Revisiting the Drake Equation with David Grinspoon

Will alien life look like anything on Earth? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice deep dive into questions about astrobiology, revisiting the Drake Equation, and life beyond Earth with NASA astrobiology strategist, David Grinspoon a.k.a Dr. Funkyspoon.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck.

• 0:00Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dr. Funky Spoon back in the house.

• 0:03Chuck Nice?

  One of our, one of our favorites always and

• 0:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  David Grin spoon.

• 0:08Chuck Nice?

  And in this episode, we found out exactly where that we found life. We found it.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did we?

• 0:16Chuck Nice?

  I mean.

• 0:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did we record the same episode together?

• 0:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, we didn't find it out in the universe. It's here, but we still found it.

• 0:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Join us again with one of the world's leading astrobiologists on StarTalk.

• 0:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Chuck Nice with me too. Chuck, how you doing, man?

• 0:52Chuck Nice?

  What's happening, Neil?

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, right. You the comedian, also acting?

• 0:57Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I'm stealing money. I saw, I'm just stealing money, Neil. I don't even know.

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You make people laugh and they just hand you their money.

• 1:08Chuck Nice?

  They're just giving me money and I'm like, you don't even know. I'm just acting like a comedian. But I'll take that, Chuck.

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So today, Chuck, we got Cosmic Queries, a fan favorite.

• 1:22Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And oh my gosh, one of our favorite guests.

• 1:27Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To help us out here.

• 1:29Chuck Nice?

  Excited to have him back.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got Dr. Funky Spoon.

• 1:33Chuck Nice?

  Dr. Funky Spoon.

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  David Grin spoon, longtime friend and colleague. We kind of came up together through graduate school, but we were sort of different sides of the fence. I was sort of galaxies and cosmology. He was like planets and asteroids and stuff.

• 1:51Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man, that's like, that's like the Jets and the Sharks right there.

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to put that in context, right? We had telescopes that would reach out to the galaxies. We had telescopes that would see the planets, but then they started going to the planets. Is it still astronomy if you can go there? You see, this was, this was part of the divide. You go there and bring back samples and stuff. You're just, you're a lab technician.

• 2:20Chuck Nice?

  Well, you had to observe first.

• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 2:22Chuck Nice?

  You had to look through something and see it first.

• 2:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  David Griswold, welcome back to StarTalk, dude.

• 2:29David Grinspoon?

  Oh, thanks a lot. It's really great to see you guys. It's a pleasure as always. And yeah, that divide between planetary and astrophysics, it's kind of funny. I mean, it is interesting how it evolved historically. And at times it was kind of intense, like, you know, when I was in grad school in planetary science, the astronomy department across the street, the professors were like, oh, don't go over there.

• 2:56David Grinspoon?

  But now that was before exoplanets. Now we need each other more than we ever knew.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there's been a meeting of the melding of the minds and hearts and souls. Also, our preeminent journal, the Astrophysical Journal, the ordering, I don't know if it's still, is this why I haven't paid attention? The ordering of the articles in every released issue was in descending order of distance from Earth. So it started out cosmic microwave background, large scale structure of the universe, galactic, and you keep doing, and way at the bottom is observations of Saturn.

• 3:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was like clearly the prioritization of the universe is writ large in those pages. That's all. So David, I noticed you have a title that you didn't have last time. At first, you're an astrobiologist. We get that. But you're also Senior Scientist for Astrobiology Strategy at NASA. What is that?

• 4:02David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, so that's my new job. Since the last time I really had a good conversation with you guys, I started a new role. I, you know, I've always worked with NASA and been supported by NASA for my research and the missions that I'm involved in my whole career. But just about a year ago this week, I started a new job at NASA. I am now a G-Man. I work for the government.

• 4:29Chuck Nice?

  Oh, look at that.

• 4:31David Grinspoon?

  Yeah. Now, see, you'll never take me alive, cop out.

• 4:36David Grinspoon?

  That's right.

• 4:38David Grinspoon?

  I am now working at your nation's space agency, helping to run the astrobiology program. And it's just like it says, I'm doing astrobiology strategy. So really trying to understand and, um, and figure out how we can expand astrobiology in new ways and plot the future. Um, it's a really interesting, uh, role for me. It's fascinating. It's very different. It's, I mean, I feel like my career up to this point was preparing me for this in a lot of ways, but it's fundamentally very different from any other job I've had. And I, it's been a year, but I feel like I'm still learning the ropes.

• 5:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you don't have power over missions, do you? We do that in our decadal surveys. So do you help shape it after the priorities are set?

• 5:24David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, so I don't, yeah, absolutely. Like you say, the decadal surveys, which are, you know, the, these big community input, uh, exercises to set the priorities for the, you know, on a decadal time scale.

• 5:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if the public understands, it's why you never see astro folk publicly arguing about how money should be spent. We, we do that among ourselves, like in private. Well, yeah, like, like any good marriage.

• 5:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what I mean?

• 5:51David Grinspoon?

  So that, so that, that's like the major priorities, which we take as our foundational document, you know, those are in a way our marching orders. But within that, there's a lot of decisions to be made about how we prioritize different research, uh, areas and, um, directions and, uh, you know, what we put, what we emphasize and how we communicate about what we're doing. The decadal kind of defines the shape that we're acting within. But then within that, there's a lot of, uh, a lot of decisions to be made. And, you know, again, it's, it's all about, uh, working with the community. We represent the astrobiology community. And so it's not like, oh, what ideas do I have today about what NASA should do? I'm just going to go do it.

• 6:35David Grinspoon?

  You know, of course, I hopefully I'm interjecting my own creativity and my own ideas, but it only works if we're really working a lot with that community and, um, kind of.

• 6:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you stray too far, somebody will come down to DC and kick your ass.

• 6:49David Grinspoon?

  Well, exactly, exactly. You know, I'm a, I'm a public servant, but you know, it's, it's interesting. It's a different kind of creativity. Before this, I was doing my own research. Now I'm putting a lot of time into facilitating other people's research and figuring out how to creatively get groups of people working together in new ways and helping, you know, create connections between people that are, that think they're doing separate things, but trying to get them to see how working together, the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts. So it's, it's a real new kind of, um, I feel like I'm tapping into a new sort of creativity for me and that's, uh,

• 7:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we kind of need that and even expect it, but are you following some mission statement that's been established for your, for your strategic plan?

• 7:37David Grinspoon?

  Yeah. So, so as you mentioned, there's the, there's the decadal survey, which is, um, you know, and there's a, there's a planetary science and astrobiology decadal survey, which is different from the astrophysics decadal survey, although they, you know, they play well together. Um, and then beyond that, there's actually something called the astrobiology strategy, which is a 10-year document, which is much more detailed about the research priorities and so forth. And part of what I'm doing now, a big, a big part is we're, we're working on a new astrobiology strategy. So we're actually starting to canvas the community of astrobiology researchers and say, hey, what should our priorities be for the next decade?

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw that right now. Find life.

• 8:21David Grinspoon?

  That's, you know, that's, that's the big goal, but then, you know, it, when, but give us some detail. How do you want us to do that? We're trying to fill in the, fill in the steps there.

• 8:33Chuck Nice?

  Here's the funny thing that you guys are always looking for life. Have you ever thought about creating it? Like maybe we're the progenitors, like, you know, when you look at like Prometheus, it's all about like, ah, you know, these aliens came, they left, you know, some microorganisms in our water and that made us.

• 8:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you mean Prometheus, the movie?

• 8:55Chuck Nice?

  The movie, not actual.

• 8:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To aliens, just to catch people up. With your your sci fi fluence.

• 9:01Chuck Nice?

  That's my sci fi, yes. So, so is it ever us, maybe we are the aliens that create and see the life elsewhere?

• 9:11David Grinspoon?

  It's funny you should ask because there are people working on, well, obviously, there's there are people working on sort of origin of life experiments, not necessarily that they're literally trying to create organisms organisms, but they're trying to recreate the chemical steps to help us understand how life started. And that's, you know, that's astrobiology supports a lot of that kind of experimentation. There are people actually trying to work on synthetic life, like, could we create some kind of a life form? And that, you know, it's a really interesting idea. We that's certainly something how that's a avenue towards learning a lot about life. If we could do that.

• 9:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, when someone says this is made of synthetic leather, it means it's not leather. It just kind of looks and smells like leather. If you're gonna say synthetic life, you're not making it out of some ingredients that life is not made of. You're actually making life.

• 10:04David Grinspoon?

  Right. So, so that that word synthetic, it can be can mean a few different things. But there are.

• 10:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think it's mean the wrong thing in person in terms of a person's first.

• 10:13David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 10:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hearing of that.

• 10:14David Grinspoon?

  Maybe you want to say artificial or, you know, laboratory created. And that's not that's not a major effort of astrobiology now, but it's certainly something that some people are are thinking about. And it is very related to this question of, you know, alien life. And and some people have predicted, you know, sort of provocatively, but maybe they're right, that the first alien life that we will discover or come to know will be something made in a laboratory, you know, and then you can say, well, is that really alien? It comes from Earth, but it's pretty alien.

• 10:52Chuck Nice?

  Yes, the the impossible meet alien.

• 10:57David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 11:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do they call the turkey made out of?

• 11:04David Grinspoon?

  Tofurkey?

• 11:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, Tofurkey.

• 11:10Chuck Nice?

  The Tofurkey.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  I'm Kais from Bangladesh and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 11:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  David, we had a guest recently who was a roboticist describing a collaboration with NASA about the search for life in the subsurface of Enceladus. We know Enceladus has these striking plumes that we can see sort of in those side views when it's properly lit by the sun, you see these sort of geysers coming out. So he's working with folks at NASA to make a worm, a robotic worm that'll go down that hole and then look around for life because it's frozen on the top and then you have sort of liquid water, we presume, below.

• 12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So do you know about that and do they need your permission or do they need your blessing? Or do they need a fishing license?

• 12:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's like Sam Drucker, right?

• 12:33David Grinspoon?

  I mean, yeah, we certainly put some resources into these experimental and speculative engineering projects that could someday lead to a new way, a new kind of mission to search for life in a place like Enceladus.

• 12:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not just a lander and like, you know, the usual, right?

• 12:54David Grinspoon?

  That's not a current, you know, mission that's in our plan, like, we're definitely going to do this, but part of our strategy is to support people with innovative concepts that could lead to future missions. And certainly Enceladus is one of the places that's very high on our list of places that we would like to visit and characterize for habitability and perhaps search for life for the reasons that you mentioned, Neil. It seems like a place, not only is there liquid water in the interior, but the... Hints we have about that ocean, based on what we've seen in that plume, suggests that the chemistry of that interior ocean may be really conducive to life. It may have

• 13:34David Grinspoon?

  the right mix of chemicals to have sources of energy and the biogenic elements, you know, the right elements to make life. So we have some hints that not only is there an ocean on Enceladus, but it might have the good stuff. So it's definitely high on our list of places that we intend to explore.

• 13:50Chuck Nice?

  You know what I never asked you guys, and this for both of you, a very icy crust frozen over, right? And then underneath a liquid ocean. So what is making it so warm underneath that we can have a liquid ocean, but clearly it's like not in some Goldilocks zone because the outside is a frozen crust?

• 14:17David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, well, you know, it's been a big surprise of planetary exploration that so many of these moons of the outer solar system have these warm, active interiors. We didn't expect that. Maybe we should have if we were smarter, you know, because the physics works out. But we thought they would, before we sent spacecraft to Jupiter and Saturn, we thought they'd just be these cratered dead ice balls. But it turns out that being near these giant planets, the way the moons interact with each other flexes their interiors, basically by tides, the interiors are getting squished. And that makes certainly a place like Europa keeps the interior warm and keeps, you know, pumping heat from basically the gravitational

• 14:57David Grinspoon?

  influence of those giant planets. There's also any place with a rocky core, and all these moons have rocky cores, have some sources of just natural heat from radioactivity in the rock. So it's some combination of natural radioactivity and the tidal history of these moons that have like warmed their interiors.

• 15:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I remember Enceladus, I'm not entirely moon fluent, but Enceladus, if memory serves, orbits Saturn, correct?

• 15:27David Grinspoon?

  That is correct.

• 15:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 15:31David Grinspoon?

  Last, last I checked.

• 15:32Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, he was like, I'm just giving you that one, Neil. I don't have to.

• 15:36David Grinspoon?

  Sorry. I thought you were just pausing for dramatic effect.

• 15:40Chuck Nice?

  When Neil deGrasse Tyson says Enceladus orbits Saturn, correct, I'm gonna think that that's rhetorical and just shut up.

• 15:49David Grinspoon?

  I was going with that.

• 15:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jupiter has no shortage of moons. It's got tidally heated moons. It's got moons with ice on it. Everybody's favorite Europa. And Jupiter is only half the distance out there compared with Saturn. So why would Saturn moons have any priority at all relative to Jupiter's moons?

• 16:07David Grinspoon?

  Cassini at Saturn, which was the, you know, the orbiter that really brought those moons to us, turned up some really surprising things. And probably the biggest surprise that was that Enceladus is so weird. And it's weird in enticing ways that, that it seems, some people think it's the best candidate for finding extant life. Some people think it's even a better candidate than Europa. Now, I don't want to get into that fight. That we're going to Europa with the Clipper mission, which is great because Europa is a very promising place to look. But what's amazing about Enceladus is, as you mentioned, it has these geysers. So it's literally, you know, like shooting its guts out into, into space. And there is stuff from that ocean landing on the surface.

• 16:52David Grinspoon?

  Some people think we can go to Enceladus and just scoop up snow from the surface and look for organisms in the snow.

• 16:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And never have to go down into the liquid.

• 17:01David Grinspoon?

  Right. It's, it's, the ocean is so accessible because it's literally squirting out into space.

• 17:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's this I heard, you know, some of the chemistry, like hydrogen cyanide, is that right? Was it HCN or something?

• 17:13David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah. Which sounds like, oh, that's poison. But actually, it's a very, and you're thinking about the origin of life and, and what primitive life may need. It's a very juicy chemical. Because whenever you've got nitrogen bound up in a carbon molecule, that's, you know, the basis of so much. That's the basis of amino acids and all this stuff. So, so hydrogen cyanide is actually a very promising sign if you're looking for a life somewhere.

• 17:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to be clear, it will kill you if you ingest it. You're talking about the formation of life, just, just to be clear.

• 17:46David Grinspoon?

  Yes, yes. No, don't, don't try this at home, but

• 17:48Chuck Nice?

  I know. It gives and it takeeth away.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go, Chuck. So it's hydrogen cyanide. I think that's the gas in gas chambers or some variant on that. But you're saying if hydrogen H C N, the C and the N together is what really that's what's fertile for organic chemistry.

• 18:09David Grinspoon?

  That's, that's enticing. That's it. Cause we, you know, one thing we've learned is that there's carbon molecules everywhere in the, I mean, many places in the universe, which is encouraging for astrobiology that it's not hard to, you know, the universe likes to make carbon molecules, which is great, but you need certain things beyond that. And carbon bonded with nitrogen is very key to all the biochemistry we know. So when you see that in a natural environment, you go, hey, that's, you know, that's encouraging.

• 18:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So this is, this is what's attracting people. All right.

• 18:39Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 18:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is a cosmic queries.

• 18:42Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 18:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Chuck has collected them. So David, you may remember in our cosmic queries, we, we tell people, you're going to be on, they're reminded of your expertise and they come in with their questions that are inspired by the, the curiosity that your work drives. So let's see what you got, Chuck.

• 19:03Chuck Nice?

  Okay, we got it. Uh, let's start off with Brad Lester. Uh, Brad Lester says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Grin spoon and Mr. Nice. Didn't get the memo on the Lord part, did you there, Brad? Okay.

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, these are paying customers.

• 19:19Chuck Nice?

  That's right. That's right.

• 19:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Be nice to them.

• 19:21Chuck Nice?

  By the way, thank you all for supporting us on Patreon. We certainly appreciate you and, and we appreciate you just even more than we appreciate your money. Just letting you know that. Okay.

• 19:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, that if they call you Mr. Nice, they must, they must be new members because they don't know the history.

• 19:38Chuck Nice?

  That's true. That's true.

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Being close. So be nice to the new.

• 19:41Chuck Nice?

  I will be nice to, that's right. Cause he's new too. So we got a super, super nice. So I've heard scientists speak about how unlikely it is for intelligent life to evolve into a humanoid form on other planets. That being said, has any study been? Devoted to the like of other exoplanets that might contain trees or other plants or structures comparable to trees. If tree-like flora existing elsewhere in the universe is reasonably likely, and if we assume sentient life could also evolve on these planets, it is it reasonable to conclude that some organisms would evolve to have limbs, hands, fingers, or similar appendages to allow them to spread to the tree-heavy environment?

• 20:23Chuck Nice?

  Maybe I'm mistaken, but isn't that the reason why primates evolved in the first place and thus, like humans, contain two arms and two legs and fingers in which to grab things? So, you know.

• 20:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn. See, that's not where I thought he was going with that. I thought he was, I thought, can we have sentient trees like they have in Lord of the Rings?

• 20:43David Grinspoon?

  That's such a good question. You should get this guy to be your next guest on this show.

• 20:49David Grinspoon?

  No, I mean, it's like what he's asking about is something that we call convergent evolution. Like, you know, on the one hand, we know evolution is full of accident and contingency. And, you know, like Stephen Jay Gould used to say, if you ran the tape again, you wouldn't get the same biosphere because there's so much randomness. Why would you expect anything to be the same since evolution is so random? But, but the opposite of that is that there are certain things you can see on Earth that evolved similarly in different environments multiple times because they make sense. They solve a problem and, and evolution is all about solving problems, right? And so we do expect on other planets, probably photosynthesis evolves,

• 21:31David Grinspoon?

  like the ability to use sunlight, because what is there all over the universe? There are stars in any environment with, you know, that's a great source of energy. So if you have photosynthesis, you're going to have some organism that spreads out and has something like leaves, so it can capture that. And then you're just going to have something like branches because that's sort of a natural, you know, so you can make these arguments. Yeah, there'll be things that are like trees.

• 21:55David Grinspoon?

  Similarly, you can say, well, there's not going to be a humanoid because that would be unlikely. Why would you expect aliens to look just like us? But then you go through some of our characteristics, like a head makes sense to have one central processing system for the brain and two eyes makes sense to have, you know, stereo vision. And yeah, like your, uh, your questioner astutely says, something to grasp and swing from tree branches. So, you know, I would not expect humanoids like we're going to mistake them and say, oh, wow, that, you know, are they from Earth? I think that nothing's going to be that similar.

• 22:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:30David Grinspoon?

  But some characteristics in common, um, there's rationale for that. And one of the fascinating things, if we ever did, when we, if we ever get to meet complex aliens, that's how we'll answer this question, you know, not by speculating, but by like finding out what they're like.

• 22:47Chuck Nice?

  And, and I'd say- By the way, you don't have to actually, uh, I mean, you can, uh, you don't have to necessarily, uh, evolve hands and instead of limbs, you could just evolve tentacles.

• 23:02David Grinspoon?

  Right, right, right.

• 23:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but David, when I think of convergence, I wouldn't be so specific as you've been. I would just say, um, there's convergent, uh, a convergent evolution that enable organisms to sense things at a distance. For us, it's sight, uh, and there's other ver- versions of sight, right? So, uh, uh, insects can see, but they don't have a retina eyeball situation, but they can see for sure. Right? And then locomotion, you don't have to talk about legs or arms, but can you move? Trees can't move. Okay? Not at least, I mean, the ones in the Wizard of Oz, I think, chased Dorothy down the street. But I think-

• 23:47David Grinspoon?

  And they threw their apples.

• 23:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Threw their apples at her. So, so you have locomotion and in that need and that valuation of that talent, you have snakes with no arms and no legs at all, yet they move along just fine. So when I think just come to it from the world of physics, I, I'm, I'm not, I don't have the urge to be so specific about what it is so much as what it accomplishes.

• 24:15David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, it's, it's a fascinating question. You're right. It's, it's all about the needs being met because that's what evolution does. And there are some cases on earth, though, of very specific things like, like eyes evolved more than once. And you can say that's all on the same planet with the same conditions. So who knows? I mean, I think we can speculate, but this is what I love about astrobiology and exploration is that that's how we'll find the answers is by going out there and seeing.

• 24:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm hmm. Chuck, give me some more.

• 24:43Chuck Nice?

  This is Tom Lindelius from Sweden. He says greetings from Sweden. Or did he say greetings from Sweden? Okay.

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, Chuck, thank you for interpreting.

• 24:57Chuck Nice?

  And right after that, he says, easty bean or biscuit bean or easty bean or biscuit board.

• 25:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was that what he said right after that?

• 25:05Chuck Nice?

  No, anyway, he says, we already know that Neil's favorite alien movie is The Blob. But what is your favorite alien movie, Dr. Funky Spoon? And what do you think the first encounter actually bigger than microbes might look like when we encounter aliens?

• 25:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me just clarify. That's my favorite. It's not my favorite alien movie. It's my favorite alien. Just to be, just to be clear, because it, it has no bones, no skin, no mouth, eyes, teeth, hair, fingers. It's, it is, I think it's the most creative alien ever put on the screen because it looks nothing like any other life form on earth. And if you're going to come visit from another planet and you look more like humans than either humans or you look like anything else on earth, you're not being creative in Hollywood. So, so I want to know too, David, what's your favorite?

• 26:02David Grinspoon?

  So, so, I mean, I have to give you two answers if that's okay. Cause in terms of favorite, I'm old school with the favorite movie. To me, it all goes back to 2001. And part of that is because, as Neil says, you know, if you show the aliens, they're gonna look cheesy no matter what. And in 2001, they did the brilliant thing of implying them without really showing them in this pretty mind blowing way.

• 26:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, I'm told, and you might have some other insight here, that Carl Sagan, at the time, though young, advised the producers of that film to not show the aliens and leave it to your imagination. And that fact was preserved in his novel Contact, when the screen version at least, you don't see the aliens at all.

• 26:44David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, no, that's absolutely right.

• 26:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that became a new way to think about it.

• 26:48David Grinspoon?

  That's absolutely right. I think, you know, rumor has it, or the story is that Sagan and Kubrick didn't really get along that well, and that Carl didn't have that much input into that film. But his one substantive piece of advice that was followed was, "Don't show the aliens," because in some earlier drafts, they were going to try to.

• 27:07Chuck Nice?

  But it's always a brilliant storytelling ploy is to leave things to the imagination. When you think about Jaws, you don't see the shark until how long into the movie, right?

• 27:17David Grinspoon?

  And again, you're right, you're right, Neil. That was what they did in Contact, to brilliant effect. The one depiction that's coming to mind of an alien organism in a movie that I think is pretty good is in Arrival, you know, where they have those...

• 27:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The septapoids.

• 27:34David Grinspoon?

  Oh, the septapoids. Is that true?

• 27:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. I just saw it a few days ago.

• 27:39David Grinspoon?

  It didn't count. Awesome, awesome. I like that. An odd number is good, too. But, you know, and they're kind of floating there and behind this frosted glass in their own atmosphere, and you can sort of see them. But to me, there's nothing about them that seems like fake or implausible. I'm like, "Yeah, that looks like an alien." So I give them high, I give them high points, high marks.

• 28:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but you miss the ray guns and stuff like that, you know?

• 28:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so you had, you said you had two movies. So The Arrival, by the way, there's another movie, The Arrival with Charlie Sheen in it, playing an astrophysicist.

• 28:13Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 28:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're talking about the more recent one where they have the, the ash, you have the physicist and the linguist to decode.

• 28:22Chuck Nice?

  Amy Adams.

• 28:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Amy Adams, yes, yes, yes. So that's the more recent one from a few years ago. So what's the other film?

• 28:28Chuck Nice?

  The Charlie Sheen one, by the way, is, is underrated. Let me just say that Charlie Sheen one is pretty cool because it's about climate change.

• 28:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. I'll go back and check it out.

• 28:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 28:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 28:38Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 28:39David Grinspoon?

  No, the other one I already mentioned, 2001, I said, that's my sort of foundational one where that's, you know, I like the aliens because you don't see them.

• 28:49Chuck Nice?

  Nice. This is Ivan, Ivan D'Souza, who says, hello, doctors and Lord, greetings from Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, longtime fan and recent Patreon member. Well, thank you. My question is about Jupiter's moon Europa. I can't help but wonder what life may possibly find in that vast ocean that insulates its icy surface. Yes, I am ruling out impossibility because I really want to be there. What do you think we will find and in what form? Please do visit the side of the world, this side of the world would love to take you all around. Okay, there you go.

• 29:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool. Open standing invitations. If, if that existed more frequently in the world, imagine how, how much more at peace we would be because there's an invitation awaiting you, right? Not a wall preventing you. It's just a very, very kind, forward-thinking gesture.

• 29:48Chuck Nice?

  We're gonna put a door in the wall. There's a door.

• 29:53David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, no, I love that. And I love the fact that these kinds of questions make it so obvious that we're all, we're all on the same side when we're thinking of what's out there, you know? So that, that's great.

• 30:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's your best, what's the best thinking about Europa? Because that's, that gets everybody's imagination for sure. Europa was in 2010, the sequel to 2001. And Europa has shown up in several storytelling efforts. There's another one called The Europa Report, which is a film, sort of lower budget sci-fi film. I know about that because. I'm in it. Oh, get out. Interesting. I have a very short cameo with, and it was simple because they just clipped something from when I was on CNN. And the clip was, I can't wait to go ice fishing on Europa. Cut a hole in the ice, put a camera lens down there and see if anything swims up and licks it.

• 30:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think that that was my entire quote.

• 30:50David Grinspoon?

  I love it. Licks, licks the camera. Could you imagine the giant Europa tongue like?

• 30:58David Grinspoon?

  Europa is one of those places that's just been in our imagination for a long time. And actually, so I, I have a cameo too. In the, um, in episode six of the original, um, Cosmos with Carl Sagan, um, Traveler's Tales. They show the scene in, um, at JPL when Voyager two showed the first closeups of Europa that had ever been seen by a spacecraft. Somehow Carl convinced the, you know, them to let a camera crew in the room while, while this was happening. And I'm actually an undergraduate intern in a skinny kid with a giant Afro holding a clipboard in the very back of that scene on screen for like three frames.

• 31:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did your mom have a poster of that, you know, with, with a circle and an arrow?

• 31:52David Grinspoon?

  Of course, of course. Yeah. But so Europa, you know, and that was 1979, summer of 1979. And that was the first, you know, Europa came to our attention as like a really weird world.

• 32:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to be clear, Cosmos was released in 1980. So it was filmed, that moment took place in 1979.

• 32:09David Grinspoon?

  Yeah. And that, you know, we saw with Voyager, uh, a moon with, with no visible craters on the surface. So that tells you it's young. There's, it hasn't been sitting there getting hit. And these weird lines turn up, you know, cross, which turn out to be cracks in a thin ice shell with an ocean of liquid water. And the more we've learned about that, it seems the ocean probably has probably the right kinds of chemicals to support some kind of metabolism. And, you know, it's more and more encouraging. To imagine some life form there. And what's really cool is that we're going back there.

• 32:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have to interrupt you again, Chuck. He said a thin coat of ice, but let's get him to quantify that.

• 32:47David Grinspoon?

  By thin, I mean maybe by maybe between 10 and 100 kilometers.

• 32:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is not, this is not, you know, dangerous ice to go ice skating on.

• 33:00David Grinspoon?

  You would, you would not fall through.

• 33:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, I'm just trying to truth in advertising here. Thin ice out of David's mouth.

• 33:10David Grinspoon?

  This is a, this is a object, a world about the size of our moon. So if it's just got 10 kilometers of ice over a deep ocean, that's it's might be, it's probably our solar system's largest ocean of liquid water. More water than on Earth. So it's, it's impressive in that way.

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As far as we know, life on Earth began in our oceans.

• 33:29David Grinspoon?

  Absolutely. I mean, it must have begun in water and either oceans or a pond or, you know, we think maybe a hot spring at the bottom of the ocean, which actually that's really interesting because they're probably your hot spring, you know, or like these, these vents, seafloor vents at the bottom of Europa's ocean, we think, fed by that tidal energy we were talking about earlier. So, so we're sending a spacecraft back there. If all goes well, launching later this year called Europa Clipper, which is going to orbit Jupiter and make lots of close passes of Europa to examine this question of habitability and to look at things like, are there pockets of water in the ice shell itself, which would be one place you could have life if there are,

• 34:09David Grinspoon?

  because then you have chemicals coming in from the surface and chemicals coming up from the, from the ocean below that are kind of mixing. So that's one place you could have in the ice shell itself.

• 34:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  NASA astrobiology strategist, why go back to Jupiter and just keep orbiting? Isn't it high time we'd landed on Europa? What, what is, what is the delay?

• 34:32David Grinspoon?

  So there's a couple of things. We can only do what we can do. It's very difficult to... At one point, we wanted to maybe orbit Europa rather than orbit Jupiter.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Dude, we landed on Saturn's moon Titan. Come on now. Don't tell me you can't land on Jupiter's moon Europa.

• 34:52David Grinspoon?

  But Huygens wasn't even... It was supposed to touch down and then die, right? And it lasts for 45 minutes on the surface. We don't want to do that on Europa. Eventually, by the way, we do want to send a lander to Europa. But with the budget that we had, it was decided that what we want to do first is characterize Europa much more carefully. For one thing, you want to know where to land. You want to know if it's safe, and you want to pick the right spot. You can't do that without surveying more than we've done.

• 35:22Chuck Nice?

  100 kilometers thick. You're not falling through.

• 35:25David Grinspoon?

  You're not falling through, but you don't want to land in the wrong spot and be like, "Oh, if only we had been over there, that's where the interesting stuff is."

• 35:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A lot of people don't know, because the Apollo program was so visible. There was an entire lunar Ranger, was it the Ranger series? That photographed the entire surface of the moon to enable people to study it and figure out where the best landing sites would be.

• 35:49David Grinspoon?

  Right, right.

• 35:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was all the homework we did before the famous words were spoken.

• 35:53David Grinspoon?

  And the other thing that's interesting is you might say, "Well, so why aren't we just going to orbit Europa rather than orbit Jupiter and make lots of passes by Europa?" Because, and there have been Europa orbiter studies, but the problem is Jupiter's radiation field is so intense that if you're at the distance of... If you're at Europa's distance from Jupiter, that's pretty close in to Jupiter, you would get fried. And I don't just mean you. I mean, our electronics don't survive very long with that intense radiation. So what you do is you orbit Jupiter, you spend time farther out when you're doing things like sending the images back to Earth and doing other things, and then you make these quick,

• 36:35David Grinspoon?

  close passes by Europa where you dash through the radiation. And then you retreat to safety. And if you do that enough time, you can build up these really detailed maps of all the different qualities we want to study of Europa, the images, the spectra, the gravity data, the radar data that's going to tell us of what's underneath the ice, the radio data is going to tell us if that is ocean is salty by looking at the conductivity. But we do it quickly on these close passes and then you retreat.

• 37:07Chuck Nice?

  You sure you can't just wrap the vessel in one of those blankets that my dentist wears and just land?

• 37:17David Grinspoon?

  Well, believe it or not, we're doing that with this thing, even even with what I said.

• 37:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Radiation hardened?

• 37:23David Grinspoon?

  Biggest danger is radiation. So we have all these radiation hardened components and it's in a vault. It's in something that's literally called the vault, which is this radiation hardened container where all the electronics are. Even with all that, you still get way too much of a dose.

• 37:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. So this reminds me of the the monster movies from Japan in the 1950s and 60s. I think many of them, if not all of them, they got that way because of radiation.

• 37:51David Grinspoon?

  Yep.

• 37:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From and of course, let's not soon forget that Japan is the only country to ever have nuclear weapons used against them.

• 37:59David Grinspoon?

  Right.

• 37:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the idea that radiation would create some next world order with these giant monsters. So that is cinematic evidence that Godzilla is in Europa.

• 38:14Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 38:15David Grinspoon?

  Well, it's funny though, because, you know, so you think of radiation is just going to like destroy everything. So there's going to be no life on Europa. But of course, underneath the ice shell, the ocean is shielded from that radiation. And not only that, the radiation is interacting with the surface of the ice in ways that can actually make Europa more habitable. Because when that radiation hits the, you know, the H2O ice, it knocks off hydrogens and leaves behind some oxygen and oxidized compounds in that ice, which then can make their way over time into the ocean. And so that could be a source of energy in the ocean that's coming indirectly from

• 38:55David Grinspoon?

  that radiation. So just like Godzilla on Earth, those Eurobans may be fueled by radiation in some indirect way. Wow.

• 39:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, only a few more minutes here. Let's see if we tighten up these answers.

• 39:24Chuck Nice?

  This is Mac Lampkin, who says, question, if you, Neil, Chuck, David, could have one definitive understanding of anything from life on another planet, what would you like to understand most? Ooh, look at that.

• 39:45David Grinspoon?

  I only get one.

• 39:46Chuck Nice?

  We only get one.

• 39:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I got one. I want to know how they encode information.

• 39:52David Grinspoon?

  I want to know how they create a global technological civilization that survives long term.

• 39:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It survives itself. That assumes they're intelligent. The question didn't require that.

• 40:03David Grinspoon?

  Right, right, right. I think, I think between Neil and I, like, kind of covered the game.

• 40:09Chuck Nice?

  Well, no, you guys missed what I'm, what I want to know. Do you have weapons?

• 40:15Chuck Nice?

  That's what I want to know. And are they better than guns? Because if they're better than guns, then you, we're not contacting you.

• 40:24Chuck Nice?

  This is Patrick Weglinski, and Patrick Weglinski says, hello, Dr. Grin spoon, Dr. Tyson, Lord Nice, this is Patrick from Salt Lake City, Utah. What is your and your colleagues' algorithm for characterizing something that's being alive? I'd imagine that if we found life far away from our planet that evolved in a vastly different environment, it could be hard to directly compare it to life on Earth and therefore make it difficult to say whether indeed it's life or not.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, David, what, what, what's the biologist's current stand on the definition of life? The definition of life has evolved.

• 41:05David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, yeah, that's right. And, and you know, this could be a, this could be a long answer, but we're keeping it short because people, people still argue about this. And that it's another one of these things that we'll be much more sophisticated about when we find other life. But, you know, in brief, something that reproduces itself and is evolving by something like Darwinian evolution.

• 41:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, except if you find a life form that is perfectly suited for its environment, it would never have to evolve. And they would never discover evolution because they were just always the same.

• 41:38David Grinspoon?

  That doesn't sound like much fun, though, Neil.

• 41:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, give me another quick.

• 41:45Chuck Nice?

  This is David Geiger. David Geiger says, greetings, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Funky Spoon, Lord Nice, David Geiger here from Crescent, Iowa. Has anyone updated the estimate of the number of active extraterrestrial civilizations postulated by the Drake equation, given the enormous amount of data that is available now?

• 42:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love it. Just a quick thing. In, in, in a book I co-published a few years ago with two fellow professors, we co-taught a course at Princeton. It's, and it's called Welcome to the Universe. We actually give the latest estimate there of the number of technologically capable civilizations in the galaxy. But that was as of maybe eight years ago. So, so David, what is, what would you say is the latest number if you give the, give the galaxy several hundred billion stars? So what do you give it now?

• 42:36David Grinspoon?

  I mean, that, you know, my, my first answer to the question is people are updating it all the time because it does, it requires a lot of assumptions of, of parameters that we, we don't know, we fundamentally don't know the answer to. And the Drake equation, you know, is really meant as a medium for a discussion of how the different factors would influence the answer, not as a way to calculate a definitive answer. And You know, as, as we-

• 43:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just to remind people of Drake equation, you start with a number of stars and you just hack away at it with fractions. What fraction of the stars have planets? What fraction of those stars with planets have life? What fraction of those that have life have intelligent life? What fraction of those have life that have intelligent life have technology? This sort of thing. And by the time you hack away with these fractions, there's not much. But if you start with a big enough number, there should be a few left. Come on now, it's gotta be at least one. So give me a number here.

• 43:29David Grinspoon?

  Well, we know there's one.

• 43:32David Grinspoon?

  Unless you consider, you know, you could debate whether it's an intelligent civilization.

• 43:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We rescind the intelligent status.

• 43:38David Grinspoon?

  Yeah.

• 43:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 43:39David Grinspoon?

  Yeah. But, you know, I, there's so many, you know, I hate to just come up with a number. I love to just like talk about the possibilities. If you asked me to come up with my own personal number, not wearing my NASA hat, but just my Dr. Funky Spoon, David Grin spoon hat, I would say, um, I would say a thousand civilizations in the galaxy. But-

• 44:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thousand.

• 44:02David Grinspoon?

  With a huge error bar that ranges from zero to a million.

• 44:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what fraction of those civilizations would you suggest might be considerably more advanced than we are?

• 44:14David Grinspoon?

  Most of them.

• 44:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Okay. There it is.

• 44:18Chuck Nice?

  And how many of them would still be around? Cause there's a possibility that many of them have come and gone.

• 44:24David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, no, that's, that's an estimate for the current number. If you want to talk about, um, all the ones that have ever been, then it's of course going to be a larger number.

• 44:32Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 44:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, good.

• 44:33David Grinspoon?

  Although I tend to think, uh, and this is again, we're trying to keep our answers short. I tend to think that over a certain threshold of success, that they last really, the longevity gets huge because you pass this sort of unstable, immature phase that arguably we're at. And if you make it to the point where you've learned how to be sustainable, then you know enough to not get wiped out. So the longevity, you know, they stick around.

• 45:00Chuck Nice?

  If you get out of your teenage years.

• 45:02David Grinspoon?

  Yes.

• 45:04Chuck Nice?

  You got a damn good chance of making it.

• 45:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your brain sets in.

• 45:09Chuck Nice?

  Right. When, when, if you make it to adulthood, you're probably gonna be okay. Right. Well, we're not quite there yet, unfortunately.

• 45:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, we got time for one last question.

• 45:17Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 45:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Squeeze this in. Okay.

• 45:19Chuck Nice?

  Alrighty. Uh, this is Starry Eyed Mama. It says, greetings, Doctors Grin Spoon, Tyson, Lord Nice. If mathematics is the universal language, what would it look like to be able to convey a message and communicate with another intelligent life form? Can't wait to watch you live here in Columbus, Ohio this fall, Dr. Tyson. I'm a grateful fan, Maria Gale. She already bought tickets, bro. That's amazing.

• 45:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, coming through Columbus, Ohio. Yeah. I generally don't give my speaking schedule publicly. You gotta go find it.

• 45:50Chuck Nice?

  Well, she did. You, you didn't.

• 45:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She did. She did. Give her free, give her free.

• 45:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Free Patreon pass.

• 45:58Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. We can get you some pass. We can get you some Patreon passes, uh, Maria Gale. Alright, so go ahead, Dr. Funky Spoon.

• 46:05David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, well, Starry Eyed Mama, if, um, if mathematics is not a universal language, then I feel like we have a much, much harder task in trying to establish any understanding with other creatures out there with whom all we share in common is the same universe of origin. So it seems to me, and you know, this is an interesting philosophical question, that mathematics kind of has to be a universal language because it seems sort of built into the universe, not something we've created so much as something we've discovered. If that's correct, then presumably other intelligences could have, should have discovered the same mathematics. And that creates a basis, you know, like even you can think of two dimensional, you know, we have these ways of making two dimensional messages.

• 46:50David Grinspoon?

  Just send, send a circle, a perfect circle. Then you at least know this is, that's another mind. Nothing made that randomly. And then, once you've established we're a mind, you're a mind, we're trying to communicate, then you can start to get more sophisticated. So to me, mathematics is the thing that gives us hope of being able to establish that connection with some other intelligence.

• 47:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Circles are everywhere with large planets and things. I would send a triangle. There are no natural triangles out there.

• 47:18David Grinspoon?

  Yeah. Well, no, right. A circle is, is ubiquitous, but, but something that is encoding a digital message that makes a circle, that's like, oh.

• 47:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it. Got it. You know, you know, the first idea, how to communicate with aliens? You know what that was? You surely know this, David.

• 47:35David Grinspoon?

  Was this like making giant triangles of fire in the Siberian forest or something?

• 47:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. No. So what you do is you, you, you, you, you create a right triangle as big as you can on earth. So it's got a right angle and then the other two angles. Okay. Now, do you remember your Pythagorean theorem, Chuck?

• 47:54Chuck Nice?

  Um, that's 180 degrees.

• 47:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, those are the sum of the three.

• 47:58Chuck Nice?

  So 45, 45 and 90.

• 48:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A, B, and C. These are the three sides. You remember how they relate?

• 48:02Chuck Nice?

  Right. Yes.

• 48:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a squared plus b squared equals c squared. C is the hypotenuse.

• 48:08Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 48:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So now this is what's so brilliant. Okay. You make this triangle as big as you can and it's got to be, you gotta be able to ignite it. I mean, not blow it up, but light it with fire. So you can see it at night on the, on the side of the earth that's not lit.

• 48:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 48:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the aliens could then see it. So that's first you get a right triangle.

• 48:26Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 48:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you fill out the sides of the triangles with squares. Okay. So one side of a triangle is the side of a square. So you, so you create squares, three squares off the side of that.

• 48:41Chuck Nice?

  Off the side of the triangle.

• 48:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why would you do that? Because the area of one of the squares plus the area of the other squares equals the area of this third square. How do I know that? That's the Pythagorean theorem. A squared plus b squared equals c squared. What's the area of a square? The, the one dimension times the other dimension. So it links like trigonometry and geometry and it's, and, and you get to, and aliens say, oh, this, there's intelligence down there.

• 49:15Chuck Nice?

  Right. The aliens say there was intelligence down there. They're like, well, uh, clearly they were smart enough to figure out our Galloping theorem. Uh, however, they were dumb enough to burn down their whole damn planet trying to show it to us.

• 49:32David Grinspoon?

  Now, wouldn't, wouldn't it be cool if like the first time we get a direct imaging picture of an exoplanet with our super duper space telescope? That's what we see.

• 49:43Chuck Nice?

  That'd be amazing.

• 49:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Galloping would be.

• 49:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Galupian theorem, that's, that's a good one Chuck, we gotta keep that. So David, we gotta call it quits here, remind, remind us of the book that you wrote about Pluto a few years back. What's that title again?

• 50:03David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, Chasing New Horizons with Alan Stern.

• 50:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, both of you. We're together on that. Excellent. And, and the subtitle was?

• 50:11David Grinspoon?

  Oh, oh gosh, you want to remember the subtitle? It was, no.

• 50:15David Grinspoon?

  Chasing New Horizons, Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto.

• 50:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's the only mission to Pluto. Just, just stop trying to number them before they're numbered.

• 50:24David Grinspoon?

  So far.

• 50:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we find you on, you also, like you're a musician, that like Dr. Funky Spoon is your, that's your, your moniker, your musical moniker.

• 50:35David Grinspoon?

  Yeah, you can find me on YouTube and, you know, the, the usual, the usual channels.

• 50:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think in our archives, we have you playing the guitar.

• 50:43David Grinspoon?

  That's right. We did, we did, we did the astrobiology blues that Chuck, that Chuck and I wrote together. Yeah, that's in there.

• 50:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, it's in our archives. Dig that one up. All good. All right, Chuck, good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. All right, Neil deGrasse Tyson, yet another installment of Cosmic Queries. This one with the one and only Dr. Funky Spoon. We'll see you next time. As always, keep looking up.