Season 8 Time Capsule (Part 2)

Neil deGrasse Tyson guides us through this year's favorite Cosmic Queries episodes, with Matt O’ Dowd, Bill Nye, Godfrey, Chuck Nice, John Allen Paulos, James Kakalios, and Harrison Greenbaum talking about quantum physics, planetary defense, cosmic phenomena and more! NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/season-8-time-capsule-part-2/

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host and your personal astrophysicist. I'm also director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. Tonight, we give you the final episode of StarTalk's eighth season. It's part two of our annual time capsule. Of course, we sent out a survey to you, our fans, and you got back to us with all your favorite episodes, favorite co-hosts and guests over the year. And we use those data to choose which episodes to splice together in the single potpourri of StarTalk's best moments. This week, we focus only on our cosmic query episodes. You sent in your queries about the cosmos, and I did my best to answer.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On your number one favorite cosmic query episode, according to your votes, we took your questions about all things spacetime. My comedic co-host was the one and only Godfrey. Check it out.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  You ready?

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, go.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  This guy, his interesting last name, Jeff Sostarek. It might, because it's like, I think it's Polish. Sostarek. I don't know. He's from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gotcha.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Is there anywhere in the universe where you can find a zero?

• 1:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Usually, yes.

• 1:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No matter what follows in that question, the answer is probably yes. Okay? Is there, the universe is large, it's old, and stuff happens in the universe.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Where you can find a zero state of energy, perhaps where even the cosmic background radiation does not permeate. Man, these questions are something else. They're challenging you, man.

• 1:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that would be, that would be an absolute zero. We, as far as we know, the vacuum of space is a seething ocean of what we call virtual particles that are, that are predicted by quantum physics. And quantum physics has been right in every other way it's ever made a prediction, so we have high confidence that what it's saying is true. But as long as you have particles, even in the vacuum, there's going to be an energy level there, and you never actually get to... Perfect zero energy because of the quantum. And so the quantum prevents it. We would need some higher theory of understanding of the universe that might enclose quantum physics. That will enable us to get to places that our current understanding does not.

• 2:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But right now, there's no way to get to a perfect zero energy. Because every state, even the zero energy state, has a probability of having real energy.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Quantum physics requires it.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Hmm. Nah.

• 2:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, quantum physics, everything bows to quantum physics.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Always.

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the end of the day.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, invisible math, man.

• 3:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Invis- where you get this from? Invisible math? There's math that can describe invisible things?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  That's what I mean.

• 3:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the math itself is not invisible.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  I like calling it.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where are you getting this? No, I'm not accepting.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Invisible, man.

• 3:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not accepting it.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Matemáticas de invisiblemente. That did that did that. No, no, nothing.

• 3:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not going there.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  No, you don't like to call it invisible math?

• 3:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  I love it calling it.

• 3:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's not there.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Well, I call it, it's invisible to me because I don't want to see it.

• 3:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, because you look the other way.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  That's why I call it invisible. Because I suck at it.

• 3:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's the fun part, here's the fun part.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  I suck at it.

• 3:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We observe weird stuff happening in the lab.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And for people who hate math, this must freak them out. So we have scientists of the day saying, hmm, let's attach math to this to make it easier. So we can bring, bring some understanding to it. So the mathematics of quantum physics is an extraordinary achievement of the human mind.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  It's, it's, yeah, that's another brain that you, that's something, I don't have that.

• 4:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but maybe you did and you, it still has to be found.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  You think that I could bring that out? I can get good at quantum physics?

• 4:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Mathematics?

• 4:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can all always get better.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  No, I think.

• 4:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whether or not we can become great at anything, we can always become better at it.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  You're naturally good at math. I don't think, I think it's a natural knack. It is. There's people I knew in grade school, like some, some guys I knew and girls that would just do, they didn't even study. They didn't even study. I had to use the teacher's example and flip the page over to do a math.

• 4:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To look at the, at the answer in the back of the book.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  My friends were just certain guys, they were just naturally good at it. You know that. Come on, you're naturally good at math.

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd, I spent a lot of time at home reading books on math.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does that mean I'm naturally good? Does that mean I'm naturally curious? And I happen to apply that curiosity to math and therefore got higher grades in math than you did? What were you doing when you went home after school?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  I was confused. So I just kept watching cartoons, man. You know what I mean? And there's stuff that you were reading, you were probably reading.

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was reading.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  The theoretical stuff about mathematics.

• 5:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was reading math, yeah, I was reading.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  You naturally have an inclination for that, because you were naturally gifted for math. That's what it is.

• 5:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had a curiosity in childhood that I, that never left me.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Guess what I wa- I watched comedies, man.

• 5:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I so did, I loved, I loved.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  You love comedy too, you're a funny guy. But I continued my funniness in that way, comedian, you funny guy, but astrophysicist. Because you're amazing at math, and invisible math. Because you see the invisibility of, okay.

• 5:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You made your case.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Are you ready?

• 5:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, what's the next question?

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Nicholas Lambert, Facebook. Why is dark matter presumed to exist when modified Newtonian dynamics is able to account for most of the missing mass? Have physicists forgotten the principle of Occam's razor?

• 5:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Occam's razor.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Occam's razor, there was like, I think it was Earl of Occam?

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 5:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  British fellow. I think he was British. Who uttered the following words. Multiplicity ought not be posited without simplicity.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is, what he means is, I think I got that quote right. What he means is, if you have an explanation for something.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is long and complicated.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And someone else has a really simple explanation.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The simplest explanation is probably the correct one.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Gotcha.

• 6:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all, okay? So for example, let's take, uh, epilepsy.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before we understood epilepsy, there you are writhing on the ground, and so people had an argument for it. Well, the creator of the universe.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 6:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, has a nemesis called the devil, and that devil has occupied the body of this particular person because of the things this person has done.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? Or the brain is misfiring in its neurosynapses. Okay, so this, this is what we're contending with.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so there you have it. So, uh, in the movie The Exorcist. It's like, this is the 21st century, the 20th century, I think. Um, we got this one. Alright, so, uh, the, the notion there is, there is a modify, you, if you modify Newton's equations of gravity, then you don't need to posit dark matter to explain things in the universe. And it would mean that our understanding of gravity was flawed in this way, where when we corrected it, we wouldn't need to invoke this magical mystical thing called dark matter. And so it turns out, you can, can modify Newton's laws of gravity to explain some

• 7:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  of the places where dark matter was otherwise invoked. There are other places where it fails completely. And we have no way around that. We don't, with the modify, you can't modify Newton's gravity in the same way to account for it. And so that's why we all haven't jumped on the bandwagon, adding terms to Newton's equations of gravity. That's why.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Awesome, awesome, I'm gonna keep going.

• 8:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  I like that one.

• 8:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go for it.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Here we go, Adrian Gray Martson from California.

• 8:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  California.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  We currently can go, we can, wait, I'm sorry, we currently can only go forward in time with regards to black hole tricknology. Given.

• 8:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tricknology.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Tricknology, whoa. Given what little we know about dark matter and dark energy, being our physics opposite, do you think our future insights and education on all things dark will grant the option to move backwards in time?

• 8:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Ooh, all things dark.

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Alright.

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and black hole techno, what is it? Black hole tech.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  It's black hole tricknology.

• 8:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tricknology, okay, so it turns out, uh, if you, you can warp the fabric of space and time. By the way, I have been told this, I have not double-checked the math. These are people whose math, in other cases, I trust implicitly. Uh, so that there's a configuration of curved spacetime, where if you go around a black hole in a particular trajectory.

• 9:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And come back around another one, you can actually go back in your own spacetime. And so effectively go backwards in time.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's it's still a little bit mysterious to me. Okay, I got people who do this. I'm not the one who does it.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, as a colleague of mine, Jay Richard Gott III, who I actually am co-author on in a book that was just released.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Princeton University Press.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  There it is. What's the title?

• 9:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The title is Welcome to the Universe.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An Astrophysical Tour.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Ow!

• 9:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just at a local bookstore near you.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  I'm gonna get it.

• 9:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, no, so in there, he talks about these solutions to Einstein's equations where you go back in time. But they involve very exotic trajectories. The point is, the bigger point of the of the question is, we've got dark matter. We don't know anything about it. Dark energy, we don't know anything about it. And who knows what else we don't know anything about?

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's kind of the fun part of not knowing about something. Not even knowing that you don't know about something.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so with all of this, could it be that once all of that's figured out, we can have access to the past? I can't rule that out. I will not rule that out. Almost everything we've discovered that came about from profound ignorance has transformed civilization. Think about the discovery of electricity.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Phew.

• 10:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What it has done.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the probably the greatest thing to ever happen to civilization.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  I can't even imagine not having.

• 10:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Imagine.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  I can't even imagine not plugging stuff in.

• 10:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plugging stuff in, flicking a switch.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Flicking a switch.

• 10:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Don't know how it works, don't care, it's here.

• 10:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not even and it's and we've made it into something that's not even only about light. Movies and.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Movies, just.

• 11:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every everything, okay. So, this is harnessing something that previously we ran away from or didn't understand. So, so I look forward to a future where dark matter and dark energy come to be understood. But then, that only puts us in a new place to stand, possibly observing new unknowns that today are yet to be dreamt of.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every now and then, fan queries are related to a specific topic outside of my expertise. And so I gotta call in an expert or two to help delve in a little bit deeper. Such was the case with one of your favorite episodes of the season about higher dimensions. Joining me in studio was mathematician and good friend John Allen Paulos. And via Skype, we had physicist and superhero expert James Kakalios. In the StarTalk co-host seat for the first time was comedian Harrison Greenbaum. Let's take a listen. Bring it on.

• 12:01Harrison Greenbaum?

  All right.

• 12:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bring it on. And I got two experts here. I could just like go to the Bahamas right now because we got all the expertise you need for higher dimensions. And so much of people's access to higher dimensions and knowledge of higher dimensions comes from superhero movies. So let's see what you got.

• 12:14Harrison Greenbaum?

  Yeah. So the first question comes from our Patreon. So thank you for

• 12:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Patreons, okay.

• 12:18Harrison Greenbaum?

  For supporting us. And this one is from Orlando, Florida. So he's near a superhero theme park. We've seen compelling theories that postulate everything from four to 26 dimensions in our physical world. What's so special about the fourth dimension? Is there anything mathematically unique about it compared to what we consider spatial dimensions?

• 12:35Speaker 03

  It's physically, I mean, there are arguments for it. As I said, the second law of thermodynamics suggests that once the early universe cooled a bit, it didn't have enough energy to

• 12:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To birth out another dimension.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  To birth out another dimension if you wanted the second law to hold. So the fourth is beyond us.

• 12:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're saying we're stuck with four dimensions?

• 12:57Speaker 03

  We're stuck with three and one. Yeah, four dimensions. So I mean, there are these other deficient, for lack of a better term, dimensions if you believe in string theory, but

• 13:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  I mean, there are lots of theories. I mean, Kant had his own theory, but I don't want to get into Kant.

• 13:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Immanuel Kant.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  Immanuel Kant.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, yeah. But he didn't know anything about cosmology.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  No. Well, one thing he did, he made a distinction that many people derided between numina and phenomena. Numina is the way things are that we'll never know. Phenomena is the way we see things. We are a priori categories. And in a way, I mean, the string theory is something we'll never know. And the extra dimensions and other universes, we'll just never know.

• 13:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In physics, we don't give a rat's ass about what something is if what it is is not revealed to us through a measurement.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, but uh.

• 13:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would you agree with that?

• 13:52Speaker 04

  I, I would. Um, it is kind of disturbing that of all the extra dimensions, none of them are in the time domain. They all seem to be it's extra spatial dimensions. Because if they were in the time domain, then maybe we could move back and forth in time the way we move back and forth in space. And in fact, science fiction stories have sometimes suggested that that would be how time travel would occur.

• 14:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so I, so help me on this. So if we had more than one time dimension accessible to us, does that mean we can just go off in one time coordinate while freezing our movement in the other time coordinate and do things with our life and then return and then continue? Cause that's what I do spatially.

• 14:35Speaker 04

  Why not?

• 14:39Speaker 04

  I, no, presumably that would be in fact the case. That's right. Yeah, so that I, I can't remember where it might have been even um, an H G Wells story, short story about um, that might be a way of achieving time travel that they discovered uh, that there's other pathways, just so you can get from one point to another taking alternate routes.

• 15:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alternate time routes.

• 15:02Speaker 04

  You could, it's spatial routes, we do, we do it all the time.

• 15:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  So uh.

• 15:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I see.

• 15:08Speaker 04

  That you could, you could.

• 15:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll take a shortcut, you'll do it all.

• 15:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll go backwards to where you once were.

• 15:14Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 15:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your old haunts. Yeah.

• 15:16Harrison Greenbaum?

  It's like a time shortcut.

• 15:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. So you could have a time short, you know, shortcut. Right. Um, that would be interesting, but they never want to add another time dimension to set when they need to add dimensions.

• 15:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this anything different from the wiggly wobbly timey wimey time of Doctor Who?

• 15:35Speaker 04

  I, I think that ultimately, the, the reason why there are only extra spatial dimensions isn't in fact just that, to avoid saying, well, they, they kind of postulate time travel's not gonna happen, so everything has to stay, all the extra dimensions are spatial.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Well, time travel always leads to the grandfather paradox. You go back in time and kill your grandfather.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  And that's the universe splits there. One universe, your grandfather.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  Okay, that's the many worlds. So that's the many worlds. That's right. So you can go back in time, but it's an alternate, so you can kill as many grandfathers as you got bullets and.

• 16:09Harrison Greenbaum?

  Would Trump be president? There's nobody who's using their time travel to come back and be like, what are you doing?

• 16:15Speaker 04

  I'm working on it. I'm working on it.

• 16:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All you have to do is prevent your grandfather from meeting your grandmother. Then you won't be born. Or delay when they had sex by 10 minutes.

• 16:26Harrison Greenbaum?

  This guy with blood on his hands, he's like, "You just had to go to the library." Knock a book out of his hand. Oh my god.

• 16:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go to the next question. What do you have?

• 16:35Harrison Greenbaum?

  This gets us to our next one. From Justin Colado in Facebook. "How much cannabis do I have to smoke to get to the fourth dimension?"

• 16:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 16:44Harrison Greenbaum?

  I'm assuming he's in Seattle.

• 16:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or Colorado.

• 16:48Harrison Greenbaum?

  Or Colorado.

• 16:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got good places for that.

• 16:52Speaker 04

  What are you looking at me for?

• 16:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so John, when you get deep into your math, how much cannabis is required to reach different dimensionality in your analysis?

• 17:04Speaker 03

  No, I don't know.

• 17:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't know? Okay. Okay, so that's an experiment that you could perform.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, in my particular case, it'd probably be a tiny amount since I don't ever engage in such. So I think a tiny little bit and I'd be in the fifth dimension.

• 17:22Harrison Greenbaum?

  Time slows down when I use it, so that's a way of changing the fourth dimension.

• 17:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So it's not for you?

• 17:28Harrison Greenbaum?

  For me, yeah.

• 17:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The rest of us are looking at you like...

• 17:30Harrison Greenbaum?

  My friend.

• 17:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, your friend?

• 17:32Harrison Greenbaum?

  Yeah, my friend in Colorado.

• 17:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who smokes?

• 17:35Speaker 04

  I don't know anything about that.

• 17:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, next one.

• 17:38Harrison Greenbaum?

  All right, cool. This is from the StarTalk website, Gary F. Anderson. He said, "Supposedly before the Big Bang, dimensions didn't exist. When the Big Bang manifested itself, dimensionality suddenly came into existence. Did that dimensionality expand at the speed of light? Or did it just instantly pop into existence, creating an infinite, empty universe?"

• 17:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, everything we know says that we were endowed by the matter, energy, space, and dimensionality from the transition from an extremely high-temperature universe to one that's much cooler, and we're freezing out these properties as the universe expands and cools. So, James, would you add or subtract anything from that account?

• 18:21Speaker 04

  Not at all. I'm a humble but lovable, solid-state experimentalist, so...

• 18:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, don't blame me for this Big Bang stuff.

• 18:30Speaker 04

  No, no, but this is not my area of expertise, so I will defer.

• 18:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so I mean, you get this at different stages of the extremely early universe. And so we're stuck with the universe we have. Get over it. Next question.

• 18:44Harrison Greenbaum?

  That's fair.

• 18:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got time for one more before we take a break.

• 18:47Harrison Greenbaum?

  Yeah, Green Meteor from Instagram said, is death the fourth dimension?

• 18:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  Sounds, seem like more the zero's dimension.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  Just disappear.

• 18:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good.

• 19:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I would agree, death is the zeroth dimension.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  I'm going with that.

• 19:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're going with that, we got three, we got three and O here. We're going with it. Okay, we got another one, bring it on.

• 19:11Harrison Greenbaum?

  Sure, Richard Adams on Facebook says, do accounts of powerful deities make more sense when you consider higher dimensions?

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 19:19Speaker 04

  Well, you know, when you think about like the, the, the flatland example, that if we lived in a flat dimension, a three dimensional, uh, a person who could put things in and out of our flat dimension would seem, you know, extra physical, you know, would seem, uh, beyond our realm or our understanding.

• 19:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And isn't that what Thor is to Earth? Thor exists in higher dimensions, they have access to space-time dimensions that we don't? Isn't that correct?

• 19:48Speaker 04

  Presumably.

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you're my comic book guy, don't tell me presumably.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  But, but, well, they've, they've gone back and forth on that, of saying, oh, it's magic, or saying that there's a scientific, it's just like hyper-science, or back to, it's magic, so, um...

• 20:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but, I think the takeaway here is that it's clear that if you live in a higher dimension, relative to some community of beings, you are all-powerful and all-knowing in ways they will never understand or imagine.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's, I think that's right, I think that's right.

• 20:22Harrison Greenbaum?

  Some of the answers, yes.

• 20:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I think the answer is basically yes.

• 20:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's indistinguishable from what a high, and deeply religious people will say God is, is a, is, knows all and, and is all-powerful, they, they will describe powers, describe powers to God that any of us would give to a four, to a higher dimensional being. If they, yeah, I think that would be trivial.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  And we could have a hierarchy of gods too, the fourth dimension, the fifth dimension, sixth dimension.

• 20:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:53Harrison Greenbaum?

  So I just need to find a flatland and be God?

• 20:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what you, is that your first thought? Is that, is that, is that what you really?

• 21:00Harrison Greenbaum?

  Yes, the cult of Harrison, there'll be a bunch of flatlanders.

• 21:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, and we're in the middle of our final episode of the eighth season. This is a special time capsule edition. We've reached back into the archive of season eight. Yeah, we've been doing this for eight seasons and extracted some of your best loved moments, according to your votes. Your number one favorite comedic co-host this season, Chuck Nice, returns to serve up your smorgasbord of questions in the Galactic Gumbo edition of Cosmic Queries. Check it out.

• 21:41Chuck Nice?

  Melissa wants to know this, coming to us from Chino Valley, Arizona. "Hey Neil, I'm curious about your thoughts on somewhat combining creationism with the Big Bang. Although I am agnostic, I was raised Catholic, and I always wonder why no one seems to consider that a possible higher power is behind the Big Bang and consequently dark matter." So do you have any thoughts on that? I mean, from a scientific standpoint, you cannot speak to this because you're speaking about, you know, the fact of a creator or some higher power creating this.

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, sure you can. Well, so let me be clear. If there's a higher power that did anything in the universe, there's no reason why that should be beyond the ability of science to determine that.

• 22:37Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So if you do science properly, you're not precluding any one explanation relative to another, if you're on the frontier of discovery.

• 22:46Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I'm not going to say there is no higher power there, and let me find something else. If the higher power is there and it manifests, then my methods and tools find it, I'll be the first one to report it. Okay, I'll be right there at the front of the press conference. Okay, so just make that clear. The, the, uh, and let's back up. There's a deep question here. It is. Got more going on than she may even know. Okay. Okay. After Einstein advanced the general theory of relativity in 1916. Right. It was, oh my gosh, the, uh, the universe, there's gravity and it shapes the universe in this way. And then in 1929, Hubble discovers that the universe is expanding. Right.

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You take general relativity and the data that the universe is expanding. And a clever physicist named George Lema- Lemaître. Okay. He was a Belgian physicist, looked at that and he said, wait a minute. If we're expanding and I have this new tool, theoretical tool to understand the whole universe. Let's go back in time and ask, what would the universe have been yesterday compared with today? It would have been smaller. Right. Let's go even smaller. Smaller. Take it all the way back. So we go all the way back, we gotta get down to a singular point. Singular point. Right. Beginning of things. Right. This person is a Belgian priest. Oh. An ordained priest. Hmm, he must have drank some good beer.

• 24:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Belgian beer? Mm-hmm. So people immediately said, oh my gosh, you have found proof of, of biblical creation. Oh, really? They said this to him. And he, a Belgian priest, came all back in their face and said, no. What? Because the Bible says the universe was created in six days. The Bible says, earth was created before the sun. There's a lot going on in Genesis that is scientifically untenable. Right. But now you wanna take just a little bit, this that God created it, and say, oh, therefore it proves the Bible when nothing else that follows it. Right. Has any anchoring in observational science. Right.

• 24:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was, he was, he was, um, smart enough to know that this, what I say smart enough. He was sensible enough to know that this should not be invoked as evidence for God creating Genesis as described in, in, in the Jewish Bible, in the, in the Old Testament. Old Testament. So. Um, cause nothing else works there.

• 25:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, nothing, nothing.

• 25:20Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Earth is in the middle of things, everything revolves around the Earth, Earth is flat, the, the, so, so this goes on and on and on. So he knew enough about the Bible and about science to not make that connection.

• 25:32Chuck Nice?

  Got you.

• 25:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now, so, so, by the way, higher power could be God, or it could be some intelligent alien in its basement, programming our universe for its own entertainment. That would be a higher power.

• 25:46Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 25:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you think about it.

• 25:48Chuck Nice?

  That would be a higher power.

• 25:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 25:49Chuck Nice?

  That guy's really effed up, man.

• 25:56Chuck Nice?

  If that's the guy, if that, hey, look, hey dude, if you're in your basement right now.

• 25:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your parents' basement.

• 26:00Chuck Nice?

  Your parents' basement.

• 26:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The alien version.

• 26:03Chuck Nice?

  You little pimply-faced alien bitch, you, this is effed up what you just did.

• 26:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then I wonder if we are a simulation.

• 26:14Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Programmed by a higher power, um, maybe they get bored every now and then, and they throw something to just mess with, throw in something in the mix.

• 26:23Chuck Nice?

  A little glitch in the matrix.

• 26:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Little glitch in the matrix.

• 26:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, they throw down, uh, a disruptive politician, or a world war, or...

• 26:32Chuck Nice?

  That would explain so much.

• 26:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, would, would, completely explain it.

• 26:36Chuck Nice?

  Oh, God.

• 26:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everything's going along just fine and tranquil, and they say, nope, you're not entertaining me anymore.

• 26:42Chuck Nice?

  Load it, load it, watch this, look at what I do right here. Fuck, how many times have I told you to stop screwing with those people?

• 26:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, so, but a broader reference to that question is.

• 26:56Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, we don't know what happened before the Big Bang, and we also don't know what dark matter is, nor dark energy.

• 27:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you, and I've said this before, and listen to my words very carefully.

• 27:08Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you want, if your understanding of God.

• 27:12Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Flows through places where science has yet to tread.

• 27:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because these are frontiers.

• 27:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before the Big Bang.

• 27:21Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If that's your concept of God.

• 27:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then the history of this exercise shows us that God would then be...

• 27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.

• 27:35Chuck Nice?

  Well, of course, that only makes sense because you're saying all these other things are provable and knowable, and so we know.

• 27:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These other things at one time in the past were mysterious, correct.

• 27:46Chuck Nice?

  So now that we know these are provable and knowable and why they happened, they're, they, uh, these phenomenon are, or phenomena are actually, um, explainable, right?

• 27:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like your plural phenomenon, very good, your plural phenomenon, phenomena, very good.

• 28:01Chuck Nice?

  Do you like that I actually corrected myself there?

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good, I'm checking you out here.

• 28:05Chuck Nice?

  That's cool, so, uh, and then you say, "Well, but what I don't know here, I just think that this is God doing this."

• 28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Philosophers call it the God of the gaps.

• 28:15Chuck Nice?

  The God of the gaps, so in other words, wherever your understanding fails you, you fill it in with God.

• 28:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fill it in with God, and by the way, this is a, this is a, this is a long tradition to do so, Isaac Newton did it.

• 28:26Chuck Nice?

  Oh, really?

• 28:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isaac Newton wrote down his equation of gravity and it described Earth and the moon and the sun and the earth, Jupiter and its moons, we would later learn it, so this is all, so, but how do you then describe the whole solar system all happening all at once?

• 28:39Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everything tugging on everybody in all directions at all different, and he tried to calculate this, and the solar system was unstable and planets would fly apart.

• 28:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because every time you came around the back stretch, Mars would tug on you a little bit.

• 28:52Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come around the next time, Mars would tug on you a little more.

• 28:55Chuck Nice?

  Before you know it, you're out.

• 28:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're out.

• 28:57Chuck Nice?

  You're out the door.

• 28:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we out, okay?

• 28:58Chuck Nice?

  You and the Kuiper belt going, "It's cold, man."

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right, so you would say, so, so he said, "Well, um, clearly I know my equations work with the one-on-one situation, with the whole system, maybe God steps in every now and then just to fix it."

• 29:14Chuck Nice?

  And corrects things.

• 29:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And corrects things, he says this, in his 18th, in his 17th century lingo, he says just that, and so that's basically God of the gaps.

• 29:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  I have another question.

• 29:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cosmic phenomena, bring it on.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  This is by William Morris, Facebook.

• 29:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  What's a henway?

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About two to three pounds. Next?

• 29:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't, you can't, what do you think I was born yesterday?

• 29:53Speaker 01

  You just wanted to see that, what's a henway? There's no science behind that, huh? That's it. Next, that's it.

• 30:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We should call the first warp drive a henway. So that wherever they land, they say, we gotta fix the henway.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  You gotta fix the henway.

• 30:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's a henway?

• 30:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Run that joke clear across the galaxy.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  That was awesome. What a jackass.

• 30:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, this is in, I'm old enough to remember, uh, F Troop.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  F Troop, that's Larry Storch.

• 30:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Larry Storch and, uh, what was it? It was like the cavalry.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the Indians, right? And the, in the, in the Wild West. And the name of the tribe were the Hakawee Indians?

• 30:37Speaker 01

  The Hakawee?

• 30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Hakawee. And I think in the first episode.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  You remember the first episode of F Troop.

• 30:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I think. And I remember, I think I'm remembering this correctly. In the first episode, the cavalry meets this tribe. And they say, who are you guys? And the Indians say, where the heck are we?

• 31:02Speaker 01

  That's hilarious. The Indians say that.

• 31:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They say, no, they didn't know where they are because they, they got lost.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  The Indians did.

• 31:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They got lost. They say, where the heck are we?

• 31:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they say, oh, you're the Hakawee. No, who are you? Where the heck are we? We're the Hakawee Indians. Yeah, that's, I think that's how that happened in the very first episode.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Hakawee Indians.

• 31:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  I just caught that again. I'm telling you, I'm light years away. The Hakawee Indians.

• 31:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Took you a full 12 seconds.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  I was like, the Hakawee, because you was, the way you said it.

• 31:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because that's how they said it all the rest of the episodes.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  But it's F Troop, it was a sitcom.

• 31:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  It's a sitcom, man. So that's good. What's a henway? You knocked that out.

• 31:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so that's, I'm gonna call, if I invent a warp drive, it's the henway warp drive.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Henway warp, I like that. Is that how they sound? Wait, how do hens? Yeah?

• 31:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hens?

• 31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I don't. That sounds better.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Okay, here we go. Ray Clark, Facebook.

• 32:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  If the moon were to somehow be blown apart. Would Earth end up with a set of Saturn-like rings?

• 32:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  What would happen?

• 32:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. Yes, temporarily, we would have rings, rings system. An awesome.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 32:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, using awesome the way God intended awesome to be used.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not, it would be awesome if you could pass the salt. No, no. In my day, we used awesome when we discovered the cure to polio. We used awesome when we walked on the fricking moon.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Do you believe that? I don't know, we were talking about that. Do you believe that they landed? I just want to know.

• 32:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're asking the wrong.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  I'm just saying, man. The astronauts should have been black, because we would have been more excited.

• 32:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Upon landing?

• 32:42Speaker 01

  No, because he was, yes.

• 32:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a huge, soon, we have just landed on the moon.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, baby. That's how we do, baby. Forget the cosmonauts. We did it first, baby. Ah, I'd be like this. Ah, no?

• 32:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's one small step for a man.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Come on. You land on the moon, you go. One small step for man, one giant step for man. It's like, it's like, it's like when they.

• 33:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you know what it is?

• 33:06Speaker 01

  It's like when the white dude scored touchdown, they just give the ball to the ref. When we score, we're like.

• 33:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You shake something.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You shake something. Now, here's the thing. Here's the thing. Here's the thing. I think the emotions that would come about.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Among people who would rejoice in having just landed on the moon.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are incommensurate with how you might react in the face of disaster. If you face that on your journey. If the oxygen tank blows.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Holy shit, what am I gonna do? Oh, my God.

• 33:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's the same person who lands on the moon and, oh, my gosh, I landed on the moon.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you need some, you need people with ice in their veins. Yeah. And Neil Armstrong was just such a person. Okay. Yeah. Well, all right. I guess, but I just. He's landed on the moon and he's running out of fuel. Okay, you know about that. I don't know if you knew about this. We're running out of fuel. Because where they were gonna land. Right. He's, there was like rocky and it was not smooth and he was worried that the lunar excursion module would tip. Yeah. So he starts going sideways. Okay. Using very little fuel that's left. And so Houston is saying, you gotta land that puppy. No, I'm still looking and he's monitoring how much it is. Yeah. You know what his heartbeat was when it's, it was like 85 or something. I mean, it was some low heartbeat. Okay.

• 34:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That any of us get just when we're irritated that we're waiting in line or something. So, no, these were very special set of the right stuff. Okay. It was truly the right stuff. How long did it take to get there? Three days. It was three days? Three days. In the ship? Yeah, well, how else? Drinking Tang. I'm just saying, drinking Tang and sitting there. Three days. Yeah, three days. Three days, okay. All right, I'm glad you explained it to me because I was doubting it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, oh, oh. You asked me if I believe it, I don't, one doesn't need to believe when confronted with evidence.

• 35:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. We sent out a survey to our fans as we do every season. And you got back to us with your favorite episodes, guests, and co-hosts. On this next episode of Cosmic Queries, Bill Nye the Science Guy takes the driver's seat alongside comedic co-host Chuck Nice. And together they tackle your questions about planetary defense.

• 35:25Bill Nye?

  We're talking about planetary defense.

• 35:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 35:27Bill Nye?

  Keeping the Earth from getting hit with a cosmic impactor. Fascinating subject. It really is, and it's important. It's important. It's near and dear to us at the Planetary Society, the world's largest non-governmental space interest organization, of which I'm the CEO. Because this is our old mission. Carl Sagan, when I was in his class. In the disco era. Would talk about the Tonguska event. Where nineteen, oh, June 30th in the modern calendar, uh, 1908, Tonguska region of Siberia was hit with something. It blew down all the trees in a moment. And if that had happened in a big city, that would be the end of the big city.

• 36:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 36:06Bill Nye?

  Be it. And so since then, uh, long after Carl Sagan's class, uh, Chelyabinsk, also in Russia, got with a big sparky thing. And a much smaller event, but nevertheless, recorded on countless cameras. And so it's something to think about. Don't want to get hit with an asteroid.

• 36:24Chuck Nice?

  You don't.

• 36:24Bill Nye?

  That said, Chuck.

• 36:25Chuck Nice?

  And judging from.

• 36:26Bill Nye?

  Welcome back to the show, listener.

• 36:28Chuck Nice?

  And those two events make me think that maybe Russia should be a little more involved in this.

• 36:32Bill Nye?

  The thing, keep in mind about Russia, uh, first of all, let's say we take the Earth and divide it in half by hemispheres. It's gonna hit one hemisphere or the other.

• 36:42Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 36:43Bill Nye?

  It's one and two. Then Russia takes up nine time zones.

• 36:47Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 36:48Bill Nye?

  It's a third of the, it's more than a third of the world.

• 36:51Chuck Nice?

  Right, so.

• 36:52Bill Nye?

  Or that former Soviet Union. So if it's gonna hit someplace, it's likely to hit.

• 36:55Chuck Nice?

  Likely to hit there. Yeah, there or the Pacific.

• 36:58Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:59Chuck Nice?

  That's about it.

• 37:00Bill Nye?

  True fact, not a false fact.

• 37:01Chuck Nice?

  There you go. All right.

• 37:02Bill Nye?

  I say true fact, that's a joke, everybody. Ha, ha, ha.

• 37:08Chuck Nice?

  Let's go to Anna Bacon. Uh, the doomsday shows, uh, shows about asteroids. Let me just start this.

• 37:17Bill Nye?

  Yeah, just do it without the, the breaks between every word.

• 37:23Chuck Nice?

  That I.

• 37:24Bill Nye?

  Slow talkers of America.

• 37:25Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. Okay, so Anna Bacon says this, "The doomsday shows about asteroids always have it hitting the planet, but what would happen if the asteroid passed between the Earth or the moon, or if it hit the moon instead of the Earth?"

• 37:42Bill Nye?

  Well, we've photographed asteroids hitting the moon.

• 37:45Chuck Nice?

  Uh-huh.

• 37:45Bill Nye?

  Yeah, I mean, small ones. It's manageable ones. Yeah. And asteroids have passed closer to the Earth in the moon's orbit. That's happened.

• 37:53Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:54Bill Nye?

  Twenty twelve, I believe is the last one. So, if you like to worry about things, this is a great, this is great for you.

• 38:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:01Bill Nye?

  So, so far, the ones that have passed that close have been relatively small.

• 38:04Chuck Nice?

  So, now, this is a, let's take a, like, extinction level size, uh, object, alright?

• 38:12Bill Nye?

  Listen to your fluency. Oh, extinction level size. How big is extinction level size in check?

• 38:18Chuck Nice?

  Well, let's, let's, let's go with something like Apophis, alright?

• 38:21Bill Nye?

  Apophis, which is the Greek, named for the Greek god of anxiety.

• 38:26Chuck Nice?

  Which is perfect. And hits the keyhole, barrels towards Earth, instead, plows into the moon.

• 38:37Bill Nye?

  Uh, I guess it would be troublesome moon-wise, but I don't think it would.

• 38:41Chuck Nice?

  Would that do anything to us?

• 38:42Bill Nye?

  I don't think so. I'm sure, I am sure, people have run this computer model.

• 38:46Chuck Nice?

  Okay, okay.

• 38:47Bill Nye?

  Uh, but I don't know it. So, I imagine it would just disturb the orbit of the moon.

• 38:52Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 38:53Bill Nye?

  Rather than, it's, almost certainly would not be catastrophic life-ending on the moon, because the moon seems to be lifeless. But that's a great question, and I'm sure people have run that test. And then, would it deflect, you know, the moon is slowly spiraling away from us.

• 39:11Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 39:12Bill Nye?

  Could it be hit hard enough to start slowly spiraling toward us? I don't know. I don't think so.

• 39:17Chuck Nice?

  Like a pool table. That'd be not awesome. What am I talking about? That'd be the end of all of us.

• 39:23Bill Nye?

  Well, not right away. You'd probably have several millennia to give it some thought.

• 39:27Chuck Nice?

  And you know what? And you'd have some really beautiful nights in the meantime.

• 39:30Bill Nye?

  Yeah, and then, I just shudder to think of all the babies that would, I just can't even.

• 39:34Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 39:35Bill Nye?

  It'd just be, would be wild. Alright.

• 39:37Chuck Nice?

  Alright, here we go. This is Ian Coleman, and Ian says this. "Hey, Bill, huge fan here. I was wondering about the possibility of NASA's controversial EM drive being something that could actually work. Apparently, leaks have confirmed that this is the least moving, it's at least moving along well. And, um, they're even saying that it may work. Could we use this in planetary defense?"

• 40:04Bill Nye?

  Uh, I don't know what an EM drive is. Electromagnetic? What's that?

• 40:08Chuck Nice?

  No, it's, um...

• 40:09Bill Nye?

  Now, there's ion drives. And there's this nuclear weapon idea where you explode a nuclear weapon behind your spacecraft every few seconds for a while to get and get these pressure waves of particles that push you through space. But I don't know what he means by EM drive, if he means electromagnetic.

• 40:29Chuck Nice?

  No, I think it's supposed to be some kind of new rocket engine.

• 40:34Bill Nye?

  Well, that's what I mentioned, the nuclear thing. Then the other one that we're all hot for is solar electric propulsion, SEP, solar electric module. So this is where you have something like xenon in a liquid form.

• 40:50Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 40:50Bill Nye?

  Put in a big scuba tank there on your spacecraft.

• 40:53Chuck Nice?

  Ah.

• 40:54Bill Nye?

  Use solar power from photovoltaic panels.

• 40:59Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 40:59Bill Nye?

  To make electricity, ionize, strip the electrons off the xenon, have a grid akin to a window screen, and shoot the xenon out the back of the spacecraft really, really, really fast. And we do that. We have ion drives right now. Just everybody wants to build a big one, a really big one. And it takes a lot of xenon, but the other thing, it takes a lot of electricity. And when you get things that big in space, it's just getting everything in alignment is tricky. But here's the idea.

• 41:29Chuck Nice?

  Mm hmm.

• 41:30Bill Nye?

  Although each atom of xenon or argon or whatever inert gas you're going to use or element you're going to use, although it is very low mass, each individual atom, they're going so fast.

• 41:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 41:45Bill Nye?

  Twenty-four, seven, out the back of the spacecraft that you can go really, really fast. Much faster is generally presumed than you can with just a regular chemical rocket. Because it never stops.

• 41:56Chuck Nice?

  Right. So it's on all the time. That's actually cool.

• 42:01Bill Nye?

  And we use ion drives, but we want to, people want to build a really big one.

• 42:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll close out this time capsule episode by remembering one of your favorite conversations of the season, according to the year end survey. Astrophysicist and host of PBS Spacetime, Matt O'Dowd, stopped by the studio to help us discuss the intersection of innovation and policy. Check it out.

• 42:25Matt O'Dowd?

  I want to ask you a really a simple question, overly simplistic, but your answer, I think, who knows, who knows what it could change. So if you are given the rights, the power to direct the entire flagship science program of an entire, let's say, administration, you know, the moonshot of a given administration, it's gonna be billions of dollars worth, but you only get to choose one thing, what would it be?

• 42:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you mean, choose one thing? Choose one destination?

• 42:57Matt O'Dowd?

  Choose, well, I'm not talking about necessarily traveling anywhere.

• 43:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Choose a thing to get a nation to do.

• 43:03Matt O'Dowd?

  Exactly.

• 43:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So first of all, this is a democracy. People vote for things, for people, and I value that. I guess we're also a republic in a way, but votes matter, okay? And as an educator, I will not presume that I have the right to take a country to a place that I think would be a fun place to take it, without the full backing of everybody who votes. So my power that you just granted me

• 43:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  would not be to just steer the bus. It would be to walk up and down the aisles of the bus, teaching people the value of exploration, the value of knowledge, the value of moving a frontier beyond wherever it may have stagnated. Then I go back to the steering wheel and I say, where does everyone want to go? And then they all collectively say, space. They might say something else, and I'll respect that. But I want at least a shot at convincing them that space exploration is one of the greatest forces that can operate on

• 44:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our science literacy. Imagine knowing that your country is about to colonize Mars or or lasso a comet that has fresh water or to mine an asteroid or deflect an asteroid that might be headed our way. And I need the best chemists and the best biologists. Maybe there's life on Mars that we'll discover. I need the best biologist. I need the best aerospace engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers. I said chemists, geologists. All of the entire portfolio of STEM fields are represented in a space mission. So that's that a space mission that's ambitious enough.

• 45:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So and we know that the engines of tomorrow's economy, the engines of tomorrow's growth economies have as their center innovations in science, technology, engineering and math. So in a democracy that is also a capitalist system where nobody wants to die, nobody wants to die poor. Space exploration is one of the one of the most potent ways to stimulate this kind of thinking in a country. So you can turn a sleepy country into an innovation nation by doing this.

• 45:51Matt O'Dowd?

  By having innovation and a dream in the right direction.

• 45:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A dream in the right direction that's hitting the headlines every day. Because if you're going to expand a frontier like this, you're going to have to innovate. You're going to have to invent. Patents will be awarded. The all that entire frontier will be new. And that is what stimulates discovery. So I would say, so you want to give me the power. I would want the power to convince people that that might be a cool thing to do. And then you implement the policy.

• 46:22Matt O'Dowd?

  Gotcha. And so with space, is it, I mean, it's hard. It's extremely hard to do. That's part of why it's so inspiring.

• 46:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not because they're hard. No.

• 46:33Matt O'Dowd?

  Because they're because they're cool?

• 46:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I got it. Okay, sorry.

• 46:37Matt O'Dowd?

  All right, no, that's good.

• 46:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We want, we choose to go to the moon.

• 46:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not because it's easy, but because it's hard.

• 46:46Matt O'Dowd?

  Okay.

• 46:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think I got that right.

• 46:48Matt O'Dowd?

  And it's the right thing to do. All right, so the policy is implemented. Do we go asteroid mining first? Do we build a colony on Mars first? Do we go back to the moon first? Venusian cloud cities, anyone?

• 47:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I have a slightly different view of that. I want to call it a contrarian view, but it's definitely a different lane that I'm driving in. It is, why think of destinations in order?

• 47:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why think of a destination as a goal? Why not let your goal be access to the entire solar system? Let that be the goal.

• 47:31Matt O'Dowd?

  Okay.

• 47:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if that's the goal, then you build ships that have different combinations of boosters. You pull this one off this shelf and that this combination gets you to Mars. This combination, you chase the asteroid. This other combination with this payload, this other combination with this payload, gets you to the backside of the moon. So it is, the goal is your capacity to explore, not the destination. And when you build the capacity, you then are, can be responsive to the creativity of everyone who's there. This is what, this is the difference between a computer that solves one problem and a computer that can solve any problem.

• 48:07Matt O'Dowd?

  Sure.

• 48:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Any problem you can think of. So, so, so don't come to me saying, do we go to the moon first or Mars first or? You do it all.

• 48:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've been listening to StarTalk Radio and I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Join us next time when we kick off a brand new season, season nine, with more science, comedy, and pop culture. That's all for now, and as always, I bid you to keep coming up.