Cosmic Queries – LIGO, Light, & Lycanthropy

Are all galaxies redshifting away? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Negin Farsad tackle a grab bag of fan questions covering cosmic infrastructure, redshift, werewolves, gravitational waves, and the nature of time itself.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Negin, this round had a lot of deep philosophy in it.

• 0:02Negin Farsad?

  Oh, people got juicy.

• 0:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Juicy about time and space and, and dimensions.

• 0:09Negin Farsad?

  And just things that don't exist and maybe never will, or, or will they?

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All that and more coming up on StarTalk Cosmic Queries, the grab bag.

• 0:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. We're gonna do a Cosmic Queries Grab Bag edition. And today I've got with me as my co-host, Negin Farsad. Negin?

• 0:48Negin Farsad?

  Hello.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back.

• 0:50Negin Farsad?

  Oh, my God. So excited to be here. So excited to launch myself into space.

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes. And you've got all the questions from our, our Patreon supporters.

• 1:01Negin Farsad?

  Oh, by the way, just reading through these questions, I have to say, I feel so much better about humanity. There are some extraordinarily smart people out there. You don't get this, that, you don't know that in your regular life.

• 1:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're saying I'm biased into thinking the world is smarter than it actually is?

• 1:18Negin Farsad?

  No, it's your fans. Because these are not the kinds of things I get from my fans. Just so we're clear.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe there'll be some spillage over. So what's your podcast is?

• 1:28Negin Farsad?

  My podcast is called Fake the Nation. You can also hear me on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me.

• 1:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, we all love Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, NPR.

• 1:35Negin Farsad?

  I feel like there's probably a big crossover.

• 1:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've only ever heard that on the radio, but it sounds like it's live. Is that?

• 1:42Negin Farsad?

  That's right. We tape in Chicago usually and other cities around the country.

• 1:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In an actual auditorium.

• 1:47Negin Farsad?

  In like a huge auditorium with like 800 people and it's a really good time. Yeah, I highly recommend a live taping if you haven't been to one.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I was, I think I've been on them once or twice.

• 1:57Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was very hard. They asked me hard questions. I couldn't.

• 2:01Negin Farsad?

  Because, because the questions were so dumb, you couldn't believe that they were happening.

• 2:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why I did. Thank you for stroking my ego there.

• 2:09Negin Farsad?

  That's right, that's right.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I haven't seen the questions.

• 2:12Negin Farsad?

  Alright, well, let's get into it.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's Grab Bag, so I don't know what it is.

• 2:14Negin Farsad?

  Well, I'm gonna start with a question from Nathan Sprow. Nathan writes, "Dr. Tyson, could we launch microsatellites as relay points between larger spacecraft on long-distance missions, effectively creating a network like a cosmic hyperlink? Would the main spacecraft release these microsatellites directly, or would we need a separate deployment system to keep them spaced out over the journey? And what would be the biggest challenges, like keeping them aligned, or dealing with the signal delay?"

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, see, I, I, that's a great thought.

• 2:50Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 2:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That this is a person imagining a future where the solar system is our backyard, or, or, or it's an extension of civilization into the solar system or beyond. And what I would ask is, what is the, the point of having a relay station? If, instead, I could just beam my signal straight to Earth, why do I have to go off of your relay station?

• 3:18Negin Farsad?

  Well, I guess-

• 3:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unless your relay station boosts the signal, that could happen.

• 3:21Negin Farsad?

  That like it gives us better pathways of communication strength to something super far away.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but I'm saying that I, there's the straight way, which is just the, my own beam of radio waves.

• 3:34Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 3:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if it goes to you and you want to boost it, you need a source of energy to do that.

• 3:39Negin Farsad?

  What if there's like a planet in between you, your signal, your beam?

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If, if I'm blocked.

• 3:46Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space is so empty.

• 3:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This, this is not your concern.

• 3:52Negin Farsad?

  It's like not happening, okay.

• 3:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And even if a planet is there, it's in motion.

• 3:57Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 3:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 3:59Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 3:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like, so imagine you say, "Oh, I want to go sunbathing. Oh, darn, there's a total solar eclipse. What am I gonna do? Wait four minutes, okay?" Because the moon orbits Earth, and it's not gonna be blocking the sun the whole time. So, blockage does not tend to be a problem in the, in the vastness of space. But here is what we do need such places for.

• 4:25Negin Farsad?

  Okay.

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're going on a very long distance. And you need fuel.

• 4:32Negin Farsad?

  Like long distance, like Mars or something.

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, even farther.

• 4:35Negin Farsad?

  Okay.

• 4:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Or let's, let's take a simple case. I don't want to get to Mars in nine months. I want to get to Mars in a week. There's a way to do that. Okay. We always say, how far away is nine months away?

• 4:48Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you know what they mean by that? That mean you, you load up your, your rocket with fuel. You burn it all until you have just the right speed. And you coast to where Mars's gravity then grabs you. And then you go land on Mars. And since you're coasting the whole way, that takes time. It takes extra time. So you'd want to accelerate at one G because we're, we, on earth, we live in a one G environment. If you put it to two G, that's just, you'll feel that beyond what you're comfortable.

• 5:21Negin Farsad?

  Like what your body.

• 5:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, your body did not evolve in two G.

• 5:25Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 5:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I don't want to travel to the planets in two G.

• 5:27Negin Farsad?

  That's just like if you, if you eat a bunch of Taco Bell and then go speed racing. You don't want to do that. That's like going two G.

• 5:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Multiply that by 10 and you get.

• 5:37Negin Farsad?

  Got it, got it.

• 5:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Digestive tract and all your circulation.

• 5:42Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does not, now two G is what you'll, you'll feel on roller coasters and things. Sometimes even three G. But you don't want to live on a roller coaster. And, and dine and socialize on a roller coaster. So one G is an interesting, nice, uh, uh, force to put on your rocket. And at one G, you will accelerate through space and get faster and faster and faster and faster and faster. And then you turn the ship around, fire the rockets in the opposite direction to slow you down.

• 6:12Negin Farsad?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because there's no other way to break in space. If you were to drive across the country or around the world, and you needed to carry all the fuel you were going to use with you, you'd have a tanker behind you, right? Something, something huge. But we don't. We just have, you know, 15, 20 gallon gas tanks. You run out of gas, what do you do?

• 6:34Negin Farsad?

  You charge it, you go to a charging station or refill your gas.

• 6:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, listen to you, how green you are.

• 6:39Negin Farsad?

  I'm sorry, it's 2026, Neil. I'm driving an electric car in this imaginary scenario, because I don't have a car at all.

• 6:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you either have a power station behind you,

• 6:51Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 6:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  or you'll run out of batteries and you have to recharge. So, in space, we either carry all our fuel with us.

• 6:59Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 6:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or you recharge at one of these nodes that, that the person is referencing. But they're not communication nodes, they would be filling stations. And, look at, for example, Artemis just went around the moon and back. You know where the astronauts were? They went up a little bitty, but a bit, bit, bit, bit, bit. This is where they were, and the whole rest, and the, the boosters.

• 7:21Negin Farsad?

  The big long thing.

• 7:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the rest of that is fuel.

• 7:23Negin Farsad?

  Fuel.

• 7:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And by the time they come back, that's all that's left, because they spent all the fuel.

• 7:27Negin Farsad?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, space travel, ideally, in the future, would be, you would refill at nodes, and you can-

• 7:34Negin Farsad?

  And then is that, is that just like regular unleaded, or like what's in the?

• 7:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, it depends on what kind of rocket technology you use. And, yeah, give me high octane, give me, yeah, I don't know. So, uh, so the real challenge will be, as we have on Earth, if that's a filling station, you would have to continually supply the filling station. But you can do that on your own time.

• 8:00Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 8:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? You can send slow ships to refill. They're not trying to get somewhere on a, you know, on a timed trip. And so, there would be this continuous source of fuel, brought to them by, uh, tankers, space tankers, if I call them that. So, there is an occasion for such things.

• 8:20Negin Farsad?

  All right, okay, so no, so not really to microsatellites, but yes, really, to fueling stations. I love that.

• 8:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 8:28Negin Farsad?

  Uh, okay, well, our next question comes from Leo B. Uh, hello, Dr.

• 8:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Leo or Leo?

• 8:34Negin Farsad?

  There's an accent on the E, so I feel like it's Leo.

• 8:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a very Leo thing to do.

• 8:40Negin Farsad?

  Hello, Dr. Tyson.

• 8:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All Leos I know put an accent on their E.

• 8:43Negin Farsad?

  I feel like the E is meant to really be observed. Um, so this is a question for all of you. Once upon a time, I was a child in junior high school back in the mid eighties. When talking about the periodic table, teachers in school used to say that no element slash metals would ever be discovered, that it was without any doubt at all impossible. Yet here we are today with a bunch of new elements on the table. In another category of science and tech, humans used to say that we would never fly slash travel in the air. Now we have all kinds of flying transportation available planes, jets, even hot air balloons. If you could choose a thing that science says can't be done yet without a doubt, which would, which would you most want to see become possible in your lifetime? Uh, thanks. And this is Leo from the Canadian Atlantic provinces.

• 9:29Negin Farsad?

  He didn't want to get specific about which province.

• 9:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he's a witness protection program.

• 9:34Negin Farsad?

  Just that vague region.

• 9:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Name really is Leo, but he's hiding on the Leo. Yeah. So that's a great question.

• 9:41Negin Farsad?

  I love this question.

• 9:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I have to put it in proper context. Okay. In science, if something violates well-tested known laws of physics, it's not going to be possible later. It's just not.

• 9:57Negin Farsad?

  Okay.

• 9:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that's what testing the idea means. So the people who said, uh, we will never go, we'll never break the sound barrier. Let's, let's look at those folks. Excuse me? We had rifle bullets that move faster than sound. Did you ever do a towel, like a

• 10:17Negin Farsad?

  whipping, yeah.

• 10:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  buttocks?

• 10:19Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 10:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Have you ever did that?

• 10:20Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 10:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was that just a guy thing that we did in camp?

• 10:22Negin Farsad?

  It's mostly a guy thing. Yeah. I mean, I can't say that me and my gal pals have ever done that. Whipping each other with towels. But yes, I'm familiar with the action.

• 10:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially a mostly damp towel.

• 10:34Negin Farsad?

  Yeah. No, it just sounds rather unpleasant. So.

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The tip of the towel makes a snapping sound at the end, even if it doesn't hit something. The tip of the towel in that instant went faster than sound. It was a mini sonic boom. Yes. And that is equivalent to what happens at the end of a whip. That's why it makes a cracking sound. It's not just because it hits something. The tip, that's why the, the, the, the, whatever the material is typically leather, it's moving this way and rapidly snaps back. And in that rapid change of direction, it's briefly moving faster than sound and it's a mini sonic boom. We've had things that move faster than sound.

• 11:15Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 11:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So don't tell me we'll never go faster than sound. You just haven't figured it out yet. Don't tell me we will never fly. Birds fly. So just say, I'm too stupid to figure out how to fly, but don't tell me that the laws of physics are preventing us from flying. There's a difference between stuff we haven't figured out how to do yet and things that are forbidden by the laws of physics. Two completely different things. That's all. So, so, uh, is there something that is forbidden by laws of physics that one day?

• 11:51Negin Farsad?

  Right, like what if the laws of physics are wrong? Ah, oh my God, are you gonna like explode right now? Are you sweating? Oh no, I broke Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 12:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's the worst that can happen to a law of physics.

• 12:11Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 12:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We learn that it, it doesn't apply in as many cases as we thought. That there's situations where those laws of physics fail. And we need a deeper understanding of how the universe works in order to account for those failures. Well, if these laws of physics failed, why don't we just discard them? We don't discard them because they still work in all the places where they were tested. And the best example of this is Newton's laws of motion and gravity. We went to the moon. The Apollo missions went to the moon on Newton's laws of gravity. Einstein has his own laws of motion and gravity. It's called the, this theories of relativity.

• 12:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When do you use that? If speeds are really high or gravity is really strong, Newton's laws begin to teeter and then they fail miserably. Whereas Einstein's laws precisely predict what's going on.

• 13:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you know what happens if you put low speeds or low gravity into Einstein's equations? They become Newton's equations.

• 13:21Negin Farsad?

  Right, so it still fundamentally works.

• 13:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's still fundamentally works. So Einstein's equations enclosed Newton's equations. And Newton, we didn't know at the time, was a special case of Einstein's equations. But it's not discarded in the way that you, I think, implied when you said, "Maybe with the attitude, maybe your laws of physics are wrong." And so it's a matter of technology. And today, when I say we're not going to Mars for 100 years, it's not because we don't know how to get to Mars. No one is denying our ability. We have an SUV-sized rover on Mars. We plonked down and it's ro- and we took a helicopter with it. It's not about whether we know how to get to Mars.

• 14:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's whether we have sufficient geopolitical or national motivation to send people to Mars. That's a whole other thing than in the 19-

• 14:14Negin Farsad?

  But we do have the scientific capacity to do it, the technological capacity to do it? And, okay.

• 14:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh. And it's different from in the 1940s and 50s. I collected comments from people, people from writers, saying, "Oh, we will never get to the moon for another 200 years." That they couldn't imagine the pace of technology going exponentially, right past their capacity to imagine. And there are people who are alien-adjacent, let's say. They're the ones who would have thought in the 1950s we weren't going anywhere. And then 15 years later, we're on the moon. "Where did you get that technology from?" "Okay, you must have been chilling with the aliens." And these are people who are in denial.

• 15:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of a true exponential growth of science and technology, which is the period in which we live right now. In the era of having gone to the moon, no one is imagining that anything is impossible. That became a thing. We can land a man on the moon, but we can't feed the hungry.

• 15:22Negin Farsad?

  Yeah, it was a constant refrain.

• 15:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was, this is the reference point for what we're capable of.

• 15:29Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 15:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And after that, people say, oh, we can go to the moon by 1969. We'll be on Mars by 1985. And there were these, the people were over predicting where we'd end up landing. Right now, it's not a matter of what can or cannot happen. When it's a subject of debate or conversation, it's,

• 15:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  we're pretty sure it's gonna happen, but how soon? So it's a time reference thing, not whether it's the laws of physics allow it.

• 15:59Negin Farsad?

  Well, you and Leo both mentioned forms of transportation, and I have one that I don't think is possible right now, but I would like to see it happen. It is a hovering subway, like a subway that doesn't have, like, hit tracks.

• 16:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 16:16Negin Farsad?

  It hovers above tracks.

• 16:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 16:18Negin Farsad?

  So that it doesn't make like a screeching noise.

• 16:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 16:22Negin Farsad?

  And that it's like a little faster and just a little more agile.

• 16:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That already exists in the world.

• 16:28Negin Farsad?

  Like a hovering subway?

• 16:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Already, yes.

• 16:31Negin Farsad?

  Okay, well then.

• 16:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're called maglev trains. You never heard of these?

• 16:35Negin Farsad?

  Oh, in China?

• 16:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, China has them. We're not up to China's practicality yet.

• 16:40Negin Farsad?

  So they hover, like, how much do they hover?

• 16:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They magnetically levitate.

• 16:45Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 16:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Over a track.

• 16:47Negin Farsad?

  Okay.

• 16:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maglev, that's the.

• 16:49Negin Farsad?

  So I just want the thing that already exists.

• 17:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What would you do if an alien actually showed up? Would you shake its hand or run? Does it even have a hand to shake? In my latest book, Take Me to Your Leader, I explore not only how they might have gotten here, but what they might want and how you should respond. Because the real question is not, are we alone? It's, are we ready? By the way, I also narrated Take Me to Your Leader, and I'm duly informed that you can get a copy of that book or the audiobook now, wherever books are sold. You should probably get the book sooner rather than later. You don't want to have a first alien encounter and not be ready for it. I'm just saying.

• 17:59Negin Farsad?

  All right, well, listen, I have another question. This one's like very scientifically advanced, I think. From Martin, Martin in Denmark says, I have a question about-

• 18:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Denmark, I love it.

• 18:09Negin Farsad?

  Yeah, about red shifting. What makes the light red shift when traveling great distances? And do we know that we're, do we know that we're directing all the red shifted light? Or is our current equipment not good enough to detect light from, for example, 50 to 100 billion light years away?

• 18:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that's, that's a very common question that confabulates two, is that the right word? Confabulates?

• 18:34Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 18:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Conflates. Conflates, that's the word. That conflates two different things going on. The red shift is only a speed thing. Okay? Forget distance for the moment. Just for the moment. Okay? If you are approaching someone and you are emitting light-

• 18:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a light you can think of as waves. Let's think of it as a wave. So I begin to emit a wave of light of a certain wavelength. But as I'm emitting the light, I'm getting closer to you while I'm emitting that light. So the wavelength that finally comes out of me is shorter than the wavelength would be if I just were stationary. So if something comes towards you, all the light shifts to smaller wavelengths. And if something's moving away from you, you're stretching out the wave.

• 19:30Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 19:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I started emitting the wave and I finished emitting the wave. It got stretched because now I've increased my distance. So it's a speed and the faster I'm moving, the longer is that shift in its wavelength. Either towards you or away from you. Okay. We call it a red shift because we're kind of stuck with just a visible part of the spectrum in the history of this exercise. And whatever features in the spectrum you saw, if the object was moving away from you, those features shifted to the red side of the spectrum. So we call it a red shift. And these are like the fingerprints of elements that are in the light. You know, hydrogen and carbon and nitrogen.

• 20:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're called spectral lines. It's there, the fingerprints of these elements. They're all shifted, every single one of them by the same amount. We call that a red shift. If it's moving towards you, they all shift the other way. Call it a blue shift. Now, another little confusing fact. All the colors of the rainbow, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. So really it's a violet shift.

• 20:41Negin Farsad?

  Oh, right, because we're going to the other end.

• 20:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. There's indigo and violet beyond the blue, right? So technically, if you're going to say one side is a red shift, we should call the other side a violet shift, but we don't. We just say blue shift.

• 20:53Negin Farsad?

  You famously demoted Pluto. Maybe you can change.

• 20:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why you gotta bring up Pluto right now?

• 20:59Negin Farsad?

  Maybe you can change blue shift to violet shift.

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you're respecting the power that I wield.

• 21:04Negin Farsad?

  Yeah, no, respecting the power that you wield.

• 21:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought you were trying to pick a fight.

• 21:07Negin Farsad?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no.

• 21:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So as an educator, I want to minimize confusion. So ideally, it would be a violet shift. But so now, what's interesting?

• 21:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's these features can shift so much. They go beyond the red and come out at the other side. And then they're like infrared. Or microwaves or even radio waves. If they keep shifting, they're shifting away from the red. It's a matter of semantics to say it's a red shift.

• 21:39Negin Farsad?

  It's not like a line like that.

• 21:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's just we the red was where it when we first discovered it, it happened to be headed.

• 21:46Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 21:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we know of other branches of the spectrum beyond that. And we can say that it's infrared shifted or or or microwave shifted or radio shifted. But we don't. We still say red shifted. Okay. Turns out in the expanding universe. The farther away you are, the faster galaxies are receding from us.

• 22:08Negin Farsad?

  The farther away you are, the faster. Okay.

• 22:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It just it's the signature of an explosion.

• 22:14Negin Farsad?

  Yep.

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why we didn't pull big bang out of our ass. We we. That is what an explosion looks like.

• 22:21Negin Farsad?

  Although it is something I can picture a scientist saying after like. A particularly good poop. Like he called it a big bang and then someone heard that is like, that's a good name.

• 22:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's exactly where the word big bang came from, though. There was a physicist, astrophysicist named Fred Hoyle. He hated the idea of a big bang. It was on a radio show, I think it was. And he pejoratively says, these people believe in the big bang. Say, hey, that's a good idea. It'll stick. He imagined the universe was eternally static.

• 22:56Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 22:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's static, but was always the same. It didn't have a beginning. So he was in the other camp. But the point is. The universe is expanding, so when we look at the spectra of galaxies. They're all red shifted. Because they're moving away from us.

• 23:13Negin Farsad?

  Right, right, right.

• 23:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And because the amount of the red shift. Correlates with how far away the galaxy is because if you're farther away, you're red shifted even faster. It's why we get to say the higher your red shift is, the farther away you are.

• 23:29Negin Farsad?

  And then also then.

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's just a fact.

• 23:31Negin Farsad?

  You sort of like then never see a blue shift. As a result?

• 23:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, if a galaxy is close enough, we might be falling into each other as we currently are with Andromeda. That has a blue shift. But on a large enough scale, where the expansion of the universe dominates, every galaxy is red-shifted.

• 23:51Negin Farsad?

  All right. Every galaxy is red-shifted.

• 23:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. So what else you got?

• 23:55Negin Farsad?

  So, from William Warren in Abington, Maryland, we have, I have epilepsy.

• 24:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sounds very British.

• 24:02Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 24:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Abington.

• 24:03Negin Farsad?

  I've never heard of it.

• 24:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 24:05Negin Farsad?

  But now we, now we know. So they write, "I have epilepsy and a neuropaste device implanted in my brain to help control seizures."

• 24:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice.

• 24:13Negin Farsad?

  "I've heard claims, even from medical professionals, that seizures can be more common during full moons." You might see where this is going. "Scientifically, is there any plausible mechanism by which cosmic events like the moon could influence neurological activity in the human brain? More broadly, what do you think about the idea that the universe can influence human experiences in ways that feel meaningful but may not have a measurable physical cause? How do you personally separate scientific reality from perceived cosmic connection?"

• 24:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man.

• 24:44Negin Farsad?

  Yes.

• 24:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Okay. So, in some municipalities, I'll get to the epilepsy in a minute, but let's start simple. In some municipalities, there's slightly more babies born during full moon than other phases.

• 24:58Negin Farsad?

  Really?

• 24:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so people say, "Oh, is it the extra gravity? Or is it the, eh, is it this?" And people wanna just...

• 25:07Negin Farsad?

  Put meaning into it.

• 25:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep it all onto the cosmos. And, right, they want the cosmos to deliver meaning into their lives. It turns out, the gestation period of the human female is almost exactly equal to 10 cycles of the moon. If you gave birth during a full moon... You got pregnant during a full moon.

• 25:31Negin Farsad?

  Right, right.

• 25:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay?

• 25:33Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 25:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just wanna put-

• 25:34Negin Farsad?

  The math, the math.

• 25:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's do the math here.

• 25:37Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 25:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No one debates the, the, the beauty of a full moon on a romantic night. So, that easily explains the slightly higher birth rate during a full moon.

• 25:49Negin Farsad?

  That's it. I mean, that's how-

• 25:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's kinda all I can give you.

• 25:53Negin Farsad?

  That's the re- okay.

• 25:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's kinda all I can give you because, because, now you're gonna take, keep a list? Keep a mental list. You ready?

• 26:02Negin Farsad?

  Okay.

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The phase of the moon has nothing to do with its gravity. The moon's gravity on Earth is the same, no matter what the phase of the moon is. A. B. The tidal forces

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  exacted by the moon on Earth

• 26:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  itself is unrelated to the phase of the moon.

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You might say, well, how about the famously high tides during-

• 26:32Negin Farsad?

  Oh, the full moon?

• 26:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Full moon!

• 26:34Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 26:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Those high tides are not because of the moon.

• 26:39Negin Farsad?

  They're because I thought it really-

• 26:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sun also raises tides on Earth. They're about a third the strength. Or, or the, the, it's effect on the waters is about one-third that of the moon. And so, but on full moon, the sun lines up with Earth and the moon. Okay?

• 27:01Negin Farsad?

  So they're both acting?

• 27:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They both act together.

• 27:04Negin Farsad?

  They can do it.

• 27:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what you're seeing is the sun's tides added to what was otherwise be a constant moon tide throughout the month. So, it's the sun's fault that the full moon has higher tides than other phases of the moon.

• 27:21Negin Farsad?

  Now, see, that needs a rebranding because I really-

• 27:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course!

• 27:25Negin Farsad?

  No one knows that.

• 27:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nobody knows that.

• 27:27Negin Farsad?

  Nobody knows it.

• 27:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nobody knows that. So, you're not getting extra tidal force-

• 27:31Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 27:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -from the moon. You're not getting extra gravity. Gravity is just a matter of how close you are to, so is the strength of the tidal force as well. But it's a distance thing. It's not what phase you're in. So, now, the moon's orbit around the Earth is not a perfect circle? Sometimes it's a little closer, sometimes it's a little farther. When it's a little closer, the gravity will be a little higher. The tidal forces will be a little higher. But that has nothing to do with the phase. That's all I'm saying. It could be that with a half moon or a crescent moon. But nobody talks about that. So let me keep going. Okay, so now, people say, I feel a little crazy under the full moon. Where do you think we get the term lunatic?

• 28:09Negin Farsad?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 28:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the lunatic moon, okay? And werewolves, if you're gonna turn into a werewolf.

• 28:16Negin Farsad?

  You're gonna do it on a full moon.

• 28:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You never see a human turning into a werewolf on a night with a full moon, but it's cloudy.

• 28:24Negin Farsad?

  No.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it's overcast.

• 28:25Negin Farsad?

  Anti-climactic for the story.

• 28:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's like, show me the cloudy sky.

• 28:30Negin Farsad?

  It's not cinematic.

• 28:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not cinematic. It's not cinematic. So then, so if they really need to see the moon to turn into a werewolf, because that's always how it is, right? They see it, and then they turn into the werewolf. That means it's the light from the moon that might be affecting them.

• 28:48Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 28:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  However, the light from the moon, and I did this experiment in an eighth grade science fair project.

• 28:54Negin Farsad?

  Okay.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got a spectrum of the sun and a spectrum of the moon, and showed that they're identical. Why? Because the moon is reflected light from the sun. If you turn into a werewolf under moonlight, you should turn into a werewolf every waking moment of the daytime.

• 29:10Negin Farsad?

  Daylight, right.

• 29:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the light, it's just sunlight. And also, if you live in any city, the light of the street lamp you walked under is typically brighter than the light of the full moon that's in the sky, even if they're in the sky at the same time. Of course, as you walk away from the street lamp, it gets much dimmer. But right around where the street lamp is, the street lamp is brighter than the full moon. No one is talking about the effects of street lamps on your emotional state. Or on werewolves, or anything.

• 29:44Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 29:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It comes down to how big is the human ego.

• 29:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To suggest that the universe gives a rat's ass about you, your social life, your mental health, or your love life.

• 29:59Negin Farsad?

  Because rats are not blaming the cosmos for whatever they do specifically.

• 30:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if there are studies to show that there are more neurology events, let's call it that, neurological events in the world during a full moon than other phases, I don't know of them, I'd like to see them. I can tell you that people are so primed to think of the full moon as a force on us that if someone has a seizure and it's not the full moon, are they going to report that? You had a seizure and it was a crescent moon. Oh my God, who gets told that?

• 30:43Negin Farsad?

  Right, right, no.

• 30:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you happen to have a seizure and there's a full moon, everybody's going to hear about that.

• 30:49Negin Farsad?

  Again, it's cinematic, you know?

• 30:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everybody's going to hear about that. So I remain unconvinced by such claims, especially since to the untrained eye, the moon will look full for about four days, two days on each side of the...

• 31:05Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 31:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To a trained astrophysicist's eye and amateur astronomer's eye, we know if you're 12 hours out of full moon, we'll know. But untrained eye will give you two days. So that's four days out of 30.

• 31:19Negin Farsad?

  That psychologically you think you're in a full moon.

• 31:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct, correct. So that's one out of, call it three days, one out of 10 days. That means 10% of your seizures, if they're random, will occur under a full moon and that's when everybody talks about it. This talk about tidal forces and things, do you realize tides are equally as high during new moon as they are during full moon? During new moon, the earth, moon and sun also line up, but you can't see the new moon.

• 31:47Negin Farsad?

  It's like a sliver, like a nothing, yeah.

• 31:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's you can't, or you can't even see it. In Islamic cultures, they, the, the term new moon refers to the, especially during Ramadan, the first sighting of the new crescent moon. They call that new moon, but astronomically, new moon is not far enough to the side yet to even see a crescent and it's there, no one sees that phase of the moon. So yet, the tidal forces are just as high. Plus, if you didn't want to explain your higher birth rates that way, you'd have to say, okay, did you give birth in stirrups facing an open window where the full moon happened to be in the sky at the time? So that the gravity will yank, yank the baby out.

• 32:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And suppose you weren't, suppose the moon was behind you, is it going to keep the baby in? Pulling, just think this through. Think it through.

• 32:40Negin Farsad?

  Right. The baby also can't see the moon.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to StarTalk every night and support StarTalk on Patreon.

• 33:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 33:20Negin Farsad?

  Well, we have another question from Gregory K. in Ottawa, Canada. Okay, a lot of Canadian questions today. It's a question about LIGO. My dad used to talk and argue with other people about gravitational waves and then...

• 33:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He'd just have arguments about gravitation. I love it.

• 33:39Negin Farsad?

  I mean, this is a man after your own heart.

• 33:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love arguments over dinner about science.

• 33:44Negin Farsad?

  Yeah. And then he celebrated when LIGO, L-I-G-O, am I saying that right? LIGO, LIGO detected the merging black holes. Now, what I don't understand, what makes me doubt, is that they haven't confirmed the merger with a telescope detecting the same event. How do they even know it's not some gravity waves cult conspiracy?

• 34:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh. So there's a lot in there, very good. So indeed, we did the calculation and we said, how often might two black holes collide in the universe? There's a lot of galaxies in the universe. You can ask, how, how often would that happen in our own galaxy? I, I don't know the number, but let me make up a number that could make, might happen only once in a million years. Well, you wouldn't build an experiment of the hope that something will happen now that happens only once in a million years. But suppose you have a billion galaxies.

• 34:39Negin Farsad?

  Yeah, that makes my head hurt.

• 34:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, okay, so if something can happen once in a million years.

• 34:44Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 34:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you have a billion galaxies.

• 34:47Negin Farsad?

  Then it's, yeah, the probability is higher.

• 34:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somebody's doing it all the time.

• 34:50Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 34:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, not everyone at the same, you're doing it and then you're doing it and then you're doing it.

• 34:56Negin Farsad?

  Somewhere it's happening.

• 34:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somewhere it's happening. It's a rare event that then would come to you frequently.

• 35:02Negin Farsad?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is fun to say that, right? This event is rare, except it's common. Okay. Armed with that calculation, they turned on the telescope. Within days of that, they made their first discovery. And we can characterize the masses of black holes and what they would look like. And, and so we knew these two black holes were around 30 times the mass of the sun. They collide, send out a ripple through the fabric of spacetime, traveling at the speed of light. And it is a signal coming from a galaxy far, far away.

• 35:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For billions of years, it washed over spacetime until it arrived at Earth, until it arrived at that detector and they measured it. Now, black holes don't emit light. Two black holes don't emit light. They collide, they don't emit light. So you're not going to see this with any telescope that uses light. But you will see it with a telescope that uses gravitational waves. So that person, what's the person's name?

• 36:10Negin Farsad?

  Uh, this was Gregory in Canada.

• 36:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Gregory in Canada wanted verification from a regular telescope.

• 36:21Negin Farsad?

  But it can't happen.

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We built a new telescope. That verified itself. The, the laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory.

• 36:33Negin Farsad?

  Oh.

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Acronymed as.

• 36:35Negin Farsad?

  The LIGO.

• 36:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  LIGO. Okay, so now. Using the same telescope, we've discovered two colliding pulsars. They emit light, they collide, they're, they're not as massive as the black holes, so their LIGO signature is not as strong, but. Once we discovered what their masses were, we told other telescopes, look for, look for this in this part of the sky. We found, and then they turn on the telescopes and there it is.

• 37:08Negin Farsad?

  Okay.

• 37:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So colliding pulsars showed up in everybody's telescope. And that's where we learned that pulsars might be the source of all the world's gold. It's, it's very high level, high mass nuclear fusion going on. Gold, platinum, iridium, silver.

• 37:26Negin Farsad?

  All comes from these collisions.

• 37:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We think most of that in the universe comes from colliding pulsars. And nothing's coming out of a colliding black hole.

• 37:36Negin Farsad?

  They're just boring.

• 37:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love me the wiggle that they send us, but yeah, no, otherwise. Look elsewhere if you want some action.

• 37:45Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 37:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so I've been giving long answers. Should I try some short answers? You want to try that?

• 37:49Negin Farsad?

  Yeah, let's do it. I mean, I, I, I mean, I, they're, they're, I find them good.

• 37:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You like them?

• 37:55Negin Farsad?

  I find them fascinating. If I, if I can follow them, I think that's a good sign.

• 37:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's try, I'll try one that's short.

• 38:01Negin Farsad?

  Okay.

• 38:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just so you can, then you can pass judgment.

• 38:03Negin Farsad?

  Yeah, let me see. So James Hudson from Alabama asks, we often talk about mysteries that may take centuries to unravel, but which cosmic questions feel close enough to touch the ones you believe we might actually answer within the next 30 years?

• 38:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So I'm going to give a cop out answer, then I'll give a real answer. My cop out answer is, I don't think about questions yet to be answered.

• 38:30Negin Farsad?

  Oh.

• 38:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think about questions yet to be asked.

• 38:33Negin Farsad?

  Ooh, okay.

• 38:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As our knowledge grows.

• 38:37Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 38:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I say, as the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance. So I want to know the question I have yet to think to ask, because there's a new vista we have yet to arrive at that'll show us the universe in ways we don't yet know how to question.

• 38:58Negin Farsad?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's the real answer I want to give that question.

• 39:02Negin Farsad?

  Questions like, why are two colliding black holes so boring? Why don't they make gold like colliding?

• 39:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you know to ask that question, it doesn't count in my list. It has to be a question you don't know to ask yet.

• 39:16Negin Farsad?

  Right, gosh.

• 39:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, for example, before black holes were developed, you wouldn't even know to ask that question. You're asking questions about other stuff black holes do, not even about the black hole.

• 39:27Negin Farsad?

  And you're, and, and you, you feel like there's things always on the precipice of being discovered.

• 39:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To put me in a new place to ask a new question I don't even know to ask right now. That's my, that's the answer I want to give them. But let's get back to like normal philosophy here.

• 39:43Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 39:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to know if there was ever life on Mars.

• 39:47Negin Farsad?

  Okay.

• 39:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or if there was ever life anywhere else in our backyard. The moons of Jupiter, other planets, the solar systems, especially Mars. I want to learn that before I die. And if I lead a healthy life and wear a seatbelt and don't smoke, I should live another 30 years. And I'm looking forward to that.

• 40:06Negin Farsad?

  You have a recent book on aliens.

• 40:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for giving it a shout out.

• 40:09Negin Farsad?

  Yeah, no, it's a good read. And I wonder, like a personal question for you is, what if you find out that there's life on Mars? And that life is like really uninteresting?

• 40:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, it would be interesting to a biologist no matter what.

• 40:25Negin Farsad?

  Okay.

• 40:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Microbial life, you're not having a conversation.

• 40:28Negin Farsad?

  Single cells.

• 40:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, you're not having a conversation with it. That's not coming up to you and saying, take me to your leader.

• 40:34Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 40:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but it's another way of being alive.

• 40:38Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 40:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that is immense. I, I, I, can I speak for biologists in this way? I'm pretty sure I got them covered here. That would be immensely fascinating. Doesn't have DNA. Is DNA, as complex as that molecule is, is it inevitable in any imprint of life the universe sees?

• 40:57Negin Farsad?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it has DNA, is there any DNA in common with DNA on Earth?

• 41:03Negin Farsad?

  Mm hmm.

• 41:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You wouldn't expect it to have any DNA in common at all because it's from another planet. But if it does have DNA in common, could that mean life began on Mars and moved to Earth?

• 41:17Negin Farsad?

  Mm hmm.

• 41:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's called panspermia. Where an asteroid hits, it kicks life, stow away life on a rock, on an asteroid, on a meteor that moves from planet to planet. It arrives on Earth, already homemade life on Mars, which would mean everyone on Earth would be a descendant of Martians.

• 41:40Negin Farsad?

  That would be wild. Also.

• 41:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some people, perhaps more so than others, perhaps.

• 41:45Negin Farsad?

  Also, that's called panspermia?

• 41:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, a guy came up with that word.

• 41:49Negin Farsad?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna not say anything further.

• 41:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let that one go.

• 41:53Negin Farsad?

  We're gonna let that one go.

• 41:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have other battles to play here. But, but, or suppose it was life and had no DNA at all?

• 42:00Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 42:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that's more interesting.

• 42:02Negin Farsad?

  Right, like you look into the microscope and it's just squigglies and you don't, it's like, doesn't look like anything that we know.

• 42:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be transformative to biology. Meeting aliens, asking me to take them to their leader, would be transformative to our culture.

• 42:18Negin Farsad?

  Oh, yeah, totally. It would be so fun. It would be so fun.

• 42:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I'm so not taking them to our leaders.

• 42:25Negin Farsad?

  I'm taking them to brunch.

• 42:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To brunch? I like that.

• 42:28Negin Farsad?

  You know what I mean? Let's have some mimosas and talk about how you guys live.

• 42:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah. And, okay, if you invite me to join you with that, totally brunch first, and then we go to the National Academy of Sciences, okay?

• 42:41Negin Farsad?

  Yes, natural second place.

• 42:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, okay. So, one more, I think we have time for.

• 42:45Negin Farsad?

  All right, here we go. Okay, so we have one. One from Donatus from Lithuania.

• 42:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Donatus, I love them.

• 42:51Negin Farsad?

  All right. Well, I love time travel movies. I suspect time travel is impossible. I lean toward loop quantum gravity where time is emergent, not a fundamental highway. Common travel theories often ignore how gravity affects subatomic particles versus macro objects. In Bell's rocket paradox, it's argued the string breaks because the rocket rotates in the time dimension. But if a rocket is just a vast cloud of subatomic particles, can a macro object truly rotate into? Sorry, can a macro object truly rotate into time as a single unit? Or is our perception of time just the sum of quantum interactions making the fourth dimension an illusion?

• 43:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well.

• 43:38Negin Farsad?

  I mean, that's.

• 43:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You had that question too. You were thinking that this morning.

• 43:42Negin Farsad?

  I think I, this question comes up for me every day, every day.

• 43:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm intrigued by emergent ideas on the landscape, the cosmological landscape. That time or our perception of time could be emergent and.

• 43:58Negin Farsad?

  What does that mean?

• 44:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like, uh, but, you know, people think of maybe consciousness is emergent. In the sense that the fundamental structure of the universe does not allow for it. But once you start doing things in the universe, there's a time reference that is very helpful to you. And so it comes out of what was otherwise fundamental within the universe itself. And so I don't have a problem with that, but it feels so science fictiony. I, I don't, I'm more comfortable seeing it in a science fiction setting. Rather than think it's actually going on in our own universe.

• 44:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know how helpful I can be in reacting to that. You know, who we really need for that is, is Brian Greene. He could, he could totally get in there. He's our, our physicist at large up at Columbia University. I like time. Einstein once said that time is defined to make motion look simple.

• 45:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because motion becomes very easy to see and interpret. It was here earlier and that's here later.

• 45:10Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 45:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's a timeline and, and I'm just angered that as a dimension of our existence, we are prisoners of the present.

• 45:20Negin Farsad?

  Yeah. And you don't think there's like a scenario, like you, you agree that it's impossible?

• 45:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's intriguing ideas right now. I, I can't weigh in on whether, what is more likely than, there's no evidence for any of this, but it's, it's intriguing. And you always need intriguing ideas on the edges.

• 45:39Negin Farsad?

  Yeah.

• 45:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to keep you, to destabilize your comfort level with what is known.

• 45:45Negin Farsad?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because only when you're uncomfortable with what is known, do true discoveries occur.

• 45:52Negin Farsad?

  Cause as we established earlier, it's possible that your little laws of physics.

• 45:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't talk about little laws of physics.

• 45:59Negin Farsad?

  Wrong. Kidding, they're not.

• 46:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Expanded upon.

• 46:04Negin Farsad?

  They can be expanded upon, there it is.

• 46:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think we ran out of time. No, one last question and I'll answer it in three sentences.

• 46:10Negin Farsad?

  Okay. Andor Klop from Scheiden, the Netherlands.

• 46:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Netherlands, yes.

• 46:16Negin Farsad?

  If the universe tends to generate more complex ways of processing information, would creating artificial intelligence beyond ourselves be unnatural? Or exactly what nature has been doing all along? At what point?

• 46:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love it.

• 46:30Negin Farsad?

  At what point does protecting humanity become holding back the next layer of consciousness?

• 46:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, I'm loving that. People, people feeling all philosophical about the universe. I would say that whatever we do, since we are of this universe, is natural. If we create an artificial intelligence, it's natural. Nature creates a beaver, a beaver creates a dam. We shouldn't not allow the dam just because it was created and nature would not have done it all by itself. Nature needed the dam. Nature needs us to create artificial intelligence. I'm cool with that. People see cities as, oh, this is unnatural. We're humans and we built the city. Deal with it. If you're a bee, you build a beehive. If you're a termite, you build a termite mound. I'm a person, I build a city.

• 47:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chill out. And so, so I don't think we're getting ahead of ourself. It's just, let me call it a natural evolution of what it is to have a brain, a curious brain that wants to keep that engine moving. Into what are the powers and expressions that our brain can offer? So I'm all in.

• 47:41Negin Farsad?

  I love that. It's a little bit like athletes that you we we thought like in the 1920s, you could only run a mile at this. It's impossible to break that record.

• 47:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The four minute mile was was like this barrier.

• 47:51Negin Farsad?

  Right.

• 47:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was a psychological barrier, it turned out.

• 47:54Negin Farsad?

  And then we break it and then we break it.

• 47:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know who who broke the mile?

• 47:58Negin Farsad?

  Broke.

• 47:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, Roger Bannister. That was that. Okay. Now, once he did that, people broke the four minute mile.

• 48:05Negin Farsad?

  All the time.

• 48:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the time. Oh, my gosh.

• 48:08Negin Farsad?

  So.

• 48:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was a psychological barrier, not a barrier created by the laws of physics. So we perhaps are our own worst enemy in this regard. So fortunately, there are people who live among us who are not constrained by these limits of imagination foisted upon them by others.

• 48:28Negin Farsad?

  And Neil, I think you're one of them.

• 48:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, well, thank you. Negin, always good to have you.

• 48:34Negin Farsad?

  So good to be here.

• 48:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. This has been another installment of Cosmic Queries Grab Bag Edition. This one was big on the philosophy.

• 48:43Negin Farsad?

  Yeah, a lot of big ideas.

• 48:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I love big ideas. Small ideas matter too, but big ideas, you need those. And remind me of your handle on on.

• 48:52Negin Farsad?

  You can find me at Negin Farzad on all the things.

• 48:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Negin Farzad, F A R S A D.

• 48:59Negin Farsad?

  That's right.

• 48:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got it. You got it. We'll look for you there. And your podcast.

• 49:02Negin Farsad?

  Is Fake the Nation. Subscribe.

• 49:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fake the Nation.

• 49:05Negin Farsad?

  It's a fun time.

• 49:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your book is still one of my favorites.

• 49:08Negin Farsad?

  It's How to Make White People Laugh.

• 49:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just laugh just thinking of that title. Really good. All right, Negin, we'll we'll keep up with you there. This has been another installment of StarTalk Cosmic Queries. Until next time, keep looking up.