Cosmic Queries: Superheroes

Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Colin Jost (Saturday Night Live) get their geek on answering questions about Thor, Captain America, Batman, Superman, Wolverine, Magneto and more. Read more and listen to the full episode at: http://www.startalkradio.net/show/cosmic-queries-superheroes

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. I also serve as the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium. And here we are entering the Cosmic Queries portion of StarTalk Radio. In the Cosmic Queries section, I don't do that alone. We get questions that come from every conduit through the internet, from Facebook, from tweets, on our website, and I troll the streets and found Colin Jost walking among them.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Colin, welcome.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, the last time I had you on, I called you Colon.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, I remember.

• 1:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I'm sorry.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  I like how little faith you have in my mom. She would name me after like the least appealing part of a body.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you were so polite to not correct me on it. Certainly Colin Jost, and you're a lifetime guy in the world of comedy, right?

• 1:19Speaker 01

  I've been doing it, yeah. I've been in SNL and been doing stand-up too.

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, but you're not that old, so you have quite a resume in these years.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  No, maybe time traveler. I don't know.

• 1:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, you know, I'm old enough to like to remember the first episodes of Saturday Night Live, back before it was called Saturday Night Live.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  This is like 40s?

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. In fact, it was just called Saturday Night, which is why they begin Live from New York is Saturday Night.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  And it predates that day of the week, right? There wasn't even that day of the week. And then they were like, we should name this whole day Saturday.

• 1:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The show, the show needs a place to air. Right. There you go. So thanks for joining me for this StarTalk Cosmic Queries.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  It's a delight to be here.

• 2:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now I don't claim any personal expertise on superheroes, but I do know physics and astrophysics. So let's see what we can offer.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The spade of questions that have just arisen.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Well, here's right off the bat. Here's one from Google Plus from Nathaniel Dorn. I'm a big X-Men guy, so this is, I'm very curious about this. If you were Magneto, what would be the coolest thing you would do with your power over magnetism? This is really more of a wish fulfillment question for you rather than a science question.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Magnetism, power of magnets.

• 2:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what I would do? I would clone myself and put one of each of me on the interplanetary voyages of the astronauts and create a magnetic field around the spaceship to shield it from harmful solar particles.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Now, but see, that presupposes you can also clone yourself. I feel like that's a whole other step first.

• 2:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so the magnetic control over magnetic field, that's the easy one to accept, but not the cloning? No.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  I can't give you every power.

• 3:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my God.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  You know, even, even magic has its limits.

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so the big challenge today is when you leave the magnetic blanket of the Earth, the Earth has its magnetosphere, which extends not quite to the moon. And so if you're in Earth orbit, you're protected from it. Sorry, you're within the protective blanket of Earth's magnetic field and charged particles from the sun, which would otherwise harm your DNA, get channeled to the poles away from you and it collides with molecules in Earth's atmosphere and it renders the atmosphere glow, becoming the aurora borealis.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The northern lights and the aurora australis, the southern lights.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  I didn't know it was called the aurora australis.

• 3:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got to call it, yeah, yeah. The borealis and the australis.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  I would have thought it was in like Antarctica or something.

• 3:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. There'd be aurora articus.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Articus.

• 3:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that was a guy from Rome.

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I am aurora articus. You are my subjects. Yeah. So.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Someone brought up too, that Magneto as a controller of all things magnetic could theoretically just tear the universe apart. Is that accurate?

• 4:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No. Next question.

• 4:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The universe is not magnetic, I'm sorry.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Well, what's the most damage, like, you know, long-term, wide-reaching damage they could do?

• 4:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, the way they've written his character in the comic books is that he's controlling metal, because metal is the obvious magnetic.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Of course, yeah.

• 4:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, if I remember my chemistry, if you super-cool certain gases down into a liquefied state, you can have liquefied magnetic materials.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  So he could combine with Iceman.

• 4:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that would be cool.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  That would be a good...

• 4:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wow, yeah, but not only that...

• 4:48Speaker 01

  That might be a good plotline.

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plasma, plasma, which is what the sun is made of, which is essentially the contents of flame, but the sun makes a better example for what I'm about to describe. A plasma is a gas that's so hot that the electrons in the outer layers of the atoms have escaped, and they're roaming free in the gas. And that means that the gas can respond to magnetic fields. So, the sun has a very powerful magnetic field, and it's plasma. And so here's this gas trying to rotate with the sun, and the magnetic field gets trapped in the rotating gas and gets wound up on itself, and it busts through the sun's surface every now and then.

• 5:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, it's on a cycle of 11 years. And you get solar storms, and sunspots, and solar flares, and prominences. All of this is magnetic activity. So Magneto would not be limited to metal. Magneto could totally tear a new one in a star, because he can interact with the magnetic fields that control where those gases appear and what they do.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  I think you just wrote the Latinx 12 issues of Magneto for them. Okay, here's the next question from Twitter, from Jimmy B, at HeyJimmyB. "Could Superman survive the spaghettification of a black hole and the force required to escape it?"

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Obviously, he's known to be traveling faster than the speed of light.

• 6:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, okay, well, Superman, in Superman 1, what's the one where he went back in time to save Lois Lane?

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Oh, where, yeah, he traveled.

• 6:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was that Superman 1?

• 6:30Speaker 01

  It is 1, right?

• 6:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Superman 1. He, in order to fly around the Earth that fast, he's going faster than light. So that establishes that...

• 6:41Speaker 01

  So it's real.

• 6:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's real!

• 6:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That makes it legit. So, yeah, actually, if you can actually travel faster than light, you can just climb out of a black hole. Nothing will stop you. However, the journey down to the singularity would, as sure as night follows day, would spaghettify him. He would be ripped apart head to toe. Yes, he's made of denser matter and can stop bullets and he's, yes, but if his material is of this universe, he is not resistant to the power of gravity on that scale. And you'd have a totally spaghettified Superman.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 7:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to go over what spaghettification is, oh, we only have 20 seconds left in this segment.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  No, sorry. So he needs a Wolverine, who has a healing power. So if he got out of it, he could reunite his particles.

• 7:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll find out when we come back in the next segment on StarTalk Radio, the Cosmic Queries section. We'll see you in a moment.

• 8:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and we are in the Cosmic Queries section. Helping me is Colin Jost. Colin, welcome to StarTalk Radio.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Thank you very much.

• 8:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We left off the last segment.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Talking about spaghettification.

• 8:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spaghettifying Superman.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is a real, that sounds like a classic Italian dish. What is spaghettification? It's when you're being sucked in, the particles are being ripped apart.

• 8:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so what happens is as you get closer to the center of a black hole, the field of gravity at your feet becomes insanely higher than the field of gravity at your head. This is a feet-first dive into the black hole. And the consequence of this is that your feet will accelerate towards the black hole faster than your head will.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 8:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And initially, that, you know, you're just stretching and it might even feel good. But there's a point where that stretching force, it's officially the tidal force, the same force that makes the tides on Earth, is what rips you apart as you fall into a black hole. That tidal force eventually exceeds the binding force of the molecules of your flesh. At the point-

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Which sounds bad.

• 9:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it is bad. And when that happens, you snap into two pieces on your way down. And this difference in force continues. Your upper half and your lower half each feel this difference in force. And they then rip into a pair of pieces each. Now you're four segments. And then eight, and then sixteen. Thirty-two, and you run the series down. There'll be a point where you will be a stream of atoms descending impossibly towards the center of this abyss. If Superman is made of materials of this universe-

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whether or not he is of this earth, it is, if it is of this universe-

• 9:49Speaker 01

  You will.

• 9:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He is subjected to those same laws of physics. And he will be spaghettified just as day follows night.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  But then what if he were, basically, took on the powers of a worm? Who's able to, you know, you could segment them and they would still live. Different pieces, would then there be a bunch of Superman out there?

• 10:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's the problem, when you cut up a worm, each segment of the worm still has a full genetic code for what the whole worm was. When you spaghettify, you are just atoms.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, so it's not even-

• 10:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the hydrogen atom that got yanked off of your DNA molecule does not remember the DNA molecule from which it came.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Huh.

• 10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you're a host.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  And then, so what about Mr. Fantastic, the rubber guy?

• 10:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, the rubber dude.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Then, how would he go in a black hole?

• 10:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, in the Fantastic Four. Ooh, or who's the woman in The Incredibles?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  Uh, oh, yeah, right.

• 10:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was it Elastic Woman?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Elastic Girl. Rubber Girl.

• 10:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Elastic. So Elastic Girl, yeah, anybody who's stretchable, in principle, might be immune to this.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  But they have to then travel faster than the speed of light, so they need-

• 10:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, to get out. If they want to get out, you gotta travel faster than lights. We've established that Superman can do that. So, we would send Superman into a black hole until he was ready to snap into two pieces. Then he flies his way back out again.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 11:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that'd be cool.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Or Superman has a baby with this Elastic Girl, right?

• 11:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  So, which we all been fantasizing.

• 11:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 11:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have you been fantasizing about being with Elastic Girl, or fantasizing with Superman?

• 11:16Speaker 01

  I just wanna watch. I just wanna watch Superman a lot.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  I don't even know how old Elastigirl is, maybe that's inappropriate for me to say. What, so this seems, this is the next question, this is from Jeffrey Williams on Facebook and it says, "The character of Captain America seems to be the closest to reality." I don't know what that means, but I guess of the Avengers, say.

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, Batman is. Batman.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Batman's a regular guy.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  He's regular, but of a, someone that has superhuman powers. "Do you believe there are currently experiments happening that are trying to increase the capacities of the human genome? Example, human strength, super strength, increased visual acuity, heightened stamina, etc.?" And he also wants to know if these experiments are going on, are they morally correct?

• 11:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not authorized to comment on that. Next question.

• 12:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, so I can say a couple of things. First, you can't just take a guy that has normal looking muscles and make them 10 times stronger. If the muscles are, if it's made of muscle tissue, because the physics of strength correlates with the cross-sectional area of your muscles. So in other words, the reason why when you work out, your muscles get bigger is because they're getting stronger.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a direct correspondence between the strength of your muscle and how big it is. There's some variation in there, like in, are you in good shape? So you can be slender and still be stronger than someone else who's slender, but who's not in shape?

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Because aren't there varying muscle densities that people have?

• 12:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sure, but not so, not so, we're all human at the end of the day.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, we're all human. And so muscle size correlates with muscle strength. So you can't have a Captain America who, he had a good body, no, you know, he turned heads in a fitness center. But the strength of those muscles are not such that he would have the strength exhibited by any genetic manipulation at all. It's just not, no, unless-

• 13:08Speaker 01

  So you couldn't genetically alter the, say, density or efficiency of muscles?

• 13:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not and have it still be biological matter. You'd have to, in fact, just replace the muscle with some other material.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Make it more cyborgy?

• 13:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, just cyborg him out. And then, oh yeah, then you're good to go. Then, so-

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Mech warrior.

• 13:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To rely on our feeble biology to improve in strength, I think is not- Not the right way to go if you want to, if you want to make a better human. Not only that, to try to improve your sight, there's a limit to how dim you can see because of how, how, because of the size of the iris in your eyeball.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Like we were talking about.

• 13:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back in the telescope show, I had you on, on, in the studio for the telescope show. Bigger telescopes see dimmer things.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's that simple.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 13:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so people said, oh, can cats see in the dark? How big is their eyeball?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it's not bigger than your eyeball, and we all have retina in the back as detectors? No, they're not, you know, they might do a little better.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they're not going to do much better than you.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So unless they had huge eyeballs.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  There are no owls.

• 14:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, exactly.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  And this, another question here from Sean Karp on Facebook is, would it be possible to do an embedded metal skeleton? With optional deployable weapons, ala Wolverine, could you do that?

• 14:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, here's the problem, so if we replace your bones, which are already pretty strong.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With some kind of metal.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Adamantium, for instance.

• 14:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Adamantium.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Adamantium.

• 14:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've forgotten about, okay, right, this is what I want. So if you replace that with, with some kind of super alloy metal.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're still susceptible to tissue damage, right? What you're describing is the Terminator.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the Terminator.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could still stab him and he'd still bleed.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you still suffer tissue damage, but you're not knocking him down.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because he's got that super alloy metal for bones. Sure, I don't see why you couldn't work that.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then you still could, you know, if you don't have a healing factor, the healing power, then you're.

• 15:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll just be this bloody mess at the end of the day.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll be alive and bloody.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like when he was repairing himself in the hotel room in Terminator.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Exactly, when he was.

• 15:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The guy knocks on the door and he looks for a response. And he says, go away.

• 15:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except a little more colorfully. Yeah, so, and he's got flies and stuff, yeah, because he's got biological tissue. Keep in mind that for the human body to work, you'd have to graft the tissue onto the metal. Our, our muscles connect to tendons that connect to ligaments that attach to your bones. So, it works biologically. In order to get foreign material in there, you're gonna have to attach it all some other kind of way.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  And now, what about, now, this is, I've read articles too about the rise of nanotechnology where theoretically, one day, we'll have tiny robots in our bloodstream that will just sort of rebuild cells. Is there any, do you ever think that's?

• 15:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That'd be cool. Yeah, I mean, a nanobot would be smaller than what a cell would identify as being a hostile invader. And so, it would just be able to do anything it needs to do. I don't see why we can't manage that. But I'd rather do it from the outside. Why get all Fantastic Voyage on us and just have some kind of device that beams through your skin and lands at the tumor and cures the tumor? I mean, why?

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, fair. Alright, I'll do that.

• 16:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I'm a bot fan from way back, so.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Good.

• 16:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  So, you won't, you won't stop me?

• 16:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I won't. Well, by the way, and Thor?

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To lift the nuclear matter that is his hammer?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But he's an alien, so aliens, you know.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  It's a whole other.

• 16:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a whole other thing, right?

• 16:36Speaker 01

  It's a different, do you have, can I ask, do you have a favorite superhero or one that you're most impressed by their construction or what the physics of them are?

• 16:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like Batman, cuz he's a reg, I can be Batman.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  He's a regular.

• 16:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can be Batman. And, and who doesn't like the gadgets? Alright? And who doesn't like the car? So, he's got the best car of any of them. I guess cuz they can fly, they don't need a car.

• 17:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you gotta like the car.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right?

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Cars good.

• 17:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As phallic as it is, nonetheless, he's got cool things that the car can do.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 17:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, the car is an extension of his utility belt in terms of its coolness factor. So, for me, I'd have to be Batman. But as a kid, I don't know if I told you this directly, I wanted to be Mighty Mouse.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Really?

• 17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  No, why? Just?

• 17:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cuz I wanted to save women who were, were mean people, were trying to harm them.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Oh, that's fair.

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I wanted to sing opera while I was doing it. Here I come to save the day.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I just, I somehow resonated with that character. I don't know why.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  That is a great combination. I would have thought, is saving women and singing opera.

• 17:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and he could fly and other things were bigger than him, but he had strength. Beyond what you would expect. So I just, I just felt good about.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  You wrestled, right? You were.

• 17:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I used to wrestle, but we'll get back to that in a minute. So we're in the cosmic queries part of StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Join us again for our next segment coming right up.

• 18:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're in the cosmic queries part of StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your resident astrophysicist here with Colin Jost, a resident comic. Colin, welcome.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, thank you for having me.

• 18:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, these are cosmic queries on our superhero show.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is kind of an exciting.

• 18:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I thought so. And you, just before the break, you, one of the questions was what superhero would I, do I most resonate?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With? And I said, I think Batman, just because he's real.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And his toys are fantasy-like, but they're, they're in reach.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Curiously, right?

• 18:56Speaker 01

  They're justifiable with technology.

• 18:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Justifiable extrapolation.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What we know today. And I confess that in childhood, I totally was digging Mighty Mouse.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I was asking, is that part of what got you into wrestling was Mighty Mouse?

• 19:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did wrestle in high school, college, and a little bit of graduate school. No, because when I'm wrestling, I'm not thinking I'm doing it to win the heart of a woman. I'm just doing it just to do it.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, it's a very personal thing, actually, because if you lose, you just got beat. Nobody to blame.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no team.

• 19:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No team, there's no, and it's, and it's not some apparatus. It's you, your muscles, your quickness, your smarts. And that's it. So for me, it was the purest form of athletic contest.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah. So what other questions?

• 19:40Speaker 01

  A great one.

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I gotta ask you, what superhero do you resonate with?

• 19:43Speaker 01

  I mean, Wolverine for me is my favorite of all time. I just, he, just his style.

• 19:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And his attitude. He's so attitudinal.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  It's great. It's pretty awesome to get shot in the head and then just like kind of shake it off and see the bullet come out of your head and just drink a beer and, you know, be unshaven and I'm approximating the look as much as I can with hair and not be shaving.

• 20:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is he the only superhero that drinks beer and goes unshaven? I'm wondering.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  I'm sure there are others in binges, but he seems like the most regular.

• 20:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's, yeah, he's, it's a reliable form of his character.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I would feel more comfortable riding a motorcycle if I had a healing power and an adamantium skeleton. Then my mom might allow it.

• 20:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rather than be the organ donor that the rest of them are.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. So this, this next question from Facebook from Eric Shaw is, if Superman needs the sun's rays for his strength, how does he still have powers at night?

• 20:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, first, I didn't know he needed the sun's rays. Oh, because he comes nearer to the yellow star.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 20:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is what, of course, the sun is actually white, but that's a separate conversation, in fact, for another show.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, the sun is yellow when it's on the horizon, when it's dim enough for you to notice and look at it without protection. So sunsets are these beautiful yellow, orange colors. In the middle of the day, when the sun is not crawling its way through the muck and mire of, of the super-thick horizon-depth atmosphere.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The sun is not yellow, it's white. That's the color of the sun, period. If the sun were actually yellow, then white things would look yellow, by the way. If you put yellow light on a white sheet of paper.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  It looks.

• 21:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The white sheet of paper is yellow. So if the sun were yellow, then snow would look yellow. But that's only near fire hydrants, last I checked, so, no. But, um, so I don't see why he just doesn't have storage batteries to store up the energy from his daytime in the sun.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 21:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why not?

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Maybe. He, maybe he doesn't have powers, but at least his, the electric car he has, he can still, like, put around in.

• 21:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which, Superman?

• 21:37Speaker 01

  So, yeah, maybe he's got.

• 21:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, he's a solar power car, maybe.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Little solar power car that he gets, you don't see him at night, he just goes.

• 21:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's where, that's where he recharges.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  His Batmobile.

• 21:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it means, well, Superman, if you send him to the Arctic, where there's six months of darkness, he'd be pretty ineffective.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  That's the thing, yeah, and isn't that his, his, like, cave that he goes to? Isn't that sort of, it looks pretty icy?

• 21:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh!

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Seems like the worst place for it, right?

• 21:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The North Pole, for six months of the year, has no sunlight.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Seems like, why go there, of all places? Should be, it should be an equator cave that he goes to.

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Should be an equator cave, yes. So, now, if it's only his proximity to the sun, whether or not he's receiving sunlight, then he's still an Earth distance from the sun.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  So he's still getting, he's still getting some.

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Getting whatever is the magic rays from the sun, whether or not it's the light.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Okay, so he's, he's gonna be okay?

• 22:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You think he'll be okay?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  We don't have to worry about him. So this is a question from Stephen King on Facebook, I assume, I hope, God, I hope it's the real Stephen King.

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stephen King.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Is what is the likelihood of creating a real world arc reactor, like an Iron Man, the kind of artificial arc reactor heart that he has? What if any negative effects would be present if you were to house something like that within the human chest cavity?

• 22:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so I like that question. So that's a huge, oh, by the way, so I resonate more with Batman than with Iron Man because the energy source for Iron Man is too, too remote for me to embrace that.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you, the energy depends on how you store it. If it's stored thermally, it would be very, very hot.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you store it electromechanically, you'd have a lot of what are effectively wound up springs.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. There are multiple, many ways you can store energy. You can store it chemically. That's what you have in the form of gunpowder. It's sitting there, ready to explode, but it's not. So it's energy built in chemically. You can think of mechanically, you can think of thermally. And so if you, if it was thermally, it would eventually heat him up.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You wouldn't be able to insulate it perfectly. And so that would be bad for him. That'd be bad.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Is there a chemical way that you'd have in the way of a gunpowder where you would have a store of it and it would, it would have small gradual reactions in parts of it?

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Best way to do that is to have a repository of antimatter. Keep it separate from the matter.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With some kind of magnetic bottle.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't put it in a regular bottle.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  I'm just writing this down so I know how to do it, so I can do it later.

• 24:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're going back to your lab?

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Hide, where's the antimatter?

• 24:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you would leak out little bits of it to merge with the matter and then you'd have energy at your disposal and there'd be no bad side effects.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  That'd be great.

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More on antimatter when we come back to the cosmic query part of StarTalk Radio. The subject, superheroes. See you in a moment.

• 24:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, based in New York City, where we do most of our broadcast. And I'm here in studio with Colin Jost, comedian extraordinaire.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  That's the grandiose.

• 25:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that on your resume?

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Yes, that's very, yeah.

• 25:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And verifiable, too.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. I was, before that, I was a journalist extraordinaire. And before that, I was a, you know, lifeguard extraordinaire.

• 25:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A lifeguard. And what did you major in in college?

• 25:15Speaker 01

  I majored in the history and literature of Russia and Britain. So I read some, lived in Russia for a little bit.

• 25:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you died.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Not that. I read some books.

• 25:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And there's a lot of comedic repository in British.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, Russia and Britain are two different ways to go about humor.

• 25:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. But one, one a lot darker than the other.

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And one of our favorite friends of StarTalk is Eugene Mirman.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Oh, of course.

• 25:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who's, who has total 100% Russian.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  I know. That's why I gotta talk to him in Russian sometime.

• 25:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know if he's still fluent.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. Well, we can probably both have two lines and then end the conversation.

• 25:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you've got more questions for me?

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Questions about superheroes right now. Here's one. This is from Christian Di Maria on Facebook. And the question is, would it be possible for a sufficiently advanced race to develop controlled wormholes as a means of transportation similar to the Rainbow Bridge that Thor uses?

• 26:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, entirely. We don't wield enough power over energy in the universe to just create wormholes on a whim. If we did, and the kind of power that would require, if we harnessed all the energy produced in all the stars, all the several hundred billion stars of the Milky Way galaxy, that'd be enough to kind of do what we want to accomplish.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Which is to what, to pierce?

• 26:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you do is you, you use that much energy, because energy and mass are the same thing. So if you wield that much energy, you can, you can, you can compress energy to smaller volumes than you can solid matter. But they both will. Have the same effect on the fabric of spacetime because mass and energy are the same in relativity. And in this universe, they're the same in terms of their effect on the universe.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 26:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And on the gravitational fields of the universe. So you'd wield this, you'd pull it out of your pocket. You say, open me a wormhole right here and there it opens and you dial up coordinates in time and in place. And you go through the wormhole, come out the other side and you can be anywhere in principle in the universe instantly. One of my favorite scenes in the movie, what's the one where the Monsters Inc?

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Undiscussed in the reviews of this movie is that that movie tapped the fourth dimension. That movie was all about wormholes. Those doors were the wormholes.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They would go through the door in the factory and end up in a kid's closet. No one, no one talked about this.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  By the way, here's a little extra physics.

• 27:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A little extra physics there. This was an awesome feature of Monsters Inc. Cause you know, they didn't come in your front door to get in your closet. There must've been some other way. It's a wormhole connecting the factory to everybody's closet. Awesome.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's so possible. You don't even need to be a god like Thor to potentially down the line.

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, Thor wasn't a god. Thor was a regular guy in his own place. They just called him a god in Norse legend because he had powers above anybody here on earth.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Right, but then it's some legends, he's a good, right? I mean, in some things.

• 28:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, he's a god on earth, but in his hometown, he's just Thor.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Oh, in Asgard, yeah, he's just.

• 28:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's just a dude. He's just, he's just a, you know, blonde hair and a tan, right? That's all he is. So he's just another guy, right?

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  That's a crazy thing about Avengers is that you're just, the people are operating on all different levels. There's a guy that people will think is a god. There's a guy made of, you know, an iron man. Captain America is just kind of like stronger.

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Hawkeye, a guy can shoot kind of well. That's just crazy. Scarlett Johansson can kick.

• 28:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a excellent mixture.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Um, this question is, could Superman use a large telescope to view Krypton from afar, seeing his long-lost family and race before the planet was destroyed? Assuming Krypton is further away in light-years than Superman is old in human-years.

• 29:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Awesome question.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Right, I love they did that. And could he then fly to Krypton? And armed with his knowledge of Krypton's past, reverse time like in Superman the movie, number one, and therefore, prevent Krypton's destruction?

• 29:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but then he would have never come to Earth to then observe the destruction to go back and prevent the destruction.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  So it would, it would require some sort of being here, but then a time travel element?

• 29:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'm just saying, if he came here, saw Krypton being destroyed, but didn't want it to be destroyed, and went back in time to prevent it from being destroyed, he would have never been cast adrift to have landed here on Earth.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  But then if he goes back and reverses it, would it stop, but then he would have no remembrance of what happened?

• 29:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, then he would have never come here on Earth to have stopped the explosion.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  So it's just, it eats itself? It's like you can't do it?

• 29:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, let's pick that up after the break.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  I need a break to figure it out.

• 29:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's steam coming out of your ear. StarTalk Radio, back in a moment.

• 30:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are back in the Cosmic Queries part of StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist, and it's my job each week to bring the universe down to Earth for you. And helping me accomplish this are people who bring different lenses from their walk of life. Today, I've got Colin Jost with me, comedian.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  And definitely not astrophysicists. Non-astrophysicists.

• 30:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I'm calling Joe's not an astrophysicist. You're reading me these questions, I've never seen them before these moments, but they come to us in all of our media outlets, Facebook, actually on Facebook, we are StarTalk Radio, and they come via Twitter, on StarTalk Radio is our Twitter handle, and what else do they come, also on our website, StarTalkRadio.net, so...

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Here's one that's pretty great from...

• 31:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did I finish answering the other question? I don't think I did.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Oh, no, so I didn't quite understand it. Because it's Superman, he goes back, he finds out, he sees through telescope, Krypton is being destroyed, you know, in the past, as you know, the traces of it.

• 31:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that light is just coming to reach us now.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Just reaching us now, so he flies out there, does his time travel whirligig around the planet, spins it back, saves Krypton, but then that means he never traveled to Earth.

• 31:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's correct.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  So what is that, where does that leave him physically?

• 31:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Means it doesn't...

• 31:46Speaker 01

  It can't happen.

• 31:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, I mean, it's a, it's a, it's not simply a paradox, it's a contradiction of what is even possible, so here, here's, consider it this way.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With the telescope, he can go look and see Krypton in the past.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, that's true.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Which is crazy.

• 32:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  However, okay, as he travels to Krypton, Krypton is still advancing into the future.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  While he's traveling, he'd have to travel faster than light in order to go back in time to then...

• 32:18Speaker 01

  But can he do that, right, can he?

• 32:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's Superman, and we demonstrated earlier, he can travel faster than light.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  So...

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We said that already, Superman won.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Right, so he can do that.

• 32:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, all right, so yes, so he sees it destroyed, then he travels faster than light, gets there before the star explodes, but he can't save, he would have, they all would have, they're all powerful folks back there, somebody would have saved the star, they knew the star was gonna die.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And plus, back then, he was a baby, so what, what's he gonna do?

• 32:48Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 32:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't you think somebody there would have figured out how to save Krypton?

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Or someone would have done the time travel thing on their own, the spinning thing?

• 32:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but time travel doesn't stop the star from...

• 32:58Speaker 01

  They would have figured out the star, more physical.

• 33:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What they would have done was move to another star.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just, just do what with the hermit crab.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  They could send him away, just they all gotta get out of there.

• 33:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, just all, just high tail out of there, go find a star. That's what hermit crabs do.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  This became a question for Superman's parents, what are you doing?

• 33:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  What were you thinking, guys?

• 33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they had to get that Moses thing going, you know, send him forward and save.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  It makes a better story.

• 33:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It makes a better story.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  They were martyrs for the sake of fiction. Uh, this is a question from, uh, Google Plus from Stephen Burkhart. And he asks, he says, "Fun question," so he's already saying it's fun.

• 33:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll be the judge of that.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're very cocky. Great question here. Uh, "What element-based life form other than carbon would you be most interested in finding? Silicon, tungsten, potassium, etc.?"

• 33:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, uh, silicon, of course.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  And why, why is that the most?

• 33:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, because if, if you remember your periodic table of elements from your chemistry class.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  You mean Si?

• 33:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, that mysterious chart of boxes on the wall. You might remember that columns of elements have the same configuration of electrons in their outer shells, which means they combine with the same other elements.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So every way you can make a molecule with carbon, you can make that same molecule with silicon. So carbon monoxide, CO, you can make silicon monoxide. Carbon dioxide, you can make silicon dioxide. Wherever you find carbon in the human body, you can swap in a silicon atom for it. So in principle, you can make life based on silicon, and silicon is kind of abundant, although not as abundant as carbon, it's plenty of silicon out there. And if you were trying to invent another kind of life, based on the model that we now have, a silicon-based life, uh, would be, would be cool.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Could we, could we somehow, could we somehow create beings that are, you know, genetically the same but replacing silicon with...

• 34:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Today, we have tools to manipulate atoms. There'd be no reason why we couldn't swap one atom at a time.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Well, it just so happens I have those tools right here.

• 34:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've got those nano tools? So what'd be interesting is if you imagine maybe a silicon-based life form superhero, that'd be kinda interesting. I wonder what that'd be like. What kind of powers it would have, but yes, the molecules are the same, but the properties would be different. They might have different strengths, different capacity to think, different acuity of vision. This would be interesting to explore, something I've never done. The problem is that the heavier you get on the periodic table, rapidly they become more rarer and rarer. So if you want any chance of life happening spontaneously, it's gotta be just hanging out doing nothing. And carbon fits that bill marvelously. You know, I think we've run out of time. Unless you have a really fast question.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Let's see. Favorite Avengers?

• 35:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Favorite Avenger. I'd have to say Thor throwing a hammer. That's so primal. Right? It's low tech.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, everyone gets it.

• 35:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you were a baby and that was his rattle, that's what you just, it is so, it's, he is how you feel. I don't like you. And then you smash him.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Ruins a Thor after 5P.

• 36:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what Bam Bam was in, in the Flintstones. We gotta, we gotta wrap it up. This is the end of the superhero show.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  This is a treat.

• 36:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cosmic queries. Colin, thanks for coming on to StarTalk Radio. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. And as always, I bid you not only farewell, but I compel you to keep looking up.