Cosmic Queries: Potpourri Vol. 2

Neil Tyson and first-time co-host Eddie Brill answer a potpourri of fan-submitted Cosmic Queries. Topics include alien communication, gravity assist, electromagnetism; "Blade Runner," "Interstellar" & "Arrival;" independent thinking, junk science, and more! 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.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and this is going to be a cosmic queries potpourri edition. And I have a guest co-host today, the one, the only, Eddie Brill. Eddie?

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dude!

• 0:39Speaker 01

  Hey, it's good to see you after all these years.

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're from like the comedy firmament. I mean, you go back, you've been everywhere, you know everybody, and it's a delight and a pleasure and an honor to have you as my co-host for this episode.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Well, that's very, very nice of you. I've been at this game since I was in college at Emerson in 1970s, and it's just been, you know, starting.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Were you one of the kids in the class that were cut up in class? And they say, "What are you, a comedian?"

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, as a matter of fact, I am. All right, but no funny stuff.

• 1:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I was very shy as a kid, and I was a good student. I was actually a science and math guy.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  In school, but you know, my stepfather died very young. Goodnight. No, my stepfather died very young, and that's our show.

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  And all of a sudden, I realized life's too short, and I went sort of to do like broadcasting, and I got some laughs at it, and I kind of liked that. And little by little, I went to school to study journalism, and the first friends I met were Steven Wright, and Dennis Leary, and Mario Cantone. We formed a comedy group, and then I stopped math and science, I stopped journalism.

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, we could have understood the unified field theory by today.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  By today.

• 1:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except that you left, you left.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Yes, so it's my fault. You know, comedy is very mathematical. The writing of comedy, the writing of music is very mathematical. And I just liked getting laughs, and I liked being creative much more than a, not much more, in a different sense.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's, so to summarize, it's comedy is a serious business.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Very true.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you've got questions for me.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  I do.

• 2:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which I haven't seen yet, but they've been culled from our internet base.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  It's wonderful.

• 2:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I always like knowing who they come from, but some, you know, when Chuck does this, he can never pronounce their names correctly. And people write in and correct him and complain and laugh.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Well, I understand. Like, the first one I saw here, the guy, I love that he used this name. It's J.J. Hingleheimer Schmidt.

• 2:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Which is a play on words, and maybe his name is Billy Hingle, or not really, but here, it really came out at me because his name is so long and I worked hard to memorize it. But he said, suppose we meet aliens.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  How do we go about asking them which creatures from their planet taste good?

• 2:51Speaker 01

  So this guy not only is, has a good name, is a good question, and he's a little odd.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A little odd, a little odd. I think if aliens come to Earth.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That means their technology is vastly superior to ours, and it means they're smarter than we are. They will be asking, who among us are tasty? We will not have that power over them to even dare to ask such a question. They, it'll be by the grace of their will that they do not eat us and only enslave us. Or only put us in their zoo of creatures that they found in their journeys across the galaxy.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Well, there might be some of us in their snack bar. You know, that might be the, the few of us that really taste good, and then we'll find out it's like, you know.

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I, I think in the history of human, uh, hunting and gathering, it's, for us, it's really just trial and error. And there's stuff that'll kill you. Um, you, if you eat something and it killed you, gone are your genes to propagate to a next generation who would think the same way. So, uh, evolution has, by natural selection, has a way of, of tuning what it is that tastes good and what it is that does not.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  That's interesting. What, what do you think of those five planets that we found? Is it exciting in a way about, I'm asking mostly, is it a place that you, we wanna go to?

• 4:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, well, it's a seven planets, three of which were in.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Two I don't really care about. It's the five.

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there are three in the Goldilocks zone. So, yeah, if you're, if you are hegemonistic, if you are, if you feel a bit of conqueror in you, yeah, you'd go there and say, "I declare these lands in the name of the empire," right? Because of course, humans did that for millennia. Sure, but it's not an interesting thing to do if no one's there and it's a hostile environment and you would die if you tried to pitch tent. Who the hell wants it anyway?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  You'll never, you'll never find out that they're tasty or not.

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  By the time you get there. Well, you might be hungry by then. You never know.

• 4:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a friend of mine who's a fan of fish, but it has a strong objection to ugly fish. Because you've been at aquariums before.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's some ugly, you know, just butt ugly fish. And so what she said was, is that,

• 5:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  her name is Denise Gamble, and she said, "You know, if you're gonna be, if you gotta be ugly, at least be tasty. Have some redeeming features about you. Otherwise, there's no point of you ever having been born."

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Well, that goes back to J.J. Hingleheimer Schmidt going, "Well, you know, maybe they'll take the ugliest of us and eat us because we, at least, we're tasty." All right, let's see what some other people have to say.

• 5:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, what do you have?

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Here's Kyle Toth. "What would a truly invincible and immortal superhero experience as the universe reaches its final moments?"

• 5:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  I like that.

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting. I love that. So, let me remind people, if you didn't otherwise know what the final moments of the universe will be, we are on a one-way expansion trip. One way.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Look at me. Look at the lunch I had.

• 5:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, we call that, you're developing a Cretian disk. We have other vocabulary for when your, when your belt size is growing. So, what we have is an expanding universe that's getting cooler and cooler. You can measure the temperature of the universe. Right now, it's three degrees on the absolute temperature scale. It's already very cold. That's why we say space is cold. That's why. All right? But it's still getting colder. So, you know, in a few more billion years, we're gonna drop another degree. A trillion years, you start getting into the fractions of a degree, and you start approaching absolute zero. And so the death of the universe will be an absolutely cold universe that has reached

• 6:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  zero degrees. Now, here's the problem. I don't mind if it's just zero degrees, but what, how about the stuff that's in the universe? Might you still have stars? No, they will use up all of their fuel and then they'll burn out. And what happens to them? Then they will cool and come into equilibrium with the cold temperature of the universe. What happens to orbits? There's energy contained in orbits. Orbits will decay and will collapse into one mass into the center. And so all motion, all processes will cease. If you're an invincible superhero, but you require food, you need someplace to get your energy. I don't care where. All energy phenomenon

• 7:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in the universe winds down. So even the invincible superhero, who presumably needs energy for their sustenance, will wind down and you will find them seated and dead in the corner. Because they've got no energy to do anything anymore.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess there would be a hierarchy of hierarchy of of how people would die. I guess, you know, there would be, I guess, if you're a superhero, it doesn't mean you're gonna live long. You'd just be a mediocre superhero, like, you know, like, you know, Ice Cream Man. You know, then that actually, that might actually work in your favor.

• 8:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So, yeah, depending on how sensitive you are to the flow of energy into your body, you'll be the first to die off if you didn't have that. By the way, this scenario is what they play out in zombie stories, right? So zombies are dangerous, not only because they'll eat you or eat your brains, but they'll eat the brains of the people who are running the power stations. They'll eat the brains of the people who are running the farms. So slowly, there's the dismantling of civilization. And what we so take for granted that provides a sustenance. Is uh one by one gets taken out. If the farms go away, then the cows go away. Cause now there's no vegetation for them to eat. So your steak goes away first.

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then all the vegetables go away and then you go away.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then as uh and earth winds down and but if you had a superhero that had infinite energy, then they're around forever, but there will be no one to save.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Right, or nothing to eat.

• 9:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nothing.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  When you were growing up, did you have a superhero that you uh wanted to be or liked?

• 9:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did. I did. It's a little embarrassing, but I I you know, I can I I can take it. I wanted to be Mighty Mouse.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Ah, here I come to save the day.

• 9:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just thought you can sing opera and save a damsel in distress. That was just, I just thought that was, that was awesome.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, sexy.

• 9:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I didn't think too hard about how little a mouse is. You know, mice are really tiny. And how do you actually lift up big buildings? And I but back then I I wasn't analyzing the physics of it. Uh today, yeah, I would say, no, the mouse is not lifting the building. No matter how big his pecs are.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  You have to work out pretty hard in this world to lift a building.

• 9:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, for me, it was not superhero, but it was more like, I always loved the idea of the three wishes and to be the genie. And to always ask the third question to be, I need two more questions.

• 9:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, two more wishes, yeah, right, right.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Three more wishes and then I can infinitesimally, that's why I went to comedy. Infinitesimally, one would be able to constantly be able to have the favors.

• 10:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, infinitely, infinitesimally would be tiny.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So infinitely would be as many more as you need.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  That's why I need you here with me. Okay.

• 10:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got your back.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  You did, and front on that one. You saved my front and back.

• 10:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Now, here's a a question, and I'm I'm picking this one out of a few because a lot of them are asking the same.

• 10:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  General.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  General uh idea.

• 10:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is potpourri, so they can come from anywhere.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Right, and it doesn't smell like potpourri. This smells like paper, which is odd, but it because of our society right now and what we're going through, how can ordinary people distinguish true facts from alternative facts? Especially if true ones, and I like this part of it, are not appealing.

• 10:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  There's like four questions that have to do with the truth.

• 10:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's and and of course, they're quite topical. So the the way to answer that is I can say what we do as scientists.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. By the way, there are things that I can tell you that completely defy common sense. And I'm telling you they're true. And I I might expect you to believe me, but if you don't, I'd have to go then find the evidence for it. So, for example, for me to say that particles pop in and out of existence. You say, oh, that doesn't make any sense. Well, I've said many times, the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. Especially when you're probing places, regions, conditions of the universe that fall outside of your physical five senses. Then what's natural in those environments is not natural in your life. So you have to be open to things that don't fit into what you expect to happen. Alright, so now what about truths?

• 11:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is why one of the great powers of science is there are certain things that are repeatable in this world. The laws of physics, the laws of optics, the laws of the quantum quantum physics, certain laws of chemistry, biology. This is why knowing science is so important, because it gives you a foundational landscape on which other people are trying to plant facts. Or false facts. Right. And but I know how things are and how they operate because I studied that. You're now going to tell me something that is inconsistent with something I know to be true in the universe. Maybe it's a new discovery and I want to know about it.

• 12:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe it's not, maybe it's fake news, maybe it's just a mistake. But I am now empowered to ask questions about it. You come to me with crystals you want to rub together and it can bring heal heal ailments. Say, here, here, I have these crystals. Do I do I completely discount it? Knowing the physics I know, I could. But that's equally as intellectually lazy as embracing everything you say. What's harder is to pose the question. And to know how to pose the questions, and this we're not taught this in school. How to be curious about the natural world. So I would say, what are these crystals made of? Where did you find them? Are they manufactured? Are they natural?

• 13:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What ailments do they heal? What is the evidence that they heal these ailments? How quickly does it heal it? What is the mechanism? And by the time you've done it, the person's ran away. They, if they're charlatans, they won't have believable answers to those questions. And in that way, you can ferret out what is true and what is not, simply by an intelligent sequence of questions that you pose upon it.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, because a lot of people will, you know, say, well, this is fake news, or if they don't agree with it, and, and not just the president or his people, but a lot of people do that in our society. And this is why the last part of the question was really kind of cool for me. Even if the true ones are not appealing.

• 13:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah. So you gotta get over that one.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Exactly.

• 13:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there are many facts that are just the reality of the world. You can ask yourself the question, I think. If you had the choice to know a truth that was unpleasant.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 14:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or instead, or know a series of truths that were unpleasant, or lead a delusional life, thinking something that's true that isn't. What would you choose? This is kind of like the Matrix, you know, the red pill or the blue pill.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I'm thinking, I, I value reality. I, I don't know. Am I, am I?

• 14:20Speaker 01

  In comedy, we were talking about this a little bit earlier before we started. In comedy, the truth is the, is the foundation. And reality is the foundation is where you go from there.

• 14:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  And in addition to that, it's, you know, I did a podcast in, in Finland, of all places, called We Are Not Here to Please You. And I loved it, and it really changed my thinking in comedy.

• 14:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait a minute, a comedian had a podcast saying, I'm not here to please you?

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How many gigs did that get you?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Well, the truth is, it's the best way to be as a comedian. Because if you have your perspective, you don't have to, George Carlin taught me that. He said, they can't argue with your perspective.

• 14:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's authentic.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Right. That's the word. It's authentic. Where if, I mean, you don't have to agree, but if I, you know, don't take you for granted. or treat you poorly, um, then if I do treat you poorly, then I'm being irresponsible. But as a comedian, uh, this is how I feel. Well, you know, like I talk about, like, I don't believe there's a devil. Because I don't, I believe it's a fear-based society and doing it, having a devil would be, you know, it's just foolish. I mean, you know, I, and I'm not saying there's no devil, there could be. I'm saying I don't believe there's one and I believe, say.

• 15:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're one of these people who say, I, I know there ain't no heaven, but I pray there ain't no hell.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Right. Pray there ain't no heaven and there ain't no hell. I love blood, sweat and tears. I just saw them and they didn't have David Clayton Thomas, unfortunately.

• 15:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  But the, the, the fact is, is for, for me, is I, so I don't believe it's a devil. And so if God created everything, why would he make a devil? He's like, well, I made this beautiful planet with trees and mountains and ducks and, and James Brown. But there's not enough drama in my life. Let me create some SOB. Who's gonna go against everything I've ever created and just to piss them off, I'm gonna force them to wear a red jumpsuit. You know, with a tail and horns and all this stuff. And, uh, but, you know, as a kid, I was taught that sex with the devil's work. And I said, look, I don't know if you've had sex before, but it's fantastic.

• 16:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  So, but I believe if there's a God, that God created sex because what do we yell when we're having sex?

• 16:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't yell to the devil, you yell to God.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Oh, God, because we're thanking the manufacturer.

• 16:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, okay, for the whole thing.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  That he's given us. So back to the point that, you know, the truth should be the foundation.

• 16:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  And reality being the foundation, it's really picking apart comedy, but it's the same thing in science, the same thing in math.

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And so once, in fact, you're not funny if you're not basing it on something that's real. Otherwise, you, you don't have me at all.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have no common ground on which you can then take me.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Unless you're so outrageous, because there are no rules in comedy. If you're just outrageous, that could be funny and consistent. But the best comics, the Carlin's, the Lily Tomlin's, the Pryors, they were based in reality.

• 16:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So, so, uh, we only got a few seconds left in this segment.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me just round that out by saying, uh, at the end of the day, it's, it's not only how much do you know about the physical world? You should also know, is something consistent with something else? There's a photo of me where I'm, I'm on stage and it shows me holding up my middle finger.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  I got you.

• 17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? Can you picture me doing that?

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just, just ask.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Well, I can.

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no. No, let me assert that my vocabulary is sufficiently large that that will never be something I need to do.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, so this is a doctored photo. I, I'd held up my, just my index finger.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 17:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And someone flipped it with the middle finger and that's the thing. And so, but that, it became a meme and I'm just saying, you should ask yourself, is there a, is, is what they're saying, is it consistent with all of my expectations of what it is? Or are you so duped by others telling you what to think and how to think?

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That they're just feeding you anything you want? And this is a shout out for being an independent thinker of whatever a pundit wants to have you say or think.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  It's beautiful. That's what we all want.

• 18:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what we all want. We gotta take a break. You are listening to, possibly watching, StarTalk Cosmic Queries Popery Edition. And I'm with my guest co-host Eddie Brill. We're back.

• 18:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Cosmic Queries Popery Edition. I got my guest co-host Eddie Brill. Eddie's been around the block, through the ri, over the river and through the woods.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  And here I am at grandma's house.

• 18:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, what, you got any projects now? What are you doing now?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, tons of things. I have a podcast called The Break with Eddie Brill and I'm talking to all A-list comics like

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Suzie Essman and Mario Cantone and Steven Wright and on and on and on.

• 18:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause you know all these people.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're all friends.

• 18:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They'll come out for you. They'll come out for you.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I have a ton of great comics coming in for that. So you go to SoundCloud or iTunes and go The Break with Eddie Brill.

• 19:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Break with Eddie Brill. Very nice.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  And talk about their childhood and, and their house. Well, who was the funniest and how did they, how were they influenced?

• 19:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, you're missing an opportunity to be a psychoanalyst and find out what is troubling these people who are professional comedians.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Right, and the truth is, is that we kinda come up with that. Yeah.

• 19:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you got questions for me?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do. I do. And there's, there's some great questions. And like I said, a lot of them have to do with fact checking and all this kinda stuff. But here's something different from Amanda Good. Um, are there resources, or resources, matters what, where you're from, within the scientific community that we can use to help refute junk science in public forums?

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh. Ooh.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Right, it has that same kind of

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Same kinda thing.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  But I like this one because, you know, there's a lot of people typing on Facebook and typing here and there.

• 19:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me just clarify what junk science is. It's it's it has a broad definition, but when it most commonly rears its head, it is something that looks, smells like, tastes like science, but it's not science. And we know when something is not science, when, for example, your controls on the experiment were not properly conducted. When you have certain funders that could influence what the outcome is and thereby have you abrogate your responsibilities as the dispassionate researcher. There are cases where there's only one result

• 20:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and no secondary confirmation of that one result, yet people gravitate to that one result because that's the result they wanted, only to find out that later, subsequent studies showed that it was false, but they got suppressed in the media because they didn't want to hear that result. All of this is science that is not in the service of advancing our understanding of the world. And so, is there a toolkit to bring to bear? What you do is you listen to that one result and then do some homework. Uh, there's something called Google Scholar. Do you know about Google Scholar?

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do.

• 21:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. It's a separate branch of Google. You just type Google Scholar, it'll take you right there. Type in a topic or a researcher's name and it will find every published scientific paper associated with that person. And let's say there's more than one, uh, that you, that one name shows up in more than one field. You just add another keyword to tighten down the list and you'll find out, are these peer-reviewed journals or not? Or are the articles something they wrote for the local thing and it's being passed off as official science? That you want to then hold opposite something that was a collaboration in an academic setting with peer-reviewed journals? So, no, there's no easy toolkit. It's always hard to show when someone is wrong.

• 21:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, but oh, how much that can pay dividends on the progress of society? If we all just had a little piece of that, of that, um, tenacity.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  And combined with the thirst of knowledge.

• 22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Really wanting to know.

• 22:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you get it for free. Then you get it for free.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like, oh, my gosh, I wonder if that's true. That's an amazing result. Let me check.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. You don't say, oh, that is true. Now let me base my and pivot my life on what the person just said.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  Which a lot of people do. And then when they find out that it's not true, sometimes they'll even hold on to it because they don't want to upset the foundation they've created, that false foundation.

• 22:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, this, I mean, that this is our susceptibility in modern times. As I've said many times before, the good thing about science, it's true whether or not you believe in it. So that's one of the distinguishing features of science relative to practically anything else we engage in. Politics, religion, cultural hegemony, whatever. And in all these other branches of human existence, you can develop a sort of a, a philosophy of uh, where you are better than others. Practically every religion says this, right?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That we're correct and everyone else is false. Essentially, every religion says that. Said, almost all. Said, there are a few exceptions. And so, so that, that means you are living in a belief system that rejects what doesn't agree with it and accepts what does. That is not the way to find the actual truths of the world. So if you're not interested in the truths, that's a different kind of country. But if you care about the truths, these are the foundations of the advance of civilization as we, as we come to know it.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, because if you have a garden and all the flowers are white color because it's, it's basically is that same feeling and that same thing, and it has nothing to do with the color, but it's all the same color. Uh, it's not as beautiful as a garden that has different flowers and different colors in it.

• 23:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a beaut- that's beautiful.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Uh, no, I was just, while I was saying it, go, that's BS. It's stuff with the garden thing. You know, it's funny, where I was talking about, about the truth is that that's basically in comedy. And when I was a kid, I loved playing cards. Our family, we didn't have a lot of money, so we played games all the time. We had a lot of fun. And we were talking about-

• 24:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Card games would be cheap.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, they really are, unless you played poker or poquino or any of those-

• 24:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you lost money, but-

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, then you're, you know, penny poker was okay. But we were wondering about the royalty-

• 24:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  In the deck of cards. We know who the king is.

• 24:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  We know who the queen is, but-

• 24:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That has, that has existence based in historical truth. Yes.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Right, but who the hell is the Jack?

• 24:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I don't ever remember reading about Jacks.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  There's no Jack in history.

• 24:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Other than the Jack of all trade.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Right, that's the one Jack, but he's a different Jack. And Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.

• 24:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Um, but you know, I am the Jack of England. There's no Jack. But you know, you-

• 24:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's never been a Jack.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Never been. And I was, you know, and then I, and I, I was talking about this. I did it on stage. I wanted to do it on one of my first Letterman appearances. And the day before, uh, Princess Diana, uh, had, fell to that horrible car accident. And I had to take that joke out of my set.

• 24:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, it had royalty.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  The king, the queen, the royalty. And I had to save it for another set. And I was so loved that joke and I, and there's more to it, you know, like, uh, you know, if, if you're the 10, you might, you're probably pissed off because you don't get the nice clothing. You know, you get clubs on, you're like, get these clubs off me. I want a robe and a knife like that one-eyed bastard. And it was kind of silly and funny, but I couldn't do it on TV until later. And again, but it was based in the truth. And then you take it to another odd place and that's how that goes.

• 25:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, plus with the Jack, we accept it in the deck of cards, because that's the only place we've ever seen it.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if a Jack started showing up elsewhere, we would question it, I think. Because, yeah, there's no Jack.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Honey, there's a Jack at the door. Jack who?

• 25:42Speaker 01

  All right, let's go on to some more questions. See if anyone named Jack here. This is funny. Is it like Superman, Batman?

• 25:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There was Jack, Jack shit. You don't, you don't know Jack shit.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  I don't know him.

• 25:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  And you know, and there's Ruthless. That would be without Ruth.

• 25:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ruthless, yeah, yeah, okay.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  You know, who's Ruth now all of a sudden?

• 26:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I always wanted to meet Clairvoyant.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's incredible. You know, you, you would think you'd see her coming.

• 26:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  It's just not happening. Okay, here we go.

• 26:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What else you got?

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Truth, truth, truth, truth.

• 26:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can't believe you have three pages of.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Of truth, there's so many of them, but here's a different one. What would be the first question the scientific community ask an intelligent, intelligent extraterrestrial visitor? And the second part, what major problem could they help us solve today?

• 26:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I don't think we would give the same answer. We all have our little pet, pet ways we would interact with the alien. But I, I've given this a stupid amount of thought. Embarrassingly, okay?

• 26:39Speaker 01

  I think we already said that there's no embarrassing amount of thought.

• 26:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, for example, I've, I've tweeted as such that in the film Arrival, where they got a linguist and a theoretical physicist, I'm saying, no, no, no, that's not how you play this. No, no, you don't bring a linguist to aliens, all right? A cultural linguist to aliens, I'm sorry. Nor do you bring the theoretical physicist. I'm sure he's a smart guy, but we got aliens here, please. So I would bring a cryptographer, who specializes in decoding messages. And I'd bring an astrobiologist, of course. That's what I would bring. And so you would first set up a common vocabulary, but you would do so by referencing things that you know we would have in common, and that would be science.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  You're right.

• 27:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be science. You might show a lightning spark, you know, what do you call this? You know they would have seen it, because it's, it's moving electrons. And they took a ship to get here. They must know something about electricity, okay? You, you don't show them an apple and say, we call this an apple, what do you call it? We don't have apples, I don't know what the hell you're holding up. So you would, we would show maybe the periodic table of elements. The organization of that chart is surely universal, literally universal.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We abuse the word universal here on Earth. Miss Universe, excuse me.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Universal ball joint in your car?

• 28:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It works on Earth, right? No, Universe, Miss Universe is Miss Earth, let's get over that, okay? Um, so, uh, so, so I would, I would take scientific iconography, display it in front of them, and then we would share a common vocabulary. Then I'd ask them how far they've gotten scientifically. I'd want to know. I'd want to know, I would tell them that we were on the brink of destroying ourselves, because perhaps our conduct and our intellect.

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was not at the same level as our scientific discoveries that we had to harness. What did they do to survive themselves? Can we, is there, is there a playbook that we can borrow from them? That's kind of the things I would ask them.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the second part to that question, if I can find that again on this beautiful page here, is, um, what major problem could they help us solve today?

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so I, yeah, great. So I, I would say the energy. The energy problem. Well, how do they, uh, get the unlimited energy that they need? Do they, have they figured out a way to suck energy from a star? At random, like the, the, the modern Death Star? Device that can suck energy out of a star? And then destroy multiple planets all at once? Um, you know, I tweeted about that, by the way. And people said, oh, why are you putting all this science on Star Wars? It's just a fantasy. And I'm thinking, no, had they known a little more science, they could have improved their Death Star. You can calculate how much energy there is in a star. If you contain that and then destroyed, you can destroy a thousand planets, easily. A thousand planets.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Right, that's a lot of planets.

• 29:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a lot of planets.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  More than one. We have one and we worry about it.

• 29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A thousand planets. You could totally destroy the force. All right, the force will have nothing over on you if you're taking out a thousand planets at a time. So if you can harness the energy of a host star, I'd like to know what methods, tools, and tactics they invoked for it. So, yeah, I would be asking survival questions.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Now, when you go to a film, do you constantly take it apart like you did Arrival?

• 30:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but not in a mean way, or, or, or, or, I, I, I have these thoughts, but I don't share it with, I'm not annoying in the aisle.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Well, to yourself.

• 30:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To myself, oh, yeah, yeah. I'm thinking, oh, no, uh, that wouldn't happen. Well, that was, that was good. They did that. They represent, that was good. Well, now, so here's my favorite compliment for a film would be, when they do something that was based in good science, which is a topic we've already discussed, but then has it, has an extremely innovative step beyond the science. So I said, wow, they really thought this one through. Kudos to them for this new thing that they came up with.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Right, well, one of the, and I took a screenwriters class, and one of the films they call the perfect film is, and it's one of my favorites, is Blade Runner. How do you look at Blade Runner as a film and the, and the future and the science?

• 30:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me see if I had any issues with Blade Runner. That's a good one. I'm sure I had a couple of issues. Well, well, it's perfect just in terms of setup and storytelling and beginning, middle, end, and all the way.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  And the science of the replicants and how long they last and, and Batty, you know, the character who knew his own death and found out the death and how people lived to a certain place and how they finished their life and still held on and wanted to live forever as humans do.

• 31:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've seen things.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've never dreamed. Attack ships off the Belt of Orion. Something else, something else. All these, all, all this will be lost in time like tears in the rain. Time to die. I think, did I get that almost right?

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Oh my god, I got chills. It's one of my, it's my, I would say my third favorite movie of all time.

• 31:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did I get it almost right?

• 31:49Speaker 01

  You got, it was incredible. It was great.

• 31:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then the dove leaves his hand. He can't, he can no longer grip it, and there it is.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Oh, and it, that was great. That was chilling, actually. And I was watching you do it and going, oh my god, he's good.

• 32:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, well, so the point is in that you, you sympathize for him, because he's kind of, he's not your, your warmest or snuggliest of the replicants. And in the end, all of a sudden, he brings you into his fate.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you can only shed a tear for him in that moment.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  And relate to it because that's how we are as humans.

• 32:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  And who's a replicant, who's not, and nowadays, and in those days, now, the line was very small between what was and what wasn't.

• 32:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that'll only get very blurry going forward. I mean.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  What do you see as the next sort of human form?

• 32:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I don't think human form is the goal. I think in the old days, we would say the ideal robot will be indistinguishable from humans. That implies that the human form is useful or interesting.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 32:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we're not.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  That's the ego.

• 32:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's ego. It's completely ego.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's cool. If you want something that can drive a car the best, you don't make a humanoid to drive a car. You just make a self-driving car.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? If you want something that can run fast, we don't even replicate human bones and feet. We just have them run on blades, right?

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With, you see the-

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Blade runners.

• 33:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The literal blades.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's Olympic runners who, who by whatever misfortune have no legs. They're running on blades and that is a, a better return on the energy of every step than anything going on in the human physiology. So the human form, I, as far as I can see, is not going to be anything anyone wants to emulate. Unless you want like a sex bot or something.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Right. Well, that you definitely want.

• 33:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'll, okay.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  What are you talking about?

• 33:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean, sorry, sorry.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm on the road all the time. Um.

• 33:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta take a break. When we come back, more with the one and only Eddie Brill as my, uh, guest co-host. You're watching, listening to likely StarTalk.

• 33:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back for the third and final segment of StarTalk Cosmic Queries, Bookery Edition. Eddie Brill, my comedic co-host, guest, guest starring as co-host today.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  It's fun. You know, I've enjoyed your work. I know it's a very artesnio of me to say that. Um, you know, you're the greatest. You're the greatest. But, um, but I really have. I've enjoyed your work for so many years and, you know, as a kid science person, you know, I, I, you know, it was, it just thrills me to do that. And again.

• 34:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you got a little bit of science in you is what you're saying. A little science sympathizer.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  I, I, I am. And I had incredible science teachers.

• 34:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  I had one, one guy with a southern accent. He thought he was funny and he was talking about the elements. He says, when you see a mouse, you seize him. And then when, when he does, you bury him.

• 34:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bury.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  And I'll never forget it. It was, that was 11th grade.

• 34:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Seize him and bury him.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Seize him and bury him.

• 34:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so you got questions?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  I do.

• 34:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The last round of questions there, what do you have?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Popery, so these are just random from wherever people come up with them.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Okay, Manfredo Aguilar.

• 35:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very nice.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Oh, gracias.

• 35:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck would have totally mangled that name.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Manfredo Aguilar.

• 35:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Aguilar.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Es muy importante. Verdad. Now, what is the maximum speed a gravity assist can get you? Second part of it. Could we gravity assist towards the speed of light?

• 35:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, so great question. So, gravity assist is widely misunderstood. So, let me tell you what people think it is, and I'll tell you what it is. So, a gravity assist, generally, if you don't have enough energy, fuel, to pack into your rocket, to get to its destination either at all, or quickly enough before you die. One of the great rules of being a scientist is your experiments should be finished before you die. That's not written anywhere, but it's built into the design of the experiment.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, if you don't have enough, you will sneak up behind a planet. You will fall towards the planet. Gain speed, and then you slingshot out on the other side, and you'll have more energy coming out the other side than when you fell in.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Makes sense.

• 36:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you can do this, the famous Voyager spacecraft back in the 70s and 80s, they did this multiple times. And so, they had, that was required to give it the energy we wanted for it, for it to escape the solar system forever. So, we gave it enough energy, it's never coming back. It achieved escape velocity. Not speed of light, but just escape velocity. Alright. So, the way this works is, if the object is just sitting there, and you drop something towards it, and it skims the outer edge and continues out the other side, that is a symmetric diagram. You will speed up falling in, and you'll slow down climbing back out. And you won't gain any additional speed for having done so.

• 36:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's why a pure gravity assist, as I've just described, in that moment will not work. The reason why actual gravity assists work is because the planet is in orbit around the star. And you sneak up behind the planet. You will accelerate towards the planet because of the planet's gravity. But because the planet is in motion, you pick up the orbital speed of the planet in addition to your speed.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Ah, yeah.

• 37:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you will speed up and slow down going in and out, but you're left off with a net extra speed. The speed of the speed, the speed of the planet in orbit around the host star. So in fact, you have stolen a little bit of orbital energy of that planet. Stolen it.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  That's great. Now, I don't know if you are, are you a baseball fan at all?

• 37:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A little bit, yeah.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Okay, well, there's a thing that constantly comes up where if a guy is running to first, if he slides into first, they say it takes him longer to do that as if he just ran through to try to get to the base quicker.

• 37:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, uh, because every time you are not in contact with the ground, you are not moving as fast as you would for having done so. So in other words, if I, um, yeah, so so there's the front slide and the back slide. Let's do the front slide because all your momentum is forward, okay? The moment you stop touching the ground and just lean forward, okay?

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your body still has to go that distance, okay?

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so you're, so, so now, the, the value of a slide is of course now they have to, they have to like, well, first base, they don't have to tag you, right?

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if they have to tag you, it's harder to slide you if you're close to the ground than if you're standing up like chest level, so. Generally, that's why you're sliding. It's harder to be, to be out. But if you're ever not, not in touch with the, with the ground, no, you are not as, moving as fast as you possibly can.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Right, because this is a first base question where you don't have to be.

• 39:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not a tag question, right, right, right. Yeah, so, um, your steps are the most important thing that you could be taking.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, that seems to make the most sense.

• 39:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Okay, all right, let's, uh, move on here. This is, uh, a very interesting question. Adam Raymer, uh, do you think the early experimenters and discoverers of the properties of electromagnetism missed the opportunity to announce they had discovered magic? And of course, the second part, it can levitate, illuminate, disintegrate, ignite, remotely cause motion, et cetera.

• 39:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I love that because, you know what I think about all the time? Suppose we physicists, um, didn't tell anyone how and why the laws of physics work. We just, we just performed them. And we said, it's because we have powers.

• 39:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we did that, we would be running the world. And people would be genuflecting as they walked by us. People would be bringing us chickens from their farm. People would be begging that we don't incinerate them with our antimatter device. Uh, the fact is, the people who are doing the research into magnetism, electromagnetism more broadly, they tended to be educators, academicians, not charlatans. And so, only if you're a charlatan, will you not tell someone how something works. Pretend you have the power, and then you have the power over that person. That is diabolical.

• 40:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, it is incumbent upon the educator, educators class, if you can call it that, to say exactly what it is we're doing, and why. And then it's not mysterious. You could do it too. You could be a physicist. You could probe the operations of nature as we do. So, I.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  In what way? In what way?

• 41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, well, no, you want you want an example? So so I can take two clear liquids, put them together, and they make a blue liquid. That's kind of mysterious, right?

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? Or two other liquids and it makes a red liquid. I put two liquids together to make a solid. Just by pouring them together.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 41:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I could take something, uh, uh, squeeze it, and then it freezes right in front of your eyes. You could put your hand on a Van de Graaff generator. Remember those? Those big silver balls?

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 41:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where you put your hand on it and your hair stands on end? I can have a secret one below the desk. And you hand me a fluorescent light bulb. And I grab my hand around it. And it will light up under my hand.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  I gotcha.

• 41:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, because the charges are within me. They go into the phosphors and they excite the phosphors.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 41:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have powers. And you don't. So, but I explain them and therefore, you don't come running to me. Thinking that I'm your your your demigod for having these powers. You say, what book did you learn this out of? I want to be able to do that, too. So, yeah, that we we could have been magicians or charlatans.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Because as a comedian, I'm sorry to interrupt. As a comedian, you see some of them and you go, well, how much did that trick cost? At the store? Because you know it's a trick.

• 42:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  And how did they pull that off? And you start doing that. And then there were people like Penn and Teller, who would break it down for you and show you how they did it. Um, but there are many people in the world who believe in magic, believe that the charlatans can create.

• 42:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so that's a that's an education issue right there. And, uh, rather than beating adults over the head, because it's not their fault. They weren't educated or weren't exposed or whatever. Uh, I think we just have to rethink K through 12. And what is taught, what science is, how and why it works. For me, science is vaccine against charlatans.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 42:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It enables you to know when someone is full of shit and when they're not. And that's power. It's power of protection for yourself. So you will not be exploited by those who do not have your best interests in mind.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Well, speaking of best interests in mind, you know, things are changing now with the EPA and with the public school situation and the but of the knockdown of science, um, for a reason. There's a reason. There has to be a reason. And that's really about making more money. How does that affect you and how hard is that for you? To to move ahead in this new world? Because they're these people are they have a plan.

• 43:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you'll make money temporarily, but the long-term plan will just fail. It'll fail miserably and we'll have to pick ourselves up from the bottom of the world's rankings in science, math, technology, economic strength. Uh, because the engines of tomorrow's economy will be driven by innovations in today's science and technology. So, yeah, it's, uh, again, people don't know how to think about what role science has played, is playing, and will continue to play in their lives. And that's unfortunate, but...

• 44:00Speaker 01

  It's like at the end of Godzilla when you see people running in the streets going, "Oh, I should have listened at the beginning to the scientist."

• 44:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I forgot that there... That should be, that should be the playbook for, for when Congress doesn't, doesn't listen, right?

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, I'm, I'm scared for the planet because it seems like we have been making all of these forward movements and we haven't.

• 44:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we go to lightning round?

• 44:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now, I, you, you read the question fast and I answer fast. We'll see how many we can get in in the last three minutes, okay? Let's see what you got.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Okay. Kurt Minz, why not reach out to alien life? Because they may annihilate us.

• 44:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, lately we've just been listening to see if they're out there with our radio telescopes. We could send active signals. In fact, we already have. It's called the radio bubble, which is the history of all of our television and radio communication leaking from Earth, moving at the speed of light, washing over already known exoplanets that have been discovered. So, our earliest emissaries are gonna be, you know, early episodes of I Love Lucy and Honeymooners and Howdy Doody, this sort of thing.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  And why were they successful? Because there was non-verbal as well as verbal. And that's what science plays to me in a part in the world. There's that part where we talk about things, but it's the actuality of the non-verbal.

• 45:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I'm just saying if aliens, if the aliens' first understanding of humans is howdy doody, I don't know what that means. I just don't know. Or early images of warfare that were broadcast. They'll wonder what kind of evil

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Violent.

• 45:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Violent people these are. So...

• 45:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, um, yeah, we could, maybe we should purposefully send a signal that's kinder. They're just getting seventy, eighty years of previous signals before we even knew what the hell we were doing.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  We should send it to our children now.

• 45:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next, what do you got?

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Tony Williams, "Do you ever get annoyed that the superheroes don't do much to help science, such as Green Lantern could retrieve an asteroid and place it in a desert, Neil helped Superman, so there's at least one favor?"

• 45:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yes, I get a little frustrated because there are problems they could solve that would preclude the daily problems that they encounter. So that you can get to the bottom of society's problems rather than finding the criminal after it's too late, now you gotta put him in jail. There are ways, you can fix the educational system, you can fix, there's a lot of things superheroes could do that they're not doing. So, yeah, give me some time with superheroes. I'll bring them as guests and we'll see what we can, what we can do. Give me another one.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Alma Cassandra, "I still don't understand why speed of time was different on the water planet than on the spacecraft in Interstellar."

• 46:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay, good. So, uh, so it's, it simply has to do with how stroo- oh, I see what you're, okay, so the spacecraft was orbiting far enough away from the planet and the black hole to have a very different rate of time progress. So as you descend towards the black hole, which they did to get to the water planet, time slowed down for them. The strength of gravity slows down the passage of time. And as you get closer to the surface of the black hole, you, you, your time goes slower and slower and slower, and they were much farther away in their spacecraft. Had the spacecraft just been orbiting the planet? Right, they would have been about the same distance, they would have had about the same passage of time.

• 47:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So with the gravity assist, you could do this for as many planets as you can, and you'll just keep boosting your speed, and you adding it to your speed. In principle, you could just keep doing this. And I suppose you could possibly one day come near the speed of light. It would just take a very long time adding up one planet's orbital speed plus another. It would just take a really long time. And by the way, if you're moving really, really fast, it'll be harder for you to navigate, to come near another planet, to get its orbital speed. And at that point, just go on sail, sail away. You've got the speed.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Come sail away, come sail.

• 47:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think that's all the time we have.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 47:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eddie.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  What fun.

• 47:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Beautiful to see you. You reminded me, we met some 10, 15 years ago.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Private function.

• 48:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, you did a private gig, then I was in the audience and I, I loved your work and well, I, I just have a soft spot for comedians wherever I see them because you guys carry the soul of our culture in the palm of your hand.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  You know, people say we're the truth tellers. We're the last people who can tell the truth because there's so much political correctness in the world. And it's really a shame. People have to be careful about what they say instead of really being passionate and the word you used earlier, authentic.

• 48:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Authentic, you got it. Eddie, good to have you.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  My pleasure.

• 48:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. In this edition, Cosmic Queries, we've had Eddie Brill as my guest co-host. Cosmic Queries edition. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.