Season 6 Time Capsule (Part 2)

You asked the questions, you chose the episodes: Join us for your favorite Cosmic Queries of Season 6, answered by your own personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, guest host Bill Nye and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Leighann Lord.

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.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I'm also the director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, right here at the American Museum of Natural History. With the second and final part of our time capsule show, we bid farewell to season six, Count 'Em, with our favorite Cosmic Query Moments. You guys submitted hundreds of questions to us over the course of the season, and we've enjoyed answering them in studio. Had a great time doing so. And now join me as we relive some of those episodes, selected by you, our fans, as your favorites of season six. First up, my good friend Bill Nye the Science Guy, who's also, by the way, CEO of the Planetary

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Society, co-founded by Carl Sagan 36 years ago, sits in as guest host for me and answers all questions you had just for him, in our special Bill Nye edition of Cosmic Queries. Check it out.

• 1:16Chuck Nice?

  Do you think that one day, technology will become so advanced that it will begin to hinder our own human evolution? Can we de-evolve?

• 1:29Bill Nye?

  Well, so...

• 1:30Chuck Nice?

  Because of technology?

• 1:31Bill Nye?

  But this gets into a tribal question, and I'll put it to you this way. Let's take, for example, a guy who was walking down the street when he was an engineer at Boeing...

• 1:41Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:42Bill Nye?

  ...and had appendicitis.

• 1:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:45Bill Nye?

  That could be me! Wait!

• 1:46Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say...

• 1:47Bill Nye?

  Wow, just a second!

• 1:48Chuck Nice?

  Continue!

• 1:49Bill Nye?

  But because I live in a tribe that has built hospitals, it was routine. Guy took out my appendix, I'm still going, I could... Have babies and things.

• 2:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:02Bill Nye?

  But if I lived in a different tribe without that technology, I would probably have died.

• 2:06Chuck Nice?

  Or a different time.

• 2:07Bill Nye?

  That's right. Some people apparently survive appendicitis, but generally it kills you.

• 2:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 2:12Bill Nye?

  And so, uh, so because I'm in this tribe, my genes are getting passed on where they might not otherwise have been passed on.

• 2:20Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:21Bill Nye?

  And so there's an example of technology enabling my genes to go into the future. Could it get to the point where you can't do anything at all? You can't survive at all without technology? That is to say, you'd be plugged into some giant matrix machine.

• 2:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 2:39Bill Nye?

  From the get-go and you'd be there all the time. Uh, it's possible, but I think it's quite a ways off. But from a science fiction standpoint, it is a worthy thing to consider. And it's also something to consider when you think about our tribes, our social systems that we have here as humans.

• 2:59Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:59Bill Nye?

  We are, we all depend on each other and that's why there's so many of us. You know, in the bad old days, if you got the flu or whatever, you're just dead.

• 3:08Chuck Nice?

  That was it.

• 3:09Bill Nye?

  But now, all these things enable so many people to not die at nearly the rate they used to, which as you can, I hope anyone can agree, is both good and bad.

• 3:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 3:22Bill Nye?

  We have, you know, one of my grandparents were around, were young. There were about one and a half billion people in the world.

• 3:28Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:29Bill Nye?

  Now they're about seven, uh, point two going on nine.

• 3:32Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 3:33Bill Nye?

  And so those, that's, that's gonna put quite a burden on the earth's resources. And but it's, but it's our ability to understand nature and to create technology based on science that will improve the quality of life of people everywhere. It's a great question.

• 3:47Chuck Nice?

  It is a good question. So let me, uh, let me tack on to Steph Bird's question and ask you, with what you just said, is there a danger of us losing our humanity due to technology? What you just talked about was how our dependence upon one another, uh, has got us to a point where we can continue to evolve and grow and actually increase our population because we depend upon each other. Is it possible that technology will move us in the opposite direction of that?

• 4:23Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah. Here's why. I'll give you an example. When I, have you ever, have you ever read, uh, The Stepford Wives?

• 4:32Chuck Nice?

  No, I can't say that I have.

• 4:33Bill Nye?

  No, but I just want to tell you guys, they make a remake of it on movies every now and then.

• 4:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 4:39Bill Nye?

  But in the original, the pill is capital T, capital P.

• 4:44Chuck Nice?

  Uh huh.

• 4:45Bill Nye?

  And this is an example of technology that enabled women to not have babies.

• 4:51Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 4:52Bill Nye?

  And take control of their, uh, family planning in a much more practical way than other things that have been suggested with something like, don't look at boys.

• 5:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:04Bill Nye?

  Cross your legs with an aspirin between your, like, those are ineffective.

• 5:08Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 5:09Bill Nye?

  And so there's an example of technology that enables us to control human reproduction, which then could enable us hypothetically to raise the standard of living of women, which will, over the course of a century or two, lower the human population by natural means, fewer people being born than are dying, and that will provide more of the earth's resources for more people.

• 5:36Chuck Nice?

  Whoa. Right.

• 5:37Bill Nye?

  So there's an example, will that technology allow us to lose our humanity?

• 5:41Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 5:42Bill Nye?

  Or actually make us love each other all the way? So I don't think technology will make us lose our humanity. I think we, as long as there are humans involved, there will be human emotions.

• 5:55Chuck Nice?

  It's all about that bill.

• 5:56Bill Nye?

  Wow.

• 5:57Chuck Nice?

  These are all personal questions for you. Here's Kalen Manzer. If you and Neil were given the entire US budget for one year, what would you do with it?

• 6:04Bill Nye?

  Fix everything. No, we would address climate change. We would raise the standard of living of women and girls through education, and we would improve transportation systems so that we would use less energy. The key to the future, Chuck.

• 6:17Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 6:17Bill Nye?

  Is not to do less, but to do more with less.

• 6:22Chuck Nice?

  I'm voting for you guys, okay? That's a ticket I'm voting for. Here's, um, Ellie St. Sire says, "What, in your opinion, was Leonard Nimoy's greatest tribute to science? Uh, what is your favorite Star Trek, the original ser- the original series?"

• 6:37Bill Nye?

  Well, my favorite Star Trek, this isn't a hard question, is City on the Edge of Forever. I mean, many such journeys are possible. Anyway, the, um, the importance of Leonard Nimoy is hard to underestimate. The guy gave us, Star Trek: Rittlerge, and he was a huge part of it.

• 6:53Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:54Bill Nye?

  Gave us this optimistic view of the future through magic? No! Through what, Chuck?

• 7:01Chuck Nice?

  Science!

• 7:02Bill Nye?

  Yes! He was a science officer, lead on.

• 7:04Chuck Nice?

  That's right. Tricia McClellan wants to know this. "Hey, since we've got more Cosmos, why not more science guy? Your people need you, Bill."

• 7:13Bill Nye?

  I'm working on it. Hey, I'm a host on StarTalk Radio. The longest journey starts with a single step. You're listening to StarTalk Radio, and you should do what I do when I listen to this show, Chuck.

• 7:24Chuck Nice?

  What's that?

• 7:25Bill Nye?

  Turn it up loud! Next question.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We love every opportunity to geek out here on StarTalk, and co-host Chuck Nice and I took it, I think, to a whole other level when you asked us to take a realistic look at superpowers on one of your favorite cosmic query shows. Check it out.

• 7:47Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna start off with one that I like a lot from Mike Dodson, comes to us from Earth and Facebook.

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Because we agreed, if they don't say where they're from, you're gonna say they're from Earth.

• 8:00Chuck Nice?

  They're from Earth. So, people, start telling me where you're from when you send these in, please. All right, here we go. Uh, "If there was a superhero whose power was to see the whole spectrum of light, what do you think he or she would see, and what could we learn from him or her?" So that, first of all, this, this, uh, person doesn't exist in superhero land, uh, so that's what I think is cool about this, but what if your power was to see all the spectrum of light at once?

• 8:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Such a person has already been created in the world of science fiction.

• 8:31Chuck Nice?

  Oh!

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's Geordi on Star Trek.

• 8:33Chuck Nice?

  That is correct, sir, 'cause he is absolutely blind. But he uses his visor to see all the different spectrums of light.

• 8:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct. He has full wide spectrum vision of the world.

• 8:45Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 8:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it was quite a discovery in astrophysics that there's more to the universe than just visible light detectable by your retina. It was, it was, I counted as one of the great demotions of human physiology. Where you learn that this cherished sense that we have called sight.

• 9:02Chuck Nice?

  Sight, right.

• 9:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is actually quite feeble relative to all the things that are seeable out there in this world.

• 9:07Chuck Nice?

  So we're not seeing anything.

• 9:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We ain't seeing jack. And in fact, you, you are familiar with the other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, whether or not you knew that that's what they were. So ultraviolet.

• 9:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  X-rays.

• 9:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gamma rays. Infrared, microwaves, radio waves, all of this, including visible light, are part of a continuum of electromagnetic energy.

• 9:30Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 9:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so if you could see all of that, it would be a really visually noisy world.

• 9:37Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 9:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because if I'm looking at you now, you'd be glowing with infrared at your 98.6 degrees.

• 9:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd look at your cellphone, it would be glowing with, with microwaves.

• 9:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If, oh, by the way, if you could see all spectrum, if you're driving the car, you'd be able to see the police, the police radar gun.

• 9:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From a mile away.

• 9:56Chuck Nice?

  Shooting at you from, right.

• 9:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. You'd say, uh, let me slow down. I got you.

• 9:59Chuck Nice?

  And, and even if he had a laser radar gun, you'd be able to see.

• 10:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you'd be, no matter the frequency of light.

• 10:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so it would, you'd be immensely empowered to know what's going on in this world.

• 10:12Chuck Nice?

  Uh, Greig, first of all, what a name. I like the name Greig Lord.

• 10:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Greig.

• 10:18Chuck Nice?

  Greig.

• 10:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As in the composer.

• 10:20Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 10:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:21Chuck Nice?

  Greig Lord.

• 10:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Edvard Greig.

• 10:22Chuck Nice?

  Yes. So Greig wants to know this. When Superman farts, is the gas or the wind more lethal? Cause he has super breath, you know what I mean? Where he can freeze things, so.

• 10:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:38Chuck Nice?

  So would his super farts be the same way?

• 10:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, so I, I think he eats regular food. Right. Right, and so if he eats regular food, then the anaerobic digestion of that food that occurs in one's lower intestine. Right. Would be creating the, you know, the, the, the smelly gases that are associated with the, the effluences of the human orifices. So, well, well, because they're human, but so would Superman have, would it be extra potent, one might ask? Right. I don't see why not, because here's what's interesting. Here, here's something Superman would be cool if he could do this. You know his breath can freeze things. Yes. You've seen that, but I've never seen his breath turn things on fire.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it hasn't. Whereas. His eyes do that. The methane, well, because he, he focuses a laser. Laser. The methane that comes out, out of, out of butt effluences, methane is actually flammable. Yes, it is. And that's the gas that is in the stove. If you have gas, typically in, in the city, you'll have methane coming out of your stove. Right. That, that lights. Okay. So. If he could look at his own butt, he could light his own fart. Well, what I'm saying, exactly. So he can use his laser to light the fart and turn it into a flamethrower.

• 11:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just inventing, I mean, you asked me, the question was. So that would just kind of look funny, right? He's got, he pulls down his drawers. No, I'm just, if, if it's model for him, it would be more flammable, right? Because whatever it is in human is super in him. Chuck, you're tearing up here.

• 12:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that image is crazy, but it's right. This team does super things. Chuck is crying.

• 12:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You asked the question. I'm just saying the physics in everything. That's all I'm saying.

• 12:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  2015 was both a difficult and rewarding year for space exploration. And unfortunately, not all of the endeavors were rewarded with accomplished missions or even successful launches. Co-host Chuck Nice and science guest Bill Nye join me to discuss why we must continue to explore space in Cosmic Queries: Rocket Science is Hard. Check it out.

• 13:25Chuck Nice?

  This is from at FishMyMan.

• 13:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's his name?

• 13:30Chuck Nice?

  That's his name. At FishMyMan from Twitter. This is Cod. His name is Cod.

• 13:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get it?

• 13:36Chuck Nice?

  And his handle is at FishMyMan. How do we balance the burning desire of our genetic predisposition to explore with the need to ensure safe passage? I think he's kind of...

• 13:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a great question.

• 13:52Chuck Nice?

  He's kind of talking also about maybe commercial space flight.

• 13:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let me add some punctuation in this, and I'm going straight to you on this, Bill. You're an engineer and you will tell the launch people, "Look, you shouldn't do that because it should be a little safer than that. That could go wrong. Don't do that." At some point, somebody's got to push the button and launch the damn thing.

• 14:09Bill Nye?

  Oh, yeah. You got to shit all the engineers, get on with production.

• 14:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At some time, you have to stop listening to the engineers and get on.

• 14:14Bill Nye?

  I'm sorry, what?

• 14:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is that threshold? Who decides it?

• 14:19Bill Nye?

  Well, that's what we call management. Doggone it. So the managers have to be literate enough to know what the acceptable level of risk is and act accordingly.

• 14:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the naive, the naive mind would say, "No risk is acceptable."

• 14:34Bill Nye?

  Oh, no, no. That's not a true fact. That's a false fact.

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a false fact?

• 14:37Bill Nye?

  No, you've been in automobiles.

• 14:40Chuck Nice?

  And there's a risk attached?

• 14:41Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Chuck Nice?

  Especially when I'm driving.

• 14:43Bill Nye?

  Yeah. Well, I'm sure you have a sense that something could go wrong. And these guys, the people who fly in rockets, have a sense that something could go wrong. And I'm very sorry about the Virgin Galactic crash the other day, a surprising result.

• 14:59Bill Nye?

  And one that they will straighten out and that I claim is not just part of the process, but it's part of the management process where you learn what is acceptable. And I think what was going on, changing the subject to the space shuttle in the previous question, a lot of people knew the risk was a lot higher than was advertised and they pressed on anyway. At Virgin Galactic, it looks like perhaps the risk was underestimated. That it's actually more dangerous than than people were saying. Uh, in other words, there wasn't deliberate, deliberate ignoring of the facts. There was ignorance of the facts.

• 15:36Chuck Nice?

  Ignorance.

• 15:37Bill Nye?

  So we'll see what happens.

• 15:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two different reasons.

• 15:39Bill Nye?

  Yeah, why the feather, feathering thing. It's a surprising result why that would cause trouble. And it could have to do, I'm shooting from the hip as an engineer, could have to do the materials involved.

• 15:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is the brakes put on too early, the air brake.

• 15:52Bill Nye?

  Yeah, well, just too high, too many molecules in the atmosphere at that level.

• 15:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 15:58Bill Nye?

  If you'd waited a little longer where you got a fewer molecules per cubic something, you might've been, I'm just working with the data we have. Stay tuned. There are people who are experts at figuring this out.

• 16:08Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Okay.

• 16:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck.

• 16:11Chuck Nice?

  That's very cool. Here we go. This is from Carlos and Carlos is C Diaz on Twitter wants to know this. How easy is rocketry these days? Been tough recently. Do we pretty much have it figured out? Or are we just kind of playing around?

• 16:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me shape that question back to you, Bill. We've been boldly going where hundreds have gone before.

• 16:37Bill Nye?

  I know.

• 16:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Into low earth orbit.

• 16:39Bill Nye?

  Ah.

• 16:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would think that low earth orbit should be zero risk at this point, given how long we've been doing it and how many people have done it. So that if we're going to put lives at risk, it should be by doing something we've never done before. If I were to think of an acceptable risk, it'd be doing something that's never done before, not doing something hundreds have done before you. So we just saw it back in, in November, in October, we saw two disasters, two space that was early November. We saw two disasters, people not even going into orbit.

• 17:13Bill Nye?

  So here's what I'd say to you. You may be mixing, the modern verb is conflating, air traffic, airplane airliner travel with rocket travel. A few hundred is not that many. Right. You think about how many airplanes people tried to build in the early 1900s and how many crashed. How many failed.

• 17:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And from the films, it looks like 100% of them crashed. I saw the film.

• 17:37Bill Nye?

  In other words, a hundred or a thousand isn't that big a sample size, really. And the other constraint, when it comes to the Antares rocket, the Orbital Sciences rocket, that was an old rocket, being repurposed, being refurbished.

• 18:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. This special time capsule episode is a collection of your favorite Cosmic Query moments from all of season six. As you know, Cosmic Queries, they're not every show, maybe once a month, we throw one of those in there. They're fan favorites and we will never stop doing them. And one of your favorite shows, according to your votes, boldly goes where no one has gone before. My co-host, Leanne Lord, and I, by the way, she's a notable Trekkie, answer your questions about all things Star Trek.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  Okay, I have a question from, oh, I think it's Manu, or Manu, I'm not sure, Patrice is the last name. And the question is, it seems to me that the most implausible thing in Star Trek, even harder to think of as a transportation or warp technology, is the fact that the Klingons have become a space traveling civilization without having themselves destroyed before.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  Uh, your stand on this, sir?

• 19:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I have, I take stands on things such as this. Well, okay, so a few things. First, there are, it's been suggested that if you are warlike, let's say, and you're, you're always getting into fights and you're not peaceful. And you are into land grabbing, if you're territorial, that your civilization is, as we say in science, self-limiting.

• 19:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In that, so you'll go out and you'll say, oh, there's a planet I want to conquer. So you go conquer it and then it's your planet. And then your relatives who also want to conquer planets, they conquer. And so you spread out, but then you reach a point where there are no more planets to conquer, then you conquer each other.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 20:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so the, the culture begins to implode on itself because that which got them off their base planet to begin with, ends up having them kill each other to reacquire land that had been obtained by others among their own, their own community. And so that would be a self-limiting future for what would be a warring, land-grabbing culture.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 20:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like modern humans.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I don't know any species like that at all. But I, I.

• 20:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so the, the culture of war and is not inconsistent with the culture of technology. In fact, wars drive science. It's, it's a pain to admit that, but it's true. The urge to survive creates extraordinary creative impulses in people to invent something that will make one person survive better than the other.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and it's usually in the form of weaponry.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, usually.

• 21:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, when the longbow was invented, the longbow, that, the arrow could pierce armor. So it rendered armor completely obsolete. That's why there's no armor anymore.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  Right. Although the three hundred, whoo, I'll take an army of that.

• 21:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, the, uh, the movie, oh, I saw that. Yeah, a lot of buff guys.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Lot of buff guys. Oh, is it warm in here? Okay. But now, you know, but now, now, I, I understand that war, you know, propels technology, but the Klingons, you know, to his question, wouldn't they, wouldn't they have killed themselves before they even got off the planet? I mean, they didn't, but shouldn't they have?

• 21:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, sure, but this is science fiction.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  I forget that. I act as if these are real people that I'm having over to dinner.

• 21:52Speaker 03

  I have a great question from Matt Ruffo. Which ship is better? Is it the USS Enterprise or the ship of the imagination? I know, it's so unfair.

• 22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know. I am so biased here.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  Yes, you are. What are the odds?

• 22:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I mean, if anyone who is listening doesn't know the ship of the imagination, it's what I got around in, around the cosmos, in space and in time. During Cosmos. And that's, that's, that's the spaceship of the imagination version two. The original one Carl Sagan rode around the universe in, back in 1980. So I would say, you have to ask, is there anything the Enterprise can do that the spaceship of the imagination can't do? No, spaceship of the imagination does not have photon torpedoes or, or phasers or anything like that because it doesn't need it.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wherever it arrives, there is peace and love.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  You know, I thought the answer for that would be really easy, but it's not.

• 23:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, it's, it's, I think, and, and because it emanates from my thoughts, the ship, there's a cool scene where I'm, I'm on there talking about the extinction of the dinosaurs and I just walk to the side of the ship. The ship dissolves and I'm in the primordial forest because that's what I needed the ship to do for me. So if the ship emanates from my thoughts and my thoughts are eternally peaceful.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Fingers crossed.

• 23:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't need photon torpedoes.

• 23:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't need a transporter.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  As, as I'm, you know, remembering when Sagan introduced the concept, it, it seems a little bit more democratic and universal. Not everybody gets to be on the Enterprise, but anybody can be on the ship of the imagination.

• 23:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People have a tendency to get all riled up, especially those on the left, the political left, that is, whenever anyone drops the G-word, and I'm talking about GMOs. Our fans had so many questions about genetically modified organisms that we had to make a cosmic query into two parts on GMOs. Guest host Bill Nye sits in for me with comedian Chuck Nice to help inform you about this often misunderstood but definitely controversial topic. Check it out.

• 24:19Chuck Nice?

  This is from Inquiring Minds. "Bill, you talk a lot about GMOs. You changed your mind. Is Monsanto paying you?"

• 24:28Bill Nye?

  No. In fact, we went out to dinner the other day. My editor Cory-

• 24:32Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I thought you meant you and Monsanto.

• 24:34Bill Nye?

  And Rob Fraley.

• 24:36Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, that may count, Bill.

• 24:38Bill Nye?

  No, no. So there were four of us at dinner, two Monsantoans. And Rob Fraley shakes your hand. He says, "Hi, I'm Monsatton."

• 24:44Chuck Nice?

  Ah, that's funny.

• 24:45Bill Nye?

  He hears all that stuff. And, uh, no, we, each team bought its own dinner.

• 24:51Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 24:52Bill Nye?

  Okay. So however, when I visited Monsanto-

• 24:55Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 24:56Bill Nye?

  They offered me a sandwich and a cup of coffee, and I enjoyed both. But I flew myself there. I mean, in an airplane.

• 25:03Chuck Nice?

  Here's the real question. Did that sandwich have genetically modified vegetables on it?

• 25:09Bill Nye?

  Sure, you can't avoid them. Absolutely.

• 25:10Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 25:11Bill Nye?

  Uh, so, uh, by the way, I went to an anti-Monsanto rally here in New York City.

• 25:17Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 25:18Bill Nye?

  And I was really impressed by how thoughtless and, uh, short-sighted the people there were.

• 25:24Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 25:25Bill Nye?

  It was really something. I, I never, I just didn't realize. They got to the point, now Chuck, I don't know your political leanings, but it got to the point where they wanted you to believe that the President of the United States-

• 25:37Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:38Bill Nye?

  -is controlled by Monsanto.

• 25:39Chuck Nice?

  Well, isn't he? Come on.

• 25:41Bill Nye?

  Yeah, and so that he's actually-

• 25:43Chuck Nice?

  Please, he's a Kenyan Muslim-

• 25:44Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 25:45Chuck Nice?

  Socialist.

• 25:46Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 25:47Chuck Nice?

  He might as well be controlled by the United States Monsanto people, too.

• 25:49Bill Nye?

  And, uh, as people point out, Monsanto is in the top 500, Fortune 500 companies, but it's not in the top five. It's way down, like, at two, 200 or so.

• 25:59Chuck Nice?

  So they're not even that big.

• 26:00Bill Nye?

  But I mean, they're big, but-

• 26:01Chuck Nice?

  Not that big.

• 26:02Bill Nye?

  They're not, they're not as big as Apple, or, or-

• 26:04Chuck Nice?

  Or Beyonce.

• 26:05Bill Nye?

  Or, or, yes, or Beyonce.

• 26:10Chuck Nice?

  What kind of research has been done to show what effects GMOs do or do not have on humans?

• 26:18Bill Nye?

  Well, this is exactly the point. This is, uh, thank you Cory, is that his name?

• 26:23Chuck Nice?

  That is Cory Garst from Google Plus.

• 26:25Bill Nye?

  Yes, uh, from out there. Uh, so what they, we, it has done is, that is the one thing you can test, is the effects of food. I mean, that's one straightforward thing you can test that's, that's not that different from 20 years ago. You feed the food to your good friends, the lab rats.

• 26:43Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 26:44Bill Nye?

  Yeah, and you, and the mice, and you say, what do you think?

• 26:46Chuck Nice?

  Right, so.

• 26:47Bill Nye?

  Steve, if that's his name.

• 26:49Chuck Nice?

  That's the mouse's name, Steve.

• 26:51Bill Nye?

  Henrietta.

• 26:52Chuck Nice?

  Right, as long as it's not Mickey, you're fine.

• 26:53Bill Nye?

  Uh, I think Mickey's really hard to.

• 26:57Chuck Nice?

  That's a hard lab rat to have, Mickey.

• 26:59Bill Nye?

  Well, to kill would be really hard.

• 27:01Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah, well, for some.

• 27:02Bill Nye?

  So, the thing is, uh, there's no, the genetically modified food has no effect on us. I mean, that is to say, there's no difference between it and organically raised food. This is scientifically provable.

• 27:13Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 27:14Bill Nye?

  It's certainly provable to my satisfaction. And, uh, that's like the most straightforward thing about it, is to see if it's still as nutritious, and see if, see if it has any allergic effect, and it absolutely does not. In fact, in general, all of these foods are more nutritious. They're.

• 27:31Chuck Nice?

  Well, now that, now see, that is the first time I've ever heard that assertion made.

• 27:34Bill Nye?

  Well, just in general. I mean, you get more soybean per hectare, per acre.

• 27:38Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I got you.

• 27:39Bill Nye?

  You get more corn per acre, per hectare, you get bigger kernels of corn.

• 27:43Chuck Nice?

  So, from a voluminous standpoint?

• 27:45Bill Nye?

  Well, not just that, if you're gonna, if the, if the bushel of corn weighs so many kilos or pounds, how much of that is nutritious corn, and how much of that is cob, unedible, inedible cob?

• 27:57Chuck Nice?

  Okay, that's a very good point.

• 27:58Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yes, you get a lot more.

• 27:59Chuck Nice?

  You get a lot more, uh, kernel than cob.

• 28:01Bill Nye?

  Yeah, and that's in that one example, the famous example.

• 28:04Chuck Nice?

  Got you.

• 28:05Bill Nye?

  So then, the other thing that's happened. With genetically modified foods, and this may be in the in the future queries. The other thing that's happened is it's led to the success of this technology of allowing you to put glyphosate on fields and then plant things like crazy, is people have raised enormous tracts of land in a single crop because it's easier.

• 28:26Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 28:26Bill Nye?

  And this is so-called monoculture. And this has had two things. First of all, you you lose diversity in your farming, which leads to a loss of diversity in the microbes that support plants and a loss of diversity in the rate at which different pollinatable flowers appear. This is to say.

• 28:47Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 28:47Bill Nye?

  If all the soybean plants come to go to flower at the same time, the bees have to work that whole deal.

• 28:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:55Bill Nye?

  They can't go from this plant to that plant to this plant. You'll notice the cherry blossoms show up first.

• 29:00Chuck Nice?

  Right, and then.

• 29:01Bill Nye?

  That's their trick.

• 29:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 29:02Bill Nye?

  So the bees and everybody, they show up and do.

• 29:04Chuck Nice?

  They're like, hey, you know, we're doing cherry blossoms right now.

• 29:06Bill Nye?

  Can we say do on this show?

• 29:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 29:08Bill Nye?

  Do, they're doing the cherry blossom.

• 29:10Chuck Nice?

  Come on, you know, birds do what bees do.

• 29:11Bill Nye?

  That's right. Then the John Coles show up, then the daffodils, and there's a sequence that has come to be the resolution.

• 29:17Chuck Nice?

  By the way, clearly the whores of the plant world, the daffodils, but I'm just saying.

• 29:22Bill Nye?

  It's just on your mind. It's just on your mind. I mean, nothing's anything wrong with that, whatever you're into, consenting adult, it's all good, harvestable plants, fine. No, so, uh, this has led to monoculture, but I I go along with the idea, I mean, I no, I claim that the success of genetic modification with respect to glyphosate herbicide does not necessarily mean you plant a monoculture and stress out bee colonies.

• 29:52Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 29:53Bill Nye?

  You could, that's not the cause and effect.

• 29:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Zombies, ghosts, vampires. This past Halloween, Bill Nye the Science Guy and comedian Chuck Nice sat down to dissect the science of these myths and legends in a cosmic query show all about monsters. Check it out.

• 30:14Chuck Nice?

  Since we're talking about zombies, Zach has a great little question I'd like to-

• 30:18Bill Nye?

  What is with the zombie thing anymore, but let's, Zach hit me with the question.

• 30:22Chuck Nice?

  Zach is a, this is a great question, I wanna, I wanna get your take on this, man. Zach wants to know, Bill, out of zombies, vampires, and ghosts, which do you believe is the most plausible and why? See, I love this question because I know you don't believe in any of them.

• 30:39Bill Nye?

  Well, but vampires, it's obviously vampires.

• 30:41Chuck Nice?

  Why?

• 30:42Bill Nye?

  Because they're vampire bats and they're mosquitoes. They make their living sucking your blood. And now vampire bats to suck cow blood.

• 30:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, they lap up cow blood.

• 30:52Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but they're good at it. And so that's, so of those three, if I gotta pick those three, it's definitely vampires.

• 30:58Chuck Nice?

  Well, because they exist, vampiric animals exist.

• 31:02Bill Nye?

  Obviously, look, you guys, you can't see him, it's radio, but he is into it right now.

• 31:06Chuck Nice?

  Because- Bill, Bill, Bill! I know, because you're, you're making it too scientific. Of course they exist, but we're talking about the plausibility of the undead versus the plausibility of, um, a being who is possessed by an eternal, eternal demon that gives it a bloodlust in order to sustain itself.

• 31:29Bill Nye?

  Wow, quite the authority on that one.

• 31:31Chuck Nice?

  And then of course, uh, the plausibility of the imprint of a human being still resonating after that person ceases to exist in their earthly body. So of the three of those, which of those would make more sense?

• 31:48Bill Nye?

  I'd, I'll say again, sucking somebody else's blood for nutrition is the most reasonable of those three. Because you watch people, it's, look, it's sad.

• 31:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 31:58Bill Nye?

  And I will be there myself, but as people get older and lose, many of us lose our faculties, it just doesn't seem like that young go-get-'em spirit lives on in some ghostly entity. It just seems like you wind down and you die, which sucks, I mean, first to admit, it sucks. Then that's the ghost thing, and then the zombie thing, well, if you ever met my old boss.

• 32:23Bill Nye?

  No, but people taking drugs to act stupid, there's a lot of that. Or unable to form sentences, there's a lot of that.

• 32:30Chuck Nice?

  I was about to say, now, when you look at drug use, I, there's some zombies out there.

• 32:34Bill Nye?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 32:35Chuck Nice?

  There's some real zombies.

• 32:36Bill Nye?

  But there are animals that make a living sucking other animals' blood.

• 32:41Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:41Bill Nye?

  Because it's full of all the nutrients you would ever need, animal-wise.

• 32:44Chuck Nice?

  Yes, and, you know, I gotta say, I, I once had an iron-poor diet, and I, you know.

• 32:48Bill Nye?

  Ah, I can't hear you.

• 32:51Bill Nye?

  Lead on, Chuck, next monster-based cosmic query.

• 32:54Chuck Nice?

  Oh, God, this is so much fun, I love it.

• 32:59Chuck Nice?

  Have you ever considered that zombie-type virus, so he's talking from a virulent standpoint, might actually be beneficial to long space flights? Let me tell you something, this is a pretty cool question.

• 33:11Bill Nye?

  Okay, well, you'd get suspended animation from a zombie virus.

• 33:13Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 33:13Bill Nye?

  Or zombie drug.

• 33:15Chuck Nice?

  So, so, so with that, yeah.

• 33:16Bill Nye?

  See, there's something to be learned, perhaps, from the zombies.

• 33:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, I mean, what do you think about that?

• 33:20Bill Nye?

  Oh, it's very reasonable that you could have an infection, something that would affect your genes, that would allow you to live a long time, or allow you to doze off, but you'd want to undo it, you'd want an antidote.

• 33:33Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 33:34Bill Nye?

  And when, and just, he specifically used the word "virus."

• 33:37Chuck Nice?

  Yes, he did, he said a zombie virus.

• 33:38Bill Nye?

  Antiviral drugs are trouble, they don't work all as effectively, in the same way that antibiotic drugs work.

• 33:47Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 33:48Bill Nye?

  But I follow you, but you'd want to be able to undo it, and you'd want to count on your crewmates to undo it for you, or, maybe, you understand it so well that this virus infects you, and you go to sleep at lunch.

• 34:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:01Bill Nye?

  And then your body takes years to overcome the virus, and then you wake up ready to play.

• 34:06Chuck Nice?

  So it's kind of like a, uh...

• 34:08Bill Nye?

  Could be.

• 34:09Chuck Nice?

  Uh, what do they call that, an induced coma?

• 34:11Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 34:12Chuck Nice?

  The vi- a viral induced coma?

• 34:14Bill Nye?

  A space-travel-virus-coma thing.

• 34:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. Today, we're reaching back into season six, The Archives, to listen to some of your favorite memories from our Cosmic Queries episodes. In this next show, co-host Chuck Nice and I were joined in studio by biological anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher to answer all of your questions about the science and love of sex. Dr. Fisher is a fellow at the famous Kinsey Institute, and she's the chief scientific advisor at none other than Match.com. So if your last Valentine's Day didn't quite go as planned, you just might want to take a listen. Check it out.

• 35:21Chuck Nice?

  Why does love hurt?

• 35:24Speaker 04

  Oh, boy.

• 35:24Chuck Nice?

  Boom. That's all he asked, but I gotta say, that's pretty prolific what he just said. He just asked.

• 35:30Speaker 04

  It really does. So, we've put a lot of people into a scanner who've just been dumped. And the brain regions that become active when you've been dumped is three brain regions linked with intense craving, a brain region linked with physical pain.

• 35:42Chuck Nice?

  Physical pain.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  Uh, physical pain, a brain region, and actually aspirin helps when you're rejected in love. There's an academic article on that.

• 35:50Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 35:50Speaker 04

  And also anxiety that goes along with the physical pain. And you're also brain regions linked with trying to figure out what went wrong, the costs, the benefits, what happened here. And I think so the brain is in overdrive. It is in, it's in a terrible state. This is why we have all these crimes of passion, you know? And why does it hurt? It hurts because you've lost, once I said, you know, life's greatest prize, a mating partner. You've, you've lost the ability to pass your DNA on to eternity. I think nature overdid it, to be perfectly honest. We really, we really suffer terribly. And there's basically two stages of getting rejected. The first is protest. You just try to win the person back. You'll try to seduce. You'll try to threaten.

• 36:29Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  You'll, you'll try to make them jealous and all that.

• 36:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 36:32Speaker 04

  And then you slip into this incredible depression.

• 36:34Chuck Nice?

  Unless you get them back.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  And then, then you get them back.

• 36:37Chuck Nice?

  In which case you slip into indifference. It's like, why did I ever want you in the

• 36:42Chuck Nice?

  Why do I keep doing this?

• 36:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've heard that other people say this.

• 36:44Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 36:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Read about it, Chuck.

• 36:48Speaker 04

  But I, I think it hurts.

• 36:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  She thinks it's a real part of the brain center that is responsible.

• 36:51Speaker 04

  No question about it. Big parts of the brain become incredibly overactive. You know, you can't eat, you can't sleep, you can't stop crying.

• 36:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's disruptive to your human physiology?

• 37:00Speaker 04

  Yes, and to your social relations.

• 37:03Chuck Nice?

  So lovesick is an actual sick?

• 37:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an actual sick.

• 37:05Speaker 04

  And you can die from being rejected.

• 37:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, don't tell me you die from a broken heart.

• 37:10Speaker 04

  You die from, um, heart attacks and strokes.

• 37:12Chuck Nice?

  So the stress.

• 37:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so your heart did break.

• 37:14Chuck Nice?

  A great deal of anxiety. Stress actually manifests itself physically. And you end up dying of a stroke or a heart attack because of.

• 37:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, it drives up the dopamine system in the beginning. That gives you all that energy and focus and motivation and craving. And then after a while, you can't get them, you finally give up, and you slip into sort of a profound depression.

• 37:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, as a corollary to this, there are people who are in love with people they've never met.

• 37:37Speaker 04

  Yes, isn't that.

• 37:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now, are they, they're not the.

• 37:40Speaker 04

  Practicing.

• 37:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're not the mating partner that they got to know intimately.

• 37:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But nonetheless, the sentiment is still there.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  It's a crush. It's most largely teenagers, but it can be somebody at work you don't ever dare come close to, but you know, you, you feel all that. It'll go away.

• 37:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're grown, I agree with the teenager thing, but isn't that more women? And when you get older, it's the male stalker of the, of the women, of the women?

• 38:02Speaker 04

  No, um, men fall in love faster than women do. Uh, they fall in love more often than women do. Uh, when they meet somebody that they really like, they wanna, uh, introduce them to friends and family sooner. Men wanna move in sooner. Men have more intimate conversations with their wives than women do with their husbands, because women have their intimate conversations with their girlfriends. And men are two and a half times more likely to kill themselves when a relationship is over. So, men are the more.

• 38:24Chuck Nice?

  Wow, so basically.

• 38:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh wait, just to be clear, I think we're, we're more likely to commit suicide in all categories.

• 38:30Speaker 04

  Probably, yes.

• 38:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think so.

• 38:31Speaker 04

  Yes, and homicide, you know.

• 38:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 38:33Speaker 04

  It's a more delicate.

• 38:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Men are just completely messed up.

• 38:35Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, it sounds to me like we're a bunch of love pussies. That's what it comes down to. Oh my God, I can't live without you.

• 38:43Speaker 04

  Women are pretty bad, believe me. I've had them on my couch.

• 38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, okay, so we've established it's a, it's, it's real.

• 38:52Speaker 04

  It's real.

• 38:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pain is real, is not imagined.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  Nobody gets out of it.

• 38:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't just say, "Get over it." It's like breaking your leg and saying, "Get over it."

• 38:57Speaker 04

  Exactly. As a matter of fact, a week later, you can't remember any physical, uh, pain in your tooth, but a week later, you're still really suffering from romantic rejection.

• 39:06Chuck Nice?

  Dan Larkins on Facebook wants to know this. If evolution favors individuals who seek out the strongest and the best suited mates to pass on their genes, is there a biological advantage to falling in love over choosing the most advantageous partner gene-wise? No insult intended to my beloved.

• 39:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 39:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 39:26Chuck Nice?

  Right, Dan, there you go.

• 39:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, so that's, that's a pretty clean question. So, if you just want to propagate a survival, you pick the person and then you do that, why does it, what's love got to do with it?

• 39:35Chuck Nice?

  Why do we fall in love with a guy who looks like the Penguin from Batman? And he's not rich, and you're a supermodel? How does that even?

• 39:43Speaker 04

  That doesn't happen too often. Basically...

• 39:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you, thank you for your honesty. Thank you.

• 39:50Speaker 04

  I mean, penguins go for penguins.

• 39:54Speaker 04

  I mean, we don't, we don't tend to fall in love with somebody with the same socioeconomic background, same general level of intelligence, same general level of good looks, same religious and social values. We do draw, we are drawn to people to some extent like ourselves.

• 40:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but that's environmental, of course. Your, your religion that you're born into is, you're born into it.

• 40:10Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly.

• 40:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? And so socioeconomic, those are the people you hang out with.

• 40:13Speaker 04

  But I do think, you know, people who are very novelty-seeking and risk-taking go for people like themselves. People who are very traditional go for people like themselves.

• 40:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Helen, except some of the greatest stories ever told were people falling in love who were completely not the same anything.

• 40:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 40:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From Romeo and Juliet to, to, and, and, and...

• 40:32Speaker 04

  Well, to Hillary and Bill Clinton. I mean, Hillary's high testosterone and Bill is, I think, high estrogen. You know?

• 40:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, look at that. Snaps. Right, so, so I can't accept the blanket statement that people tend, I mean, yes, statistically perhaps, but the exceptions to that are so extraordinary...

• 40:49Speaker 04

  So, sociologic...

• 40:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As it could be a lesson to us all.

• 40:52Speaker 04

  There's always exceptions.

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  We are an animal that's flexible. No question about it.

• 40:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 40:56Speaker 04

  An environment always plays a role.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Finally, your number one favorite cosmic query episode, according to your votes, Colonizing Mars. Let's see what co-host Chuck Nice and I do with your Martian-themed queries.

• 41:12Chuck Nice?

  When the New York Yankees play a road series against the Mars cosmos. How big will the outfield have to be to prevent everybody from hitting home runs? Also, will the pitcher throw faster in the atmosphere or slower? And will he or she, this guy's very liberal.

• 41:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice.

• 41:35Chuck Nice?

  He's got a female pitcher in the major league interstellar.

• 41:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interplanetary.

• 41:42Chuck Nice?

  Interplanetary, not interstellar, interplanetary baseball league. Will he or she be able to throw a curve ball?

• 41:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm. A couple of things don't change and other things do.

• 41:53Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 41:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The pitcher does not throw faster because that's just their musculoskeletal capacity to do so.

• 41:59Chuck Nice?

  Alright.

• 42:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The ball will not slow down as much between release of the fingertip and crossing home plate. Because the air is thinner. And there's air resistance to the ball.

• 42:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That slows it down. I don't know, maybe 10 miles an hour, whatever it is, 5 miles an hour. It's not traveling for very long, so, but it will slow down a little bit. It does that in the majors. Uh, it will do that on Mars, but it will slow down by a little bit less.

• 42:25Chuck Nice?

  A little bit less.

• 42:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's not the major thing going on here. The Martian atmosphere is very thin. It's like 1% of our thickness. And it's the air, the movement of the ball through the air that enables it to curve.

• 42:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So curve balls would be very hard on Mars.

• 42:42Chuck Nice?

  Because you don't have the air or the thickness of the air.

• 42:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The thickness of the air.

• 42:46Chuck Nice?

  For those, those, what do they call it? Stitches?

• 42:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stitches, yes.

• 42:50Chuck Nice?

  Right? Is that what they call?

• 42:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that what they call the stitches on a ball?

• 42:53Chuck Nice?

  The stitches?

• 42:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They call it the stitches.

• 42:55Chuck Nice?

  The stitches? Do they call the stitches on the ball a stitches? But, you know, that's what's causing that rotation.

• 43:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it assists it. Even if it didn't have stitches, you'd still have some, you could still move it, right?

• 43:06Chuck Nice?

  Oh, really? Okay.

• 43:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The stitches help it, definitely.

• 43:08Chuck Nice?

  But without the, the thickness of the air, you can't get that movement?

• 43:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, you don't get as much movement.

• 43:14Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 43:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't get as much movement. Now, it is windy on Mars, so you could throw an awesome knuckleball.

• 43:21Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 43:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because knuckleballs don't rotate, and so they're not stable moving through the air.

• 43:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rotating things are stabilized.

• 43:27Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, that's why football's, a rotating football is stable.

• 43:31Chuck Nice?

  It's spinning.

• 43:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spinning. Okay, so, a, a knuckleball does not spin, therefore it is susceptible to any possible puff of air.

• 43:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That comes across its path.

• 43:40Chuck Nice?

  So you could use a, a windy day knuckleball to create the, the, the effect of a curve ball?

• 43:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, yeah, but it, it'll, it'll curve in a way that you can't predict. And that's why catchers are always dropping knuckleballs. Cause they don't know where the hell they, the, you know, the, the ball's jiggling and wiggling and it comes in. And so, uh, the number of pass balls, pass knuckleballs by a, by a catcher is huge relative to other pitchers.

• 44:08Chuck Nice?

  Cause it's a surprise ball.

• 44:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a surprise ball for everybody.

• 44:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 44:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even the pitcher. A curve ball, the catcher calls for the curve ball.

• 44:14Chuck Nice?

  Right, so he knows what he's doing.

• 44:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they know where it's coming. So, so those are.

• 44:17Chuck Nice?

  This is what I love, this is what I love about you, man. I mean this, I, I swear to God. See, thi- this is what's great. We're talking about baseball on Mars, but yet you know all this crap about baseball. Well, cause how does this happen?

• 44:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you know what it is? It's not like, I mean, but I like, who does, I'm, I'm a red-blooded American. I like me some baseball and hot dogs, okay? And apple pie.

• 44:39Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 44:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just start there.

• 44:40Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 44:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now the rest of it is just cause I go to a baseball game and I'm curious about it. Like I just ask questions of the game and of myself relevant to the game.

• 44:49Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 44:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So for example, I say to myself, suppose you're hit by a pitch on ball four.

• 44:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 44:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You ought to be able to go to second base.

• 45:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right?

• 45:04Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 45:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying.

• 45:05Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, true.

• 45:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying.

• 45:07Chuck Nice?

  No, that makes sense when you think about it.

• 45:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just, this is the kind of questions I asked about the game.

• 45:11Chuck Nice?

  That's very funny, yeah.

• 45:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, now.

• 45:13Chuck Nice?

  We gotta get that rule in baseball. That's awesome.

• 45:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now, uh, how far, how big a stadium would you have to make? Martian gravity is about 40% of Earth's gravity.

• 45:23Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 45:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you weigh a hundred pounds on Earth, you weigh 40 pounds on, or 38 pounds on Mars.

• 45:27Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 45:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So 200 pounds, you weigh 80 pounds, which is great because the muscles that you have for carrying a 200-pound body, uh, will now be operating in an 80-pound body. So you'd be able to jump higher. Okay. Yeah. Be able, yeah, so there's, so maybe you'd make the infield a little bigger because you'd be leaping. Uh, you know, you'd have to sort of adjust that, but there'd be some trial and error on this. To get the ideal field size. Now, when you hit a homerun, the ball is doing two things. It's going forward and it's going upwards. Right. Okay. And then it finishes going upwards and then it starts coming downwards while it's still going forwards. Right. Each of those have a different effect, okay? How far you, how fast you can hit the thing going forward has nothing to do with being on Mars. Okay.

• 46:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's just how, how fast did you swing it back? That's your, that's your swing strength. It's your swing strength. Now, the Mars, the ball going up, okay? The same force will have the ball go higher. Correct. Than on Earth, which means it will travel farther simply because it'll go higher. Right. All right. And so you gotta do the ma, I haven't done the math on that. Well, yeah. I don't have, if I were to guess, uh, you know, make it forty percent bigger. I mean, just as a first cut. As a general rule. Just a first cut. First cut. And probably if I do the math, there are some adjustments in there. Right. So a four hundred dead center field, a forty percent greater than that would be a hundred and sixty more feet. And is that right? Yeah, four times, yeah, a hundred and sixty more feet. So it'd be five hundred and sixty feet dead center. Right.

• 46:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to recreate the same likelihood of a. Of a homerun. Now, now, now, that means outfield is huge. Right. Which means you gotta have some fast outfielders. That is true. You might have to add two more outfielders to it. Yeah, that's exactly. It fans out from home plate. Right. So if you, if it's, if it's five hundred and sixty dead center, you know, you're, you're gonna be missing a lot of balls. Yeah. Be like Little League, you add a fourth outfielder.

• 47:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You might need two more outfielders. Dude, that's amazing. And, and a shoestring catch would be awesome because you would jump and you just keep going. Just keep going. Exactly. Just out of the stadium, into, into the locker room. What a catch, any's in the showers. That's fantastic, man. Hey, Steven, what a fascinating question. There you go. That was great. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. Join me next time to help kick off a brand-new season with more science, more comedy, and more pop culture, because that's how we roll. That's all for now, and as always, Neil deGrasse Tyson here, bidding you to keep looking up.