StarTalk All-Stars at Star Trek Mission NY – The Science of Star Trek

Join us for StarTalk All-Stars recorded at the Star Trek Mission: New York 50th Anniversary. Featuring astrophysicist and StarTalk All-Stars host Charles Liu, Chuck Nice, astrophysicist/All-Stars host Summer Ash and author Andrew Fazekas. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Find out more at https://www.startalkradio.net/startalk-all-access/

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk.

• 0:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And tonight, we're featuring our spate of StarTalk All-Stars, led by Charles Liu, a friend and colleague, and he's our geek-in-chief with all things obscure and all things geek, especially as it relates to Star Trek. This 50th anniversary of the first run of the series, I'm old enough to remember back then. I remember sort of celebrating what that world was. Little disks that had data on it. You put it in a box and information would come out. There are other boxes where hot food would come out instantly. These things that were in so far distant future,

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  you can barely imagine that they'll ever occur. I also tried to, I had pretty strong grip at the time, I tried to grab people's shoulders and paralyze them the way Spock did. Never worked. So that's the only part of that I didn't believe. That and the fact that doors would open automatically. I thought that was an impossibly far prediction for the future. How could a door possibly know that you're walking up to it? You can never know that. I don't know. It's magic. So anyway, y'all have a good time tonight. And StarTalk is all about learning science in the context of pop culture. That's exactly what's going on. So I leave you in good hands. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, signing off.

• 1:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As always, bidding you to keep looking up.

• 1:38Charles Liu?

  I am Charles Liu. I am an astrophysics professor at the City University of New York's College of Staten Island, and this is StarTalk All-Stars Live.

• 1:59Charles Liu?

  This is our first live all-star show, and we're really excited to do it here. I cannot think of a better place to do it than here at the Star Trek Mission New York on the 50th anniversary of the original series of Star Trek. So, thank you all for being here. We can't wait to hear your questions and your comments, but right now, let me bring on our wonderful panel. Joining me tonight first as my comedic co-host, Mr. Chuck Nice.

• 2:34Chuck Nice?

  Chuck.

• 2:35Charles Liu?

  Chuck.

• 2:36Chuck Nice?

  How are you, buddy?

• 2:37Charles Liu?

  I am well, thank you.

• 2:38Chuck Nice?

  And thank you all for coming. It's a pleasure to have you all here, and we certainly appreciate Neil beaming in from his Catskills hideaway.

• 2:48Charles Liu?

  Catskills?

• 2:49Chuck Nice?

  Did you see all those trees in the background? I don't know where he was, man.

• 2:52Charles Liu?

  Yeah, there's only the Catskills. Could there be that many trees?

• 2:55Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. There's only two places in the world where there could be that many trees. The Catskills is one of them.

• 3:00Charles Liu?

  Central Park is the other, maybe?

• 3:01Chuck Nice?

  I was actually thinking Brooklyn Park, you know.

• 3:04Charles Liu?

  Oh, man, okay, all right, good. Well, Chuck, you are a regular on StarTalk. We've done many episodes together, right? And now, we can add all-stars to that list.

• 3:15Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely, and it's very cool.

• 3:16Charles Liu?

  A lot of fun, right?

• 3:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 3:17Charles Liu?

  Okay, and you know, you may not realize just how much Trek this gentleman has flowing in his...

• 3:26Chuck Nice?

  Oh, we don't need to go into that.

• 3:27Charles Liu?

  Yes, we do.

• 3:28Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 3:29Charles Liu?

  Yes, we do.

• 3:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm a huge Trek, uh, huge Treker. I've been a fan since, uh, as long as I can remember. And I feel very good that I'm in a place where I really don't have to hide it. You know? That's very cool.

• 3:46Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 3:48Chuck Nice?

  You know?

• 3:50Charles Liu?

  We have two wonderful, wonderful science guests today. The first one, a friend of mine whom I've known for many years, my first time sharing a microphone with her, from Columbia University. Please welcome Summer Ash.

• 4:11Charles Liu?

  Summer. I know, isn't this great? In addition to being on StarTalk's new All-Stars, right? And being a host, a StarTalk All-Star host, you're also an astrophysicist, a director of outreach for the Department of Astronomy at Columbia, you're a freelance journalist, an in-house astrophysicist for various cool television-type things, a blogger, a writer, a Twitterer, and you totally understand what it means when we fuse science with fiction and put it on television.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  I hope so. I like that area.

• 4:46Charles Liu?

  Yeah, if it's not you, I can't imagine who else would do it. I'm so glad that you're here, thank you.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  Thank you, Charles.

• 4:51Charles Liu?

  And, all the way from Canada, William Shatner's home country, may we add, there is someone that I just met today, I'm very, very, very happy to introduce you all to the person who wrote this book, Star Trek: The Official Guide to Our Universe, Andrew Fazekas.

• 5:21Charles Liu?

  Andrew, thank you so, so much for coming in. The audience may or may not know already that he is the Night Sky Guy. You are a TV broadcaster, Andrew, a syndicated radio columnist, you write the weekly Starstruck column for Nat Geo News. And since William Shatner wrote the foreword to this book, I think it is only fair that you spend a moment describing what is now the official guide to our universe from the Star Trek perspective. Let us know what you were trying to tell us, and then we'll get right into the science from that book and others. Go.

• 5:57Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I mean, this is a labor of love for me. I mean, I'm... I am in, I'm in heaven with this because this has been a book I've been working on for, I guess about 10 years, 10 years I've been working on this thing. Two years of, you know, hard labor, watching Star Trek episodes.

• 6:14Charles Liu?

  Oh, hard labor, yeah.

• 6:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, movies, you know, scene by scene. And, you know, what I've done here is cherry picked episodes and movie scenes that really reflect, I think, the, the science of, the real science so well, particularly astronomical science. My, my kinda, my shtick is really showing people the night sky. That's what I've been doing for, I don't know, about 30 years now. And since I was a little kid, I've been taking out a telescope and trying to get people excited about the night sky, you know, like grab them and say, "Come on, that is, that's the rings of Saturn, man."

• 6:52Charles Liu?

  That would do it. What you just did there made me want to grab a telescope and get out there.

• 6:56Speaker 04

  See, that's what I'm talking about. That's what I said. So that's really what I love about this. And this book sort of, I guess what I like to call it is a Vulcan mind meld of two of my passions, right? This stargazing and Star Trek coming together in one, one volume here.

• 7:11Charles Liu?

  Your thoughts to my thoughts, Andrew. Your mind to his mind. Where is Vulcan in the sky? Where is Cardassia Prime? Where is Romulus? Where are these things? What is the answer to this question? You guys are the astrophysicists. The answer very basically is they're all in our Milky Way Galaxy.

• 7:39Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 7:40Charles Liu?

  Right? You've heard of the quadrants? We live in which quadrant? Alpha, right? And what is in the Gamma Quadrant?

• 7:53Charles Liu?

  The Dominion? What is in the Delta Quadrant?

• 7:58Charles Liu?

  Voyager? Well, no, they came home. They came home. They came home.

• 8:03Charles Liu?

  The Borg? So what the heck is in the Beta Quadrant? Does anybody know? Rigel?

• 8:12Charles Liu?

  What are these quadrants? Summer, what is a quadrant in a galaxy? What is the quadrants of our galaxy? And why do we only go in our galaxy? Why don't we go beyond our galaxy?

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Because it's huge compared to us.

• 8:26Charles Liu?

  Is it huge or is it yu-?

• 8:30Chuck Nice?

  It depends on if Donald Trump is talking about it.

• 8:34Chuck Nice?

  If Trump says it, then it's huuuuuge.

• 8:37Charles Liu?

  Well, Bernie also said, "yu-"

• 8:39Chuck Nice?

  That's huge.

• 8:40Charles Liu?

  Huge? Okay. That's the Brooklyn huge, everybody. Remember, we are in New York after all. Yes, just tell us, what is the size of our galaxy? And how come even with Warp, being able to go up to 9.4 when we're trying to chase down the Borg in The Best of Both Worlds Part 2, can't we exit our galaxy?

• 8:57Speaker 03

  Because we can't even exit our solar system yet. The galaxy is so big. It's at least 100,000 light-years across. We're about 2/3 of the way from the sun, so each half of it is about 50,000 light-years. And the farthest that we've sent something right now is one of the Voyager probes. And that is pretty much still around like, what, 23 hours away?

• 9:26Charles Liu?

  23 light-hours away.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  23 light-hours.

• 9:28Charles Liu?

  Barely a light-day.

• 9:30Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  So 50,000 years is not happening. And, you know, we could go up or down, but that's at least, that's on the scale of hundreds of light-years still. So anytime, first of all, this is just a fun fact, point of information. Anytime somebody shows you a picture of the Milky Way, it's not the Milky Way. It's a very nice artistic impression of the Milky Way, or it's an example of a spiral galaxy, and it's a picture of another spiral galaxy that we can see from our galaxy. Because we just can't even send something out to take a picture like that.

• 10:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, you've got to remember that we are in the galaxy, right? We are, our viewpoint here from Earth is embedded within one of the arms, the humdrum suburbs of the galaxy, right? Because it's sort of like a pinwheel shape, right? So we're on one of the arms that are spreading out from the central bulge of the galaxy, and we're embedded there inside this arm. And so our viewpoint really is only of a partial of the galaxy. Have we actually seen the entire? Have we been able to map the entire galaxy?

• 10:38Speaker 03

  We haven't mapped every single star, but there are projects that are doing that. So there's Gaia, and there's a new one that I can't think of. But Gaia is a project that is trying to map hundreds of thousands of stars in our galaxy. And we can take pictures. So actually, one picture, there's a one-picture exception. And it's if you see a picture of the Milky Way that looks like a strip, that's basically a panoramic that somebody has taken from Earth, and it looks like a dusty plain with stars, and you can't see through to the middle because there's actually, for as empty as space is, like the vacuum of space, there's still a lot of stuff in it. And most of it is gas and dust. And it gets in the way, and it blocks starlight from us

• 11:22Speaker 03

  when we're trying to look with optical wavelengths, like our eyes. But the Milky Way looks gorgeous from inside. And I have to say, I think we're in the prettiest suburb I've ever been in.

• 11:32Speaker 04

  So really, we are like little tiny fish in a vast ocean trying to map the ocean. We would be like Nemo trying to find Dory.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Trying to find a lot of Doris.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  With or without Sigourney Weaver's assistance.

• 11:50Chuck Nice?

  I just love the fact that you're mixing mediums here, so it's totally cool.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  This is what we do on StarTalk. We mix everything. So again.

• 12:00Charles Liu?

  Nemo's finding Dory, we're finding Vulcan, right? We're looking for Cardassia, we're looking for Bajor, all these wonderful places that supposedly exist. And let me ask you the following: if we find them, how will we know that they are habitable? What is the classification, Andrew? How do we know something is a world where actually there's something? Never mind the, you know, sort of fictional way of saying, "Oh, anything can live anywhere," right? Which is true, but non-fictionally, what do we need to look for to make sure that life actually can live somewhere on a planet?

• 12:34Speaker 04

  Well, right now, one of the big criteria out there that scientists use is looking at this habitable zone around a star, right? So this is what we affectionately call the Goldilocks zone, right? It's not too hot, not too cold. And on the surface of a planet, that is meaning that how far away it is from its parent star. So in terms of liquid water being able to exist on the surface. So if the planet would be too far away from its parent star, then the water would basically freeze out on the planet, right?

• 13:13Charles Liu?

  So this most recent discovery of Proxima B, right? Those of you who've heard this, Proxima Centauri is probably the closest star to us, a mere four and a quarter or so light-years away from Earth. Most recent studies, after literally decades of people trying to find a planet around there, seem to suggest that there is a planet there, maybe one to two times the mass of our planet, orbiting in what we might consider that habitable zone. Is there life there?

• 13:44Speaker 04

  At this point, I don't think we can just, it's speculation, right? And we haven't really, we have to remember, we haven't actually observed the planet. We haven't actually directly imaged this planet. We're detecting the effect that the planet has on its parent star, right? In this case, we're looking at wobbles of the star. Because as planets go around their host star, the star actually ends up... ...wobbling because of the gravitational pull and tug of that of those planets. And what's amazing is that we have such exquisitely sensitive enough instruments today that we can actually take those wobbles, measure them, and and understand like what how many planets are orbiting around that star, what their masses are.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  But to take it to the next level is what I think would be would really take is understand like, does it have an atmosphere? We know that it's one to like in Proxima B case, we know that it's one to two times the mass of the Earth. And with our understanding of planetary physics, we think that it's a it's a it's a rocky terrestrial type planet, so has a rocky surface, someplace solid we could land on, right? But does it have an atmosphere, for instance? We don't know that.

• 14:57Charles Liu?

  Summer, how do we find out whether there's atmospheres around other planets? Is there a technique or techniques that actually will give us that scientific handle on whether there's gas surrounding a planet?

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely, but it requires a chance alignment because so the method that Andrew's talking about is making use of this wobble. But there's another method that's called the transit method, which is when the star actually goes, sorry, the planet goes in front of the star and blocks the star's light from us, and we see a dip in that star's light. But that can only happen if, you know, that solar system is in line with our point of view. And in theory, the stars and all of their potential planets are in random directions from us. So not every star is going to have its planets going between us and them.

• 15:49Speaker 03

  But when they do, the cool thing is that you can actually monitor the star's light, not just the brightness, but actually the content of that starlight, the metallicity, sort of the spectrum of that star, what type of elements it has. And when the planet goes in front of it, if there's an atmosphere, some of that light goes through the planet's atmosphere. And then that changes what the starlight that we record is. And we can subtract one from the other, because when the planet goes around the back of the star, then that signal goes away. So you can figure out what the atmosphere of that planet, what elements it's likely to have.

• 16:26Charles Liu?

  And Chuck, what would you do if you found a comedy club on Proxima B?

• 16:31Chuck Nice?

  I probably would make sure they have air first.

• 16:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and then maybe I might take a booking.

• 16:40Charles Liu?

  The first ever stand-up in space. Andrew, you had something else to add on Proxima?

• 16:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I just think that I'm so excited when I hear that. The idea of being able to have this, um, this, uh, chemical fingerprint of the atmosphere. Because let's take that to the next step. If we could actually detect the chemistry of an atmosphere of an exoplanet, we, and we could tell what, what's there. Imagine if we found things like methane, or, uh, you know, oxygen.

• 17:11Charles Liu?

  Wait, wait, methane is like cow farts. Why would I be excited about finding cow farts?

• 17:15Speaker 03

  Because cows are on the planet.

• 17:17Speaker 04

  Exactly. Cows, I mean, come on.

• 17:19Chuck Nice?

  It's also the, it's also the funniest planet, let's be real.

• 17:22Charles Liu?

  Farts do make everything funnier, right? Just ask Dr. Nina Stroming.

• 17:25Chuck Nice?

  It's just a rule.

• 17:26Charles Liu?

  Yeah, okay.

• 17:27Speaker 04

  Exactly. Think about it, it's a potentially a sign of life, right? Potentially, uh, and, uh, or things like chlorophyll. Hmm, that, wouldn't that be interesting? Or how about, uh, greenhouse gases, or something like that? So, there could be some very interesting findings that could indicate very clearly that there would potentially be life on these planets.

• 17:49Charles Liu?

  Wonderful.

• 17:50Speaker 03

  Can I just say that I think it's really funny that the nearest star to us is the one that took us so long to find a planet around? It's kind of like when you're, like, looking for your glasses and you can't find them and they're on your head.

• 18:01Charles Liu?

  That is an excellent point. Yeah, no, I think that's a very good point. Sometimes the most difficult things to find are the things that are right nearby, but faint.

• 18:08Chuck Nice?

  Proxima B, you were there all the time.

• 18:13Charles Liu?

  Wait, isn't there a song from the 1980s like that? "The search is over. You were with me all the while."

• 18:27Charles Liu?

  So you all are here. Thank you again for joining us for our StarTalk All-Stars first live show here at Star Trek Missions New York. On the 50th anniversary of this wonderful show, Star Trek and everything has come as a result of it. We're gonna zoom out a little bit now and talk a little bit about some of the science about the cosmos that shows up. You've heard now about the planets, about the Earth, about planets. Now let me ask you about the universe itself. And the first thing I'm gonna ask you is warp drive. We have to know about warp drive. Obviously, the only reason you can get from one place to another in any reasonable time before the show gets canceled is warp drive, right? So how can warp drive actually work?

• 19:11Charles Liu?

  Does space-time actually warp? Summer?

• 19:16Speaker 03

  It does.

• 19:18Chuck Nice?

  Well, we've cleared that up.

• 19:21Charles Liu?

  Now we can move on.

• 19:22Chuck Nice?

  Now you can move on with your lives because warp drive works.

• 19:25Charles Liu?

  Hold up, duh, duh. She said space warps, but can we use it to drive? Because I wanna mention a Mexican physicist in a little while that came up with something. But please, Summer, first tell us, how does space warp exactly?

• 19:42Speaker 03

  Oh, so space warps because, like Charles said, space and time are kind of this thing together. And they're this fabric of the universe, we say. But one of the things... Oh, look. Props. Yes, so here's the fabric of the universe. And anything in the universe that has mass is gonna warp that fabric.

• 20:07Chuck Nice?

  By the way, the fabric of the universe is a fine silk. Just in case you were wondering.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  It's about 70 cents a yard.

• 20:15Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  So, things with mass, actually, this is what Einstein's theory of gravitation tells us. Basically says that because space and time are one, an object in spacetime warps the area around it. And so that's why objects that get within a certain distance of something more massive than them will fall towards it and eventually go into orbit around it. And so this will happen, I mean, you're warping space right now.

• 20:44Charles Liu?

  I am one?

• 20:45Speaker 03

  Yes. Everybody in here is exerting gravity on everybody else.

• 20:51Chuck Nice?

  I thought I smelled that.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  No such thing as personal space. But none of us are big enough to outweigh the other thing that's attracting all of us, which is the Earth beneath your feet. So it's warping space, so we're stuck to it.

• 21:05Charles Liu?

  All right, well, that's nice. I have here, by the way, my original series-era communicator, right? Which we will use as a prop to define gravity. Okay, so there is the communicator warping space and time. So, why can't we just use warp drive? Why can't we just warp space and time in front of us and before us and just drive on through?

• 21:28Speaker 03

  I don't know, do you have enough mass just sitting in your storage area to do that?

• 21:32Charles Liu?

  So we need mass.

• 21:33Speaker 03

  That's mine.

• 21:34Charles Liu?

  Chuck?

• 21:35Chuck Nice?

  I'm fresh out of mass, but thanks.

• 21:38Charles Liu?

  Man, Andrew, got any mass you can spare?

• 21:41Speaker 04

  No, I need everything I can get.

• 21:43Charles Liu?

  How much mass precisely will we need to warp space and time to such an extent that we actually travel? Okay? Well, let me tell you something that somebody said in about 1994, there was a Mexican physicist named Miguel Acubiere. Miguel Acubiere wrote a paper speculating that it might be possible for something in a bubble to move faster than the speed of light through space, even though you cannot move through space at or faster than the speed of light if you have any mass at all. Alcubierre hypothesized that the mathematical equations of general relativity were flexible enough

• 22:28Charles Liu?

  that if you could create an asymmetric bubble in spacetime, one part compressed, one part expanded, it would propel whatever's inside that bubble forward through space at faster than the speed of light, or even slower, faster, doesn't matter, right? So that would be very cool.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:49Charles Liu?

  Does that make any scientific sense?

• 22:54Charles Liu?

  Andrew?

• 22:56Speaker 04

  It's theoretically possible, but can we actually build a spaceship that would have enough power, generate enough power to do that, bend spacetime?

• 23:08Charles Liu?

  Well, apparently all we need is some antimatter and a dilithium crystal, right? Right, that's all you need. Isn't that a nice thing to do? But in true physics, how much mass would be necessary? Would a planet-sized object be enough to do that kind of warping of spacetime?

• 23:25Speaker 03

  Charles, I'm an astronomer, not a physicist.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  Just kidding.

• 23:32Charles Liu?

  That was very Bones McCoy of you.

• 23:37Charles Liu?

  "I'm astronomer, not a physicist, damn it!"

• 23:41Charles Liu?

  Actually, do you all know the difference between an astronomer and astrophysicist, right? When I am on an airplane and someone sits down next to me and says, "Hey, so what do you do for a living?" If I want to speak with this person, I say, "I'm an astronomer!" And if I would rather be quiet and not speak with a person, I say, "I'm an astrophysicist."

• 24:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, that works every time.

• 24:06Charles Liu?

  But I know that you have a specialty in radio astronomy, Summer. You understand things that produce radio waves out in the universe.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're the coolest.

• 24:17Charles Liu?

  They are cool. Can you give us a sense of, say, two or three such things that we have run into? Or by "we," I mean the Enterprise X, A, B, C, D, E.

• 24:31Charles Liu?

  That's enough.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 24:32Charles Liu?

  Yeah, we'll stop there.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, stars give off radio waves, actually.

• 24:36Charles Liu?

  Really?

• 24:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, they're just not the brightest in the sky, but like our sun. So any given star is gonna show up if you look at it with a radio-type of telescope.

• 24:45Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  And also, I just want to clarify, because this can be a source of misconception. Radio, even the radio that most of us don't have anymore, we have wireless, we have Spotify and Pandora, but the radio in your car, the radio, your old boombox, for those of us that know what those are, that radio's light, actually. So your radio is picking up a light signal that's in radio frequencies, and then it's turning it into sound that comes out of the speakers. So when we talk about the radio universe, we're not talking about picking up, I mean, we can pick up sound signs, sorry, signals that we can turn into sound. But radio astronomy is looking at things with radio telescopes, and you can see the

• 25:29Speaker 03

  coolest types of light, so you can see supermassive black holes, and they look nothing like an actual galaxy. So you can see a pretty picture of a spiral galaxy, and then you put on your radio glasses, and it just looks like giant jets just spewing out into space and shooting particles and hot plasma out there, to like scales 10 times the size of the galaxy.

• 25:49Chuck Nice?

  But can you pick up a classic rock station?

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Uh, yes.

• 25:55Charles Liu?

  How about some classics?

• 25:56Speaker 03

  It's extragalactic FM.

• 25:59Charles Liu?

  How about some classic surfer punk while you are driving an old starship through a whole bunch of drones that are heading toward a really, really oddly gravitational space station?

• 26:11Charles Liu?

  How real was that? How possible is it? For those of you who haven't seen the most recent Star Trek movie yet...

• 26:18Chuck Nice?

  Spoiler.

• 26:19Charles Liu?

  Too bad. Sorry.

• 26:22Charles Liu?

  But...

• 26:22Chuck Nice?

  Is there anyone who hasn't seen the most recent Star Trek movie?

• 26:25Charles Liu?

  Oh, no. Don't worry, we haven't given up anything significant yet.

• 26:30Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 26:30Charles Liu?

  Okay?

• 26:31Chuck Nice?

  By the way, just because you should have seen it by now, Picard ends up pregnant.

• 26:39Chuck Nice?

  Sorry.

• 26:41Chuck Nice?

  Sue me.

• 26:45Charles Liu?

  Right, so that is a very interesting science that was shown in that particular space station, right? Andrew, if you saw that movie, you saw that people were walking up and down, sideways, left and right, and so on. Was that some weird artificial gravity effect, or can that actually happen in real physics? That's a good question. I'd ask the astronomer person, right? Come on, Summer, you're a physicist as much as I am.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  So, actually, I did not see it. Oh, but I do know about creating artificial gravity.

• 27:17Charles Liu?

  Yes, imagine a smorgasbord of weird things, like going this way, your escalators going this way, like an Escherian painting, and yet your hand is drawing your other hand while your brain is up here, and the environmental system is spewing out this black stuff, okay? Or not?

• 27:34Speaker 03

  Were you on anything when you were watching that?

• 27:36Charles Liu?

  Well, the popcorn butter was pretty darn amazing, I have to say, it's true. But yes, tell us about artificial gravity. Is there actually physics to artificial gravity?

• 27:46Speaker 03

  I believe there is. So, in, some good examples of it are in 2001, the spinning space station. So, the fact is that, once you're spinning, you're forced away from the center of rotation. And so, you can put the wall there, that then becomes your floor. And I think it was also in Elysium, and it was in Interstellar. And so, in Interstellar, they were like floating through the space station, and you could see the gravity change at different points. When they were going from one side to the other.

• 28:28Charles Liu?

  Let the woman finish!

• 28:36Charles Liu?

  Come on, man, we need some atmosphere.

• 28:39Chuck Nice?

  So is there a way to make artificial gravity the way you see it portrayed in most sci-fi without the spinning? So the physics of the spinning, of course, that makes sense with the certain trepital force, but when you see a ship and it's just traveling and everyone is just not floating, is there a way to feasibly create that environment?

• 29:01Speaker 03

  No.

• 29:02Charles Liu?

  Aw, man.

• 29:04Chuck Nice?

  I am so sorry I asked that question.

• 29:06Charles Liu?

  Well, okay.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  I would love to have that.

• 29:09Charles Liu?

  Well, what about gravitational waves?

• 29:11Speaker 03

  That's a whole different ballgame.

• 29:12Charles Liu?

  Yeah, because we were talking about like warping spacetime, right? And recently, a very, very big deal was made of gravitational waves. Can we not just surf along a gravitational wave and actually like travel wherever you end up? How does that work?

• 29:27Speaker 03

  Actually, what I would really like to get are the boots that Chatham, Channing Tatum had in Jupiter Ascending, because as he described it, they, they change differential equation slips so you can surf them, which makes total sense, right?

• 29:40Charles Liu?

  Well, it does to me. Ah, ah, ah. Sorry, everybody.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  So, yeah, so gravitational waves are, so Charles had his fabric of spacetime there.

• 29:50Charles Liu?

  Oh, right. They go two to two.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  And gravitational waves are basically when there are two massive things that end up merging, two black holes in this case. So two black holes, one was, they were roughly both 30 masses, one was a little higher, one was a little lower.

• 30:05Charles Liu?

  30 times the mass of the sun, yes.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  Exactly, sorry. 30 times the mass of our sun. And they were orbiting each other because actually, most stars exist in binary systems. Our sun is kind of an exception, but we think 2/3 of the stars in the galaxy are roughly that. I'm not sure if that's changed, but binaries. And a lot of times, they, they can evolve in lockstep, or they can evolve one ahead of the other, but you can actually get cases where you have two black holes as the result of a binary at the end of their lives. And they are warping spacetime and they're actually losing energy, so they're falling towards each other, and then eventually, they speed up, speed up, speed up, and then merge. And then, all of spacetime goes rippling out, kind of like somebody threw a massive rock in a pond.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  And so that ripple went through the earth.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  And it was detected by two different observatories. And when I say observatories, in this case, these are not types of light whatsoever. This is space actually stretching. So these observatories, LIGO, it's called Laser Interferometer Gravitational Observatory, are two arms that are four kilometers long. And at each end of each arm is a mirror, and in the middle, there's a couple different beam splitters and a laser. And the laser is basically being split down each arm and bounces back off those mirrors. And it's set so that when the light comes back, it looks like everything's perfect. They're exactly the same length.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  But a gravitational wave passes through, and one of those arms gets a little bit longer. And then the light looks funny, and the scientists can do the math, and they can back that out. This happened, and the length that one of those arms stretched was the width of a proton.

• 31:56Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  And we detected that. We're good.

• 32:00Charles Liu?

  That's a millionth, a millionth of a billionth of an inch on something that's more than two miles long, and it was able to be measured. This is what your tax dollars are paying for, ladies and gentlemen. Thank God.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  I know.

• 32:14Charles Liu?

  All right. Thank God. Thank you so much.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  And how cool is it that from that tiny, tiny, tiny little length, we're like, oh, that's a black hole this big, and a black hole this big, and they're about in that direction, and they totally collided?

• 32:30Charles Liu?

  It's amazing. Andrew, where is the nearest black hole to us?

• 32:33Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh. Well, there's a few. There's a few candidates, and it's very controversial exactly how far away. But they're, one of them is near Sagittarius constellation.

• 32:50Charles Liu?

  Uh huh.

• 32:50Speaker 04

  So you would be, right now, at this time of the year, it's something that you would be locating in the southern sky, late at night, about a few, couple hours after the sun has set. So you'd be looking low from here in New York, it'd be low in the southern horizon. You'd try to get out of the city, of course, you wanna see the... But you'd be able to see from a dark location, maybe where Neil is in Catskills, maybe, perhaps. If there's not too many trees. Perhaps you can see it, and there is one, that's about 6,000 light-years away. So, what's neat is to think that when we're examining these objects, right?

• 33:33Speaker 04

  Everything in space is so far away. We measure, we use the measure of light-years, because that's how we're... When we say something 6,000 light-years away, means that light has taken 6,000 years to reach us here on Earth. So we're observing that object as it appeared 6,000 years ago. But of course, in terms of black holes and lifetime of stars, their lives are measured in hundreds of millions to billions of years. So, changes are not really that obvious, unless we really get very exquisitely sensitive instruments, right?

• 34:10Charles Liu?

  Yep. Oh, it's wonderful. I love babies, by the way. It is totally okay for that wonderful child to be making those noises.

• 34:19Chuck Nice?

  Are you doing a Donald Trump right now? What the hell?

• 34:24Charles Liu?

  She believes?

• 34:25Chuck Nice?

  I love babies, get it out of here, like...

• 34:28Charles Liu?

  Do not. Bring the baby up later, I wanna give it a hello.

• 34:31Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 34:33Charles Liu?

  I think one of the great things, this is not exactly science, but I think one of the great things about Star Trek was, in fact, its family-friendliness, right? That there were actually children on the Enterprise-D and things like that, even though Stodgy old Picard was like, "Yee." But I think it's a great thing, I'm really, really a big fan of that.

• 34:51Chuck Nice?

  What are you talking about? I loved Ensign Crusher.

• 34:55Charles Liu?

  Yes, he was a little child, wasn't he, then? Yes, but I think that's one of the ways, you know, and of course, there are panels here this weekend about the psychology and the sociology of Star Trek and how things have changed as well. And I think maybe one of the things that has really helped is now there are children in workplaces, and maybe that's because of the Enterprise-D, right? Wouldn't that be cool?

• 35:16Chuck Nice?

  Child labor you're blaming on the Enterprise? Oh my god. Hey, Apple, it's okay. Have you seen the latest Star Trek? You get in there and make that phone, young man.

• 35:31Charles Liu?

  Okay, so, uh, let me just bring up two more things from the Star Trek episodes, and then what I'd love to do is for people to, to ask some questions of us. Things that we can answer from you about the science that has shown up in Star Trek a couple of times. There's some microphones, uh, over here and over there, so if you'd like to come up or at some point, and as you've been modifying or thinking about whether we're talking about it here, or whether you had this question in your mind for a long time. And I just want to ask you two, uh, first Andrew, uh, then Summer, about two things that were mentioned in Star Trek: The Next Generation, which I still don't really know that much about, okay? So Andrew, we'll start with you.

• 36:09Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 36:10Charles Liu?

  Starting first in the Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The word wormhole was mentioned, right? What the heck is a wormhole? And then, of course, Star Trek: Voyager is all about wormholes, right? It's like, everything is a wormhole. What the heck is a wormhole? Is there actually a scientific thing called a wormhole that actually exists?

• 36:29Speaker 04

  I believe that theoretically, right, Summer, there is, uh, and Summer, maybe you can elaborate, but it's, uh, it's like two black holes that are connected, I believe, in, in, in, uh, warping of space and time, and there's this bridge that, uh, sort of allows you to travel very large distances, uh, very quickly.

• 36:50Charles Liu?

  Yeah, so physically it doesn't exist, but theoretically it's possible, is that what you're saying?

• 36:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, and we haven't found any, any sign of a wormhole, no.

• 36:58Speaker 03

  Can I use one of your papers as a prop?

• 37:00Charles Liu?

  Oh, yes, please.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  Can I use your pencil?

• 37:04Charles Liu?

  Oh, totally.

• 37:05Speaker 04

  Oh, oh, here we go, this is, this is-

• 37:06Charles Liu?

  Okay, this is good.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  So, fabric of spacetime, again, right? Let's just say Earth. And now we'll say-

• 37:16Charles Liu?

  Vulcan.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, Vulcan.

• 37:18Charles Liu?

  Vulcan, thank you. Okay.

• 37:20Speaker 03

  All right, Earth and Vulcan. We want to get from here to here. This way, we're all gonna die. Our next generation's gonna die, the generation after that. It'll be who knows how long. But the secret way is this way.

• 37:35Charles Liu?

  Ow!

• 37:37Speaker 03

  Wormhole.

• 37:37Charles Liu?

  That was my paper, dude.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  Wormhole.

• 37:40Charles Liu?

  Oh, man.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  That's the theory, that that's what it allows you to do. It allows you to not go the long way, but to go the short way.

• 37:47Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  But, yeah.

• 37:49Chuck Nice?

  And how about a hand for our very expensive visual effects here at StarTalk? We spare no expense. Piece of paper and a pen. Science.

• 38:01Charles Liu?

  It just seems to me that it's a lot easier for us to bend ourselves than to bend spacetime, right? But, you know, I'm just a physicist, astrophysicist, astronomer. You know, what do I know? I just, just my thought. Okay, all right. And let me ask you one thing, and let's start taking some questions, all right? So please, start coming up. Let me ask you the following question. In the episode of the next generation entitled "The Loss", the Enterprise is almost sucked into a cosmic string. Later, later on in the series, in the episode "Disaster", the Enterprise runs into a quantum filament. And then, as you all know, right? Counselor Troi is first to assume the bridge.

• 38:44Charles Liu?

  And then, O'Brien is saying, "We ran into a quantum filament." She says, "Oh, so that's like a cosmic string." And then O'Brien's like, "No, that's a totally different phenomenon." Was I good? That was okay, right? Yeah. So what is a quantum filament? And are they actually different things? Do they actually exist?

• 39:00Speaker 03

  I have no idea. But the word "quantum" to me means really tiny.

• 39:05Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 39:06Speaker 03

  So a big ship running into something really tiny doesn't seem like a problem.

• 39:10Charles Liu?

  Well, my understanding is that they're just possibly remnants of the Big Bang. When the universe was very small, there was an imperfection in the actual expansion of the universe at the moment of inflation or just after the Big Bang, then magnified any imperfections that were tiny and turned them gigantic.

• 39:30Charles Liu?

  But I do not know. So if any of you out there, those of you who are in line waiting to ask questions, you know the difference between a quantum filament and a cosmic string, please, inform us all, and let's write a paper together. Okay? Let's submit it to the Astrophysical Journal. Do it, let's do it. Thank you so, so much. Okay, so, we are ready, here on StarTalk All-Stars Live, to take questions from the audience here at Star Trek Missions New York, the 50th anniversary. It is a tremendous pleasure to be here. Let's start over here, yes, please. What is your question? And please feel free to move the microphone, that will make it easy for you to use. Yes, I wanted to know if it's true that in the future, the transporter technology will become real. Great question.

• 40:17Charles Liu?

  Andrew, you want to take a crack at that? And then Chuck, I want you to take a crack at that afterwards.

• 40:22Speaker 04

  I can tell you, I would never want to be in a transporter.

• 40:25Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 40:26Speaker 04

  Everything that I learned, I just, even if they develop it, I would not go. I'm like McCoy, I just hate those damn things. I'll be damned if I get in your molecular egg scrambler.

• 40:37Charles Liu?

  That's right, spreading my molecules across the cosmos. The thing about transporters, which I would say is that you have to get every single subatomic particle in its exact quantum state completely replicated, right? But there is this thing called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in quantum mechanics, which means that if you take a particle from one location and move it to another, there is a certain amount of "you don't know what's going to happen, no matter what." So, I personally think it'd be a great idea to have a third head. Okay, but I don't know that my hands would want to have become heads if I get transported. So until we can solve the uncertainty question, right? And you've heard, like, "Oh, the Heisenberg compensators are not in flux,

• 41:22Charles Liu?

  we don't know what's going on," and boom, Picard becomes a kid, right? You've seen that kind of thing happen. But that's a very good question. So at this moment, I would say, so the answer is probably not. No. No? Okay. Thank you for your question.

• 41:33Speaker 03

  My favorite example of a transporter going wrong is in spaceballs.

• 41:37Charles Liu?

  Spaceballs, oh no.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  Mel Brooks is backwards.

• 41:47Chuck Nice?

  She's still enjoying the moment.

• 41:50Charles Liu?

  Yes, thank you. Yes, your question, please, or comment.

• 41:53Speaker 05

  Hi, how you doing?

• 41:54Charles Liu?

  Very well, thank you.

• 41:56Speaker 05

  So, my question is, you mentioned earlier about the Voyager probe that was the farthest thing that we've sent out in space so far, and I know that in the motion picture, VJ is Voyager and it comes back and everything. But my question is about the real one, where, how far out can it go and still be able to reach Earth and we'll be able to be in contact with it and receive signal, and how do we receive the signal in the first place?

• 42:19Charles Liu?

  Oh, that's a great question. Summer, do you know that?

• 42:21Speaker 03

  That is a great question.

• 42:21Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  Well, it's got a radio transmitter on it. It's actually not... We can't actually send signals to it to tell it to do things anymore, because it's just, it's running on batteries. It's too far from the sun for any solar power, so it's just gonna go until the batteries go. And I believe there was either a malfunction or the batteries went on Voyager 2 already, because we're out of touch with that one.

• 42:45Charles Liu?

  I don't know.

• 42:46Speaker 03

  I mean, it can go forever until it hits something, which it's so small compared to things, that's very unlikely. And so, it's kind of pinging us, and it did, it can ping us enough and tell us the composition of the space around it, I believe, because that's how we had the most recent news about it leaving the sun's magnetosphere, the sun's solar influence, but not the gravitational influence. So, there's a hilarious comic... Does anybody know XKCD?

• 43:17Charles Liu?

  Oh, yeah. How do we not know XKCD?

• 43:18Speaker 03

  One of the best ones is, "How many times has Voyager left the solar system?" Because there's so many different ways to define the edge of the solar system, and also Voyager has sort of gone through a bunch of different transitional phases that we've never been sure, like, "Oh, is this it? Is this it? Is this it?" And so, now, I think we think that it's confident that it's outside the magnetosphere, but it's still not outside the solar system. It's still gonna go, it still hasn't passed the Oort Cloud, like, that's hundreds of years away.

• 43:47Charles Liu?

  Andrew, do you know how long the batteries will last? I know that we receive the signals using our Deep Space Network.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  Right, and it's radioactive decay, right?

• 43:55Charles Liu?

  It's being powered by radioactive generators?

• 43:56Speaker 04

  That's right. Right.

• 43:59Chuck Nice?

  I thought they were energizers, I'm sorry.

• 44:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that it's coming close to the end. I mean, there may be another decade.

• 44:10Charles Liu?

  So they're 40 years out now, so maybe 10 more years. I believe the radiothermoisotropic thermoelectric generators were supposed to last 20 years, and it's already after 40, so.

• 44:22Chuck Nice?

  We got our money's worth.

• 44:24Charles Liu?

  Apparently NASA does build them like they used to, right? Thank you very much for your question. Thank you.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  And I just want to add to the Deep Space Network, because if you haven't seen it, you should Google it, and JPL, there's a guy at JPL who made a

• 44:37Charles Liu?

  Jet Propulsion Labs.

• 44:38Speaker 03

  Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who made a visualization that's actually up on the screens in the mission control room at JPL, and it has the Deep Space Network antennas that are on the ground, and it can show you which antenna is talking to which space probe, and it shows you whether it's talking, we're talking to it, or it's talking to us, and if it's sending data, or we're sending data. It's kind of the coolest thing ever.

• 45:00Charles Liu?

  I know that the Voyager signal is now weaker than one ten billionth of a watt by the time it gets to the Earth, so it's pretty amazing technology. Yes, go ahead.

• 45:09Speaker 06

  We talked a little bit about lasers already.

• 45:12Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 45:12Speaker 06

  And using lasers for minute tasks, whether it be a laser pointer, whether it be surgery, et cetera.

• 45:19Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 45:19Speaker 06

  How about phasers? Is there any scientific ability to take lasers or something to that extent and have them impact and cause damage to something possibly the size of this building, the island of Manhattan, et cetera?

• 45:36Chuck Nice?

  Are you an evil genius?

• 45:39Chuck Nice?

  You're just looking for ideas?

• 45:42Charles Liu?

  That's a great question. One thing that I'm pretty sure is going to happen is that phasers will not evolve from lasers, because lasers are a specific kind of coherent light beam, and you're exactly right, they're micro-type things, they're very precise, whereas phasers clearly are like, you know, the death rays of the olden days, right? But are there beams, are there energy beams that can be harnessed in that way to cause damage on a physical level? Summer, do you know? Andrew, do you have any ideas?

• 46:11Speaker 04

  Military DARPA, I think, are working on laser-based weapons.

• 46:15Charles Liu?

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:17Speaker 04

  But the lasers that I'm more interested is the idea of communication, extraterrestrial communication. Using laser beams for that. That's their searches now, aren't there? I think you're looking at lasers, powerful lasers, powerful enough to cross the cosmos and be able to communicate, so.

• 46:35Charles Liu?

  Wonderful.

• 46:36Speaker 03

  Ooh, there's also a science about using lasers to either cloak your transit signal or make it so it's clearly artificial and doesn't look like realistic, so you can announce your presence if another planet is watching you transit.

• 46:51Charles Liu?

  Wonderful. Thank you. We have so many people who have questions. Let's get as many of them as we can into that. It's wonderful. Yes, sir, over here.

• 46:58Speaker 07

  Hey, and lasers as propulsion, too.

• 47:00Charles Liu?

  Oh, yes, that's true. The pressure of the light can actually push something forward in the no-friction environment of space. That's right.

• 47:08Speaker 07

  Which actually would cause a problem if part of my next question were actually true.

• 47:14Speaker 07

  Whenever they go through an asteroid field in Star Trek, in Star Wars, in Cosmos even, they would show the asteroids really, really close together, and that's something that's bothered me for a long time, because it's just not true. I was wondering from the panelists what's something from Star Trek or related that has bothered you that's really kind of scientifically inaccurate but makes for better writing.

• 47:38Charles Liu?

  Oh, great question. Ah, can I just go first?

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 47:43Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  Do it.

• 47:45Charles Liu?

  In the Next Generation episode, Starship Mine, at the beginning of the episode, you know, captain's log, whatever, whatever, whatever, you know, the Enterprise is at the space station so that it can have its excess baryons removed. Okay. And baryons are protons and neutrons. So if you're removing the baryons, everything's gone! Everything!

• 48:10Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's why if you get caught in the baryon field, you die.

• 48:14Charles Liu?

  I know, right? But that was just so funny. I saw that, I was like, yes, removing excess baryons from the ship. And I was like, looked at the person I was watching the show with together at the time, who happened to be an astrophysicist who got his degree from MIT. We stared at each other, and we just went, "Ah!" We started laughing, we just died. And my poor wife was like, "You guys are morons." That's my favorite story. Thank you. Anybody?

• 48:38Speaker 03

  Well, so I have one from the original series. They, because I just rewatched it again recently, the episode Nomad, where there is a space probe.

• 48:49Charles Liu?

  Right, Kirk, yes.

• 48:50Speaker 03

  That sort of has been altered in its mission. But they bring it aboard and they are trying to communicate with it. And so Kirk says, "If I show you like our star maps, you know, you can see where we're from." And the star map was literally a poorly drawn version of our solar system.

• 49:09Charles Liu?

  Error, error.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  I'm like.

• 49:12Charles Liu?

  Sterilize, sterilize.

• 49:15Speaker 03

  That's not going to tell you anything about where we're located.

• 49:18Charles Liu?

  Somebody got that, right? Okay.

• 49:21Speaker 03

  I got it.

• 49:21Charles Liu?

  You got it? Okay, because it's from that episode.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 49:24Charles Liu?

  Yeah, okay.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  And so instead, though, what they could do, speaking of Voyager, is that they could have used the pulsar map, which obviously had not been created at that time. But the pulsar map that's on the Voyager record, that's on the Voyager probes, is there to show where Earth is in relation to pulsars in our neighborhood of our galaxy. Because the pulsars have such precise timing that another civilization should be able to also have observed some of them and then like kind of triangulate eventually.

• 49:54Speaker 04

  That's why that was put on the plaque, right?

• 49:56Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah.

• 49:56Charles Liu?

  The golden record?

• 49:57Speaker 03

  To say, "Here we are, come."

• 49:58Speaker 04

  So they can come and find us?

• 50:00Speaker 03

  Come find us.

• 50:01Charles Liu?

  Please, find us. Take our natural resources.

• 50:04Chuck Nice?

  Great idea.

• 50:07Chuck Nice?

  Hey, you alien life form, clearly superior to us because you can get to us. Why don't you come on over?

• 50:16Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 50:17Speaker 08

  Hi. So in 1977, in my home state of Ohio, the WOW signal was recorded. And I'm curious, I mean, it sounds like since it was discovered, there's really no consensus of what it actually was. And I'm curious if you guys have an opinion on that or what your thoughts.

• 50:32Charles Liu?

  Has there been any advance, the literature for the WAO signal?

• 50:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's been recently, I remember in the last couple of years that they think it might have been a satellite or something, a signal bouncing off a satellite. So it's more of a terrestrial origin. That kind of reminds me of what we just heard in the news with the other alien signal, right? In Russia? Yeah, from the Hercules constellation, the planet about 94 light years away supposedly. It's turning out that the latest information from the Russian Academy, Science Academy, they put out a statement, I think, just a few days ago, saying that they think it's terrestrial in origin, unfortunately, raring all our parade.

• 51:12Charles Liu?

  So I guess we're still not quite there yet, right Chuck? We just need a little more time to prove that they are out there.

• 51:18Chuck Nice?

  Well, they're out there, you know, they're just, they're just hiding, that's all.

• 51:22Charles Liu?

  You sure?

• 51:22Chuck Nice?

  I'm positive, I've spoken to them.

• 51:27Chuck Nice?

  That's a whole nother panel.

• 51:28Charles Liu?

  That's another episode, I think we're good with that. Thank you very much. Yes, question.

• 51:33Speaker 09

  Good evening.

• 51:34Charles Liu?

  Hi.

• 51:35Speaker 09

  There was an episode of Next Generation

• 51:37Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 51:37Speaker 09

  that dealt with the idea that using warp drive repeatedly in the same area of space might cause a rupture, which was kind of an, obviously a comment on environmentalism, but in Star Trek context.

• 51:48Charles Liu?

  Yes, indeed.

• 51:49Speaker 09

  Obviously, that idea would be so far ahead of us to even think about, but is there any way in which environmentalism in our interaction with space has come up in any of the technologies and space exploration things that end out there?

• 52:03Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:04Charles Liu?

  I will say that when the Deep Impact Mission was going to launch a chunk of metal into a comet, Temple Tuttle, I think it was?

• 52:13Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 52:13Charles Liu?

  That, and then there was somebody that tried to sue NASA, saying that we were messing up the environment, the vibes of the universe by messing up that particular thing. I don't know, did anything come about of that?

• 52:28Chuck Nice?

  No, the person actually ran out of marijuana and gave up on the case.

• 52:35Speaker 04

  But there is the idea of forward contamination for planetary missions. That's a big issue, right?

• 52:41Charles Liu?

  That's a good point.

• 52:42Speaker 04

  You know, we get some microbes hitching a ride on one of our spacecrafts and we send it to, say, Mars, right? This is a big thing of sending our little germs there. And then, how do we detect life for real on these planets if we're contaminated?

• 52:58Charles Liu?

  The Cassini spacecraft, when its mission ends, where was, it's not going to go, just let it go, right? There will not be pollution.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  Because they don't want to contaminate Europa.

• 53:07Charles Liu?

  Right.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  Sorry, Enceladus.

• 53:09Charles Liu?

  Enceladus.

• 53:09Speaker 03

  But Juno, they're doing the same thing with Juno around Jupiter, that when it's done, they're plowing it into Jupiter to not contaminate Europa.

• 53:17Charles Liu?

  So the answer is, I guess we are environmentally aware of the solar system and maybe the universe. Thank you.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  There's a NASA office called the Office of Planetary Protection.

• 53:26Charles Liu?

  Hey, hey, hey, all right. On the ball. Yes, go ahead.

• 53:29Speaker 10

  So with the recent excitement of SETI, I'm curious to hear your theory, you know, being both master of science and fans of science fiction. If first contact was a realistic thing to happen in our lifetime, how would you imagine that would play out? What type of intelligence would we be dealing with? And what would it take on air and to be able to really conceptually establish communication?

• 53:50Charles Liu?

  Wow. I just want to tell you that on April 5th, 2063, I will be in Montana. Okay? I'm just telling you that. It's going to be a great vacation. We're going to drive out there, enjoy Yellowstone, whatever, and then on April 5th, I'm just going to stand there. And I'm just going to stand there. And I bet you, you all will stand there with me, right? April 5th, 2063. Yeah, actually, is there a realistic, scientific way to deal with first contact?

• 54:16Speaker 04

  Well, I think there's a protocol that they've put together.

• 54:19Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 54:20Speaker 04

  For that. And, you know.

• 54:22Charles Liu?

  Nanu, nanu, no?

• 54:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. That's right, of how we would go about doing that. But it's very controversial, too, because do we want to announce? Like, if we, and you have to remember, if we do get a signal, let's say we're supposing, we're looking at radio signals now, how far away these are? I mean, it's more likely a one-way conversation. I mean, they're gonna go "hi," and that may take, what? If it's 500 light-years away, it'll take us to say "hi," back, and that's another 500. It's like, what kind of conversation can we?

• 54:57Chuck Nice?

  Worst remote delay ever.

• 55:00Speaker 04

  That's right. That's right. So, that's a big issue, right?

• 55:04Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 55:05Speaker 04

  In terms of communicating, so.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  There's actually a job a guy at SETI has that's called like Director of Mission of Message Composition.

• 55:16Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:18Charles Liu?

  Are you looking for a job?

• 55:19Speaker 03

  He's the one deciding what we're gonna say.

• 55:21Charles Liu?

  That's great. I hope he says "nanu nanu." But, you know, thank you. Great question. Yes?

• 55:28Speaker 11

  So, there was a episode of Voyager, I think it was either the second or third episode, where the Voyager crew finds themselves in this time loop, and they actually see and receive a transmission from themselves about like a couple of hours in the future.

• 55:47Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 55:48Speaker 11

  And I was wondering, how scientific is that phenomenon? Is that based on a real theory? Is that complete TV?

• 55:56Charles Liu?

  That's a great question.

• 55:58Speaker 11

  Do you know?

• 55:59Chuck Nice?

  Your ears are awesome, by the way.

• 56:01Speaker 11

  I purchased them in the hall.

• 56:03Charles Liu?

  Yeah. Well done. Here's what I know about that, and then please add in if you understand. When radio signals get sent out, they get scattered all over the place, right? And... If you have an appropriate environmental situation, like a highly ionized cloud of gas or something, it is possible to reflect some of that off of that and come back. All right? There is a time delay that happens as well. For example, around supermassive black holes, if you have a kind of graphite dust or other kind of dust that has a special orientation to it, and then you have magnetic fields that hold that orientation, they almost act like a side mirror,

• 56:48Charles Liu?

  sort of like Spider-Man's, you know, vision thing on the side. So the light that goes to you gets to you first, and the light going out sideways bounces off and then comes to you later. Right? That's a time delay thing. And that's also, this light is polarized, and so you can see all kinds of neat things that are unusual. So there is possible to get multiple signals, like from various physical sources of doing that. That particular episode might have had more details than that. Is there anything that you'd like to add to what I just said in terms of getting multiple signals or getting a time delay in what we have in the past? I think we're pretty good, Chuck?

• 57:25Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I think you covered it.

• 57:28Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna go with what he said.

• 57:31Charles Liu?

  Okay. Thank you very much. Yes?

• 57:34Speaker 12

  Hi. My question may be simple compared to some of the other ones.

• 57:38Charles Liu?

  No, no question is too simple. We love this.

• 57:41Speaker 12

  Can you guys explain stardates?

• 57:43Charles Liu?

  Stardates. Stardate. Come on, official guide dude.

• 57:48Speaker 04

  Well, you know, for my book too, you know, I was looking at stardates and I was confounded with how they came up with it. It's all over the place. And the last, I found the most sense in this, in the reboot series. It was very simple. It's the year and dot, the day, the date of the year, of the, how should I say? The number of the day of the year.

• 58:14Speaker 12

  Based on the...

• 58:15Speaker 04

  So it would be 2016 dot 224 or something like that for the day of the year itself.

• 58:23Speaker 12

  But it's based on the, you know...

• 58:26Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, because the day of the year would have to be based on a revolution around what? Our sun? So it would be...

• 58:33Speaker 04

  Yes, it's...

• 58:34Chuck Nice?

  So it's the date.

• 58:35Charles Liu?

  It's based on the That's the answer, it's the date. But, but my

• 58:39Chuck Nice?

  First date based on

• 58:40Charles Liu?

  You just don't say May, or June. But, but my guess is that all had to be retroactively continue, uh, red coned, right, to make it work, because I have no idea how they work either. I think it's just stuff people saying stuff, which is really cool. So, uh, we, we are basically out of time, but, but, I want to get to all your questions. So, so let's get to all the questions that are in line, and, and then we will call it a, a show. Does that sound like fun? Okay, thank you all, really, we very much appreciate it. If you have to go, you know, you've really got to catch the last 45 minutes of, uh, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan 4K. I completely understand, but we've got some great questions coming up, and we're gonna finish this up coming up here. Yes, please, go ahead.

• 59:21Speaker 13

  Pardon, pardon me for the simple question, I'm

• 59:23Charles Liu?

  Not at all.

• 59:24Speaker 13

  Scientifically impaired.

• 59:25Charles Liu?

  No, you're not. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, remember, I am a professor, I have to tell you this, nobody is scientifically impaired. Science is beautiful, and it's wonderful, and you are all good at it. It's all a matter of whether you've got the training to write it down. It's like, you know, I could be Swahili impaired, right? Cause I don't speak it, but that's not because I can't do it. It's just because I haven't done it yet. That's where you are now in life, always remember that, okay? Always remember that.

• 59:50Speaker 13

  Thank you.

• 59:51Charles Liu?

  Thank you, please, ask your question.

• 59:56Speaker 13

  Thank you, I've always been curious, in any way, shape, or form, can the shuttles going up, or rockets going up, um, mess with the weather?

• 1:00:08Charles Liu?

  Oh.

• 1:00:09Speaker 13

  Because it so happens, I tend to notice, that's just me, I'm not a scientist, when a shuttle used to go up, because I live in Florida, shuttle or rocket, we had some weird weather. So, I always wondered, like, okay, are they affecting, you know?

• 1:00:22Charles Liu?

  That's a great question. Andrew, do you have any insight on that? Uh, nope. Okay. Nope. Summer? So I am losing my mind. Summer?

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  So I don't think that there is a cause, causal effect. There could be a correlation, but correlation does not equal causation. And probably weird weather, you're more prone to notice. And a shuttle is something you're also more prone to notice. So it just might be sort of observational bias. But there are people that do study sort of rocket plumes and the, you know, the exhaust of rockets and what they do to the atmosphere. But it's a very local phenomenon and, you know, they dissipate within a certain amount of time and probably nothing on the scale that could, could really affect strong weather patterns.

• 1:01:11Charles Liu?

  Okay. Yeah, no problem.

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  It's my educated guess.

• 1:01:13Charles Liu?

  That's, that's very likely to be true. And, and because clouds form by nucleating around things, you can imagine that an exhaust plume could cause clouds to nucleate, right? So locally, as Summer says, it may actually have a good effect. So that's a very good question, see? Not at all, not at all bad question.

• 1:01:30Chuck Nice?

  Now go ahead and write your first science book.

• 1:01:35Charles Liu?

  Here, let me, let me, let me mention a couple of science books while we're at it. We have to show, this is available downstairs in the exhibit hall. So please remember that. This is Andrew's book, Star Trek: The Official Guide to Our Universe, okay? And this is StarTalk, the book with Neil deGrasse Tyson, all right? And this will be available also downstairs. And feel free to enjoy these. These and many of the questions that we've had are in these books. And we're here all day, right? Yeah, okay. So let's get to the rest of the questions, please. Your question.

• 1:02:08Speaker 14

  Okay, so subspace is largely a fictional concept.

• 1:02:13Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 1:02:13Speaker 14

  With sci-fi. I saw a very interesting hypothesis that subspace, discrete subspace layers are represented by the warp function number. So that you reach a threshold and then continue to the next layer and the energy goes up.

• 1:02:27Charles Liu?

  Like, like the seven layers of hell.

• 1:02:31Speaker 14

  Dante was on to this. We've already kind of covered like going through wormholes and warp drive. So I was thinking, how would they justify that within the idea of subspace communication? Because in theory, it would should take a long time for the signal to go and then to get a reply. You know, Picard should be sitting there waiting for a reply to happen.

• 1:02:50Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:51Speaker 14

  Yet they kind of use the narrative device to speed up the production of having instantaneous communication. So how would subspace communication work in a more practical standpoint?

• 1:03:02Charles Liu?

  If you all don't, if you want to take a crack at that, someone?

• 1:03:05Speaker 14

  I have no idea.

• 1:03:05Charles Liu?

  Okay. Subspace, if it exists and is basically our spacetime or some version of our spacetime, right? Because string theory does allow for the existence of other spacetimes in parallel with ours. If you are going through these boundaries that get us from one spacetime to another through, say, membranes or some other kind of string or structure supersymmetry or something like that, each membrane has its own threshold. But those thresholds, we have no idea if there's actually any physics involved with them. Do they have actually an entropic barrier? Are they just so separated that they never come across? Or are they instantaneous under the right circumstances? So in that kind of context, I can see that there could

• 1:03:48Charles Liu?

  be an effect, but there doesn't have to be, right? And then the issue of total internal reflection or partial reflection between layers, if that's how it happens. But this is something that I really don't have a good answer to. But that's a good question, though. Yeah, because we're thinking about the string theory side of things.

• 1:04:03Speaker 04

  It played a big role in Star Trek. It allows us to see a wonderful, you know, episode play out and allows those stories to move forward. I mean, that's the same idea with transporter system, the warp drive. It allows us to have these wonderful stories play out.

• 1:04:21Charles Liu?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Very true. And that's why we're all here, right? Yes, question over here. I love your hat, by the way.

• 1:04:28Speaker 15

  Thank you.

• 1:04:29Charles Liu?

  I don't know if there's a Pikachu trek coming up, but I sure hope it is soon.

• 1:04:33Speaker 15

  I really don't know.

• 1:04:34Charles Liu?

  Gotta catch them all.

• 1:04:35Speaker 15

  Out of all the ways that they've traveled in Star Trek, what's your favorite way? Like, what way would you choose and why?

• 1:04:46Charles Liu?

  Great. Chuck, what way would you like to travel?

• 1:04:50Chuck Nice?

  You know, unfortunately, there's no buses in space.

• 1:04:55Chuck Nice?

  No, I mean, to be honest, I think to be able to travel at warp speed would be just unbelievable. You know, to be in that position. I mean, just to be able, because the bridge has a visual. So can you imagine the visual of traveling faster than the speed of light? And what that would look like as you're sitting on the bridge of a ship, watching that go by you? I don't smoke marijuana, but I am puffing, I'm puffing away while that's happening, just to trip out on that. Okay, because that's gotta be very, very trippy.

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  If you're faster than the speed of light, though, all the light's behind you.

• 1:05:37Chuck Nice?

  Well, you know what?

• 1:05:41Chuck Nice?

  Now you just ruined my whole thing!

• 1:05:44Charles Liu?

  Sorry. Andrew, do you have a favorite travel?

• 1:05:46Speaker 04

  No, I agree. I was gonna say warp, because for me, as a stargazer, you know, everything is remote, right? Everything up in the night sky are these little points of light, and you know, I take my telescope, and no matter how big of a telescope I get, I'm still remote. And then to have this capability to go to these places and have ringside seats. You know, this is what I love about Star Trek. Since I've been a little kid, is Star Trek allows me, as a space geek, to get these ringside seats that are otherwise impossible. And with today's technology, right, the film technology, we have these hyper-realistic visions of space. And just like with the new movie, I mean, obviously, you know, there's some, some elements that go,

• 1:06:31Speaker 04

  "Well, that's not realistic" or something, but it allows me, like, the portraits of Nebula, for instance. You know, even going back to, like Wrath of Khan and the Mutara Nebula, that has stayed with me.

• 1:06:43Charles Liu?

  That is my favorite nebula.

• 1:06:44Speaker 04

  It is. And by the way, that's kind of all on the Orion, the Great Orion Nebula, which you can see every winter. That's on my front cover. By the way, I told them I gotta have that because it's beautiful and it really does look beautiful. I mean, look at the Hubble Space System. We are now capable of really showcasing nebulas, for instance, these gas clouds in space so well, and they play an integral role in many Star Trek episodes. And so having Warp Speed to get there and to just hang out and see these objects would be awesome.

• 1:07:16Charles Liu?

  Wonderful. Summer?

• 1:07:18Speaker 03

  Oh, I just like the part of the hanging out. Like, I would just sit next to a window of any ship and just look out. Because that's like my favorite thing to do if I can go to a dark sky is just sort of sit underneath it and just look at it.

• 1:07:32Charles Liu?

  My favorite way of travel would be to go through the wormhole right next to Deep Space Nine. And to go to the Gamma Quadrant and watch all those swirly things go around. That would be my favorite way to travel.

• 1:07:42Speaker 04

  And think of all the things you could explore, things that we would not be able to see otherwise without having that transport.

• 1:07:48Charles Liu?

  Absolutely. So this is what I'm gonna do, everybody. I did say we were gonna answer all your questions, and we are going to answer your questions. But what we're gonna do right now then is we're gonna do two things. The first thing we're gonna do is do an ending of the show for the podcast right now while everyone's here, like, big loud clap, okay? And then we're gonna get your questions, and we're gonna do it a second time afterwards. Sound good? All right, this is how we're gonna make this happen. Ready? So, this has been StarTalk All-Stars. You can watch this entire episode commercial-free on StarTalk All-Access. Summer Ash, thank you. Andrew Physakis, thank you. Chuck Nice, thank you so much. I'm Charles

• 1:08:26Charles Liu?

  Liu. Enjoy the universe, everyone. Thank you so much. That was awesome. That was awesome. Well done. Okay, let's answer these questions, and then let's do a real wrap-up, okay? But I know people need to go, and I want to thank you all for staying. It's really, really been such a great, great time. And anyone else wants to move closer so that your applause is louder later, please feel free to do that, too. Okay, yes, go ahead. Oh, wait, over here. Yes, please go ahead.

• 1:08:59Speaker 16

  So, the Goldilocks Zone, is that unnecessarily limiting our choices of candidates for possible life, given our observations with sea vents and the moons out in Jupiter and Saturn and how much gravitational energy that's possibly biologically usable? Are we limited by just focusing on sun energy on the surface and the atmosphere?

• 1:09:23Speaker 04

  Andrew, Brian, do you have an answer to that, and then Summer can follow up? So, in terms of what we're, you mean, look, searching for life?

• 1:09:29Speaker 16

  Yeah, where the life could be, because we have the tubes down in the ocean, they get no sun energy to speak of.

• 1:09:35Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:09:35Speaker 16

  And that could be happening out on the moon, Enceladus or Enceladus, the moon of Saturn?

• 1:09:40Speaker 04

  Exactly, and that's, yeah, and that's something-

• 1:09:42Speaker 16

  Are we limiting our choices?

• 1:09:45Speaker 04

  The ability to see exo-moons, not exoplanets, the moons of exoplanets, is something that I think we're just starting to, that's really a big endeavor. There's a race around the world amongst astronomers to really be able to see it. We theoretically think, just like we thought exoplanets were around, you know, the time when Star Trek started, it was a theory, but now, you know, it's reality. But moons, you know, around, say, Jupiter or Saturn.

• 1:10:14Speaker 16

  But with the high density of binary stars, you have all that gravity as energy. Is that possibly a better way to focus?

• 1:10:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I think what Andrew's saying is that we sort of have to start with what we can do. And so, basically, what we can do now is see planets around stars and figure out how far away they are. And then start figuring out if they have an atmosphere and if they're in the habitable zone. But you're completely right that as far as the most likely place in our solar system for finding life, signs of life right now, it's probably Europa, and then maybe also Enceladus. And so that shows us that once we are able to see, learn more about these other solar systems, that then we can start thinking about exo-moons, and also just extreme environments in general. Because I totally agree.

• 1:11:02Speaker 16

  Baby steps.

• 1:11:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. There's actually an astronomer at Columbia right now, David Kipping, who came from Harvard and he's originally from England, and he does exo-moons. So he's, he's going for it.

• 1:11:16Speaker 04

  Yes, go ahead.

• 1:11:17Speaker 17

  I have a simple question. What is the galactic barrier?

• 1:11:22Charles Liu?

  The galactic barrier, which theoretically happened in a couple of episodes, and then also at the, in the fifth movie, the final frontier, the one we owe it all. Well, never mind.

• 1:11:38Charles Liu?

  That galactic barrier was supposedly something that we could not penetrate unless we had some sort of tremendous, magical, energetic push through that barrier.

• 1:11:51Charles Liu?

  Is there anything physical to that barrier? Did that actually come from something that might be physically true? Andrew's shaking his head.

• 1:11:59Speaker 04

  The only thing that I've come across is the fact that there's a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, just like it exists in probably most galaxies that we see. These monster black holes that measure, you know, billions of times the mass of our sun, and they belch out tremendous amounts of radiations, right? All kinds of radiation. So there's those kind of things, but I don't think there's any barrier, per se, right?

• 1:12:27Charles Liu?

  Chuck, no barriers?

• 1:12:28Chuck Nice?

  Not in my life. I'm barrier-free, quite frankly.

• 1:12:31Charles Liu?

  Thank you. Thank you very much. Yes?

• 1:12:33Speaker 18

  All right, I have a fun question.

• 1:12:35Charles Liu?

  Good.

• 1:12:35Speaker 18

  What emerging technology or scientific principle would you like to see explored in Star Trek: Discovery when the new series comes out?

• 1:12:44Charles Liu?

  Oh, wow. What a great question.

• 1:12:46Chuck Nice?

  Great question.

• 1:12:47Charles Liu?

  All right. Summer, you're thinking hard. Thank you. Okay, we'll give Andrew this first one.

• 1:12:52Speaker 04

  I like medical stuff. I'm interested in that. That's such a hot topic today is all, you know, take, let's see where we could go with what McCoy had, right? You know, and the tricorder and stuff. And we're living in a time where we have wrist-worn medical devices, right? And there's this promise of being, you know, non-intrusive medical tests. You know, I've heard now there's a work on even doing like a glucose monitoring without any...

• 1:13:20Charles Liu?

  Wow.

• 1:13:21Speaker 04

  You know, any puncturing.

• 1:13:22Charles Liu?

  No pain prick.

• 1:13:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:24Charles Liu?

  A lot of diabetics, a lot of succ...

• 1:13:25Speaker 04

  Where could this go? I mean, I want to see that.

• 1:13:27Charles Liu?

  That's great.

• 1:13:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:28Charles Liu?

  Chuck?

• 1:13:29Chuck Nice?

  You know, I kinda like the medical thing too. I mean, when you think about it, even, it's all in the news now, but when you think about the EpiPen and its delivery system, the first time we saw that was in the hypo with Bones where he would just, and would just make that pssss, and I was like, as a kid, I felt like, man, if only it were that easy, just to get a needle like that would be awesome. So, you know, yeah, it's a pretty cool thing.

• 1:13:56Speaker 03

  I was thinking maybe like 3D printing, because that's sort of something that's already like implied in that universe.

• 1:14:03Chuck Nice?

  The replicator.

• 1:14:04Speaker 03

  But it's sort of just like magically happens. But I think that we're getting towards some of that, you know, the very edge of the beginning of that. And even, there's a 3D printer on the space station.

• 1:14:15Charles Liu?

  That's what I was gonna say, yeah.

• 1:14:15Speaker 03

  And so the astronauts can print a tool if they need it, or if something breaks, it's kind of amazing.

• 1:14:21Chuck Nice?

  Maybe one day they'll be able to walk up and go, "T, Earl Grey, hot."

• 1:14:24Charles Liu?

  Oh, wait.

• 1:14:27Charles Liu?

  Thank you very much, thank you. Yes.

• 1:14:30Speaker 19

  I have two questions about gravitons.

• 1:14:32Charles Liu?

  Gravitons, ooh. You're not talking about that old 1970s Marvel supervillain, right? Graviton?

• 1:14:39Speaker 19

  No.

• 1:14:39Charles Liu?

  Not that guy. Okay, all right.

• 1:14:41Speaker 19

  As far as I understand it, gravity should have a particle?

• 1:14:44Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 1:14:45Speaker 19

  And would, two things, if, when we find it, for the artificial gravity on the ship, could they be manipulating gravitons to keep them down? And second, if we do find it, could we maybe make a warp field sort of based on gravitons? So we don't need, we could just create?

• 1:15:05Chuck Nice?

  So instead of mass, you would manipulate the gravitons to create that bubble you were talking about?

• 1:15:11Charles Liu?

  I'll just put a little bit of a particle physics background on that question, and then I would love for Summer to give this a shot.

• 1:15:21Charles Liu?

  I get the easy part, obviously. So, according to the current model of particle physics, there are four kinds of what are called bosons. These are the things that carry force, they mediate between the four forces of the universe. The strong nuclear force has something called a gluon. The electromagnetic force has something called a photon. And the weak nuclear force has something called the intermediate vector bosons, the W and Z particles is what they are. And for gravity, there thus should be a thing, another particle, because it's a force too, and it's called the graviton. But the graviton has never been detected.

• 1:16:03Charles Liu?

  Even though the other three kinds of particles have all been detected, and even though we know that gravity works, so there ought to be a graviton, gravitons have never been found. And so this is the point where we can now speculate from real science into science fiction.

• 1:16:19Speaker 04

  But that's what Star Trek is basing. I think it's interesting that they've taken something like that, that's in the realm of theory, and they've moved it forward. Is it possible to move forward from here? We don't know, but they have applied it in this wonderful adventure.

• 1:16:35Charles Liu?

  It's really nice. So, Summer, gravitons for artificial gravity or for warp drive? What do you think?

• 1:16:41Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:16:42Charles Liu?

  Okay.

• 1:16:43Speaker 03

  But it's like, I mean, we knew that the Higgs boson existed, or in theory. We theorized that it existed, and we had to build massive, massive machines to attempt to just find a hint of it. So, maybe we'll just continue to do that, and hopefully, we'll have another international collaboration that will come together to find evidence of the graviton.

• 1:17:08Charles Liu?

  Wonderful.

• 1:17:09Speaker 04

  Thank you very much.

• 1:17:10Charles Liu?

  Yes?

• 1:17:11Speaker 20

  Well, I have several questions.

• 1:17:14Charles Liu?

  Okay, pick one.

• 1:17:15Speaker 20

  Oh, just one of...

• 1:17:16Charles Liu?

  For now, yes. We'll do...

• 1:17:18Speaker 20

  No, I'm still thinking. One second, okay. Well, all the questions were good, but I'll do...

• 1:17:26Charles Liu?

  Just do one this time. Do more next time.

• 1:17:28Speaker 20

  Okay.

• 1:17:31Speaker 20

  They've been doing research about how possible is the warp drive?

• 1:17:36Charles Liu?

  Yes.

• 1:17:36Speaker 20

  There was a news in NASA and all that stuff.

• 1:17:38Charles Liu?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:39Speaker 20

  What are the latest news about that? Is it still like something that's fantasy? Or is it gonna be real?

• 1:17:46Charles Liu?

  Anyone know the latest information from NASA? The last I heard was it is still fantasy. But nevertheless, there is some theoretical framework that, as Summer has demonstrated earlier, that there is a possibility of warping space and time. So now it's just a matter of whether we can warp it for our needs. Those gravitational waves that Summer was talking about earlier, where space-time was literally rippling because of the collision of two supermassive black holes? Those ripples, which were less than the width of a proton over a multi-mile stretch, in order to have created that much energy to ripple across space-time,

• 1:18:26Charles Liu?

  it would have been like having our sun use its entire energy output that it would have shined over 10 billion years in less than a tenth of a second. So if we can control that amount of energy, then yes, warp drive is very, very possible. Wouldn't that be nice?

• 1:18:45Charles Liu?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:45Speaker 03

  So 2020?

• 1:18:48Charles Liu?

  Sure. Let's stick it on to NASA's decadal survey plans. Let's do it. Yes, go ahead. Thank you for your question.

• 1:18:55Speaker 17

  Hi, everybody.

• 1:18:57Charles Liu?

  Hello.

• 1:18:57Speaker 17

  It's my first Star Trek Con ever.

• 1:18:59Charles Liu?

  All right, all right.

• 1:19:04Speaker 17

  Can I do a two-part question?

• 1:19:06Chuck Nice?

  Not if you wanna piss that guy off.

• 1:19:10Speaker 17

  All right.

• 1:19:10Charles Liu?

  No, go ahead and do two parts that are really close to one another.

• 1:19:13Speaker 17

  All right, I'll just do one. All right, this is one thing about, is one thing that, you know, I loved Star Trek my whole life. But one thing about it just hit me a couple of weeks ago. And it actually happened when I wasn't watching Star Trek at all. Actually watching Man of Steel. You ever see Man of Steel? When Superman arrives on the Kryptonian ship that belongs to Zod? And he's gagging and Chuggin's not used to the atmosphere and all that stuff?

• 1:19:39Chuck Nice?

  Tell me more.

• 1:19:40Speaker 17

  It got me, it got me thinking, all right, every crew in Star Trek goes on all these different planets. They can't all have the same type of oxygen and atmosphere and things like that for... Humans to breathe, especially not Kronos. You see how dirty Kronos is?

• 1:20:01Speaker 17

  My bad.

• 1:20:03Chuck Nice?

  That woman is from Kronos. You've insulted her.

• 1:20:07Speaker 17

  My bad. Much love to the Klingons.

• 1:20:10Charles Liu?

  I'll bet you don't like Klingon opera either.

• 1:20:12Speaker 17

  So.

• 1:20:17Chuck Nice?

  I gotta tell you, that was pretty good Klingon opera.

• 1:20:19Speaker 17

  It's not too bad.

• 1:20:20Charles Liu?

  I may be a little rusty.

• 1:20:22Speaker 17

  But I always wondered, like, do they ever explain how human beings could breathe?

• 1:20:27Chuck Nice?

  So really, I think the better question is, can you classify how they determine planets, like Earth being a Class M planet, and the other planets being different classes? Because that's really what he's talking about. Because clearly, they're only beaming down to Class M planets. So how is that determination made?

• 1:20:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I think you're right. Like, in the Star Trek lore, there are those classifications of the ones that have the breathable atmosphere. And so, in theory, I think to some extent,

• 1:21:02Speaker 03

  it's very possible that there are millions of planets inhabitable zones. Because there's 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

• 1:21:10Speaker 17

  That's true.

• 1:21:11Speaker 03

  And if, in theory, we're finding, you know, potentially statistically says, every planet could have a star, every star could have a planet. So out of 100 billion, you could easily have a million. And that doesn't even exhaust the ones that they've been to in all of the...

• 1:21:28Chuck Nice?

  You could easily have 100 million out of 100 billion.

• 1:21:30Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:21:32Speaker 04

  And the elements, too, that we're talking about. Like, we're discovering water is ubiquitous throughout the universe. We're finding them in nebulas, we're finding them all over the place, in very unusual place, very distant, even other galaxies.

• 1:21:46Charles Liu?

  So I guess the answer is, although it is impossible that every planet has such breathable atmosphere, it is possible that there are enough breathable atmosphere planets that we actually can just fill 17 seasons of different Star Trek episodes. That's a great question.

• 1:22:03Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:22:03Charles Liu?

  Thank you.

• 1:22:04Speaker 17

  That just make, the whole thing just make so much more sense. Thank you, guys.

• 1:22:07Charles Liu?

  You're welcome. And, sir?

• 1:22:11Speaker 21

  And the final question, yeah. So, this is a practical question, but I want you to, like, give me an estimate, hypothesize a little bit about it.

• 1:22:22Speaker 21

  The core of Earth and by extension of any extrasolar planet that still has an active core radiates, right? There is radioactive decay. Is it possible for us in the future, this is not too much of a Star Trek question, for us to build sensitive enough radio telescopes so that we can detect extrasolar planets that way?

• 1:22:49Charles Liu?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:50Speaker 21

  So instead of using transit or how the stars-

• 1:22:55Charles Liu?

  Doppler effects or direct imaging, can we use radio?

• 1:22:58Speaker 21

  Because I guess that the elements that decay in the core are different from what you would get from stars, you know.

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 1:23:07Charles Liu?

  As a resident radio astronomer, Summer-

• 1:23:08Speaker 03

  In theory, that sounds to me like that would be something that would work, but I would think potentially it's the resolution of the radio because that would be such a small source. And like I said, stars will emit from the radio, so it's how sensitive can you get your instruments to detect a difference from what you would expect from the star? But they already are looking for planets also within infrared because basically you can see the heat signature of a planet, re-radiating the heat that it's absorbed from its star. And so in theory, I think then the next step would potentially be that, but it's just going to take a, you know, a huge leap forward in our technology.

• 1:23:51Chuck Nice?

  So all you have to do now is invent that equipment and you get your Nobel props.

• 1:23:55Charles Liu?

  That's it.

• 1:23:56Chuck Nice?

  You're gonna be my partner.

• 1:23:57Charles Liu?

  You can have two, you can have three of them. Well, this has been such a wonderful opportunity here to talk with you all, to geek out just a little tiny bit, but also bring some science down to earth into our kitchens, into our homes here into New York. I think it's fair to say that this is the very, very best Star Trek missions panel that I have ever, ever moderated and hosted. So I want to thank you all very, very much. Chuck Nice, my co-host, thank you so much for being here today.

• 1:24:32Chuck Nice?

  It's a pleasure. You guys are amazing. Thank you, each and every one of you for coming out and- Spending time with us.

• 1:24:39Charles Liu?

  Andrew Fazekas, author of the book Star Trek: The Official Guide to the Universe. Thank you so, so much for being part of this wonderful thing, coming down from Canada for this. Summer Ash, my friend, thank you so much. Really appreciate everything that you're being here. Looking forward to hearing you on StarTalk All-Stars. And this is the book StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson, which is available down there if you want to go find it. Please do, or otherwise. This is StarTalk All-Stars, a live episode. Thank you all for being part of it. I'm Charles Liu. Enjoy the universe, everyone. Thank you so much.

• 1:25:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk.