate throughout history?

• 52:20Speaker 07

  Well...

• 52:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we're in the middle of one right now.

• 52:22Speaker 07

  Yeah. We evolved, uh, our, uh, ancestors in East Africa, uh, in the last couple million years, and it was in a time when the climate was there was slowly getting cooler and drier, and it was, uh... Destroying or, or, or cutting into the forests and replacing them with grasslands. So our ape-like ancestors were forced to come down from the trees and to an environment where they were then more vulnerable to predators like cats. And so this was something that probably favored the evolution, the, there's an evolutionary selection pressure for legs that could run and for intelligence that could make weapons.

• 53:03Speaker 07

  And so some people think that this climate change did play a role in the origin-

• 53:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is, climate change in Africa several million years ago enabled us to become human, without which we might still be swinging in the trees in Africa?

• 53:16Speaker 07

  Yes, that is, that is one prevailing view today.

• 53:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is an astonishing fact.

• 53:20Speaker 07

  It's hard to prove a thing like, not a fact, but it's a-

• 53:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an astonishing hypothesis.

• 53:23Speaker 07

  It's an astonishing hypothesis that may turn out to be right.

• 53:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, and plus if you walk bipedally, then you can see at a much greater distance.

• 53:30Speaker 07

  You can see further.

• 53:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your hands are freed up to make tools.

• 53:32Speaker 07

  That's the big-

• 53:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can bust some, some feline heads.

• 53:35Speaker 07

  You can also look up and begin to understand then what the, the stars are doing with the seasons.

• 53:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can invent astronomy.

• 53:43Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 53:44Bill Nye?

  No, but the ability to, to free up your hands, that's just, no, really, it changed a lot of-

• 53:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, think about it, nobody else has got hands to do that.

• 53:52Bill Nye?

  Well, people, they're people. Organisms have hands and claws and-

• 53:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can bust your head while we're running.

• 53:57Bill Nye?

  That's right.

• 53:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 53:59Bill Nye?

  And apparently the deal, by the way, if this, I hope this doesn't come, this push come to shove with the chimpanzee, but apparently they're very strong and they'll pull your arm out of your socket.

• 54:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are you thinking of the movie?

• 54:11Bill Nye?

  Uh, well-

• 54:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Planet of the Apes?

• 54:13Bill Nye?

  Uh, sure, but-

• 54:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was push come to shove if they had a left one.

• 54:18Bill Nye?

  Yeah, but you can outrun them, apparently. Humans are, what humans bring to the party is ability to run. And that's apparently contributed, we are losing the hair on our body and here we are.

• 54:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Between the two of you, what would you say is the single most dangerous, single most dangerous consequence of global warming to us?

• 54:36Speaker 07

  It's going to involve water. Yeah. It's going to be droughts and floods, that is too much or too little water, and it's going to be sea level rise.

• 54:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go.

• 54:44Bill Nye?

  That's exactly right. And the main thing is the speed at which it is happening. That's what we're not ready for. Talking about decades of timescales, not millennia.

• 54:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not centuries or millennia.

• 54:56Bill Nye?

  Yeah. And people just are not going to be able to get it done fast enough.

• 54:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get it done.

• 55:00Bill Nye?

  It's going to be a mess.

• 55:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what do you do? Do you move the city inland? I mean, what do you?

• 55:04Bill Nye?

  Well, we'll start, I believe, in the developed world, we'll start out like Holland, with dikes and levees and so on, and flood control.

• 55:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 55:12Bill Nye?

  But the, um, what I always say about climate change, really the thing to do is everything all at once. Everything that we could do to alleviate or mitigate or address or get ready for changing climate will help.

• 55:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it too late, Steve? If the ocean already has a store of carbon dioxide and heat, and even if we stop now, the world will still get hotter for how long?

• 55:35Speaker 07

  Uh, probably for at least a hundred years.

• 55:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 55:39Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 55:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if we stop all of this now, we will not benefit from our frugality?

• 55:44Speaker 07

  We'll benefit to some extent, but, uh...

• 55:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it'll benefit three, four generations down.

• 55:48Speaker 07

  Even more so, yeah.

• 55:50Bill Nye?

  Uh, the, um, it's really important, everybody, to address this as quickly as possible. The idea that you can put it off is what's gotten us in so much trouble already.

• 56:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I have a happy note or something?

• 56:04Bill Nye?

  Well, you have to be optimistic.

• 56:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Optimistic, I am optimistic.

• 56:07Bill Nye?

  You have to believe you can change things as you want, so let's get it done. It'll be fun, people.

• 56:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill Nye's mantra in this world?

• 56:13Bill Nye?

  Change the world.

• 56:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Change the world. Thanks for joining us in the Cosmic Crib. This is Neil deGrasse Tyson, signing off for StarTalk.