The Science in "Don't Look Up" with Adam McKay and Dr. Amy Mainzer

Is a comet coming to destroy Earth? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Chuck Nice talk about the science behind Netflix’s comet apocalypse movie "Don’t Look Up" with director Adam McKay and astronomer Amy Mainzer. Are we all gonna die?

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?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, personal astrophysicist. Today, we're gonna talk about protecting Earth from space. Chuck, always good to have you, man.

• 0:29Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure to be here, man. Yeah, honestly, I think today's show should be called "Destroying Earth From Space."

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From space.

• 0:38Chuck Nice?

  Or "From Within."

• 0:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or from, ooh.

• 0:42Chuck Nice?

  Or "From Within."

• 0:45Chuck Nice?

  Because we seem to be doing our damnedest to get it done, don't we?

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, I try to turn a blind eye to that, but I shouldn't. What we have to help us put some of that content on the table is writer, producer, director Adam McKay. Adam, welcome to StarTalk, dude. Hello, thanks for having me.

• 1:06Chuck Nice?

  Adam gets an applause. Now, you know, we don't applaud our guests here, but Adam...

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have never applauded anyone ever, Chuck.

• 1:13Chuck Nice?

  You know I have never applauded a guest, Neil, but I'm just...

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is true.

• 1:18Chuck Nice?

  I'm just so impressed with what he has just accomplished, so...

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me put some of his resume out there. So, you're former head writer for SNL, alright? And you're co-founder of Upright Citizens Brigade, very cool. I love their work. You're also co-writer, along with Will Ferrell, with Anchorman, alright? That was cool. Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, okay? A co-founder of Funny or Die, alright? That's a production company, if I remember correctly.

• 1:46Chuck Nice?

  That is right, yes.

• 1:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think so. And wrote and directed The Big Short. I distinctly remember that movie. Um, very, it was like, oh my gosh, this has happened. And we lived through it. But that's not why you, we have you on the show right now.

• 2:00Chuck Nice?

  That's right, because quite frankly, all of that is gold plated dross. In comparison to why we have Adam on the show.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Which is because of my workout routine, which I'm gonna share with you today. My diet, my weight program, and you too.

• 2:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's exactly not the reason. So, so Adam.

• 2:24Chuck Nice?

  Adam, Adam has a new Peloton class he wants to. He wants?

• 2:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's trying to plug.

• 2:29Chuck Nice?

  He's trying to plug. He's trying to plug his new Peloton class.

• 2:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Adam, you, you wrote, directed and produced the Netflix hit, Don't Look Up. It's a movie.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  That is correct, yes.

• 2:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And it's star studded, starting Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence and, eh, you know, it's, it's, there's a dozen famous people who have each starred in their own films. You managed to collab them together for this script. And it's about an asteroid, a comet that's headed, discovered to be headed towards Earth, putting all of life on Earth at risk. And the travails and challenges and troubles of the scientists trying to alert the public. And everyone ignores them or discounts it. And so, what the hell were you thinking?

• 3:30Chuck Nice?

  I love it.

• 3:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What? The, what? Who told you to make this? Why? Who? Why? Did your mama tell, do? Explain yourself, please.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Like, a lot of ideas, it came from stark terror. Uh, which is the last five, 10, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, back to 1965.

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Of just our culture and our leaders and our industry and our media ignoring that we're flooding the, you know, atmosphere, the climate with CO2 and we are on a bad, bad path. And, uh, you know, I had the fortunate, unfortunate, uh, experience of colliding with a lot of this information from reading scientific reports and reading a great book by David Wallace Wells called Uninhabitable Earth, which if you haven't read it, read it and it will wake you up when it comes to the climate. And I really started, like my wife can tell you, at a certain point,

• 4:35Speaker 02

  I was losing sleep and I kept kind of looking at our world and going, what am I missing here? And rather than do, you know, my initial idea was, oh, do a big, dramatic, dystopic, serious movie. But then, uh, a friend of mine who's a journalist made an offhanded joke, David Sirota, where he just said, it's like it's Armageddon, but the asteroid is coming and no one cares. And I was like, that's it. And, and then I thought if we could laugh, you know, if we could have some laughter about the crazy world we live in as well as some big emotions, that maybe that's something that could go out into the world

• 5:16Speaker 02

  and hit millions of people and maybe jar some feelings loose. So that was it. It was definitely a cra-

• 5:22Chuck Nice?

  So you were born, you were born to make this movie. That's what you're telling-

• 5:25Speaker 02

  I am telling you that, that I was plucked from the Schuylkill River outside Philadelphia, where I'm from. And they said, this child, she'll make a movie for Netflix.

• 5:39Chuck Nice?

  Like, like, like Dirty Moses pulled- pulled from the river.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Pulled from the-

• 5:46Chuck Nice?

  The child shall save us. We're gonna clean him up first.

• 5:51Chuck Nice?

  Well, he says school kill. That's why I call him Dirty Moses.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  No, this Google's dirty. This Google's dirty.

• 5:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm from Philly too, so I can say that.

• 5:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Adam, what enabled you to amass this level of talent? I'm presuming, I mean, these are people who are well paid in their own movies. So is there some kind of social cause that that they get to justify doing this without having to get their normal paycheck?

• 6:17Speaker 02

  No, no. I mean, you know, the cool thing is, I gotta give a lot of credit to Netflix. You know, Netflix read this crazy script and was just like, yep, we'll roll with this. And, you know, the whole kind of emotional impetus for the project was the idea that there's hundreds of millions of us out there that are freaking out. Even though if you flip through the TV channels or you look on, you know, parts of social media, people seem like they're freaking out about other things or they're, you know, they don't care. Or it's about the stock market, or it's about, you know, politicians' legacies.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  And the idea was there's a lot of us out there that can feel what's going on. And that played out with the actors. All the actors we went to were like, yep, I want to laugh about this. I want to go into this.

• 7:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want a piece of that.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but Adam, you started describing your concerns based on climate change, but you didn't make a movie about climate change. Maybe it's allegorical, but you had to come into my place, into my universe, and tell a, tell a, tell a climate change story where you don't even mention climate change? Why do you come in my space to do this?

• 7:35Chuck Nice?

  Because, because your space and your people have been trying to kill us since the inception of your, of your, your whole science. It's always about us. The earth, the universe is trying to kill us.

• 7:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's true.

• 7:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So at what point did you say, maybe if I told it about climate, no one would pay attention. So let me tell it about asteroids. So this is a storyteller's ruse, right?

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, in a way, because I think one of the tricky things with the climate crisis, which you gentlemen, I'm sure know, is that it's slow and creeping, even though now it's getting much faster and much more overt. But I think one of the tricky things is, you know, the way we're wired as humans, we know how to freak out and run from a bear, or we know how to like, deal with a serial killer. Like, we all get that. But the idea that these gases, you know, this carbon that we're burning is creating greenhouse-

• 8:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That you can't see.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  That you can't see, and you have to go to climate scientists who, God bless them, aren't really, you know, built to like, be the PR front for this story. I think it just falls in a tricky area. And so I thought by replacing climate, the climate crisis, with a comet, which is something we all sort of mostly get, like, that's scary, would put the spotlight on our messed up human reaction. And, and that's really what the movie's about. I mean, the movie's really about how we've, you know, befouled, twisted, and mutated the very ways that we talk to each other through social media, through

• 9:22Speaker 02

  media, through career, through money. And, and that's really ultimately what the movie's about.

• 9:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, did you hear how politely he referenced the media and aptitude of scientists?

• 9:36Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 9:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What phrase did you use?

• 9:38Chuck Nice?

  Not, not just that, but the way he basically cajoled the, the public in their response. Because this movie could have just as easily been called, "Hey, dumbass." That could have been the name of the movie.

• 9:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He didn't put those words in your mouth.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  I mean, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me defend-

• 9:59Chuck Nice?

  I didn't say you said that, Adam.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Let me defend that point.

• 10:04Chuck Nice?

  I didn't put those words in your mouth, Adam.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  The people at large have been, you know, chest deep in BS, spin and marketing for decades. And, and I think it's tricky. I mean, you look at like the resistance to the vaccine. Well, like, you know, for decades, people have been getting sold, you know, crazy drugs like OxyContin. Their doctors are telling them, oh yeah, take this. And then we're surprised when like a vaccine comes out and people are like, I don't know about that. So there's been a lot of like marketing, PR, twisting, turning about science, which is crazy.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  And it kind of makes people have to like figure out how science works and what real science is versus marketing PR science. So we're in a tricky spot and, and so, no, you know, it was cool to see people's reactions for, for the movie. Because, you know, it went worldwide and everyone was kind of like, oh yeah, I get that.

• 11:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I gotta, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta read my tweet. I gotta read my tweet that I, I don't know if you saw my tweet, Adam, but I'm gonna read it right now.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  I did, I did. I think I retweeted it. I love some, uh, I love some, some love from Neil. I took it.

• 11:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some Twitter love. I said, finally saw the Netflix film, Don't Look Up. A fictional tale of a nation distracted by pop culture and divided on whether to heed dire warnings of scientists. Everything I know about news cycles, talk shows, social media and politics tells me the film was instead a documentary.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 11:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all. Just, I stood there flat footed and, and, and put it out there.

• 11:52Chuck Nice?

  You know, uh, uh, before you go any further, since you said that, Neil, since you just said that, was the fact that it's a documentary. What was the pushback, if any, Adam, uh, from what community or any community that saw this and said?

• 12:09Chuck Nice?

  What the hell are you doing? Or, that's a bunch of BS. Or, oh, look at you, you, whatever. Was there any of that?

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, we got some of that. I mean, anytime you do a comedy, you know, certain people are gonna be with it or not with it. And so that's a given. But then, yeah, there was some-

• 12:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He means, Chuck, anytime you offend people, people are gonna be with it. That's what he means. When he said, anytime you do a comedy-

• 12:34Chuck Nice?

  Well, it ain't comedy unless somebody's-

• 12:37Speaker 02

  I mean, we definitely had certain quarters of the media were not too happy with the movie. I mean, we go pretty hard at the collective media. There was one paper that's pretty famous for climate denial, where, you know, their critic did not care for the movie. So, you got some of that. But for the most part, you know, once the movie premiered on Netflix, no, it was, it was a great, universal response of, we know what that's saying. It was, it was really heartening, actually, because I think there's this idea that people don't get it, that people are bored, they want entertainment. And it's like, no, people actually know what's going on and they're frustrated with the BS.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  So, it was a cool moment to see that, to see that people across the political divide. I mean, the weird thing about this movie is it got some great responses across the red-blue political divide, which, you know, I didn't know what to expect. But when I saw that, it was, it was actually hopeful.

• 13:43Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Mmm.

• 13:44Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 13:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So, at this point, we're gonna reveal some of the things that happened at the end of the movie. So, if you-

• 13:54Chuck Nice?

  Spoiler alert.

• 13:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you can sort of fast-forward to the next segment if you'd like to, right now. So, I was particularly intrigued by Meryl Streep's character, playing the President of the United States. And there, there's a, is she based on some amalgam of personalities out there that you thought would do just right as President?

• 14:20Speaker 02

  No, no, just one.

• 14:24Chuck Nice?

  Sorry.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  No, I mean, there's definitely a big old tablespoon of the last president in there. They're sort of blinding narcissism, only responding to the moment, no foresight. No question that's in there, but you know, hey, I talked to Merrill about it and you know, there's also a little bit of Bill Clinton in there. There's some, you know, the used car salesman kind of slick, you know, sort of nefarious Bill Clinton. There's also, you know, half a tablespoon of George W. Bush, dangerously unqualified. So unfortunately.

• 15:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, plus it was the announcement on the battleship. The announcement on the ship was part of that, right?

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 15:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's some scenes there where, yeah, so that's why I didn't, um, so Chuck, I didn't uniquely identify any one actor with any one real other person. There was enough of an amalgam there that I, I saw all of society, all of American society, folded into practically all of those characters from the, from the, the talk show host.

• 15:30Chuck Nice?

  Neil, the problem is I, I, I'm not as smart as either one of you, so.

• 15:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need simple characters based on simple.

• 15:39Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, what I saw was what I wanted to see. I saw what I wanted to see.

• 15:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was wondering, Adam, up to that point, are, are people just a lens, not a lens, are they their own filter? And they will then see in this, like what Chuck said, what they want to see without really grasping the fuller storytelling that you imbued it with.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I was really happy with how people got it. I mean, people got the idea, you know, there's jokes in the movies about super donors being allowed in the White House. There's, you know, clearly the media is just concerned with good cheer and keeping the ratings up. And it was pretty amazing to, to see those reactions. And even the ending of the movie where, you know, once all the white noise of our kind of for-profit kind of jumble of media goes away, how things got real and got about family and faith, like people really got into it. I, I was like really happy with that part of the response, even though there was certainly an element that was like, didn't dig it.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Um, for the most part, though, the public at large was was dialing into it. Um, so, you know, you never know. You have these feelings. You make a movie. Kind of seems like how the world is now. I mean, you even look at the White House now, which is, you know, uh, the opposition party. And then the Congress is owned by the opposition party. Well, what's going on with them? They're stuck in the mud because of dirty money and they're not doing anything. So, you know, these problems, I, I think we've been scammed in some ways with this red, blue game. And I, I think it's all about dirty money, big money. And if we could just get that out, things would start moving a lot better. So,

• 17:26Speaker 02

  it was cool to see people around the world identify with that and know that was the case.

• 17:32Chuck Nice?

  So let me ask you this. Did you, did, did you do this on purpose? Or was it just a byproduct of or a natural outworking of what you just mentioned? It's at the end, there was kind of a admirable nod to AI in a very humorous way where the technology and the prediction, or the predictive analytics of technology came true. But at the same time, the reliance upon the people who run technology effed everything up. Was that purpose?

• 18:07Speaker 02

  Wow. Chuck went deep. Chuck went like three layers into the moussaka, into the lasagna with that one. I like it. Um, yeah, I mean, like, you know, it's incredible, these algorithms that they use.

• 18:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, Chuck. It sounded like he didn't intend any of that at all.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, yeah, I did that on purpose. That's what, Adam, that's what you sounded like just then. I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was that brilliant when I wrote that part. By the way, that's a much better answer. I should have been mysterious and just said, Chuck, you gotta find your own meaning in it. We just make what we do. That would have been a much cooler. If I had a pipe, I would have taken a hit off a pipe and just been like, find your own meaning. No, but you're right, though. I mean, God, you guys know these algorithms they have for search engines and for social media and the way they corral us and get emotions out of us. We were definitely playing around with that, but I like that Neo's character

• 19:11Speaker 02

  was told what his death was gonna be, and then it wasn't that death. Even though, you're right, the president did have her death that was predicted. So as much as the algorithms try and corral us, I guess we were trying to make a point, like, you can still stop it, you know?

• 19:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. Well, you need, without that kind of message, you know, then you're just pissing people off, depressing people. So, let me, it's a rare moment. I have two sort of comedic people in front of me.

• 19:44Chuck Nice?

  I love that I'm the sort of...

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was hurtful, Neil.

• 19:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no. Did I say sort of? I didn't mean that, okay.

• 19:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Given that I have two comedic talents in front of me, I'd like to ask, do you think comedy is the best way to change someone's heart? As compared with teaching them a curriculum lesson plan?

• 20:10Chuck Nice?

  I... I'll let, I have my, but I'll let Adam do this.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Well, see what you think, Chuck. I mean, here's the funny thing, is, you know, the reason we chose comedy with this is comedy is great in the sense that it's kind of a truth detector. Like, if you wanted to go on stage and do a stand-up routine about how billionaires are taxed too much... I dare you to get a laugh off of that. Like, an audience will know that's bogus. And people have tried. They had a Fox News comedy show about 15 years ago. They tried to do it and it just bombed. And, uh, true. And, uh, so I, I think comedy is great. And I also think comedy, you have to have a perspective.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  You can't laugh at something if you're in the middle of being traumatized by it. Like, it's hard to laugh about a crazed, you know, uh, monkey attacking you. But like, if you can look from a distance at a crazed monkey, you can laugh at it. So I think comedy does a lot of things. I think it's a truth detector. I think it also means you have to have some perspective. You have to have a little bit of a view of the world, which I, you know, personally, I think that's exactly what we need right now. The world is so overwhelming and confusing and ridiculous and traumatizing that for us to be able to step back, uh, just feels good right away. Chuck, what do you think?

• 21:40Chuck Nice?

  First, I mean, I agree with everything you just said. And I also think that unlike, um, you know, uh, any other didactic message, which immediately puts people in the defensive and immediately causes them to withdraw in whatever, uh, thought pattern that they have already.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  If they disagree in advance, yeah.

• 22:00Chuck Nice?

  If they disagree, comedy disarms you because you're laughing first as an impulse. And then you go, hey. Which is always my favorite humor when, uh, you know, whether I'm doing it or somebody else is. My favorite thing to happen on stage is when I tell a joke and people laugh and then they groan.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:23Chuck Nice?

  I love that. I love that. And my answer to that every time is, too late, bitches.

• 22:32Chuck Nice?

  I already got you. It's too late. You laughed, it's already funny, you can't come back.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  I think that's spot on because it's like you laugh and then you realize in laughing, the world is not black and white. We're all contradictions. Like, I always say with this movie, people are like, oh, you're trying to warn people about climate and you're doing all this. Well, what are you doing? I'm like, don't get me wrong, I'm a moron. I, like, if there's a new ad for like a Taco Bell combo burrito filled with mini tacos, I'm like, I wanna eat that. And like, I, I'm, I'm way too invested in is our, our fleck and Jennifer Lopez happy together? Like, I'm way too invested in that. So, it's like, we're all like this.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  I mean, we're all animals that love like great smells and bright colors. But, you know, there's a little part of us too that can do something like step back and take a look at stuff. So, that combo is kind of the whole game, which I think is what Chuck's talking about.

• 23:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so what, what do you know about, the movie's been out for several months now, Don't Look Up on Netflix. What, what do you know about what impact it has had? No pun intended.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  You know, some of it's anecdotal. In some cases Netflix gives you all these crazy statistics. But, I mean, it's been really cool. I've just seen some, you know, stories where an opposition leader in the French government the other day referred to Macron's inaction over the climate as he's like Janie Orlean from Don't Look Up.

• 24:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  I saw the organizer of COP in, in Glasgow refer to Don't Look Up. I've seen, it's been mentioned in articles about leaders that are denying science. Extinction Rebellion in the UK has rallied around the film and has been mentioning it. Um, so, that's really cool. And then they show you the stats where it's like, you know, by some estimates, 250 to 300 million people have seen the movie and, and then they show you the social media responses and they're showing you that it's four to one positive and, uh, so, you know, there's a lot of stats, there's a lot of anecdotal, but.

• 24:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but I like the fact that if, if reference to the movie and its characters becomes part of pop culture, then you. I don't know what more you could ever hope a movie to do. And

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Hundred percent, yep.

• 25:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, there are movies that are in our common parlance. That, you know, say, oh, it's, it's, let's go to Oz, right? We know what that means. It's, it's part of our, it's part of our lexicon, our cinematic literacy. So that's, I think that's an excellent measure and there's perhaps no better measure of the influence of a movie than people.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the idea that there's now, there's now, I'm sorry. The idea that there's now a phrase for self-interested leaders and media and conglomerates ignoring science. And it's, don't look up is like, and it seems to kind of be catching. I mean, it's still a little early, but if that was the result, I, we're, we're doing backflips. I mean, we just tried to get something out there to kind of jar some people and it's just a movie. So, you know, your hopes are, are fairly modest, but uh.

• 25:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, the tagline of the show, the tagline of the show is the opposite of that, right? I end every show with, keep looking up. And so to, to, to watch the movie, to hear us say, don't look up. It's like each one of those was like a dagger to my, to my heart. Yeah. Uh, you know what? Adam, you should have named your show. F you, Neil Tyson. I felt that every time someone said, don't look up.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  We were really close. We, we tested it, we printed up posters.

• 26:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, Adam, you didn't leave the viewer any hope at the end. Except for the, the, the infinitely rich who went on the, the ship. And we didn't like any of them anyway. So, so, so what does it mean to offer no hope? This is America, we like some hope.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Ah, well, you know, I mean, here's the thing. It's just a movie.

• 26:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We like happy endings. We like happy endings.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's it's a fictional outcome, but we definitely were very conscious of the fact that we have seen thousands of movies for decades that have the guaranteed happy ending. And, you know, we were trying to say, if you, you know, we're not audience members. We're part of this. And unless you do something, there's not a guaranteed happy ending. So it was amazing to see how much that ending really hit people just because it it broke the kind of routine that we're used to. But make no mistake about it, uh, science is powerful. Science is the Excalibur on the wall. If we take it down and use it, uh, we can deal with this this urgent, urgent climate crisis.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  I mean, we have renewable energy.

• 27:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See, what you could have had, Adam, what you could have had was a small faction of people in your movie who watched StarTalk. Okay. And listen to StarTalk.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  I apologize. I should have had this in there.

• 27:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They band together and then they figure out how to convince everybody how to properly deflect the asteroid and Earth is saved. See, you could, you could have had that.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  That could have been the ending. Maybe we'll release that version.

• 28:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The director's cut.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  Or we could have, we could have had a bunch of people laughing at Chuck's stand-up. And then through the joy of their laughter, they see the world clearly and they get the government's to do it. Could have been either one of those.

• 28:20Chuck Nice?

  Or we could have had the reality of that same scenario where they're actually egging on the end of the world because they're watching.

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, no, but like, I've been saying. Rather than sit through Chuck's routine, they'd rather the world end. Is that what you're saying, Chuck?

• 28:37Chuck Nice?

  Right. Yes. Even so, come asteroid now.

• 28:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There was some, uh, so Adam, you probably got this in your stream. When I posted my Twitter comment about the film, uh, the response was wide and varied, and many were humorous. One of the, one of them said, by the end of the film, I was rooting for the comet. They didn't care. They didn't care about anybody. So Adam, let me get at least a little half serious here. If a movie has the power to move people intellectually, emotionally.

• 29:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, what you have done with Don't Look Up is hold up a mirror to us all. But a movie also has the power to offer a solution. And you didn't offer a solution. A solution to get through, to cut through the brush and bramble and the muck and mire of social media and, and, and political idiocy. So you could have, and you didn't. So is that, what do you want people to do?

• 29:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think this movie was a kick in the pants. I mean, this movie was, you know, what we're missing when it comes to the climate crisis is will in action. Right? Those two things. And that a lot of people don't feel the urgency in their bones. And I'm not saying they're at fault. It just is what it is. So this movie was designed to be a big old kick in the pants. And what I hope is, I hope other people, and certainly our production companies doing it. I want to see other movies, other TV shows. I want to see, you know, the news start to cover, the media start to cover the different ways we can deal with this. Because there are a lot of ways we can.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  I mean, we have the renewable energy. We, you know, there's, there's some early research going on with carbon removal. That's really exciting. You gotta be careful though, because the fossil. Yeah, or, but the fossil fuel companies will come in and use those solutions as a way to slow us down. So you gotta kind of distinguish between the good faith and bad faith solutions. But, um, but yeah, it is ultimately one movie. And, uh, we could only tell so much of a story. And the goal of it was a kick in the pants, a moment of identification for people that have felt gaslit. And a chance for people to have a little perspective on how batshit crazy our world is. That was the goal of the movie.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  And yeah, you're, you're a hundred percent right, Neil, like.

• 31:14Chuck Nice?

  So Yale and George Mason have a study. And in that study, one of the things. That was most prominent is the fact that one of the biggest problems with climate is that people do not talk about it. So when you talk about the impact of movies having a shockwave, the fallout is if people talk about it, that is part of the solution.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  I, uh, you just gave my answer in your question. Yeah, that's it. Is like, I don't think people realize how much power they have in just the people they talk to, the way they behave, feeling and emotion. I mean, you know, advertising companies are trying to replicate word of mouth. That's what they're trying to replicate. But every study shows like nothing's more powerful than people just talking to each other. So that was it. That was the goal of this one. Let's get a little spark going.

• 32:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna summarize what both of you just said by quoting Ray Bradbury. And so Ray Bradbury will take us out of this segment. He said, when asked by a fan, because Ray Bradbury, the science fiction writer, said, why do you always portray these apocalyptic futures for humanity? Is that the future you think we're going to have? And he says, no, I show you those futures so you know to avoid them. Oh, that's good.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  Very nice.

• 32:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Adam, great to have you. Keep being crazy out there and doing things that no one else would even think of doing and thereby changing the world for the better. When we come back, we're gonna invite in my friend and colleague, Amy Mainzer, who's an astrophysicist, who's one of the world's experts on planetary protection, protecting Earth from asteroids. And she's gonna talk about a recent mission launched by NASA to test whether we have the power to deflect asteroids. When StarTalk returns.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  I'm Joel Cherico, and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 33:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. We're talking about cosmic things that can harm humans on Earth. Coming off a great interview with Adam McKay, writer, producer, director of Don't Look Up, the Netflix hit movie. And now we bring in a friend and colleague, Amy Mainzer. Amy, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 33:56Speaker 04

  Hey, thanks. It's great to be back.

• 33:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Last I checked in on you, you were at the Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena, California. And where are you now?

• 34:05Speaker 04

  Well, I have since moved. And now I'm at the University of Arizona in the Department of Planetary Science.

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool. One of the jewels in the crown of that institution. Whenever they look up, they find something good at the University of Arizona. So that's one of the finest departments around. So great to have you back on StarTalk. Now, why do we have you here? We could have had you anyway, just because of your expertise, thinking about stuff that can harm us. But you doubled down on that as being like the science astro advisor to the film, Don't Look Up. And so what we're gonna do is we solicited questions from our audience, and a zillion of them came in. But just before we go to those, Chuck, you're loaded up with those questions?

• 34:54Chuck Nice?

  I am. Yeah, we're all good to go.

• 34:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're good to go. So before we do that, let me just ask you, Amy, what did they want you to do for the film?

• 35:02Speaker 04

  Well, you know, I think the role of science advisor probably is different for every movie or TV show. But for this one, there was quite a bit to do. There was basically advising Adam and the rest of the cast and the crew on the actual asteroid and comet science. But kind of even more basically, there was a kind of a task of advising them on what it means to be a scientist and how do scientists think. And what do we do when we have bad news to tell everybody based on what we're learning?

• 35:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's interesting. I implicated you, I think probably correctly because they wouldn't have known this otherwise on the, in the scripting. I was interviewed by MSNBC and they played a scene about Don't Look Up. And they played a scene where I forgot which character asserts it. It might have been Leonardo DiCaprio. He says, "A comet the size of Mount Everest is gonna hit Earth." And I said, "Well, you don't get that size just by accident because that was the size of the comet that took out the dinosaurs." And so a real astronomer had to be in there sort of infusing these, these reference frames for them. So did I correctly credit you for telling them that?

• 36:12Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Thank you. Yes.

• 36:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  See Chuck, my people, my people, we are, our people, we all know how we gotta talk. See Chuck?

• 36:22Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just so you know.

• 36:23Chuck Nice?

  Yes. The dinosaur's died and so are you. So will you.

• 36:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all will you. Yes. Yeah.

• 36:30Speaker 04

  Well, hopefully not. Hopefully not this time.

• 36:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you also coach them on the behavior of scientists as scientists rather than just script points?

• 36:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, we really talked about a lot of different aspects of what it means to be a scientist. Just, you know, how do scientists think? What are the things that sort of frustrate us? And how do we, you know, how do we succeed? And sometimes how do we fail when we try to communicate with the public and, and with people who are, who are in power to make decisions about what's gonna happen to all of us?

• 36:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but okay, but wait a minute though. You are very good at communicating with the public. How do you train actors to be bad at communicating with the public?

• 37:08Speaker 04

  Well, I think, you know.

• 37:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you, if you told them all you knew, they would have been much, much better at it. So how do you tell them what you don't know and have them be bad at it?

• 37:16Speaker 04

  Well, it's funny because we, Leonardo and I especially talk a lot about this, this part that, you know, there's a tendency in science to use a lot of jargon.

• 37:24Chuck Nice?

  I just love that you can say that. I, I mean.

• 37:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  First name basis.

• 37:27Chuck Nice?

  First of all, don't even try to just bury that lead.

• 37:34Chuck Nice?

  Don't even try. Let the woman be first name basis with all these people, dude. Wait a minute, no.

• 37:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At least you didn't call him Leo.

• 37:41Chuck Nice?

  Wait a minute. Leonardo and I, we talk a lot about, it's like, and we know that you're not doing a seance with Da Vinci.

• 37:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, okay.

• 37:52Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead, I'm sorry.

• 37:53Speaker 04

  Which would have been very cool. I would definitely.

• 37:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would have been even cooler, yeah, that would have been cooler.

• 37:57Speaker 04

  If that's possible, that would have been very cool.

• 37:59Chuck Nice?

  Even more cool.

• 37:59Speaker 04

  We talked a lot about just, you know, what is it, what is it that's so confusing sometimes? Obviously, we use a ton of jargon, and we do it sometimes without even meaning to. I mean, you guys encounter this all the time, right? I mean, we use words in a scientific context. Same word, use it in everyday life, and it takes on a totally different meaning sometimes. The word uncertainty, for example. In science, that has a very specific definition. We use it in a, in almost a mathematical context. But if you say in everyday life, "Well, I'm uncertain as to whether there is a rattlesnake in my backyard." You know, that means you don't know, right? But to a scientist, that, that, that word is used in a very different way. So we talked a lot about that.

• 38:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So people don't know that we can quantify our ignorance, and that's actually a profound place to be.

• 38:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:45Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say that's.

• 38:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In a world of uncertainties.

• 38:47Chuck Nice?

  That's very scientist of you. We can quantify our ignorance.

• 38:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, science deals in probabilities all the time, right? I mean, that's just part of what we do as scientists, is we are trying to quantify how likely it is something's gonna happen. But that.

• 39:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or not happen.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  Or not happen, yeah. And that's a, that's a, sometimes a kind of a hard thing to get across. But I think also too, just generally, you know, more basically, can we agree that there are facts that are supported by scientific data that are true? And that's a big theme of the movie. Can we have something that we all agree on that is true?

• 39:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you weren't just a random astrophysicist to advise them, you actually have expertise in asteroid risks. So, what can you tell us? Give us just some numbers. How many asteroids have us in their path? Just so we can freak everybody out before we start the Q and A.

• 39:39Speaker 04

  Well, the very good news is, okay, full stop, the movie is pure science fiction. Okay, we don't know of a giant comet.

• 39:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's not, so you're lying. That was, that was a documentary. I told everybody that. Okay, go on.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  We're very lucky. There is no comet that we know about that is about to smack into the earth in six months. Full stop. We don't know of any such object.

• 39:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Seven months, yes, but six months, we're saying. Okay. Let's put it there. Let's go straight to questions. Chuck, what do you have?

• 40:04Chuck Nice?

  I don't know what you're doing in six months and two days.

• 40:08Chuck Nice?

  Wouldn't make, wouldn't make any plans.

• 40:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Live it up for now.

• 40:12Chuck Nice?

  Yep, live it up for now.

• 40:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, give me some questions.

• 40:15Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. Alex Reynoso, who kind of dovetails on Dr. Tyson's question, says, hello, Alex from Mexico here. My question for Dr. Mainzer is, were you asked for any new ideas for the movie? Or did they just ask you to fact check the ideas they already had?

• 40:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that question.

• 40:35Chuck Nice?

  And if so, what was the craziest idea that you fact checked?

• 40:40Speaker 04

  Uh, well, I would say, yeah, we, we had a lot of back and forth about the script and it was, it was, you know, we started working on it more than two years ago now, so it's been a while. First off, uh, had to work with Adam to, to figure out the size of the comet, actually. Well, first of all, we had to establish that it was a comet and not an asteroid. So that was number one. Number two, uh, he wanted it to be a lot bigger than I thought was, was a good idea for the script. So, uh, had him kind of downsize it a little bit and I told him at a certain point, if the thing is too big, you know, there is no movie, right? There's no hope at all. So we wanted to try to size it to something that is, is, uh, you know, is, is large enough that it would have caused a lot of damage in the movie. Obviously that's part of the plot, but, but not so large that everybody would just give up and stop trying right off the bat.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  So, so that was number one. So that, getting the size of the comet right was, uh, was kind of one of the first orders of business.

• 41:32Chuck Nice?

  Interesting, that's really cool.

• 41:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, but how about weird, but was there something you added, other than the size of the comet that they already knew was gonna hit? Was there some extra plot line you said, you know, you gotta add this to the storytelling? Otherwise it's not real.

• 41:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there's a, there's kind of a key, and I'm assuming this is spoilers are okay here, I'm hoping everybody's seen the movie at this point. But, uh, yeah, one of the things that we talk a lot about that is, uh, is, is features pretty heavily in the plot is, uh, the concept that somebody's gonna wanna come along and instead of just deflecting the comet, they're gonna wanna try to mine the comet.

• 42:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I, I was very impressed with that turn, with that turn of the, of the plot line.

• 42:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, so basically, there's sort of a key moment when it looks like everybody, in spite of all their differences, has kinda gotten all their stuff together, and we're gonna deflect the comet, and everything is going according to plan, and then all of a sudden, there's a wrench in the works.

• 42:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A plot twist.

• 42:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that, that.

• 42:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and we're reminded that indeed, comets and asteroids are very rich in minerals and natural resources, so that, that factual dimension of it made it comedically authentic for someone to say, let's exploit this for economic gain.

• 42:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, Jeff Bezos comes in and says, hey, I, I, we gotta, we gotta, I got a trillion dollars up there coming at us.

• 42:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  Well, in this case.

• 42:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you wanna blow it up, you know?

• 42:54Chuck Nice?

  What are you doing?

• 42:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and we, and we can ship that overnight.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  Oh, gosh. Yeah, no, we gotta, we gotta, I mean, this was, this was something we talked a lot about in the movie, because, you know, there's been a lot of talk about asteroid mining. We do have asteroid sample return missions. In fact, there's two of them. One has already brought a sample back from an asteroid, that's Hayabusa II, and there's another that's on its way back to Earth right now, and that's Osiris Rex. But, both of these missions are bringing back kind of the equivalent of about a baseball-sized worth of material, maybe a coffee can's worth, but that's it. We're not talking tons and tons and tons of minerals here, we're talking a baseball, so.

• 43:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this sample returned, Amy. So, uh, we'll get to this later, maybe in the next segment. But that means you're bringing space stuff back to Earth. That can't always be good, even if it did have economic value. Thinking of like space viruses or something.

• 43:48Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 43:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But we'll get to that. Just want to tease what could happen later. All right, Chuck, give me another one.

• 43:54Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 43:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's see if we can mine these questions.

• 43:58Chuck Nice?

  Ah, I see what you did there.

• 43:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You see what I did there?

• 44:00Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, this one's about space herpes, so, no.

• 44:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck.

• 44:04Chuck Nice?

  You said space virus, so anyway, here we go. Uh, hello, Dr. Mainzer, Dr. Tyson, and Lord Nice. Oh, please. Uh, since DART's counterpart, AIM, was canceled, and thus, we're relying on ground-based telescopes to observe the effects of DART, will the mission still provide us with enough data to determine if a kinetic impactor could counter the scenario like the one depicted in Don't Look Up? Or will further tests be necessary? Uh, by the way, I appreciate your work on NeoWise. Greetings from Germany, the place where we like to show off

• 44:46Chuck Nice?

  how much we know about everything. Okay, Patrick? You know, you could have just asked a question, Patrick. You didn't even have to give us a dissertation on how you yourself are an astrophysicist, and let me ask Amy all about it. Come on, man.

• 45:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Okay, so DART, Amy, quick, what's DART?

• 45:11Speaker 04

  So, DART is the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, first of all. And it is a mission that is going to a double asteroid. So it's an asteroid that's got a moon going around it. And the idea is to bump into the moon. So the idea is to take the spacecraft and just crash it into the moon and bump the moon a little bit so that you can see the moon's orbit change. So the idea is to test this so-called kinetic impactor technique. In other words, the energy of motion. Can we change the orbit of this asteroid's moon in a way that is detectable?

• 45:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what is AIM, then? What happened to AIM?

• 45:44Speaker 04

  So there was a proposal to have another mission that would watch the impact in real time. So basically, just watch the impact happen and see whether or not there was a big explosion off the asteroid or what have you. Now, there's a couple of things. So the AIM mission didn't end up happening as proposed. However...

• 46:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And was that an acronym?

• 46:03Speaker 04

  Oh, yes. And it... I'm gonna have to look it up. Boy, we have...

• 46:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Asteroid Imaging... Make this up. Right now, let's just do it now.

• 46:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. Asteroid Imaging Mission. Yeah.

• 46:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Maneuver. Maneuver, yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 04

  Good question. I don't actually remember them.

• 46:21Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna go with murder. I was gonna go with murder.

• 46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Murder!

• 46:24Speaker 04

  Okay. So AIM did not make it. However, they are gonna watch it with the ground-based telescopes, as the questioner noted, and there is a CubeSat that's been provided by the Italian Space Agency that is gonna be watching the impact as well. So, there's that. The other thing is, the Europeans have a mission that is gonna go there eventually in a couple of years after the impact, and it will come back to the asteroid's moon, and it's gonna do a very careful mapping of the system. So hopefully, between all of that, we can piece it all together.

• 46:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are these videos I've seen where it's some part of DART detaches while the rest of it collides?

• 47:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think this is the CubeSat with the observer, the camera on it.

• 47:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, because they were together, and then they separated, and one went in for the collision.

• 47:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I believe it's got a little friend that's gonna drop off and take a look at things as it happens.

• 47:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta take a quick break. When we come back, more cosmic queries with a collision, end of Earth, end of all of civilization expert, Amy Mainzer, advisor to the Netflix hit film "Don't Look Up." When we return.

• 47:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back with Amy Mainzer. Amy, friend and colleague, planetary scientist. Amy, how do we find you on social media? Where do you hang out?

• 47:50Speaker 04

  I'm on Twitter. So I'm at Amy Mainzer on Twitter. That's where you can find me.

• 47:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mainzer, I'm mispronouncing your last name. Shame on me.

• 47:57Speaker 04

  Ads either way.

• 47:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  M A I N Z E R.

• 48:01Speaker 04

  You're feeling particularly German. You can say Mainzer.

• 48:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mainzer. Yes, okay. Don't get Chuck started on his accent.

• 48:10Chuck Nice?

  Do you have your papers?

• 48:12Speaker 04

  No.

• 48:16Chuck Nice?

  Your peer-reviewed papers?

• 48:19Speaker 04

  I did say it the English, the American pronunciation one time in front of my German grandfather. And boy, did I get an earful.

• 48:27Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow. I bet you did.

• 48:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. We want some more of that chuckle to fill in for him.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  Say, Chuck, you're bringing back memories.

• 48:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, let's get another question, Chuck. See, I mean, we can squeeze into this final segment.

• 48:41Chuck Nice?

  This is Dylan. He says, greeting doctors and comedians from Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was wondering what size do asteroids become dangerous? Not just Mount Everest's size. I know that Earth pounds through millions of particles from space that they do nothing. In other words, we get bombarded all the time. What can we expect when an asteroid that could potentially kill all life, what's the smallest that it could be?

• 49:11Speaker 04

  Well, so we do have some good information about this. And the question's absolutely correct, or the questioner is absolutely correct. We do get pelted with all kinds of little particles all the time, every day, about 100 tons. And we mostly see those, if we see them at all, as shooting stars. Those are tiny. These things are like sand grains or maybe the size of a grain of rice or a pea, something like that. But we know that if an object gets to be bigger, say about maybe 20 meters across, so about 60 feet, 50, 60 feet across, at that point, it can start to make it through the Earth's atmosphere more or less. intact. Now, we know this is a reasonable lower limit because we have a really recent event.

• 49:50Speaker 04

  Well, recent on astronomer time scales in 2013, there was an object that that hit over Russia. And it exploded. Remember that it exploded in the upper atmosphere and there was a shower of fragments. It broke a bunch of windows, but there wasn't a big hole in the ground. Right. It was. It was mostly just an airburst explosion. And that's because the object was small enough that the atmosphere was effectively like a brick wall and really just shredded it. But if the object's closer to, say, 50 meters across, then what happens is you get what we have here in Arizona, which is a mile wide hole in the ground, more or less. So very small differences in the size, relatively speaking, can make a really big difference. So basically, kind of.

• 50:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, for those who've never been to Arizona, she referenced a practically mile diameter meteor crater sitting there.

• 50:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, near Winslow, Arizona, isn't that right?

• 50:40Speaker 04

  That's right, yeah.

• 50:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One of the closest towns, a town that showed up in a song, something, I've been tum tum in Winslow, Arizona. What's that song? I don't know. I think it's called by the Eagles.

• 50:52Chuck Nice?

  Mile wide crater.

• 50:55Speaker 04

  Really large crater.

• 50:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 50:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so the takeaway from that answer, Amy, is that occasionally, um, rice and peas falls from the sky.

• 51:05Speaker 04

  Uh, you have rice and peas.

• 51:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said that. We heard. We heard you say that.

• 51:10Speaker 04

  Space material.

• 51:10Chuck Nice?

  It's like, it's like Earth sweating. It's like Earth sweating.

• 51:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rice and peas.

• 51:15Chuck Nice?

  Rice and peas is Earth sweating.

• 51:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I heard her say that. She's on the record.

• 51:18Speaker 04

  That's it. The comments are helping us celebrate every day. That's it. That's it.

• 51:24Chuck Nice?

  Hey, so I.

• 51:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, keep going.

• 51:25Chuck Nice?

  It just occurred to me because you said about the shockwave in 2013. So that was not a very big, uh, object that, uh, impacted the atmosphere to create this shockwave. So. Would something the size, what would it take to actually just blow the atmosphere off? Because the first thing that it would hit would be, it would make the air like an ocean. Our atmosphere would be like an ocean, right? Because it hits it if the-

• 51:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, Chuck, are you asking this question? Or is this a Patreon question that you're supposed to be reading from?

• 51:57Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wait, that's, wait, that's from, that's from, that's from Buck Rice. Buck Rice. Buck Rice from Rice and Peas, Arizona, would like to know.

• 52:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, let me tighten up Chuck's question for you, Amy. So at what size asteroid is unfazed by moving through the atmosphere?

• 52:15Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 52:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then it just hits the ground as though there was no atmosphere.

• 52:18Chuck Nice?

  Nice. That's what I was trying to say, but I don't know what I'm talking about.

• 52:22Speaker 04

  No, no, this is exactly the question. If it's a little bit bigger than 20 meters, it's going to make it to the ground mostly intact. And by the time you get to about 50 meters across, now it can blow a pretty big hole in the ground. So now the thing that hit in meteor crater, there's a caveat, it's made of mostly nickel iron, because we found some pieces of it that didn't get completely vaporized.

• 52:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Chuck, she meant nickel plus iron?

• 52:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When she said nickel iron, just so you know. There's not some new element that-

• 52:49Speaker 04

  Nickel iron.

• 52:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only she knows about nickel iron.

• 52:51Speaker 04

  Oh, no, no. Yeah, no, basically-

• 52:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're commonly found together in the universe. Supernovae make them, and so they're everywhere together. So it's not a surprise we find them together in chunks of things in the solar system. So Amy, if I remember correctly, the one that hit over Russia was a rocky, a stony meteorite. And, but that's not what fell in Arizona.

• 53:11Speaker 04

  That's correct. Yeah, the one that hit over Russia was, was a kind of a common type of stony asteroid. So sort of average in its properties. But the one that, that impacted in Arizona about 50,000 years ago, that was made of mostly nickel and iron, so a much higher density material. It wasn't a whole lot bigger. It was about 50 meters across instead of 20 meters across, but probably a pretty high density compared to the stony object that exploded over Russia.

• 53:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that crater, by the way, can sink a 62-story building. I've been there several times. It's great. If you ever go to Arizona, put that on your list. If you're a fan of this podcast and you go to Arizona, wave to Amy as you go by Tucson, but then go to this crater.

• 53:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I definitely recommend it. It is impressive.

• 53:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think there's a Subway merch concession stand up at the top. You can eat a sandwich.

• 54:03Speaker 04

  I thought you were gonna say the Subway stuff.

• 54:04Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, I was like, where did that MTA get that good?

• 54:11Speaker 04

  Get on the way.

• 54:12Chuck Nice?

  Wow. I thought Coney Island was far.

• 54:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, well, next stop, meteor crater. All right, go for it.

• 54:22Chuck Nice?

  This is, woo, I'm gonna say, "Ayah Buena Costa," okay? Whatever. Ayah Buena Costa says, "Hi, Ayah from the Philippines here. What would be the place where humans could possibly survive Earth's destruction? Would you still want to live after that? Is there any place you can hide from an extinction-level impact?"

• 54:53Speaker 04

  Well, let's put it this way. It is thought, we know a lot about what happens because we can look back at the event that wiped out the dinosaurs, right? And in fact, Neil's home institution there at AMNH does a lot of research on this.

• 55:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  American Museum of Natural History.

• 55:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, American Museum of Natural History has done a lot of work on this. But basically, we know from studying the fossil records that pretty much any form of life that was bigger than about 50 pounds went extinct. And that's because the food webs really collapsed. There wasn't a lot to eat for a very long time. Life did eventually come back and re-diversify after that impact event, but it took millions of years for that to happen. So it was not a fast process on our time scales. So I would say that, you know, it's bad. We definitely don't want this to happen. And we can learn about present-day climate change that we're causing as human beings by looking back at that event and seeing exactly how things unfolded. In fact, I would say the obvious conclusion from that event is that doing large, uncontrolled experiments on our atmosphere

• 55:53Speaker 04

  is a really bad idea, and we shouldn't be doing it.

• 55:56Chuck Nice?

  So.

• 55:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, plus, plus, Amy, I think that there's a, there's an important point that you're making there, which is many people think that when the asteroid hits, that's what kills you. An extinction level asteroid. No, it's because it takes out the food chain, right? It takes out the base of the food chain and everything that eats that goes extinct and everything that eats, the animals that ate the food go extinct. And so it's this wave of extinction percolating across the tree of life that can take about, how long, how long did it take all those animals to die? Do we know?

• 56:26Speaker 04

  Well, we know from the fossil record that it, uh, it was pretty fast, but on geological time scale. So in other words, that could have been, you know, thousands of years or something like that.

• 56:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thousands of years. So we lose, we lose most of the species over thousands of years, not because they, they were hit by the asteroid itself, which is how you get a small asteroid, small the size of Mount Everest, affecting life everywhere on, on Earth. And you made such an important point, Amy, that, um, the only way that can kill life around the other side of the Earth is if it affected the climate.

• 56:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 56:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and then we learn what we're doing. Are, are we, uh, Amy, are we an Everest scale collision?

• 57:06Speaker 04

  Well, let's put it this way. We should do everything in our power to make sure that we're not the asteroid or the comet.

• 57:13Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, we, at least we got the first part of it right. Ass. Um.

• 57:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ass as in asteroid?

• 57:22Chuck Nice?

  Okay. Anyway.

• 57:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't be an asteroid. All right. What, next question, Chuck.

• 57:28Chuck Nice?

  Hello, everyone. My name is pronounced Bridge. Really? Okay. Uh, what?

• 57:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 57:38Chuck Nice?

  Would it be possible to eventually put a detection system at points in space like the moon or Mars? And, uh, would it, would it even be necessary?

• 57:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, detection or deflection?

• 57:51Chuck Nice?

  Oh, good, good thing. No, he says detection, but I like your question too. Detection and deflection.

• 57:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 57:58Speaker 04

  All right, yeah, so I mean, you know, of course, we've got ground-based telescopes. We even have a space-based telescope right now. We have NeoWise, the New Earth Object Wideband Infrared Survey Explorer. NeoWise is the project I work on. And we're building a new one that's gonna go in space that will eventually replace NeoWise, because NeoWise is now very old. That's called the New Earth Object Surveyor. And it's not gonna go on the moon, but it's gonna go just past the orbit of the moon. So not too much further away. In principle, if we have these telescopes, plus we've got the Rubin Observatory that's gonna be coming online in Chile, uh, pretty soon, hopefully. And so with all of those expanded capabilities, we should be in pretty good shape. We should be able to map out where most of the really big stuff is at that point. Now, could we look at other options?

• 58:41Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And one of the things we'll do is we start to get data from the more advanced surveys is we'll look at the population models and figure out, okay, what do we do about the rest of the objects? What's the best way to search for them? We could try building asteroid or building observatories on the moon and on Mars, but it's, it's hard to do that, of course. Um, so if we can build observatories...

• 59:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Amy, I have to stop you. Everything, I have to stop you. Everything you just said is just so that we know when to kiss our ass goodbye.

• 59:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You haven't said anything about deflection. You just, you just talk about, oh, now I have a catalog of all the things that will kill us and the date and time. So I need more than that from you, Amy.

• 59:19Speaker 04

  Yes, well, well, well, okay, I am hoping, full stop. I am hoping that when we make our big catalog, we find nothing. And that's a great, that would be the best possible answer.

• 59:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, good point.

• 59:28Speaker 04

  Right, we could look out there and we could see that, you know what? They all look...

• 59:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nothing for 10,000 years.

• 59:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, just fine, we're good, we're fine. It's, we're all fine here, you know, to quote from Star Wars a little bit. Uh, but you know, we could find that, and that would be the best case. Of course, we don't wanna, we don't wanna just assume the best case, though. We do wanna make plans for deflection, and that's, that's where the DART mission comes in. That was a test of that kinetic impactor technology, which is kind of the easiest thing you can imagine, where you just bump into the asteroid with a spacecraft. There are other technologies, though, that we could look at, like something called

• 1:00:00Chuck Nice?

  Bruce Willis.

• 1:00:00Speaker 04

  Bruce Willis. Yes, yes, the Bruce Willis technology, which I'm always in favor of, but, but you can always send Bruce Willis. That's probably gonna help, but if you want to do something else, you can look at something called the gravity tractor. And I'm not talking about a John Deere tractor, I'm talking about a mass in space. So in other words, you build a really big spacecraft, something very big and heavy, and you park it next to the asteroid, and then you just sort of let the gravity of the spacecraft pull on the asteroid and try to tow it out of the way. Of course, that only works if you have a pretty long time to let it work.

• 1:00:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a gravitational tractor beam. I love the concept of that.

• 1:00:40Chuck Nice?

  That's super cool.

• 1:00:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, I think we might have time for only one more question. This is sad, because we're talking about the, the future of life on Earth, and, and we gotta fit it into our time slots. That, that's the wrong, that's just wrong.

• 1:00:52Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, it makes sense, too, you know, uh, because we're sad, as, as the way we're responding to everything is sad. So, okay, here we go. I'm sorry, I shouldn't be a downer on humankind. I'm sure we'll get it together. Okay, here we go. Uh, this is Daniel Kulakowski, and Daniel says, first, Dr. Tyson, were you consulted on the movie title? No! That's pretty funny.

• 1:01:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good, that's good. No, the answer is no, but as I watched the movie, I kept, I felt each of those don't look ups as like a dagger into my heart, because every day I tell people to look up, and they're saying, don't look up, and a movie is way more powerful than I am in messaging the public. So I, it was like tiny, that, you know, the death of a thousand cuts, that's how I felt.

• 1:01:46Chuck Nice?

  So then he says, uh, second, Chuck, just take a deep breath and then pronounce my name exactly as it looks, you'll get it right. Okay, well, thank you. For your very, thank you for your very zen, your very zen instructions. I hope, I hope, I should have read that first, cuz now I don't know.

• 1:02:07Chuck Nice?

  And then third, Dr. Mainzer, in the opening scene where Leo is calculating the trajectory of the asteroid, how is he able to do that accurately in discrete steps rather than using a method to calculate the trajectory with calculus or a computer model? Could he really be that smart?

• 1:02:29Speaker 04

  This scene in the movie condenses a kind of a bunch of things all together at once. We were trying to be sort of quick about it, but the upshot is, is that Leo is not an expert in comet discovery, so he's going back to grad school and he's got a bunch of students with him. So I kind of thought, you know, if I were a professor in that situation, I probably would want to try to actually work out the math if I could to show the students how it's done. So in other words, use it as a teachable moment. So in the movie, he's kind of using it as a teachable moment. He's looking at a textbook. He's trying to figure out the math for himself rather than just going right to the computer. He's actually trying to kind of work it out. If you look carefully, you will see that they are using their laptops and he is actually writing stuff down on the board that they're, that they're getting off of a computer. So they are actually using the computer, but there's

• 1:03:14Speaker 04

  kind of a scene in the beginning where he's, he's gonna try and figure it out for himself a little bit, just to make sure he understands it. And I think that's what a good scientist will try to do.

• 1:03:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I think the question was, he's showing discrete steps of the location of the comet. And then one step, the separation between Earth and the comet is zero. Wouldn't that happen as a continuous calculation or, or a mathematical function that gets there? Like the guy said, whose name is, we didn't pronounce, would he use calculus, which then gets you the continuous solution?

• 1:03:43Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So you do use calculus, although the method that he's using, it's referred to as Gauss's method, and this is a sort of a classical method of orbit determination. The idea is you actually iterate. So in other words, you make an initial guess and then you kind of refine the guess based on an estimate of how far off you are. And then you do it again and again and again. And after that, then you can start looking at discrete steps in time. Once you have a pretty good idea of what the orbit is, the next step is to figure out where's the object going at these specific points in time. And so that's kind of what's shown. There's sort of a two-step process there.

• 1:04:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now Gauss is my man. Gauss is my man.

• 1:04:18Chuck Nice?

  Gauss is the Google Maps of orbit plotting.

• 1:04:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you know Gauss invented the method of least squares in statistics to solve the orbit of the first asteroid ever discovered? So this has deep.

• 1:04:34Speaker 04

  Ah, yeah.

• 1:04:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The asteroid series was in space, moving, and then it got lost in the sun's glare. And it's like, where do we don't know? Where are we gonna look? Gauss, I got this. Okay? So he used the previous measures, extrapolated into the future, into the future, using the single best method possible. And to do that, he invented the method of least squares. On asteroids. I'm just saying. We got people everywhere working, working on stuff.

• 1:05:01Chuck Nice?

  Well, what a slouch he was.

• 1:05:06Chuck Nice?

  God, if only, if only that Gauss had tried harder.

• 1:05:12Speaker 04

  What he could have made of himself.

• 1:05:14Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 1:05:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, let's try to slip in one more question, Chuck. See what you got.

• 1:05:21Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:05:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Amy, you gotta answer quick on this. Pretend you're in, pretend on the evening news and you gotta give me a sound bite. Okay, go.

• 1:05:27Speaker 04

  You got it. You got it.

• 1:05:28Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go, guys. Uh, this will be an easy one because we almost got to it. But, uh, Michaela Nagas says, uh, what valuable resources exist in asteroids? And how much money could be made by mining them, uh, right, directly to, uh, related to the movie?

• 1:05:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, I have said, I have said, Amy, that the world's first trillionaire will be the person who exploits the natural resources on asteroids. So, how, am I right or am I wrong? Tell me here.

• 1:05:58Speaker 04

  Boy, I tell you what, it's a, it's a science fiction question in a lot of ways because it's really hard to do stuff in space. We can bring back kind of baseball-sized or coffee can-sized bunches of material. Bringing back a lot more than that so far has been really challenging for us. Maybe we will get there someday, but right now, we're still talking baseball-sized amounts of material. So we're, we're still in the, uh, I don't know, maybe we'll get there someday, but we need, we need some Star Trek to happen first.

• 1:06:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but in 1902, before the airplane was invented, if you said in 67 years gonna be walking on the moon, they would have put you, they would have committed you.

• 1:06:30Chuck Nice?

  True.

• 1:06:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, that can't be more far off than walking on the moon before the Wright Brothers flew.

• 1:06:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's hard to say, you know, I mean, gosh, so many people have tried to predict the future and have been way, way wrong. So, I mean, you know, who knows? But I will say-

• 1:06:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We want you on record so we can embarrass you in 10 years, okay?

• 1:06:46Speaker 04

  There we go, there we go. I think it's probably the case that in 10 years, we're not gonna be towing back whole big chunks of asteroid. Probably about 10 years is too soon. But, you know, after that, who knows? It's very appealing to try to do it because we all know that there's limited resources on Earth, right? Of all these rare materials, right? And we do use them to make things like cell phones and computer screens and all this stuff. So we definitely want to find more sources of them. But it's just really hard to do stuff in space right now, and it's hard to bring material back. Hopefully someday we can figure all this stuff out so that we can tow asteroids back in ways that are safe and then chop them up and extract the minerals without having to come out.

• 1:07:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially asteroids that might have taken us out. Then we say, "So there, we're gonna eat you."

• 1:07:30Speaker 04

  That's it, revenge on those asteroids, yes.

• 1:07:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, last one word question, Amy. Are we all gonna die?

• 1:07:39Speaker 04

  Not from an asteroid.

• 1:07:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh!

• 1:07:42Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 1:07:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, you heard it here.

• 1:07:44Chuck Nice?

  There you go, America, it's still heart disease.

• 1:07:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Still heart disease.

• 1:07:49Speaker 04

  So eat your broccoli.

• 1:07:51Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 1:07:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We will die if we behave the way they did in the movie you advised. So, they made that clear. We gotta end it there. Amy, a delight to have you back on StarTalk. We're gonna do this again, maybe we'll talk about infestations from space and planetary protection. I know you've got some thinking on that as well. Chuck, always good to have you, man.

• 1:08:11Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:08:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, this has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries, everything that might kill us from space. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.