Creating Science Fiction, with Gale Anne Hurd

The Terminator, The Walking Dead, Aliens, Dante’s Peak, Armageddon, and more – explore what it takes to bring science fiction to life with Neil deGrasse Tyson, producer Gale Anne Hurd, comic co-host Chuck Nice, science fiction expert Jason Ellis, PhD, and volcanologist Janine Krippner, PhD. Photo Credit: Brandon Royal. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/creating-science-fiction-with-gale-anne-hurd/

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and beaming out across all of space and time, this is StarTalk, where science and pop culture collide.

• 0:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we're talking about sci-fi in literature and in movies. I got with me my co-host Chuck Nice. Chuck?

• 0:42Chuck Nice?

  Hey Neil!

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, we have between us-

• 0:45Chuck Nice?

  Yes?

• 0:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jason Ellis, who's an assistant professor of English at New York City College of Technology, City Tech, we call it.

• 0:52Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you teach a course on science fiction.

• 0:55Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They didn't do that when I was in school.

• 0:57Chuck Nice?

  There were no courses on science fiction-

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We were learning all these folks, they were all dead, and talking about a time in a way with no way understood.

• 1:05Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, they were like, "No, it's about real science." Okay, you have to, you don't even know real science. You have to know that before you can- Do you have to know real science before you write science fiction?

• 1:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're getting there Chuck, we had a whole show Chuck! We let it happen organically Chuck!

• 1:19Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so we're talking about this relationship, and we're featuring my interview with Gail Anne Hurd.

• 1:33Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 1:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gail Anne Hurd, if you, I'm a credit watcher at the end of shows.

• 1:36Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's hard on TV.

• 1:37Chuck Nice?

  You're one of those people.

• 1:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On TV, it's hard because they roll the-

• 1:40Chuck Nice?

  They ruin it.

• 1:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Movies?

• 1:41Chuck Nice?

  In the movies.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm the last one out, and they're asking me, "Get the hell out."

• 1:44Chuck Nice?

  Let me tell you something, people who make films, love you. Because that is the ultimate sign of respect.

• 1:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you, as you know-

• 1:52Chuck Nice?

  Is to sit and read the credits at the end of a film.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right on down to who supplied the food.

• 1:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The food truck.

• 1:58Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, yeah. Grab services by, you know, Reggie!

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Reggie and Sons.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so you teach us a course on science fiction. And as I understand this, you you curate their science fiction library.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  That's right. We got a donation of over 600 linear feet of materials, including 4,000.

• 2:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're measuring books by feet.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Right. If you think of like a standard shelf is three feet wide, three, I mean, 600 feet long, that's a lot of books.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a lot of books, dude. And so you're the man for that stash.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  I help coordinate it with the library, but it's a really tremendous resource that we have now.

• 2:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a lot of science fiction first appears in magazines, if I remember correctly. Is that correct?

• 2:41Speaker 02

  That's right. More so in the past than today, but certainly there's a very vibrant publishing industry in science fiction magazines now, like Astounding Science Fiction's having their 90th anniversary this year.

• 2:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Astounding Science Fiction, 90th anniversary. Wow. Wow. So Gail Anne Hurd is a producer, and I think her first day on the block was The Terminator. Good movie to start out on, start your career. Right. What a baptism that is. Did the whole trilogy. She's got Armageddon under her belt.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But don't get me started. That movie violates more laws of physics per minute than any other movie that has ever been made.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Love.

• 3:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just FYI.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Love it.

• 3:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She did Dante's Peak. So these are films that are different branches of science. Dante's Peak, of course, is of volcanoes. Also did, of course, The Walking Dead for television. Wow. So, science fiction, science fantasy. And so, when did you first get into science fiction? Because you're an academic professional at it, so.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Right. I guess I've had a lot of.

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A lot of academics, it's something from childhood, right?

• 3:39Speaker 02

  It is. It is for me, too. My first, like, strong memory I remember is when I was three years old, watching.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Three?

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Three years old.

• 3:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  I'm I'm in front of.

• 3:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember that when I was three.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  It's like probably the only thing I remember from back then, but it was like, like, burned on my brain, seeing the Millennium Falcon deftly maneuvering between the asteroids in a trailer for The Empire Strikes Back when it first came out.

• 4:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  And it was playing in the drive-in, and my folks saying, no, we're not going to drive in to see that. And so it was this this tension of the desire to see this fantastic spectacle on the screen and being told I couldn't.

• 4:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So then on, so you got you got imprinted?

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Yes, and it's something that's stuck with me throughout the years.

• 4:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Since then, all right, all right. Did you ever get to see Star Wars?

• 4:24Speaker 02

  I did get to see Star Wars. I've seen it hundreds, thousands of times, probably.

• 4:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, and so, did you, was it the, which medium were you most enchanted by? The film, TV, or?

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Um, it was primarily film originally, um, and then your television became a part of it later on, um, and I didn't get into like reading science fiction until I was a teenager.

• 4:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Until you learned how to read.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  Well, I had to learn how to read first, but...

• 4:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, happened a little after three, right? Just a good, just a few months.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Right. Um, but it was, it was strange for me to get into reading science fiction because I, originally, you really enjoyed reading science popularizations, uh, like, you know, Einstein's, uh, Relativity, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, uh, Mirror Matter, other books like that, you know, Carl Sagan, uh, his works, um, and it was one of my friends, Marty Magden, Boy Scouts.

• 5:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, popular, non, uh, non-fiction science?

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you're talking about, yeah.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Um, who worked at the local Barnes and Noble. I was having him order new books once the library was out of stuff that I could read, and, um, he said, you know, Jason, you ought to try out science fiction. And so he introduced me to Asimov and, um, Bradbury and Clark, uh, and got me into reading it.

• 5:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the Trinity.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Three, three of the early grandmasters, yeah.

• 5:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh, uh huh. Okay, very, very early, dude. So, of course, I had to know how Gail Anne Hurd got interested in this, and so, uh, let's check it out. So I'm looking at this filmography, and it has very strong overlap with the geekosphere.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  I am. I'm a geek, I'm a nerd, before there were words to describe.

• 5:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Were you a girl nerd?

• 5:58Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, yes, are you kidding?

• 6:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh. So, what, how early did this manifest?

• 6:03Speaker 03

  Uh, I started reading comic books when I was six.

• 6:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  And, I mean, this is how geeky I am, all right?

• 6:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I don't think girls did back then.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  No, no, no.

• 6:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I looked at the ads in the back, it was all for guys.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  No.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the ads were for...

• 6:14Speaker 03

  No, but I, I loved them all, and I would admit, I was a Marvel girl.

• 6:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Okay, um, guilty as charged.

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:20Speaker 03

  And then I graduated into science fiction novels, both YA, which...

• 6:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Young adult, yeah.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  YA didn't exist back then.

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It didn't, it wasn't its own category, really.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  No, it was still children's.

• 6:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  Children's books. Um, and I became so obsessed with it that I actually advised the local library, this is Palm Springs, California, and suggested what books they should acquire.

• 6:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  In science fiction fantasy.

• 6:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You were out ahead of the librarians.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  And then I started writing book reviews, and, uh, predominantly about science fiction fantasy.

• 6:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, people who read a lot... Disappoint me if they do not take that wisdom that they've acquired and somehow share it with others. Because you're keeping it all locked up into yourself. And the fact that you're writing reviews, you've satisfied my...

• 7:12Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 7:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're okay by me on this. That you've obtained some kind of insight into the human condition, into storytelling, and then other people get to know about it.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  I was not only passionate, but I was proselytizing for the genre.

• 7:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jason, other than sheer entertainment, is there some other value you can ascribe to reading science fiction? And I ask that because if you read novels, people can be entertained by novels, but at the end of the day, you also gain a little extra insight into the human condition and human emotion, and love, and hate, and war, and peace. So there's an extra... And maybe if it's embedded in a history, you learn a little bit about the history of the world. So in sci-fi, what else do you get out of it?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  I guess one of the things that I like about science fiction is that it combines the STEM fields with the humanities.

• 8:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Science, technology, engineering, math.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. And so instead of just having a story about science and technology, it looks at how science and technology affects individuals and society. And it's through those means that we get to ethical questions, philosophical questions.

• 8:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good.

• 8:23Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely, yeah. I think that's one of the things that drew me to science fiction as a kid was, my first encounter, I would say, wasn't reading, it was Star Trek. And what I really liked was not the spaceship, and not the fact that there were aliens, but the fact that all of mankind worked together. And I thought that was the coolest thing in the world, that all these different people were on this ship, and they never... Ever talked about their differences. Not once.

• 8:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting.

• 9:00Chuck Nice?

  They never ever acknowledged that anybody would. And then they would meet these like creepy, crazy looking aliens. And they would never say like, what's up with your face?

• 9:12Chuck Nice?

  You know, they would just say like.

• 9:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You some ugly aliens.

• 9:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They were objectively ugly.

• 9:18Chuck Nice?

  They made, yeah, they made them objectively ugly like it's so funny.

• 9:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it never became a topic.

• 9:23Chuck Nice?

  And it never, but it was never anything that like no one's appearance ever became an issue.

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jason, let me ask then, is science, hold aside the reader. Is science fiction a way for the writer to offer social commentary?

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Oh, certainly. And I think that Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek is an excellent example of this where not only are you showing how people work together, you have equality amongst the sexism inside the crew. And also you can think about how the first kiss between a white person and an African American on television was in Star Trek. And it was largely not just you on the part of Gene Roddenberry wanting that that moment to happen.

• 10:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  But also the part of of William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols. You're wanting it to happen because they would flub the takes when they were, you're told not to actually kiss for the cameras because the producers and the studio was like, we don't want to see that on TV. But you, you Shatner Nichols, they kept messing up those takes, but always nailed the ones where they were actually kissing because they knew how important that was for people to see that on television.

• 10:35Chuck Nice?

  And of course, Bill Shatner really liked kissing Lieutenant Uhura.

• 10:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so the weird thing is, of course, when they did kiss, they got mail from, you know, some southern states objecting to this on television. But I don't think they ever got mail when Shatner was kissing.

• 10:52Chuck Nice?

  The green one?

• 10:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Green aliens. Green aliens, not even human. Okay?

• 10:58Chuck Nice?

  I can't believe you're kissing an alien.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Dude, that's amazing.

• 11:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So apparently, so there's social commentary, but not all authors.

• 11:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Think about that kind of effect, I presume. Is that correct?

• 11:12Speaker 02

  I would say so, but even if someone isn't intentionally providing some social commentary, science fiction is extrapolating from the here and now. Whether it's something that's in the far future, or an alien world, or even extrapolating into the past, like with steampunk. It's everything based around the authors, or the directors, filmmakers, attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, etc.

• 11:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, if science fiction is a conduit to the future, and it's not only movies, of course, but comic books and other media. And so, I asked Gail Anne Hurd about whether any of this background that she enjoyed with science fiction influenced her choice of movie that she elected to produce. Let's check it out. At the risk of stating the obvious, your geek roots in comics, comic book stories, science fiction, they manifest in this filmography.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 12:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Strongly. So, what are you... What the hell... How are you doing?

• 12:13Speaker 03

  You know what?

• 12:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is going on here?

• 12:15Speaker 03

  I make what I'd like to see. And my newest show is Falling Water for USA Network, which is...

• 12:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I have yet to see that, but everybody's telling me to see it.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  It is...

• 12:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  Fantastic.

• 12:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  So, why weren't you listening to them?

• 12:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Tonight, I'll dig up some episode. Tonight.

• 12:37Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 12:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, because I felt bad. I gotta know what the pulse is out there.

• 12:40Speaker 03

  And it's because it is... I mean, if you liked Inception, that was a great amuse-bouche for Falling Water, because...

• 12:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because in Inception, these are the nested dreams of reality.

• 12:56Speaker 03

  And we're following in Falling Water, we're following three different characters who are all seeking something. Something that's missing from their lives.

• 13:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a shared dream among them, or something?

• 13:08Speaker 03

  It turns out that one of the conceits of the show is that we're all dreaming separate tiles.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Of a large mosaic. And certain powerful dreamers can leave their dream and enter yours, or mine, or anyone's. And just think of the power that that will have. And how valuable they will become to people who want more control than they already have over the world.

• 13:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jason, can you assess the causes and effects of the chicken/egg technology shown or imagined in science fiction? Does it become real? Is something that we do in science that then gets adopted, but they take it another step? What is that relationship?

• 13:57Speaker 02

  I think it's a very complex relationship, one where both feed into each other. It's like a feedback loop that works in both directions. So as science and technology create new innovations, those things get incorporated into the science fiction that we enjoy and the comic books that we enjoy. But at the same time, people come up with new ideas, try to stretch the boundaries of possibility, such as Jerry Pornell and I forget the other author's name, wrote a book in 1970s, The Moat in God's Eye.

• 14:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Moat.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  And they imagined The Moat in God's Eye, in which they imagined personal computers, pocket computers that you would carry around. And you're 30, 40 years later, then we had that reality.

• 14:39Chuck Nice?

  Right. You know, it's funny because Jeff Bezos just did an interview.

• 14:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The head of Amazon.

• 14:45Chuck Nice?

  Head of Amazon, did an interview where he talked about Alexa being inspired by the way people talk to computers in the sci-fi movies and TV shows that he saw when he was a kid. And I thought about it, I was like, that's so funny. Like, in all sci-fi, people talk to the computer, they go, "Computer, working?" You know, it's like, it's so, and now we do that.

• 15:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's almost always a female voice.

• 15:12Chuck Nice?

  And it's almost always a female voice, you know? But even 2001's Bezos, he's talking to the computer.

• 15:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, how?

• 15:19Chuck Nice?

  How? You know, "I'm sorry, Dave." Like, you know, "I can't do that," right? So it's weird that we now actually do that. And we take it for granted that we say, you know, "Okay, Google," or "Hey, Alexa," or "Siri," and we take it for granted. It's so weird.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  But I would say that it's not just that one-way street of science fiction imagining this new possibility and it comes reality, but also that the things that are discovered, the new things that are found in science and technological innovation also feed their way back into science fiction. Because the thing is like with really the way like the iPad works, or really the way that Alexa works, the way that we understand it now, wasn't envisioned in science fiction. We can trace it back and see where there might be a little bit of inspiration, but it wasn't the thing itself.

• 16:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm, okay. So this is the complex elements. It's more a tapestry of information coming together.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 16:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As opposed to a linear track that you can establish.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  Right. There's a really good example of this, if I can share it, with H.G. Wells. He wrote The Land Ironclads, a story about the first modern battle tank. And it was some years later, Major General Swinton invented the tank for the British military with the advent, or it led into the advent of World War I. Later, Wells sued Swinton, claiming ownership of that invention of the tank. And then Swinton showed up at his house and blew it away.

• 16:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With an actual tank.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  You got a tank.

• 16:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just wrote about it. I made the thing.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Who's suing who now? Luckily, it didn't have to go that far, but Wells did lose that court case. And I think rightly so, because even though he was able to show that Swinton had read The Strand magazine that the story appeared in, is, science fiction is something that I think can inspire, give people ideas, it can provide motivation for new research, but it isn't necessarily like the actual patent application. Right.

• 17:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're gonna take a break. When we come back, more of my interview with Gail Anne Hurd, the producer of really cool sci-fi movies and TV shows, when StarTalk returns.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  This is StarTalk.

• 18:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. This episode, all about science fiction as it's represented in film, in books, in comics, in television. Featuring my interview with Gail Ann Heard, who's a prodigious producer of just this kind of product.

• 18:21Chuck Nice?

  Say that five times fast.

• 18:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Prodigious producer.

• 18:26Chuck Nice?

  Producer of this kind of product.

• 18:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's pick up where I just asked her about, how much does she think about the accuracy of science in sci-fi films? Let's check it out. I'm looking at the, you know, The Terminator, Aliens, Alien Nation, The Abyss, that was all underwater, there. And, and this just goes on and on and on. Armageddon. So, I gotta tell you my relationship with Armageddon.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 18:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let me say of Armageddon, that I found the movie thoroughly entertaining. Just the writing, the timing, that mixture of actors, the wit, the emotion, it was just fun. Okay? That's my first of all comments. That being said, in my community, Armageddon is one of the films we reference in science class for how many laws of physics are violated.

• 19:21Speaker 03

  Well, what's really funny is the last thing I was hearing about was, if an asteroid was coming, that people have decided that, that some of the science in Armageddon, which we know was faux-science, was actually like, not the worst. We were not the worst.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  I probably have another one in there. And by the way, we could spend an entire hour on Dante's Peak. I mean, the volcanologists. Because this is the thing. So we were like, we have a Cascades volcano. They don't have lava. It's pyroclastic flows, et cetera. And

• 19:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They have pyroclastic flows?

• 20:01Speaker 03

  So So the studio, which we'll go and mention, said, no. No. Volcanoes have lava. It's like, there are different kinds of volcanoes.

• 20:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They didn't care.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  We had a volcanologist named Jack Lockwood, who was fantastic. And I kept saying, you know, I kept sending him scripts, saying, I'm sorry, I can't get this changed. So we tried to get other things right in terms of the earthquakes and the and the pyroclastic flow that we did have.

• 20:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's bring in a geologist. I've got Janine Krippner on Skype. Janine, welcome to StarTalk.

• 20:38Speaker 05

  Thank you very much.

• 20:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're a volcanologist. So this with, this is, you know, Spock.

• 20:47Chuck Nice?

  Live long and prosper, Janine.

• 20:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Volcanologist with the Smithsonian Global Volcanism Program. That's actually a thing. And also a science communicator and blogger for in the company of volcanoes. So that's a thing. And you haven't melted yet or anything. You just, you're one of these people who walks up to volcanoes and studies them.

• 21:07Speaker 05

  Yes, I am. But I study the pyroclastic flow side of things, not the lava flow.

• 21:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're exactly, your expertise is where Dante's Peak got it exactly wrong.

• 21:17Speaker 05

  No, they got it, well, the pyroclastic flow was great. I love it.

• 21:21Chuck Nice?

  So now just

• 21:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. So they were able to include pyroclastic flow with lava? But the lava part was false?

• 21:28Speaker 05

  The lava part's completely wrong.

• 21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For that particular volcano?

• 21:32Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 21:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So briefly, tell us about pyroclastic flow.

• 21:35Speaker 05

  So pyroclastic flow is basically

• 21:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Chuck knows it. Chuck knows it, but for the rest of us.

• 21:41Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna go get some coffee now, Janine, because, you know, pyroclastic flow, I mean, that's where I'm a Viking.

• 21:47Speaker 05

  What do you think it is?

• 21:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She's calling you out.

• 21:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 21:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck just left for coffee. So tell us about it.

• 21:56Speaker 05

  It's this really fast, really hot cloud of hot gas and hot volcanic rock. So it's basically a racing cloud of death that goes on a volcano and can destroy everything in its path. So they showed that very, very well in the movie. In fact, that was the scene where I watched it as a 13 year old girl going, that's what I'm going to study for the rest of my life.

• 22:16Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Talk about inspiration. That is cool.

• 22:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait. Just to clarify, listen to what she just said. She said, I saw this rolling cloud of hot death and I want to study that for the rest of my life.

• 22:30Speaker 05

  Teenage girls do, right?

• 22:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool. So, so how would you generally rate the science in Dante's Peak? Is it one of the best volcano movies? Cause you know, there's the Pompeii has been done five or six times, you know, since the, you know, since movies could be made. Where would you rank that?

• 22:49Speaker 05

  I'd rank it at the top by a very big margin.

• 22:52Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow. Okay. High praise from Caesar.

• 22:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What would you say they did best? And what would you say they did worst?

• 23:03Speaker 05

  The best, I mean, I'm a bit biased, but the pyroclastic flow was fantastic. The ash plume was great. The ash spreading out over the town was fantastic. The uncertainty around the eruption as it's leading towards eruption is pretty good. The monitoring that they're using the different tools like seismicity, measuring the gas is fantastic. Um, not so great was the volcanic ash. I have a major beef with the volcanic ash. Um, and of course the lava flow, that's the volcanic elephant in the room. And they did the Lahar really great too. That mud flow that wiped out the bridge and killed our fearless leader, unfortunately.

• 23:43Speaker 05

  Um, and with the outrunning of the pyroclastic flow, so they make it into the mineshaft. It looks like everything's okay. Really, that really hot scorching gas cloud probably would have got them a bit there in the end.

• 23:57Chuck Nice?

  Right. And so what, what was the problem with the ash? You said I had a real problem with the volcanic ash. Why, why?

• 24:03Speaker 05

  They have used wet newspaper, so it looks fluffy and really soft. But in reality, volcanic ash has pulverized rock, crystals and glass.

• 24:12Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 24:13Speaker 05

  So it's really nasty stuff. It can collapse roofs. It can cause breathing issues. You do not want it in your eyes. It's horrible.

• 24:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so ash is just the wrong word.

• 24:22Chuck Nice?

  It's a wrong word. It's not ash.

• 24:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not ash.

• 24:25Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's, it's volcanic glass.

• 24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Volcanic pins and needles.

• 24:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. Volcanic shards.

• 24:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Shards.

• 24:32Chuck Nice?

  That's what it is. It's volcanic shards.

• 24:35Speaker 05

  Volcanic doomy bits.

• 24:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 24:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, oh, how about the banter among the science folk in the movie? Cause that takes research to get that right. How did they do there?

• 24:45Speaker 05

  I think they did pretty good, um, especially the coffee addiction. That's a really important part of being a scientist, probably in many fields. Um, the gunpowder nature of Dr. Harry Dalton is a bit too much. We would always want more data. We wouldn't want to go straight and scare the crap out of the townspeople. That's, that's not what we do. Um.

• 25:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Until you have enough data to do so.

• 25:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:07Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 25:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but don't try to play like you don't want to scare the crap out of the townspeople.

• 25:11Speaker 05

  That part's pretty good.

• 25:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you hear what Chuck said. Chuck, repeat that.

• 25:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I, I said, don't play like you don't want to scare the crap out of the townspeople. Cause you know, that's one of the parts of your job you enjoy most.

• 25:21Speaker 05

  I haven't got to do it yet, so I'm not sure. I have to come back to you on that one.

• 25:24Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 25:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, so, uh, just to, just to repeat, you, you are, you are certifying Dante's Peak with all of its shortcomings as being the finest scientific, the most representatively accurate volcano movie ever made. Head and shoulders above all others.

• 25:41Chuck Nice?

  Including Joe and the volcano.

• 25:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Joe and the volcano.

• 25:47Speaker 05

  As a doctor in volcanology, yes, yes, I do.

• 25:50Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 25:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And could the fact that New Zealand has had some unfortunate encounters with earthquakes in recent decades, Christchurch being almost completely destroyed, has that had an influence on your curiosity about the raging earth?

• 26:08Speaker 05

  I was actually on my way long before that. I look a lot younger than I really am.

• 26:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 26:13Chuck Nice?

  If you say so yourself.

• 26:17Speaker 05

  But no, living in New Zealand, I grew up around volcanoes. So I always loved volcanoes since I was, gosh, since before I could remember. So yeah, the landscape I grew up in is definitely made an impact.

• 26:28Chuck Nice?

  Can I ask a question, just unrelated to sci-fi? This is actually very, very real. There are some people who advocate for the denial of climate chaos and being caused by humans that say that volcanoes are kind of the culprit here, that they dump more

• 26:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  CO2.

• 26:55Chuck Nice?

  CO2 into the atmosphere than anything else could ever do so, and that we're wasting our time trying to mitigate human activity with respect to producing carbon. What do you say to those people?

• 27:09Speaker 05

  I can see why people think that. In fact, people don't even realize just how much activity there is when they think that. But in reality, volcanoes on land and underwater produce less than 1% of carbon dioxide than people do. So it's so true on any, it's just not.

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me bring this to a close and ask you, is there some volcano movie that you can imagine wanting to consult on that takes it in another direction or it's uncharted territory for the science fiction media?

• 27:44Speaker 05

  Ah goodness, that's a good question. We've done the supervolcano thing, that's been overkilled. Um.

• 27:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How about underwater volcanoes or ice volcanoes as we have on some of the moons of Jupiter?

• 27:57Speaker 05

  That'd be a neat one to do. Would we be in space or is this somehow happening on Earth?

• 28:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, well, astronauts on a planet that has ice volcanoes. How about that?

• 28:08Chuck Nice?

  That's a good, actually, I will see that movie.

• 28:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because, because, you know, we think of volcanoes as a place where hot things come out of.

• 28:16Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's only a place where there's high pressure. And you can have high pressure on a place that's very cold.

• 28:21Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where something boils at 100 degrees below zero.

• 28:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, and so now everything is icy to us, but you have high-pressure volcanic circumstances on these other places. Okay, so if we get that to happen, we'll make sure you're on the list for their consultants.

• 28:35Chuck Nice?

  Consultants, yeah.

• 28:37Speaker 05

  I would absolutely consult. There need to be more scientists consulted on movies, as I'm sure you will agree.

• 28:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, excellent. So thanks for coming on, bringing your expertise to us.

• 28:46Speaker 05

  My pleasure.

• 28:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Okay, thank you.

• 28:50Chuck Nice?

  That was a very cool, she was very cool.

• 28:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 28:52Chuck Nice?

  I like the idea of the ice volcanoes too. That's right. But Jason, do you have any volcanic sci-fi literature that you dig?

• 29:01Speaker 02

  Um, not in literature.

• 29:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dig, what is it, the 1967? What?

• 29:05Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 29:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you dig it?

• 29:06Chuck Nice?

  That's right, man. I'm a mad cat.

• 29:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I dig it.

• 29:12Chuck Nice?

  I'm digging it, babe.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  I say the same thing to my students. They probably don't know what I'm talking about.

• 29:18Chuck Nice?

  I don't know why I just turned into Sammy Davis Jr. there.

• 29:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, you didn't turn into Sammy Davis, you turned into Austin Powers there.

• 29:26Chuck Nice?

  Oh, big, hey.

• 29:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 29:27Chuck Nice?

  Okay, go ahead.

• 29:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what volcanoes do you dig?

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Well, I can't think of any in literature that I've read about, but I'm thinking in terms of the movie that you just pitched to the volcanologists that we spoke with. Europa Report. It seemed like part of the story centers on like how unstable the surfaces where they land on Europa. Um, which those, you could either see or maybe turn in different ways to be like ice volcanoes. And the inherent danger of studying an environment like that.

• 29:54Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 29:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool.

• 29:55Chuck Nice?

  That is very cool.

• 29:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you know how I know about the Europa Report?

• 29:58Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 29:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I'm in it.

• 29:59Chuck Nice?

  Are you really?

• 30:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes!

• 30:01Chuck Nice?

  Get out!

• 30:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, this is my office, I ain't getting out. You get out.

• 30:05Chuck Nice?

  What, what, so what are you doing there?

• 30:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, it's, it was a cheap shot, so, at first, it's a, it's a, it's a nicely done, lower-budget sci-fi film.

• 30:13Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 30:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's called the Europa Report. They try to take a different angle on how you might make a movie.

• 30:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is a mission to Europa, to see if there's life there.

• 30:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the entire movie are just the cameras stitched together from the camp, the different cameras in the ship and outside the ship.

• 30:32Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 30:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So throughout the entire movie, say, camera three, camera six, someone walks with a camera eight. And so it is the report of this mission assembled by, basically, the video cameras positioned around the ship. So that's, that's the, that's the premise for it.

• 30:48Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 30:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they used a clip of me being interviewed by the news, saying, "I want to go to Europa," because it has an icy surface and an ocean below, and I want to cut a hole and go ice fishing on Europa, see if anything swims up to the camera lens. So they used that clip of me.

• 31:02Chuck Nice?

  They used that clip, that's cool.

• 31:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they paid me, too.

• 31:04Chuck Nice?

  Get out!

• 31:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That totally made! I forgot, it was just like, like a thousand dollars, I said, "Yeah, good."

• 31:08Chuck Nice?

  It's found money.

• 31:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, there it is. Now, let me think, okay, do it.

• 31:13Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 31:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, it was an interesting attempt, and you're right, the surface is very unstable, because it's ice sheets floating on water that is being heated, and there are heat sources. And so when you heat water under ice, the ice is not stable, it breaks, it refreezes.

• 31:28Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 31:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you can have a, a ice phenomenon that you might not otherwise be familiar with.

• 31:34Chuck Nice?

  That's cool, man.

• 31:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 31:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I think I read where that they, they see the fissures change.

• 31:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 31:39Chuck Nice?

  Uh, on Europa.

• 31:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 31:41Chuck Nice?

  And that's how they know that this ice is melting and refreezing and melting and refreezing.

• 31:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and if you find life on Europa, you know what we'll call it?

• 31:50Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 31:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Europeans.

• 31:51Chuck Nice?

  Oh, no.

• 31:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta take a break.

• 31:54Chuck Nice?

  Oh, God. Help us. Help us, Europe.

• 32:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're gonna take our next break, when we come back, more on StarTalk. And we're talking about sci-fi in movies, TV, and literature when we return.

• 32:22Speaker 04

  Bringing space and science down to Earth. You're listening to StarTalk.

• 32:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. By the way, we are recording this in my office at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. Better known as the Cosmic Crib. The Cosmic Crib. We haven't done some Cosmic Cribs lately. Come back to Cosmic Crib, do some episodes. I got Chuck Nice, of course. That's right. Jason, professor. The professor of sci-fi. You know, that should not be allowed. That's too fun. Yeah, that is a pretty cool title. How many kids take your class? Is it one of the more popular classes? It's one of the more popular classes, yeah. Look how he's so casual.

• 33:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, just happens to be the most popular in all of campus. I've taught at Georgia Tech, as well as here at City Tech, and students always want to sign up for it. Very, very cool. Well, we're featuring my interview with Gail Ann Hurd, one of these highly prolific producers of really innovative science fiction material from the Terminator trilogy, right on up through The Walking Dead on television, which went through, how many, the tens, how many seasons was that up to? Clearly, she is not, it's a shame she hasn't come into her own. She's got to figure out her, she's still figuring life out. She's still figuring things out, you know, she'll get there.

• 34:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I had to ask her, what was it like to work in two completely different media? Television, where there are multiple stories that, or you can develop more subtleties within a story over many episodes, and a movie, we got to go and get the job done and get out? So I had to understand. Excellent. How does that work? Let's check it out.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  What I've discovered, having been both a feature film producer and a television producer, is that with a feature, you spend two, maybe three years making a two and a half hour film.

• 34:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a one-shot deal, yeah.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  And so you've got to get all that character in, you've got to get all that plot in, you've got to wrap it all up. And with a series, in a series like Falling Water, we have 10 hours to do this.

• 34:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So those 10 installments?

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Yes, there are 10 episodes.

• 34:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a 10-hour movie?

• 34:49Speaker 03

  It's essentially yes. So we get to learn so much more about the characters, dive so much more deeply, not only into that, but into the mythology, into the world.

• 35:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And into the conceit of the storytelling.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Yes, and, and the stakes are so much greater because you can unfold them and, you know, unspool it more slowly and get more and more invested.

• 35:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because when you do a movie and you have to get all of that out in an hour and a half, two hours, it looks very forced.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  Exactly, and not only that...

• 35:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It completely opens up a character.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  And that's one of the constraints of the medium. And television is much different. Um, you know, you can, once you're connected, you know there's going to be so much more. I mean, the idea, I mean, like, let's say a film like Inception, there's not a sequel. So if you really wanted to follow these characters into the future, that's not happening. Or if it does, it'll happen, you know, five, 10 years later.

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me, Jason, tell me about the difference between developing a cool science tech storyline and developing the characters within the story. Because it's clear that a movie has a harder time developing people than a 10-hour movie or a 10-hour TV series would. So how, as a, as a consumer of this medium and a teacher of it, how do you, how do you split that?

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Well, whenever you're thinking about like television, you obviously you have a lot more time to develop not only the characters, but do the world building necessary for the audience to really engage in the ideas of the show like with Star Trek, for example.

• 36:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  World building, I like that.

• 36:32Chuck Nice?

  I like that, yeah.

• 36:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good, yeah.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  But whereas like a film, you have to jump right in and get straight to the point. Otherwise, you could either lose the audience, or it could slow the pace of the film down so much that the audience begins dozing off. Also, another issue that relates both to series and film has to do with novels, that when you write a novel or short story, you can provide interiority, you can provide the thoughts of the characters, which you can't really do on film or in television, other than like flashbacks.

• 37:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In awkward ways.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  In awkward ways, exactly.

• 37:03Chuck Nice?

  Except Japanese anime, where they're always doing that. That's all they do, is give you the interiority of what the characters, it's always what the character's thinking at all times.

• 37:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that a word, interiority?

• 37:13Chuck Nice?

  I don't know.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  It is, yeah.

• 37:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've just heard him say it. And you picked it up like that?

• 37:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 37:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You act like you knew that word your whole life.

• 37:20Chuck Nice?

  Hell no, no, I knew it for 30 seconds, and that is all I need.

• 37:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's interesting, how clumsy it can be to get inside someone's head, without having them be a whispered narration over their thoughts.

• 37:32Chuck Nice?

  So what's a mechanism, as a writer, that you can use to portray like the thought patterns of a character, without doing that, you know, that they're showing the close-up of the face, and it's just like...

• 37:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they look off at a scan.

• 37:46Chuck Nice?

  And they're looking off, it's just like, "I don't think I can do this. I'm not sure if I can make this happen." Like, you know, what can you do?

• 37:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And maybe, really good actors can convey those emotions just by their facial expressions.

• 37:59Chuck Nice?

  Oh my god, you're absolutely right. Yeah, like Meryl Streep, I think that's one of her strongest points.

• 38:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, back to your expertise here, so tell us.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  But you're exactly right, that things about like, non-verbal information from facial expressions, the way a person carries themselves, the tonality of their voice, but also, you know, film techniques like the cinematography, the way the shot is framed, the color scale that's used for background or foreground.

• 38:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Music can get, carry some emotion to it.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  And obviously, music is the biggest thing.

• 38:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which you don't have in a book.

• 38:28Chuck Nice?

  Right, right, right.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  And this is the thing, is not to say that one medium is superior to another. Each of them have different affordances, things that they can do, and constraints, things that they can't do, in order to tell a story. And I think a master for storyteller uses the mediums' affordances to their maximum capability, to be able to tell the story, but also involve the audience and those emotions and those characters.

• 38:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have affordances too, by the way. I just learned two words tonight. How's your affordance?

• 38:56Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 38:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So nowadays, with streaming services, where they'll drop an entire series all at once, do you think the future of sci-fi is bright? Because now sci-fi can have the same kind of treatment as other long, dramatic stories that have been dragged out for multiple episodes have done in the past?

• 39:16Speaker 02

  I think so. Like, maybe a good example would be The Expanse.

• 39:20Chuck Nice?

  Yes! Oh, my god, I was just about to say that! So do you... I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

• 39:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He didn't give you that affordance.

• 39:26Chuck Nice?

  I know.

• 39:28Chuck Nice?

  I get very excited, but that is a trim... If you... people listening, if you get the chance, watch The Expanse. I found it by mistake, and four days later, I was sitting there, unshaven and smelly.

• 39:42Chuck Nice?

  I was like, "This is so good!"

• 39:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no higher compliment in modern times.

• 39:45Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. You know, but they do the science well.

• 39:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And who's streaming this?

• 39:49Chuck Nice?

  Um, I think it's Amazon, if I'm not mistaken. But they do the science well, and it was cool because, you know, I sit at the feet of the master all the time here, and I get to hear and learn a lot about what really happens in space. And one of the things that they do very well is let you see that in zero gravity, you are a helpless little baby.

• 40:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yours is one of the most helpless states you could ever be in.

• 40:15Chuck Nice?

  There is nothing you can do! And they do it really well. But anyway, I'm sorry, I got excited, I interrupted you. Go ahead, The Expanse.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  But you make a really good point about, like, you stumbled onto it by mistake, right? And I think that with streaming services and this new way that we're consuming media actually may introduce science fiction to more people now, because they just stumble onto things or try something out. In a way that was harder to do in the past where you had to tune into the channel at a certain day, a certain time.

• 40:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  And if you didn't, well, then you just, you totally missed it. But now with things being shared on social media, recommendations, or things that you find just browsing through Netflix or Amazon.

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And no one's gonna jump in the middle if they can start at the beginning.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so you got them.

• 40:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. And the cool thing about the expanses, they take um, the geopolitical relationships between countries that we have right now, and they expand that to become um, intersolar relationships between people who are uh, born in the asteroid belt, in the, in the Kuiper Belt, uh, people who are born on Mars at thirty-eight percent gravity, and Earthers.

• 41:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa.

• 41:24Chuck Nice?

  Who are, and so over this long period of time, human beings have kind of, you know, not really evolved.

• 41:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if they're born on Earth, are they birthers?

• 41:31Chuck Nice?

  They, they.

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was good. Chuck, that was good.

• 41:35Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna give it to you, only because I'm a birther. But, yeah, and it's really, it's very, it's very funny because the prejudices that we hold towards one another here on Earth now just becomes different prejudices that we hold towards each other based on where, which planet, or which reason of the solar system that you're born in.

• 41:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Jason, let me ask you, are there untapped, possibly low-hanging fruit available for the sci-fi author? Now that we have these media, these new ways of delivering storytelling?

• 42:09Speaker 02

  I, I think so, and you, Netflix has jumped to this like with the, the streaming of the series Black Mirror, I think. But no, it's, it's, they, they take new, new things that we're all very familiar with, and just push it a little bit into the future, near-future science fiction.

• 42:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that, so that it's, you can almost touch it.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But not quite.

• 42:28Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just almost touch it enough to scare the bejesus out of you.

• 42:31Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 42:32Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  But it's, it's through the, you know, this, this platform of being able to stream uh, you a series of movies or just watching one individual episode, um, you, I think immerses people in these ideas and gets them thinking about them in a way that science fiction is given to as opposed to other media where it's more just about a dramatic story.

• 42:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's another aspect to this storytelling that I think, uh, I briefly discussed with Gail Anne Hurd, uh, and it has to do with. Not only are you imagining the science, but how much of the science are you getting right? And what value that might have to your audience? Let's check it out.

• 43:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now, I think, and I'd like to get your verification of this, or falsification. I think we live in a time where if you get the science right, there is an entire other following that the movie will pick up in the blogosphere, where people compliment the science that it gets right, and it gets talked about for months beyond the normal marketing period.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  Like The Martian?

• 43:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like The Martian. And so, I'd like to believe that gone are the days, we just make stuff up because you think it looks better, and then you alienate an entire community of people who could have praised you for doing it accurately. And the more we are in this era that I'm thinking we're entering, the more pressure there is on producers, directors, to bring in a scientist and maybe...

• 44:04Speaker 03

  By the way, we had scientists on each of those films.

• 44:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't believe you had a single scientist on Armageddon.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  We've had multiple scientists on Armageddon.

• 44:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're lying.

• 44:12Speaker 03

  Including futurists from NASA. And in fact, we even shot in the neutral buoyancy tank.

• 44:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Houston?

• 44:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 44:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, that's it. In fact, there's a whole scale model of the Hubble telescope submerged there, so that the astronauts who would be servicing it, you know, it's kind of, it's not perfect zero G, but you get that floaty feel to it. And so, yeah, that's good. That's good. But I'm saying...

• 44:37Speaker 03

  I am not arguing with you. I am not arguing with you. At least we knew that we were breaking those laws.

• 44:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jason, how do you feel when you see bad science in a film?

• 44:52Speaker 02

  I don't think it's necessarily always a bad thing, but I would say that it's unfortunate today, because obviously audiences are more well-educated, and I think there is a certain expectation that the science is right.

• 45:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you do agree with me about the blogosphere? There's a whole geek community that cares about real science.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Oh, I think that you're absolutely right about that. But I can also say as a warning, like When Sunshine by Danny Boyle was released, I saw it in theater in Liverpool, England, and after the film was over, I was complaining to all my friends quite vocally about how bad the science was in parts of it, especially about like restarting the sun. And unbeknownst to me.

• 45:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry, I didn't see the movie, but they restart, that's kind, it sounds kind of cool, though.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  It is kind of cool, except it's a very small, like, nuclear package that they use to, to kickstart things.

• 45:40Chuck Nice?

  To kickstart the sun.

• 45:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sun, yeah, okay.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Matters of scale here.

• 45:47Chuck Nice?

  We get a Bic lighter up there.

• 45:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, my, my.

• 45:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My pilot light went out, helped me out. Yeah, go on.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  But what unbeknownst to me was that Danny Boyle's family was sitting in the row behind me, and they kind of leaned over and gave me some dirty looks. It made me a little uncomfortable. And I, I thought about it, and I, it's obviously a tremendous success for someone to be able to make a film, right, to, to realize their artistic.

• 46:16Chuck Nice?

  At all.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  At all, right. But I do think that, you, if you were gonna be putting these millions of dollars toward making a film, why not make it a film that has more real science, that can teach people as well as entertain them?

• 46:28Chuck Nice?

  True. True. I mean, you, sometimes it's like, what's the movie where they basically play around with the tenants of string theory and Matthew McConaughey?

• 46:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interstellar.

• 46:40Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, yes. And so, I, I loved all the questions that they posed in the movie, but then it comes down to love.

• 46:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I, I never thought about it till this moment. Maybe Interstellar spent too much time on getting their science right and not enough time on the emotion and the interpersonal stories.

• 47:07Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 47:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be embedded within it.

• 47:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, there's a balance. Yeah, there's gotta be a balance.

• 47:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's gotta be. Otherwise, yeah. So you can praise it for its science, but then if there's no story, or if the story is not otherwise convincing novelistically, then what do you have at the end of the day? Because I think we're all fundamentally. Storytellers, story listeners, even as adults.

• 47:27Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think it's core to being a human being is really stories, you know?

• 47:33Speaker 02

  Well, related to this is Hugo Gernsback, the father of science fiction. Started the first science fiction magazine in April 1926, Amazing Stories. And he defined science fiction in part as being 75% romance and 25% science.

• 47:48Chuck Nice?

  I didn't know that.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 47:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's early.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  And so even from that beginning point of what we think of as modern science fiction, there was this idea that you have to have a balance between being able to tell a story that is about people while bringing in to show how science and technology influences and affect people and how people respond to those challenges.

• 48:07Chuck Nice?

  Nice. Excellent. I'm gonna go home and write a story right now.

• 48:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The way I think of this is, yeah, you should try to get the science right, but don't, don't let that stop your creativity. But often, there's newly discovered science in any branch of science that might be more creative on its frontier than you can be trying to make stuff up.

• 48:30Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 48:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So why not reach for that edge? My field, that edge overflows. We gave you wormholes, black holes, the vacuum of space, antimatter, that's photons, lasers. We, that's, we gave you that.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Jason, do you see him bragging?

• 48:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't mean to brag, but, so, but because I can tell you, there's a famous quote from J.B.S. Haldane. And it's, "The universe is not only stranger than we have imagined, it may be stranger than we can imagine."

• 49:11Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 49:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which to me says that there's no greater source of material to mine for science fiction storytelling than the science itself.

• 49:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just make sure you get that three quarters romance.

• 49:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. And that is a cosmic perspective. You've been listening to, possibly even watching, this episode of StarTalk. I want to thank you, Jason. Thank you, Chuck. Yes. For this episode. Thank you, guys. This was great. Okay. And until next time, as always, I bid you to keep looking up.