StarTalk Live! at the Beacon: Searching for Life in the Universe (Part 1)

Neil deGrasse Tyson and Eugene Mirman welcome planetary scientist Carolyn Porco, Sean Ono Lennon, Vanessa Bayer, and Michael Ian Black to search for life in the universe in Part One of our StarTalk Live! show recorded at the Beacon Theatre in NYC. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can 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.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Eugene Mirman?

  Hello, everybody.

• 0:26Eugene Mirman?

  Welcome to StarTalk Live.

• 0:33Eugene Mirman?

  We have an awesome show for you. It is my incredible pleasure to bring out your host, the amazing science communicator and natural wonder Neil Dikram Tyson.

• 0:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eugene.

• 0:57Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 0:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Always great to have you here. Thanks for making us a part of your comedic universe.

• 1:02Eugene Mirman?

  Thank you.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I get to invite the guest Eugene Mirman. StarTalk Live first appeared as part of Eugene Mirman's Comedy Festival. He organizes groups of comedians and they make you laugh. And he said, "Let's add a little science to one of the spots." And ever since then, StarTalk Live was born.

• 1:20Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And now, it started out at a small bar in Brooklyn and now we're like in the Beacon Theater.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tonight, we're going to talk about the exploration of the universe and the search for life in that exploration and what impact that might have on us philosophically, culturally, religiously, on our artwork and all that we are and define ourselves to be as humans. And let's bring out, oh, yes, you like that. So let's bring out one of my scientific guests, a colleague and a friend, in fact, a hometown native. Give a very warm welcome to Dr. Carolyn Porco. Carolyn.

• 2:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Carolyn. Carolyn Porco is a hometown native. She's a planetary scientist. She was head of the imaging science team of the Cassini mission to Saturn. If you saw any image of Saturn in the last 15 years, she did it.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She and her team.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I call her Madame Saturn.

• 2:31Carolyn Porco?

  Thank you, thank you. I love that.

• 2:33Eugene Mirman?

  It is my great pleasure to bring out a comedian, wonderful comedian, from Wet Hot American Summer and many, many other things. Ladies and gentlemen, he has a new show called Debate Wars out on CISO. Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Ian Black.

• 2:53Michael Ian Black?

  Oh, you know what? I'm gonna go around. I'm gonna go around.

• 3:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dude.

• 3:02Eugene Mirman?

  And from Saturday Night Live and Trainwreck, ladies and gentlemen, Vanessa Bayer.

• 3:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And rounding this out, we can't do this. If we're gonna talk about art, we need an artist. If we're gonna talk about the impact of science on our lives, we need somebody who sits at that intersection. Give a very warm welcome to musician and artist Sean Ono Lennon. Sean.

• 3:38Speaker 04

  Over there, right?

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dude.

• 3:40Speaker 04

  Hey, man. Thanks for having me.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So let's just get some basic science on the table. Carolyn, we went to Saturn.

• 3:52Carolyn Porco?

  We did, indeed.

• 3:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did it in an awesome way. We went, we entered orbit back in 2004?

• 3:58Carolyn Porco?

  Four.

• 3:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's been going gangbusters since then?

• 4:02Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, it has.

• 4:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why go to Saturn?

• 4:04Carolyn Porco?

  Oh, wow. Where do I begin?

• 4:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, sorry. Okay. I'll be a little more specific. What were you after? What did we not know about Saturn that you found out?

• 4:14Carolyn Porco?

  Well, let me back up and start at the beginning with the Voyager mission, okay? The Voyager mission, we toured the outer solar system in the 1980s, and we had two spacecraft encounter Saturn in 1980 and 1981.

• 4:28Carolyn Porco?

  And that was really the first time we ever got a glimpse of what the Saturnian system offered. So we got to see the surfaces of the satellites, we got to see the rings in some detail. And as these things often happen, you know, it was just a wonderful exploration and journey of discovery and all those accolades you've heard, but they really leave us with other questions that we'd like to answer. And so as soon as the Voyager mission was over, everybody was deep into planning the next mission to return to Saturn because that was considered the system, the planetary system, it is the planetary system that is the most phenomenologically rich. So it has Titan.

• 5:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That means it's the most beautiful.

• 5:14Carolyn Porco?

  It's also the most beautiful. It's also the most beautiful. And I was in the privileged position of being responsible for the images that we returned. So I just very much wanted to make them beautiful.

• 5:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, let's give it up. Yes. So you couldn't just send Cassini there. You needed some gravitational help, last I remembered.

• 5:35Carolyn Porco?

  And we got it.

• 5:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you launch it from Earth, and you don't have enough energy, enough propulsion to get it there. So you steal orbital energy from what?

• 5:43Carolyn Porco?

  Well, this is a maneuver that was found before going to Voyager. But if you fly a spacecraft by a planet, let's say, that is already moving, then depending on how you fly the spacecraft by the planet, you can actually take a little bit of momentum from that body. But because the planet's so big and the spacecraft is so small, you really give a big kick to the spacecraft. So in order to get to Saturn, we actually flew around the inner solar system for two years, kind of parked it there, building up speed. We flew by Venus twice, the Earth once.

• 6:20Eugene Mirman?

  And it never went back in time?

• 6:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so you

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you did a double slingshot around Venus.

• 6:31Carolyn Porco?

  Not around, we just flew by it.

• 6:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Flew by, slingshot Venus, and you also slingshot Earth.

• 6:36Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, we did.

• 6:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 6:38Michael Ian Black?

  Now, did we just get, you just got lucky that you ended up on Saturn, or you had figured all this out?

• 6:43Carolyn Porco?

  Look, I'll tell you, if they had left me in charge of the navigation, we would have ended up at Uranus. So they do have a group of people.

• 6:50Carolyn Porco?

  They have a, they have a group, I, I, well, anyway, I have terrible, I have a terrible sense of direction.

• 6:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She just referenced Uranus.

• 6:56Michael Ian Black?

  I know what she said.

• 6:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, I just want to make that clear. Yeah, okay.

• 7:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but, so, so this is like a three cushion pool shot, off of three planets. Any more planets on the way out?

• 7:08Carolyn Porco?

  Oh, no, no, then we went by Jupiter. And we went by Jupiter, incidentally, on the eve of the year 2001, which I thought was like so incredibly bitchin'.

• 7:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bitchin'?

• 7:20Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah.

• 7:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember that since 1963.

• 7:24Michael Ian Black?

  Was the thing you sent a Camaro?

• 7:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You were bitchin'. Alright.

• 7:31Carolyn Porco?

  It's a surfer term.

• 7:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, alright, so you slingshot Jupiter, and now you got enough energy to get to Saturn, which is twice again as far away as Jupiter is.

• 7:39Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, so it took us another three years to do it. So it took us seven years in total to cross the solar system.

• 7:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, cool. And then it gets pulled into orbit, and you've got rings, you've got magnetic fields, you've got all manner of things going on there. You know what my favorite? I have two favorites. One, you found lightning on Saturn.

• 7:57Carolyn Porco?

  We did, yes, we captured lightning on Saturn.

• 7:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, is it raining? Like, what's going on?

• 8:02Carolyn Porco?

  Well, it's doing essentially what lightning does here. It's accompanied by thunder and rain and so on. These are big convective storms that produce lightning.

• 8:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have rain on Saturn?

• 8:11Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, we do.

• 8:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it water, water, or some other liquid?

• 8:14Carolyn Porco?

  Well, this, this is in the water clouds, yeah.

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The water cloud. But you have other clouds. If they rained, it wouldn't be rain water. It'd be like rain ammonia or something, is that right?

• 8:21Carolyn Porco?

  It could be rain ammonia. I guess, that's too deep for us to know much about. We knew about the water clouds.

• 8:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. That'd be weird. Ammonia rain.

• 8:31Michael Ian Black?

  But think how clean your countertops would be.

• 8:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How clean? Everything would be clean. They used to have rain like that in New York.

• 8:39Carolyn Porco?

  Disinfected, disinfected.

• 8:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so we got that, and then what freaked me out to this day was this hexagon in Saturn's, what, South Pole, was it?

• 8:50Carolyn Porco?

  North Pole.

• 8:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  North Pole? A hexagon? No. No. There are no hexagons in the universe. How did you, what is that?

• 9:01Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, so this is, I'm glad you brought this up, because every time we released something about the hexagon on our website, cyclops.org, our hits went through the roof. You know, because I think people think this has something to do with crystal energy, and what a, what's a, you know...

• 9:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, hexa, like, a hexagon's a common crystal cross-sectional shape.

• 9:20Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, but it's the straight sides in an atmosphere that really blew people away. So, we've explained over and over and over again that this is just a continuous wave with just six waves in it. It's, you know, M-number, you know that, wave number? So we have a wave number six jet stream that encircles Saturn. It's nothing more than that. It's very similar to what we have here on the Earth, except on the Earth it's very discontinuous because the system, the jet stream, is traveling over the oceans and hill and dale and so on, and it, friction just wears it down, but on Saturn there is no friction, so it just is continuous.

• 10:02Michael Ian Black?

  So, is it land?

• 10:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, what were you gonna say?

• 10:04Speaker 05

  I was just, so it's, like, in my mind, it's, like, the, I'm, like, picturing the shape that you learn about, like, when you learn about octagon.

• 10:14Carolyn Porco?

  Hexagon is six-sided.

• 10:16Speaker 05

  So, right, I knew that. So, and then there's...

• 10:23Speaker 05

  And then there's, there's water? That's jet streams going between?

• 10:27Carolyn Porco?

  Well, it's a jet, it's a jet stream of, of air on Saturn. And at that level, um, I don't know, it's probably hydrogen, mostly hydrogen. But it's, um, it's, yeah, it's just a jet stream. It's just very regular because there's nothing to disturb it.

• 10:43Speaker 05

  And it's at the bottom?

• 10:44Carolyn Porco?

  No, it's in the top of the atmosphere. It's at the pole.

• 10:46Speaker 05

  Got it, okay.

• 10:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, so Carolyn, I just want to comment that you're all calm and casual. Oh, it's just a hexagon, it's a, it's a sustained wave. Don't tell me you didn't freak out when you first saw the hexagon.

• 11:02Carolyn Porco?

  Well, we first saw the hexagon with Voyager and I was very freakable when I was young. But, you know, by the time...

• 11:14Speaker 05

  Why was that funny?

• 11:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because if you get your freak on, you know, it's like... So, uh, so it's just easy in retrospect to say how to explain what you're looking at. But it seems to me that's a pretty impressive thing to discover on a planet. That's all. And you say, well, Earth has it too. It's just not a hexagon. But then we don't have it.

• 11:38Carolyn Porco?

  Well, okay, so that's why we went. You asked, why did we go? That's why we went. We wanted to discover all those things that are the same and are different about our planet. Because ultimately, we want to learn about process. And process, the more we learn about process, about planets, the better custodians of our own planet we can be. So that's what planetary exploration is all about.

• 11:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So...

• 11:59Carolyn Porco?

  Aside from...

• 12:02Carolyn Porco?

  Aside from having, aside from having a really bitchin' time.

• 12:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so, uh, tell me about the, uh, any questions you thought you would have answered but didn't get answered.

• 12:18Carolyn Porco?

  Oh, well, we still don't know exactly what the mass of Saturn's rings are. And it's important if you're interested in figuring out how old they are, where they came from, and that whole process. So, in fact, that's what the end of the Cassini mission is aiming to do, eventually.

• 12:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To measure the mass of Saturn's rings, because they're really skinny.

• 12:38Carolyn Porco?

  They're really skinny. They're only about 30 feet thick, yet they extend for 280,000 kilometers, which is about one light second. It would take light, the fastest thing we know, one second to travel across the rings. They would fit in nicely between the Earth and the Moon. And we've discovered so many things in there. Just let me know when we can start.

• 12:59Michael Ian Black?

  I have a question.

• 13:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, Mike.

• 13:03Michael Ian Black?

  Now, I'm going to explain this in layman's terms for the audience. Saturn's really big.

• 13:11Carolyn Porco?

  Really big.

• 13:12Michael Ian Black?

  Why are the rings so thin in comparison?

• 13:17Carolyn Porco?

  You really want to know the answer to this?

• 13:18Michael Ian Black?

  No, I just asked because I felt like I should say something.

• 13:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, they are so thin, when Saturn is edge on, when they're edge on to us, they disappear entirely.

• 13:30Carolyn Porco?

  Well, not really.

• 13:34Michael Ian Black?

  Oh, snap.

• 13:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, all right. Let me try that again. They're so thin, they disappear. How thin are they? They disappear mostly.

• 13:46Carolyn Porco?

  Mostly.

• 13:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fine.

• 13:47Carolyn Porco?

  Mostly. But they, but you wanted to know, okay, it's a real simple Physics 101 explanation.

• 13:54Michael Ian Black?

  I didn't get that far.

• 13:58Carolyn Porco?

  They consist of lots and lots and lots of icy particles, chunks of ice, that are like that tiny, all the way to the size of small apartment buildings. And when they collide, which they did in the early days after they formed, and we think they formed by two satellites colliding with one another, something like that, this creates a cloud of debris, and these particles are in very wild and crazy orbits. And when they collide, they lose energy, but they conserve angular momentum. This is a process that even has produced the... Disks of galaxies that we know, the spiral galaxies, which are very thin also compared to their horizontal dimensions.

• 14:38Michael Ian Black?

  Does that mean that Earth will eventually have a ring of space junk and debris?

• 14:43Carolyn Porco?

  Well, it would have to, it could. If we left enough junk up there so that they collided, that actually would happen, yeah.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  And isn't Saturn just like a mini solar system? I mean, in terms of the way our solar system formed, I mean, can't you make that analogous, the way the discs are?

• 14:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the moon count? If you want to analogize them to planets, what's the moon count for Saturn right now?

• 15:03Carolyn Porco?

  I've lost track, it's over 60.

• 15:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, over 60.

• 15:06Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, it's a lot of moons.

• 15:07Michael Ian Black?

  Wait, you don't know how many moons?

• 15:09Carolyn Porco?

  I'm sorry, I don't.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  Not yet.

• 15:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you know? Allow me to defend this bit of ignorance.

• 15:15Carolyn Porco?

  Thank you.

• 15:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we went through a little bit...

• 15:19Carolyn Porco?

  A girl can't know everything.

• 15:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You reach a point where the number of something is not as important as what the thing actually is.

• 15:31Carolyn Porco?

  Good for you, Neil, that was brilliant.

• 15:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, wait, wait, wait. Sounds like a cop-out to me. So, so, when people were taught that there were nine planets in the solar system, and then Pluto got kicked out, people cried foul because they thought science was about the number. And they got jacked to do with the number.

• 15:55Speaker 04

  Right. Wait, but didn't they just find a ninth planet anyway?

• 16:00Michael Ian Black?

  And is that why science has since stopped measuring things, Neil?

• 16:05Speaker 04

  But hasn't Pluto been replaced?

• 16:08Carolyn Porco?

  No, no, we've only stopped counting.

• 16:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've just stopped counting.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  But hasn't Pluto been replaced by some, they detected a wobble that might mean there's another planet out there that we didn't know about?

• 16:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Way out.

• 16:17Speaker 04

  Very far.

• 16:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the Kuiper Belt.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  I just find that so hard to understand, that we could have had a planet in our own solar system that we haven't seen yet.

• 16:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's way out.

• 16:26Carolyn Porco?

  It's way out.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  But we see exoplanets, I mean, we see, you know, we can detect them.

• 16:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's dark.

• 16:31Speaker 04

  Right. It's just really dark. I bet.

• 16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we come back, segment two of StarTalk Live, the Beacon Theater!

• 16:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so among the 60 moons, 60+ moons, there are a couple moons that rise up in their significance to those in search for life or interesting things going on on moons. So what can you tell us about that?

• 17:11Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, so these are the two best moons there are, okay. The first one is Titan. It's about 50% larger than our own moon. It has a thick atmosphere of molecular nitrogen. It has a thermal structure that's like our own Earth here. And so it's, in some sense, it's a mini-Earth, except that it does not have oxygen, free oxygen, in its atmosphere. And it has organic materials in its atmosphere. And those organic materials, we suspected, would be found on the surface in liquid form, and we didn't find them at first, and we didn't find them after a year or two, and then finally, we found that they went to the poles. The liquids on Titan are liquid hydrocarbons

• 17:56Carolyn Porco?

  that are bonded at the poles.

• 17:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a word, bonded?

• 18:00Carolyn Porco?

  Bonded?

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's cool, I like that word.

• 18:01Carolyn Porco?

  Someone get, where's their phone?

• 18:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's good, I like it. Doesn't that, we made it a word here and now, if it wasn't previously a word.

• 18:06Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, I think it was a word.

• 18:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So liquid hydro, like methane?

• 18:11Carolyn Porco?

  Methane and ethane, yes.

• 18:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So like methane is the gas that comes out of your stove, typically, if you live in a city. So that's flammable.

• 18:18Carolyn Porco?

  That's very flammable.

• 18:19Speaker 05

  I have a question about moons, just for the audience. I do know the answer to this, but...

• 18:24Speaker 05

  The difference between like a moon and a planet, is that the moon orbits around?

• 18:30Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, and they're generally smaller, generally.

• 18:32Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 18:33Eugene Mirman?

  Are there some moons that are bigger than the planets?

• 18:35Carolyn Porco?

  Uh, no, I don't really think so.

• 18:37Eugene Mirman?

  Right, I didn't either. It was only when you said "generally" that I got confused.

• 18:40Carolyn Porco?

  I was just covering my butt.

• 18:43Speaker 05

  So, but a lot of-

• 18:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, so Eugene, if the moon were bigger than the planet-

• 18:46Carolyn Porco?

  It would be all the way-

• 18:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The planet would be the moon, and the moon would be the planet.

• 18:49Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah, that's what I figured until she said generally. And then I was like, "I need, I need, I have a question now."

• 18:57Speaker 05

  They're made of like the same kinda cool stuff, right?

• 19:01Carolyn Porco?

  Cool stuff, but not the same stuff.

• 19:03Speaker 05

  Right, well, they're all different, but do moons have elements in common that, you know?

• 19:11Speaker 05

  Do moons have, do moons all share certain elements that-

• 19:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're all made of cheese.

• 19:17Speaker 05

  And by elements, I mean like, uh-

• 19:20Eugene Mirman?

  Stuff.

• 19:20Carolyn Porco?

  Alright, let me help you out here. Okay.

• 19:22Speaker 05

  Help them out.

• 19:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 19:25Carolyn Porco?

  That was a nice passing of the book.

• 19:28Speaker 05

  You're welcome.

• 19:28Carolyn Porco?

  So, in the Saturn system, for example, the moons are largely made of water ice, because it's so cold out there that water becomes, you know, it's like a rock. You get to Uranus, and then you get to Neptune, which are much farther out, you have moons that actually have methane on their sur- Solid methane, so it just-

• 19:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Solid methane?

• 19:48Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, what's one with that?

• 19:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you cool the gas down, you liquefy it, cool it some more, then you get a solid, and that's laying around the moons of Uranus and Neptune?

• 19:57Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, and also liquid nitrogen, I mean, you know, most of our atmosphere, I mean, solid nitrogen, most of our atmosphere is molecular gaseous nitrogen, but by the time you get to Neptune, Neptune, we've got nitrogen on the surface, on Pluto, you heard a lot about nitrogen flowing on the surface of Pluto. Yeah.

• 20:16Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, you used to hear about it.

• 20:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, to Vanessa's point-

• 20:24Carolyn Porco?

  Hey, let's leave time to get to my favorite moon.

• 20:28Eugene Mirman?

  The best moon.

• 20:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Vanessa-

• 20:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear-

• 20:33Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 20:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The fact that the moon is comprised of ingredients that are essentially identical to Earth's crust is one of the factors that led us to suggest that the moon was formed by a side swipe of a planetesimal in the early solar system.

• 20:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scattering countless tons of Earth's crust into a ring of debris around Earth that would later coalesce and form what today we call the moon.

• 21:05Carolyn Porco?

  Hallelujah.

• 21:06Speaker 04

  But didn't they just study the moon rocks that they got in 1969? And they just realized that the collision that created the moon was not a graze. It was actually something a lot more impactful.

• 21:15Carolyn Porco?

  This guy reads up on everything.

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta watch out for him. Yeah, yeah. We gotta watch out. So the question is, how deep did it actually graze?

• 21:24Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 21:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it could not have gone too deep because if you get too deep in Earth, on Earth, when Earth was molten in its early days, the heavy stuff fell to the middle, the lighter stuff floated to the top. So nearly all of Earth's iron and platinum and iridium and gold is in our core. And if you side swiped enough to reach the core, you would scatter the heavy elements into what would become the moon. And the moon would have an appreciable amount of heavy elements. And it doesn't. It just doesn't. For something that size, it should have a whole iron core. And it's got no, it's got nothing, no.

• 21:58Eugene Mirman?

  So I shouldn't go to the moon to get any platinum?

• 22:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 22:03Eugene Mirman?

  Well, now I need a new thing to do in February.

• 22:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I just want to be clear. You asked a completely sensible question. And that question, when applied to the Earth-Moon system, led to an entire new understanding of the formation of the moon. Just, just.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  So which planet is a candidate to have sideswiped us?

• 22:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's that?

• 22:25Speaker 04

  Which planet is a candidate to have sideswiped us?

• 22:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We think it may have been completely destroyed.

• 22:29Speaker 04

  Oh, just it's gone? Is that what the asteroid belt is now or something?

• 22:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Asteroid belt, yeah, it's got a lot of debris. But if you add it all up, it doesn't come to much.

• 22:36Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It comes about like 5% of the mass of the moon.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 22:39Carolyn Porco?

  It's very, it's very, it wouldn't have had to be a planet-sized thing. And it's likely that the projectile broke up and is now part of the moon.

• 22:49Michael Ian Black?

  Can I offer an alternate hypothesis?

• 22:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:57Michael Ian Black?

  Space ray. Space ray. Laser gun. Gamma ray. Gamma ray. Yeah. Laser gun. It could have been.

• 23:04Eugene Mirman?

  What level Phaeton are you? I can't remember.

• 23:09Michael Ian Black?

  Can't divulge it.

• 23:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so we had Titan, but if we're gonna look for life, which inspires so much of our invested emotion and energy in space exploration, Titan doesn't sound like the place we would find life as we know it.

• 23:24Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, it would be very difficult to find life as we know it.

• 23:26Eugene Mirman?

  Like it wouldn't look like a goat, or it would be like, super not a goat?

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, not a goat, right. So, and you're asking him about his Phaetonism, is that what you were asking?

• 23:37Eugene Mirman?

  Earlier, but we moved on.

• 23:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what else is tantalizing with regard to life?

• 23:44Carolyn Porco?

  So, to me, the most provocative and most thrilling result we found is that this little moon called Enceladus, which is no bigger across than England, I mean, it's very small, has geysers shooting out that extend hundreds of miles above the surface. In fact, if you follow some of them, they go tens of thousands of kilometers away from Enceladus and they form the E-ring. But, these geysers, we now know, after being there for-

• 24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait just a sec, Saturn's rings have been lettered.

• 24:14Carolyn Porco?

  Yes.

• 24:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of which is called the E-ring.

• 24:16Carolyn Porco?

  One of which is called the E-ring.

• 24:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, gotcha.

• 24:18Carolyn Porco?

  Okay.

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think the Pentagon has an E-ring, too, I think, doesn't it?

• 24:21Carolyn Porco?

  Oh, does it?

• 24:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know, a D-ring?

• 24:22Michael Ian Black?

  I've got a phone that has a ring.

• 24:24Eugene Mirman?

  How many rings does Saturn have?

• 24:26Carolyn Porco?

  Don't ask those questions. Let me finish one thought at a time. I can only handle one thought at a time.

• 24:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me about Enceladus, go.

• 24:33Michael Ian Black?

  You know we don't count things anymore, right Eugene?

• 24:37Carolyn Porco?

  We don't learn them either.

• 24:38Eugene Mirman?

  Wanted one last counting.

• 24:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, E-ring, I mean, Enceladus, go.

• 24:42Carolyn Porco?

  Enceladus. So, these geysers, we know, come through four major fractures at the south pole, which is a really unique, interesting terrain.

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are fractures in the ice.

• 24:53Carolyn Porco?

  In the ice, in the ice shell, sorry. There's an ice shell that exists, lies on top of a global ocean of salty liquid water that is suffused with organic materials. And we know that because, after being there a while, we figured all this out, and then later on in the mission, we actually send the spacecraft through the plume to pick up material and analyze its composition. So, like, we got this down pat now.

• 25:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have that much remote control over what next orbit? Your spacecraft took.

• 25:25Carolyn Porco?

  You know, you know how you operate drones?

• 25:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 25:28Carolyn Porco?

  No, never.

• 25:30Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, so when you say organic material, what do you mean? Like, what constitutes organic material?

• 25:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kale.

• 25:36Eugene Mirman?

  Did you say cake?

• 25:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, kale.

• 25:38Carolyn Porco?

  Kale, kale.

• 25:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kale.

• 25:40Eugene Mirman?

  Did we find space kale?

• 25:46Carolyn Porco?

  Well, close to it, close enough, but, uh, simple stuff like, you know, things, compounds that contain carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and things like that. Those are the basic bi- what?

• 25:59Speaker 04

  I'm kidding, sorry.

• 26:02Carolyn Porco?

  The basic bio elements that you and I are made out of.

• 26:05Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 26:05Carolyn Porco?

  You know, plus a lot more, but especially you.

• 26:07Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:12Carolyn Porco?

  He's laughing.

• 26:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, okay, so Carolyn, I, I'm less impressed

• 26:17Carolyn Porco?

  Oh.

• 26:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that there are organic materials there, because these, you just listed some of the most common kinds of atoms in the universe. The question is, is Enceladus in a kind of state where we can think of it containing life as we know it?

• 26:32Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, because it has an ocean and we-

• 26:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, why is it, it's outside the Goldilocks zone.

• 26:37Carolyn Porco?

  It has a subsurface ocean. Okay, I see where you're going with this. It has a subsurface ocean and we've found through whatever it's been now, nearly 60 years of exploring planets, uh, both from ground-based observations using telescopes and our spacecraft, that there are several moons in our solar system that have, uh, subsurface oceans, and so they're-

• 26:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Liquid ocean.

• 26:59Carolyn Porco?

  Liquid water-

• 27:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Something had to be melting them, and it's not the sun.

• 27:03Speaker 05

  Isn't every ocean a subsurface?

• 27:05Carolyn Porco?

  Not, not the Pacific.

• 27:07Speaker 05

  But isn't it sub-

• 27:09Carolyn Porco?

  No, sub means it's under the ground, think of it that way, except the ground on Enceladus is ice.

• 27:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, I got it, wait.

• 27:15Speaker 05

  The to- the top of it starts under-

• 27:18Carolyn Porco?

  The surface, it's on the surface of the body.

• 27:19Speaker 05

  Because I was like, what do you think an ocean is?

• 27:21Carolyn Porco?

  Wow, I'm doing a really bad job here.

• 27:22Michael Ian Black?

  It's like, it's like when you have a chocolate cake, the frosting is on top, the cake is subcake.

• 27:31Speaker 04

  It is.

• 27:31Carolyn Porco?

  And then, and then, sometimes there's a layer of frosting that is subcake.

• 27:36Michael Ian Black?

  Yes. Do we have that? Do we have frosting on?

• 27:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, just to be clear, Vanessa.

• 27:40Speaker 05

  I see, I see.

• 27:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Vanessa, until recently, the north, the North Pole Ocean is an ocean under a layer of ice. So, your question was not out of nowhere. I mean, you can't have oceans on Earth under layers of ice.

• 27:58Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah.

• 27:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You used to be able to. Used to be able to, yeah.

• 28:00Carolyn Porco?

  We used to be able to.

• 28:01Speaker 05

  Thank you very much.

• 28:02Michael Ian Black?

  Can I ask a dumb question? You referred to the South Pole. How do we gauge north and south on a, on a moon in space?

• 28:11Carolyn Porco?

  The way it's spinning.

• 28:14Carolyn Porco?

  We know, we know how. What?

• 28:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got you, I got you. Ready? Hold out your right hand. Okay, like this. Curl your fingers. If your fingers curl in the direction of the rotating object, your thumb points to the North Pole.

• 28:29Speaker 04

  Oh, but Venus rotates the other way, so what would the north be reversed on Venus?

• 28:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so if anything that seems to rotate this way, you take your hand, do that, and then the North Pole would be down.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  Okay, so Venus's North Pole is south of everyone else's, uh, pole, North Pole in the solar system?

• 28:48Speaker 04

  Because doesn't it rotate?

• 28:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's called the right-hand rule to establish what is north.

• 28:51Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 28:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 28:52Speaker 04

  I got that.

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 28:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so go on, so.

• 28:56Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, let me finish this.

• 28:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it's a great question, great, great question.

• 28:59Carolyn Porco?

  Let me finish this story, so.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why we can all agree what is north, no matter what object we're looking at.

• 29:04Speaker 04

  Well, that guy doesn't agree over there.

• 29:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so where were you? Go.

• 29:08Carolyn Porco?

  So, liquid water, organic compounds that we know come from the ocean, and it's being heated by tidal flexure. Okay, so it's in a resonance, which makes its orbit eccentric. Sometimes it's far away from Saturn, sometimes it's close, and that means that the tidal forcing varies, and that's how you get tidal energy injected into one of these bodies. There's enough of it to keep the ocean stable. And so, this is what NASA has been saying for decades now, would be... The formal requirements that we would want to know existed on a body so that we'd mount the next kind of wave of exploration and go there particularly to look for life.

• 29:53Carolyn Porco?

  And so that's where we are with Enceladus.

• 29:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the Goldilocks zone that is so celebrated can exist in other ways outside of the traditional Goldilocks zone?

• 30:01Carolyn Porco?

  There really is no Goldilocks zone as it pertains to distance from the sun. But there is a Goldilocks zone in the sense that, well, there is not, no, it just, because all you need is something that...

• 30:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A source of heat, whether or not it's the sun.

• 30:15Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, but you ultimately need something like tidal energy.

• 30:18Michael Ian Black?

  How warm are the oceans?

• 30:21Carolyn Porco?

  What?

• 30:21Michael Ian Black?

  How warm are those oceans?

• 30:22Carolyn Porco?

  Well, we don't really know, but they have to be at least, you know, the temperature of liquid water, like zero degrees Celsius or 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

• 30:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they gotta, they gotta pack some punch if you're blowing geysers 100 kilometers in the sky.

• 30:35Carolyn Porco?

  That's not hard to understand because the weight of the overlying ice shell forces the water up the cracks. And then there's also volatile materials like we've seen ammonia.

• 30:44Michael Ian Black?

  In Japan, they have special toilets that do that also.

• 30:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they do.

• 30:48Carolyn Porco?

  Do we want to go there?

• 30:52Speaker 04

  They're dangerous, those things, right?

• 30:54Carolyn Porco?

  Are you serious? Are you serious?

• 30:56Speaker 05

  I have a question about, okay, so if you're looking for life on that moon, has anyone ever thought, maybe this is very irresponsible, but has anyone ever thought like, what if we just threw a bunch of bugs in there?

• 31:07Carolyn Porco?

  Why would you want to do that?

• 31:09Speaker 05

  Well, just to see if they could like live and then you could create like a new...

• 31:14Carolyn Porco?

  This is not an aquarium. I mean, we're not...

• 31:17Speaker 05

  But I know, but wouldn't it be so cool and then come back five years later and they've all grown up and like...

• 31:23Carolyn Porco?

  Neil, help me out.

• 31:25Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. Could we put, this is just an idea, we put enough trout that when we get there again, we can fish? Is that really so bad?

• 31:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so NASA has an entire office called Planetary Protection.

• 31:41Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, they do.

• 31:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And their goal is to preserve planets, this would include moons, that may have life from contamination of life from Earth and to preserve life on Earth from any bugs that might accidentally be brought back from our planetary missions.

• 32:01Carolyn Porco?

  It's called forward and backwards contamination.

• 32:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Forward and backwards contamination.

• 32:04Speaker 05

  We know that those planets have that with us, so why are we like two months to two planets?

• 32:08Carolyn Porco?

  Ah!

• 32:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They don't have an agreement, a treaty.

• 32:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, like they never said to us, "We'll do this for..." You know what I mean? It feels sort of one-sided.

• 32:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So until we know that a planet is completely sterile, we want to be real.

• 32:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Carolyn, you are also part of this Voyager team, which had messages for aliens that might find this spacecraft. How old are you? It has escaped our solar system. And so this movement to try to contact extraterrestrial life, be it microbial or what we might call intelligent, it's been going on for a while. But some people might ask, since that Voyager, the Voyager record contained data that would allow aliens to triangulate back to find out what planet in the galaxy this was launched from.

• 33:08Carolyn Porco?

  Yes.

• 33:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is basically our return address.

• 33:10Carolyn Porco?

  Right.

• 33:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you give strangers your email address?

• 33:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Other humans that have DNA in common with you?

• 33:17Carolyn Porco?

  If they're in space. Actually, I do.

• 33:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Apparently.

• 33:20Carolyn Porco?

  Actually, I do.

• 33:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You do?

• 33:21Carolyn Porco?

  I do. It's on my website, cyclops.org.

• 33:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah?

• 33:24Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah.

• 33:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 33:25Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah.

• 33:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Vanessa, do you?

• 33:27Carolyn Porco?

  No.

• 33:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying, I'm curious about the, it's not the ethics of it, but the sensibility of alerting. And we all know what aliens will do when they find humans. We've seen this many times played out in the movies.

• 33:46Carolyn Porco?

  So, so this is really...

• 33:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Didn't you tell this to Carl Sagan at the time? That he put the, and he, and Andrian put the record on the spaceship?

• 33:56Carolyn Porco?

  Um, no, I did not.

• 33:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 33:58Carolyn Porco?

  No, I did not.

• 33:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everyone was very hopeful that aliens will be peaceful creatures.

• 34:03Carolyn Porco?

  Everyone thought it was, well, you know, it's on a spacecraft that, you know, is fast to us, but it's going pretty slow. It's not going to get too far. You know, I mean, it's, you know. But we have been, there are, there are people, myself included, who wanted to send messages into the galaxy, encoded on transmissions coming from the most powerful radio dishes we have here on the Earth. The Aracibo Telescope is one. Frank Drake, famous astronomer, radio astronomer, started this in 1974. He relayed a message to M31, is a globular cluster in our galaxy. Actually, it was a demonstration of the power of the transmitter on that telescope,

• 34:45Carolyn Porco?

  which they had just brought online, and he and his creativity and his just exuberance and wondering about life elsewhere, constructed this message that was encoded on the signals, and they sent it into space. Very celebrated thing. And I wanted to do it again, except do it better, and there's even a website where I describe this. But suddenly, there is a foot, this movement of people who think that this is a terribly dangerous thing to do.

• 35:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It includes Stephen Hawking. Yeah.

• 35:15Carolyn Porco?

  It does.

• 35:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It includes, who else? Elon Musk.

• 35:18Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, and they think that we are endangering the planet to let aliens know where we are.

• 35:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We endanger ourselves when one civilization encounters another in the history of life on Earth.

• 35:32Carolyn Porco?

  Right, so the extrapolation is, you know, so a much more powerful advanced civilization encounters us, it's gonna be like humans encountering flies, and they'll just wanna like squish us, and, you know.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I say what my-

• 35:47Carolyn Porco?

  We're already doing it. That's my argument, that's the counterargument.

• 35:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is the counterarg- I have yet to hear a counterargument.

• 35:52Carolyn Porco?

  And the counterargument is not due to me, the people have been saying this for a long time now, but the idea is that any civilization that is advanced enough to come knocking on our doorstep, has already filtered out, I mean, if it got that far, it has to be benign, because if it wasn't benign, it would have destroyed itself.

• 36:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. I just feel like, even if this advanced civilization is so much more advanced that we're like ants relative to these aliens, then whatever they want, even if it is enslaving me, I kind of feel like that would be the right thing to do anyway. You know?

• 36:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 36:30Speaker 04

  Because I mean, if they're so smart, if they think that, you know, I should be basically, you know, the coffee boy or something, then I'll do that.

• 36:37Carolyn Porco?

  This is a guy who has no trouble with authority figures.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  Well, no, because they know everything, so they must know what's right for us, then. And it might be squashing us like bugs.

• 36:45Michael Ian Black?

  Can I just clarify? You're making a pro-slavery argument.

• 36:48Carolyn Porco?

  Yes, we are.

• 36:50Eugene Mirman?

  As long as it's an advanced enough civilization that I believe you think needs coffee? Is that the...

• 36:57Speaker 04

  I mean, I've heard that...

• 36:58Eugene Mirman?

  That you would get them coffee. They would come here.

• 37:00Speaker 04

  How do you think they stay awake on those long interstellar flights? It's definitely Starbucks.

• 37:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Wait, wait. So you were saying that a sufficiently intelligent civil... uh, uh, uh, alien species that made it here must, number one, be benign, otherwise with that technology and power, if they were evil, they'd be evil to each other and destroy one another, as we were on the brink of a few decades ago, possibly even decades to come. And so, fine. And now you're gonna say they're so smart, they have our best interests in mind.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  Well, they'll have... they'll know what's right better than we'll know what's right. That's what I'm saying.

• 37:34Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, I think so too. I think that they'd be so evolved, literally evolved, and they will have... they will appreciate life because they will have studied, they probably know already what's going on in Enceladus.

• 37:45Speaker 05

  What I was gonna ask is, what have we said to them? And doesn't it also matter, like, what we say? Like, if we're like, "Oh, everyone's nice here, you guys should stop by," or if we're like...

• 37:55Carolyn Porco?

  No, it's usually our coordinates, like, where we are, you know, we're built on DNA. This is what we look like.

• 38:03Eugene Mirman?

  Is it ever like a paella recipe or anything? That like, they could try this thing and be like, "This is fun, I wonder if they have more of that?"

• 38:09Speaker 05

  How?

• 38:10Eugene Mirman?

  And they come and they all want paella.

• 38:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. Plus, if they... if they show up and there's some appendage sticking out, maybe that's not what you should shake. Because you don't know alien anatomy, for example.

• 38:29Eugene Mirman?

  I'd love to pull on an alien penis. As a sign of friendship.

• 38:33Speaker 05

  How did we give them our coordinates and stuff? Just... do we just think that they know our...

• 38:40Carolyn Porco?

  Well, you know, you have to make certain assumptions. It's actually a very, on all seriousness, this is a very interesting, fascinating, intellectual exercise to go through to figure out how you would communicate with an alien, uh, alien organism. You have to assume...

• 38:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're not gonna speak English.

• 38:59Carolyn Porco?

  They're not gonna speak English.

• 39:00Eugene Mirman?

  But they would know some French?

• 39:01Carolyn Porco?

  They'll know...

• 39:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I... I would freak out if an alien landed in my backyard and it said, "Polez-vous français." I would just... I... I...

• 39:20Carolyn Porco?

  Okay, that won't happen.

• 39:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd be trawling in the corner.

• 39:22Carolyn Porco?

  It won't happen.

• 39:23Eugene Mirman?

  Telepathic, but only in French.

• 39:24Michael Ian Black?

  Some people think Gerard de Pardieu was an angel from another world, so...

• 39:31Carolyn Porco?

  So you'd have to assume that they know the geography of the galaxy, and that they know about electromagnetic radiation and all its properties, and they know physics, and maybe they have math too, or something like it. Because they got here. I mean, they had to get here from, you know...

• 39:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Carolyn Porco?

  Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of light-years.

• 39:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Light-years away.

• 39:52Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah.

• 39:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 39:53Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, they didn't just fold space on a lucky guess.

• 39:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so Caroline, you are hopeful, and I'm delighted to hear that. You're more hopeful than I am, because there's... Look at how tribal we are, human to human. And somehow you're thinking we wouldn't be human tribal against aliens, or vice versa.

• 40:13Carolyn Porco?

  But there's no guarantee that we're gonna make it. We may be one of these failed civilizations if we don't get our act together. We haven't, right?

• 40:23Carolyn Porco?

  We haven't passed the test yet. So we may just go by way of all those civilizations that just destroyed themselves, and we're not gonna get to participate in the nirvana that awaits all the peaceful...

• 40:36Eugene Mirman?

  Well, hopefully that'll be a future generation.

• 40:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What gets me is...

• 40:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are all these outer space treaties that the UN comes up with, and peaceful use of outer space, and friendship in outer space. And I'm thinking, I have very little confidence in that. Because why would you think that on Earth we like killing each other, but in space, oh, that's a place to be friends?

• 41:07Eugene Mirman?

  You don't think ISIS would be super-nice on the moon?

• 41:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying...

• 41:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I am not convinced, I'm not convinced that we will treat each other better in space than we do on Earth until we know how to treat each other better on Earth. Okay. All right, it's time to wrap up all this talk about death and AI. We're going to take your questions on everything cosmic about the future of the human race on Earth or in space on StarTalk. All right, let's go straight on in. If you come from someplace other than New York, I would welcome to know your point of origin. Sir, go ahead, what's your question?

• 41:49Speaker 06

  I come from 10 blocks away.

• 41:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  10 blocks away. What country is that?

• 41:54Speaker 06

  Exactly. So, my question is Elon Musk has been doing a lot of stuff in SpaceX on launching stuff into space, but it seems like his underlying motive is really to colonize Mars to some extent. And he just wanted to get kind of, I guess, everybody's opinion about.

• 42:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll only get one because otherwise we'd be here all night. Well, go ahead.

• 42:13Speaker 06

  Very good.

• 42:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that was one. I assume you want mine. Dan? I'm all for it. So specifically, you want a comment on?

• 42:22Speaker 06

  On Elon Musk's plan to colonize Mars with SpaceX.

• 42:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sean, what do you feel about colonizing Mars?

• 42:28Speaker 04

  My understanding was that Elon wanted to get to Mars himself. I don't think he cares that much about the rest of us coming along.

• 42:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know why? Because I think he said he'd rather die on Mars than live on Earth.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  That's what he said. And I, you know, I repeat, I think it's, it's obviously something that we should do is to send people to Mars because we want to study it, but I don't think we should consider that any savior for the human race because, again, look at Arizona, I mean, look at the Sahara. It's like if we can't grow trees in the Sahara, then we're not going to be able to do much on Mars.

• 42:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go. Thank you. Next question. Ed, where are you from?

• 43:04Speaker 07

  Hi, my name is Carla. I'm from an unfascinating place also called New York.

• 43:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, great.

• 43:08Speaker 07

  And my question is more on the social side. You guys mentioned about Carl Sagan making a marketing move as far as taking images in outer space and all that. What do you think is going to take for the 21st century, the quote-unquote millennial kind of generation, to get interested in space and actually propel the next generation towards space exploration? Alien invasion.

• 43:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is there something working on that generation now, do you think?

• 43:31Carolyn Porco?

  Yeah, I'm sorry, I can't...

• 43:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, so there's a next generation coming up.

• 43:34Carolyn Porco?

  Yes.

• 43:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The millennials and those who follow them. We had our sort of pale blue dot and our moon launch and our forces of science and technology to inspire us. Do you see anything on the horizon? Is that okay, paraphrase of your question? Yes. Yes, good, thank you. Is there anything on the horizon that you see? Memes. Memes! Internet cats, yes. This is what you guys have created for yourselves. Carolyn, any reflections there?

• 44:03Carolyn Porco?

  I think the biggest thing that's going on in the planetary science community now and also at NASA is this idea that we're going to go and find life in the solar system. And so, it's going to take work to do that because it's actually a pretty hard question and we've got to figure out what the best way is to do it. But, it's not going to happen...I'm going to be gone but probably before that great big discovery happens and they're going to...we're going to need young people, people who are young now, to kind of, you know, carry the torch, so, you know.

• 44:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People today who were as young as you were when you joined Voyager.

• 44:37Carolyn Porco?

  Right, so, it's going to happen at some point. I mean, there's really good reason to think we actually might find life in our solar system. We've just got to, you know, mount the, you know, get going on it.

• 44:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, thank you.

• 44:52Speaker 08

  My name is Zach from the smellier side of the river in New Jersey.

• 44:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh-huh. Across the moon, yes.

• 44:59Speaker 08

  Exactly. Kind of bouncing off of what you said about life within our solar system, I think everyone here is in agreement that there's life in the universe and that's kind of where I'm going at, in the universe as a whole. Coming from a, you know, non-religious man, I am Jewish, but, you know, talking about... But, hold on, stay with me, it's okay. But, you know, religion is a whole...

• 45:22Carolyn Porco?

  No wait, I can't hear him.

• 45:23Speaker 08

  Take a one, Eugene. But, the universe in general, I was wondering what you guys think, you know, because I know when you put your head on the pillow at night, you think of what is the universe and what is the functionality of it? Is there a greater cause? Is it meant for a purpose? Is it built for something?

• 45:36Speaker 04

  In three minutes.

• 45:38Speaker 08

  I'd love to know what you guys think. Simply, as fast as you could, you know, what you think the universe is.

• 45:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Vanessa, this is for you.

• 45:44Speaker 05

  Oh my god.

• 45:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what is the universe to you, I guess is the...

• 45:52Speaker 05

  I, I do think that there has to be life on so many different parts of the universe, and so that everyone's coexisting, but I don't see why we can't just go to another planet,

• 46:04Speaker 05

  throw a couple things out, see what comes back. But I do think it's to like, have every, all these different species coexist.

• 46:14Speaker 04

  Do you, Neil, think that, you know, that we might be more likely in a matrix than in a real universe? Do you ascribe to that philosophy?

• 46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I remain convinced that if we figure out a way to make

• 46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  a perfect computer simulation of a world, or of a universe, and in that simulation there is what we would call life, and that life has free will as programmed in, that they could then decide that they want to make a simulation of a universe themselves.

• 46:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if each one of these simulations reaches a point where it makes a simulation of the universe, then most universes that will exist will be simulations. And if that is the case, then the likelihood that we now are in a simulation compared with being the first actual universe that created the life that made the simulations is very high. So, I...

• 47:20Eugene Mirman?

  Why are there no dragons then?

• 47:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would be deeply intrigued. I'm intrigued by that possibility. That we are the playthings of a higher intelligence, and every now and then they get bored, so they throw in, you know, they stir the pot a little. And they say, "Okay, Donald Trump say this today", instead of something else. Everything is a frenzy. And then, everybody, and then they're watching this, and they're entertained by it all. Thank you for your time. Thank you for my panel.

• 47:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Vanessa, Carolyn, John, Michael.