Things You Thought You Knew – Billionaires in Space

Bezos? Branson? Elon Musk? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice break down why all these billionaires are going to space, how achieving orbit works, and how to wrap our heads around exponentially large numbers.

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.

• 0:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. This episode is another installment in Things You Thought You Knew. And today, we're gonna talk about billionaires in space. We're gonna talk about how our brain is not wired to think in exponentials. And we're gonna talk about what it takes to achieve orbit. All in this episode of StarTalk. So Chuck, I haven't checked in on you lately. What's been eating you?

• 0:43Chuck Nice?

  Well, you know, I'm not sure if it's something that's eating me, but I'm curious because a little while ago, you were on CNN and there was a lot of hoopla about man returning to space.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, billionaire returning to space.

• 1:00Chuck Nice?

  That's true. Billionaire returns to space.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Actually, no, it's like this Cro-Magnon man, now we have billionaire man.

• 1:08Chuck Nice?

  This is so true.

• 1:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Billionaire man going to space.

• 1:11Chuck Nice?

  Right. And now it looks like that's the new thing is that billionaires in space, you know.

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, yeah, so what's your problem?

• 1:18Chuck Nice?

  So my problem is that...

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, just to be clear, I was on Farid Zakaria GPS.

• 1:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to give him a shout out. Yeah, he's a good guy. We all love him.

• 1:26Chuck Nice?

  That's your buddy.

• 1:29Chuck Nice?

  But here's the thing. So during that day, on every single channel, the coverage was like the moon landing.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:40Chuck Nice?

  It was like, it was like, and I'm thinking...

• 1:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We interrupt this program.

• 1:44Chuck Nice?

  Right. Get a break in. So I'm thinking like, yo, that's kind of like we went to the North Pole and then...

• 1:56Chuck Nice?

  We did a Sarah Palin, like, you know, I could see the North Pole from my house. But then we said that was like, we went there, didn't we do better than this already?

• 2:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what you mean, let me unpack what you just said. So on the occasion that I was on CNN, it was Richard Branson.

• 2:14Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who had a crew of six, including himself, who went into a suborbital flight, had a few minutes of weightlessness, and then because it's a space plane, a rocket plane.

• 2:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 2:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It could come back and land on a runway. Okay. So you're saying, did we do that before? Yeah, kind of. We did it 60 years ago with Alan Shepard. All right, America's first astronaut, basically, and he was launched from Cape Canaveral, launched him due east and plunked down in his capsule in the Atlantic Ocean, and we plucked him out with an aircraft carrier, as we did with all the astronauts who landed in the water. So we did that 60 years ago. So why all the buzz? Because this is now done by a private enterprise.

• 3:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 3:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Virgin Galactic, all right? So a private enterprise, it's a billionaire, he's on the jet.

• 3:11Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's how you knew it was gonna work.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how you knew it was gonna work.

• 3:14Chuck Nice?

  That's how you knew it was gonna work.

• 3:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he has literal skin in the game. And for me, I'm not riding any billionaire rocket anywhere until they send their mother and bring her back, or themselves, right? I mean, this counts. So this was remarkable publicity if you were thinking about signing up for the trip, and the man gets on the trip himself. So I think all of that worked, and the man likes to live. What's the French, joie de vie?

• 3:43Chuck Nice?

  Joie de vie.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are, how about that? Yeah, lover of life. And so, so that was the celebration of the day. Now, so how far did they go? Because they kept saying, going to the space, space. And I'm an astrophysicist, I know what space is.

• 4:02Chuck Nice?

  And they called it the first commercial space flight. What's, I'm like-

• 4:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, except Elon has sent his own spaceships into orbit, so- And it was commercial in that sense, so I don't know what they would mean by that. But, so, so, let's get, so what do they mean by space? Well, he went up about fifty miles, something like that, around there. And that's lower than the internationally agreed altitude, by the way, just so you know. That's okay, the Air Force recognizes that as, as space, but internationally, it's a little higher. Sixty-two miles, which comes out to be a clean hundred kilometers.

• 4:37Chuck Nice?

  So, wait a minute, you mean to tell me that he couldn't tack on twelve lousy miles?

• 4:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It takes a lot more energy to keep ascending away from Earth's gravity. He need a bigger rock, we're gonna need a bigger rocket, okay? You take a look at his size, the size of his rockets relative to Jeff Bezos's rocket, that one is way bigger than the other, just in terms of sort of launch mass, okay?

• 5:01Chuck Nice?

  Somebody's compensating for something.

• 5:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said, is Chuck gonna go there? Yeah, he went there.

• 5:08Chuck Nice?

  Of course.

• 5:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck went there.

• 5:10Chuck Nice?

  I have no choice.

• 5:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, so here's the thing. So what happens at a hundred kilometers? You ascend high enough so that there's so few air molecules, I think we've talked about this on a previous explainer. There's so few air molecules that there's nothing there to scatter sunlight. And the blue sky, sky blue, is scattered sunlight.

• 5:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you remove the atmosphere, because you're so high up, then there's nothing there to scatter it, there is no blue sky because there's no sky. And then the nighttime, uh, the nighttime universe reveals itself. While the sun is also in the sky at the same time. So, so they, they, they classify that as space, the boundary between our atmosphere and space.

• 5:52Chuck Nice?

  So, if you get, if you get far enough out of Earth, far enough away from Earth, and you're like, yo, I think we're in a black neighborhood. You made it to space.

• 6:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, because the sky loses its brightness.

• 6:06Chuck Nice?

  This guy literally goes black.

• 6:12Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry.

• 6:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're in a black neighborhood, damn, Chuck.

• 6:14Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry.

• 6:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why's everything got, Chuck? Chuck, I thought you were in therapy for this.

• 6:18Chuck Nice?

  I am, I am.

• 6:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 6:21Chuck Nice?

  But, but anyway. And for those of you out there that call jokes, don't write me and say-

• 6:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 6:27Chuck Nice?

  Stop being racial, Chuck, I'm, you know, I live in America, what you want?

• 6:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so here's the thing, okay? So you're in space. That's what we want to call that space.

• 6:42Chuck Nice?

  Okay, 62 miles, 100 kilometers.

• 6:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not weightless, though. People equate being in space with being weightless. You're only weightless if you're in free fall.

• 6:50Chuck Nice?

  Aha!

• 6:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? So if at that moment, he cuts off his engines and they fall, then you're weightless.

• 6:58Chuck Nice?

  Got you.

• 6:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For as long as you're falling.

• 7:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but there's a point where the atmosphere gets thick enough again. And in the case of Richard Branson's rocket, it was also an airplane, it had airfoil. So as it starts hitting atmosphere, then the control surfaces of his wings begin to take effect. And then it can actually do a descent as an airplane. But the moment it does that, you are no longer weightless.

• 7:24Chuck Nice?

  Right!

• 7:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I just want to make that clear. The weightlessness is simply for being in free fall, not for being in what people are calling space.

• 7:34Chuck Nice?

  Space.

• 7:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not like you hit space, "I'm weightless, oh my gosh, I'm weightless." No, no, it's, are your rockets firing? No. Are you a plane? No, you're just falling, you're weightless over that time. It's just like, what is it? The parachute drop or whatever it is at the amusement park. When they just drop the floor out onto you, you are weightless until some parachute opens. But over that time, you're weightless.

• 7:56Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Basically, weightless, okay? Now, if you fall long enough, then the air resists you, all right? But for the, while you're accelerating, you're weightless. And so that's the experience. So now, here's the thing. Do you need to go up 62 miles, 100 kilometers, to see the night sky? No, you can just wait until the sun sets.

• 8:14Chuck Nice?

  Oh my god, that's terrible.

• 8:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just, I'm telling like it is, Chuck.

• 8:20Chuck Nice?

  I'm just so happy that...

• 8:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is why you, this is why you, you have me as your man here.

• 8:24Chuck Nice?

  I am so, I am so happy that neither Bezos or Branson are watching this right now.

• 8:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying, so, so to say, "Oh, I can now see the night sky." Right. "I'm in space." Right. After sunset, you're seeing exactly the same damn night sky, okay? So, so, so then the next side of it is you're getting to be weightless for a couple of minutes. Well, we have what's called the vomit comet. Yes. And, and without going into space, but it goes to a high enough altitude, and then it just sort of shuts off its engines and then drops. Or there are ways to control it, so that the engines can simulate a free fall. But while in that period, you're weightless. In fact, they filmed all of Apollo 13, although I was told, all of the weightless scenes in Apollo 13 were actually filmed in the vomit comet. Wow, so they were actually weight- They were actually weightless, not on cables.

• 9:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, that is a level of commitment that you have to respect. Yes, yes, yes. And so, and you only get like 20 minutes a pop, so you have to just keep going, you just keep doing that. Wow. Right, to get all your footage, right? You can't say, "Oh, let's get another take just for safety." No, that's all you get, because I'm ready to throw up all over you. That was perfect, let's do it again.

• 9:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Perfect, let's do it again. Alright, so the night sky you're gonna get after sunset, the weightlessness you can get on a vomit comet. Right. So, now how high up are they relative to the Earth? Are they gonna see the curvature? I did a calculation, the answer is no. Okay, so let's run this back again. So Chuck, schoolroom globe. Okay. About a foot across, right? Right. Uh, the space station. Okay. If you're gonna find that orbiting, it'd be about a centimeter above the Earth, about three-eighths of an inch. That's the International Space Station, three-eighths of an inch. Wow. Alright, that's 250 miles, so Branson went a fifth of that. So what's a fifth of a centimeter?

• 10:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's two millimeters, which is just a little less than a sixteenth of an inch. Oh. Above Earth's surface. So if you got a ruler, any standard, like, American ruler. Couldn't measure it. It doesn't, doesn't even have the- There's no demarcation to say this is where we are. Well, because the, the first marker is farther away than the height that, uh, Richard Branson ascended above Earth. So, Richard Branson, you must be this tall to ride this ride.

• 10:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sorry, buddy. Stop it!

• 11:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, so I'm just putting it out there, I'm just saying, I just, I, I, it's, it's truth in, in, you know, it's, we can be honest about it. Now, by the way, if people want to do this and pay a quarter million dollars, I don't have a problem. Open up a whole new tourist industry. No problem. No problem. Oh, by the way, Jeff Bezos' rocket, okay, you may have seen, does not land as an airplane because it's basically a capsule. So, that, that has to be like retrieved and brought back to, to its destination. Just the way Alan Shepard did in 1961.

• 11:33Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 11:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but in each case, there's a period of time where they are weightless. And that's what people are paying for. And Bezos' cabin has bigger windows. So, again, there is this billionaire competition thing going on. I kind of, I enjoy it on the sidelines here.

• 11:48Chuck Nice?

  It sounds to me, the way you have just described this, is you could save yourself 249,0990 dollars by going to Six Flags and riding any one of them roller coasters.

• 12:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, one, one other thing. So, as you, you may remember, there's an airplane that's taking off that deploys the rocket plane.

• 12:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they go up to like 40 something thousand feet and the rocket plane takes off. All right. The rocket plane is in free fall until the engines kick in. So they'll actually be weightless for a little period of time there. And then the rockets kick in and they experience about three Gs. Three Gs is sort of, um, good housekeeping approved G-forces on the human body.

• 12:40Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 12:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, that's the maximum you're gonna get at an amusement park. That's the, what they subject the, the shuttle astronauts to. The, uh, that, so, they, you, they could accelerate you faster than that.

• 12:51Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they don't need to, and so they don't. And so three Gs is like, you know, nice, um...

• 12:57Chuck Nice?

  As King Deca at, at, at, at Great Adventure.

• 13:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So, so it's, it's within the realm of what we have all experienced if you're a fan of amusement parks. So that, that's what it is. That...

• 13:08Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 13:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but, but more power to them. Somebody's got it. I'm glad somebody's doing it.

• 13:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 13:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd rather watch them do it and, and, and that's why...

• 13:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I should put this, um, I never want to interfere with someone who is trying to advance a frontier.

• 13:26Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even if I have skepticism, I'll share the skepticism if you ask, which you did.

• 13:31Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I'm not going to run in front of the line saying, "Don't, not necessary." I just let it go because there's spinoffs, there's all kinds of things that overall historically have been good for civilization and for culture. And so I tip my hat to all of what they're doing.

• 13:47Chuck Nice?

  No, it's like, look, you're rich, right? You gotta find something to do with your money. Somebody comes along and says, "Hey, you like motorcycles, right?" You're like, "I love motorcycles." They're like, "I got a brand new motorcycle for you. It's human powered. You get on it and you just pedal really, really hard." And it only costs $250,000.

• 14:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, that is not true. Damn, Chuck. Okay, by the way, Elon is not fooled by any of this, okay? Because you know, you don't hear Elon saying, "I want to just put people into suborbital paths." What is Elon saying?

• 14:18Chuck Nice?

  Go to Mars.

• 14:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go to Mars.

• 14:20Chuck Nice?

  He's saying, "Go to Mars."

• 14:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and just to put this back in perspective, so Richard Branson went two millimeters above a schoolroom globe.

• 14:26Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 14:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, Jeff Bezos, a little higher.

• 14:30Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 14:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The space station is one centimeter above the globe.

• 14:33Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 14:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The moon, 30 feet away.

• 14:36Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 14:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mars, a mile away.

• 14:38Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 14:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is.

• 14:40Chuck Nice?

  So on scale, yo, so we.

• 14:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when they say, "Let's go into space."

• 14:44Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 14:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you tell that to an astrophysicist, I have a different answer for you than 50 miles up. That's all I'm saying. Why you pull all this out of me?

• 14:51Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry, man.

• 14:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was perfectly happy. I was minding my own damn business.

• 14:54Chuck Nice?

  I'm so glad we did this, though. Take that, billionaire.

• 14:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, we got to take a break there, but when we come back, we're going to talk about achieving orbit, all that it takes.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk, the Things You Thought You Knew Edition. And for this segment, we're going to talk about achieving orbit. Chuck.

• 15:56Chuck Nice?

  Hey.

• 15:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You ever been in orbit?

• 16:00Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, the answer's no.

• 16:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll answer for you.

• 16:06Chuck Nice?

  Okay. You know, I was, I was just thinking about a couple nights where I partied really hard, man.

• 16:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And. Party down.

• 16:13Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, so, but of course not.

• 16:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I want to just tell you a little bit of the history of orbits. It's just, for me, it's fascinating. I don't know if you'll find it fascinating, but it's fascinating to me. And it's my show, so I get to do.

• 16:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get your own show, you can edit this out, okay?

• 16:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So, Isaac Newton, my man, all right? He was around in the 1600s, early 1700s. He, an English scientist, physicist, natural philosopher, they were called back then. Deepest thinker I've ever known, I've ever read on all of the operations of nature. And he's sitting there and sees an apple fall from an apple tree in his backyard in Lincolnshire, which is in very outskirts of London, sorry, Cambridge, but it's in the countryside of England, okay?

• 17:10Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 17:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a childhood home where he grew up. There's an apple orchard there. All right. Did I tell you I was gifted a clipping from that tree?

• 17:20Chuck Nice?

  I actually saw the tree.

• 17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You saw the tree? Okay.

• 17:23Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I actually saw.

• 17:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, yeah, that was a whole other thing. We gotta dig that out of the archives.

• 17:27Chuck Nice?

  I saw the sapling.

• 17:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was a sapling, yeah, yeah.

• 17:32Chuck Nice?

  I saw the sapling, which, by the way, is still being cared for.

• 17:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the New York Botanical Gardens.

• 17:37Chuck Nice?

  At the New York Botanical Gardens.

• 17:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Up in the Bronx.

• 17:40Chuck Nice?

  Up in the Bronx.

• 17:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so he's there and he sees an apple fall to the earth. Didn't hit him in the head, that's just tale. And in the sky is the moon. Okay? So, he thinks to himself, "Is there some way to connect the falling apple with the orbiting moon? Is there some single understanding that renders these two things that I'm looking at the same? Most people would look at it and say, "Well, there's something different going on in the moon than for the apple, because the apple landed on earth, on the ground."

• 18:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the moon is not falling to...

• 18:21Chuck Nice?

  It stays up there all the time.

• 18:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so clearly it's different. But we're talking about Isaac Newton. And so, he said, "Let's do an experiment, a thought experiment. Let's go to a mountain top and take the apple and just sort of drop it. Okay, it'll fall to the earth, the way it does in his backyard. But now, let's sort of fire it from a cannon at ever-increasing speeds. So you do that horizontally. So you do this, it'll fall farther and farther away from you. That makes sense, right?

• 18:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 18:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the faster it ejects from the cannon, the farther it will go. We'll just keep doing this exercise. And you keep doing it, and the apple starts following the curvature of the earth. And maybe it falls a thousand miles away, but then hits the ground. Well, how about, make it faster? How about 10,000 miles away and it hits the ground? Well, let's keep doing this. Oh my gosh, is there a speed where I can eject it so fast that it goes entirely around the earth and hits me in the back of the head? Boomer apple.

• 19:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And wait a minute. If there is such a speed, and it's about to hit me in the back of the head, and I duck... Then it will just continue.

• 19:50Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 19:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he said, there must be such a speed. And so he invents the laws of gravity and calculus and all of this, and he figures out that speed. And that speed for Earth is about five miles per second. If you go sideways, neglecting air resistance, and if you go, that's why you have to get high enough where there's no atmosphere, then you can go sideways at five miles a second. If you go five miles a second sideways, that's about seventeen thousand five hundred miles an hour. Then you're actually falling to Earth at exactly the rate that the curve of the Earth curves away from you.

• 20:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So to drop an apple is for the apple to be in free fall, but to send an apple into orbit is also to be in free fall.

• 20:46Chuck Nice?

  Right, it's just falling around the Earth.

• 20:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, no, no, it's falling towards the Earth.

• 20:51Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the Earth has a curve and it never actually hits the Earth. So the falling apple and the orbiting moon are identical. The moon just happens to have a sideways velocity that the apple did not.

• 21:06Chuck Nice?

  That is okay.

• 21:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's why astronauts are weightless. They're not weightless because they are in space. They're weightless because they are in free fall towards Earth in an orbit first described by Isaac Newton in sixteen eighty-seven.

• 21:22Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Dude, that, first of all, I have a new respect for Isaac Newton. Because for you to look at an apple and say anything other than, I think it's lunchtime.

• 21:39Chuck Nice?

  And then take that apple and equate it to a celestial body that orbits us, the moon itself. I don't even know how you get to there.

• 21:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the man is high, at every time you think about what he said, what he thought, what he calculated, he goes higher and higher and higher on a scale of, and by the way, he, there's a, there's a plaque to him in the chapel at, at University of Cambridge, and there's a statue, and it's in Latin, and I loosely translate the Latin, it says, "Of all humans, there is no greater intellect."

• 22:13Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 22:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a loose translation of the Latin.

• 22:16Chuck Nice?

  That's a big statement.

• 22:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a big statement, but the more I read about it.

• 22:19Chuck Nice?

  They just call him the smartest man in the world, ever.

• 22:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm saying, I, I, more I read about him, yeah, yeah, I'm with, yes.

• 22:26Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 22:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm going with this, yes. So, so that's what an orbit is, and that's why you are weightless in space. And I think we talked about this before, but now it has context. There's a recent movie, what's that movie that had like moon pirates on it?

• 22:43Chuck Nice?

  Oh god, yes, Ad Astra.

• 22:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ad Astra, Ad Astra.

• 22:46Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 22:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, had, there were a lot of scenes where, okay, it took the astronauts three days to get to the moon, because what they do is not, they get to five miles per second going in orbit around the earth, now they want to escape the earth, you have to go faster. So you add another two miles per second to your speed, you hit seven miles per second, and now earth will no longer hold you, and you escape the earth, that's the escape velocity. That'll get you to the moon. You can coast to the moon at that speed, all right. The astronauts were weightless en route to the moon because they were falling towards the moon. All right.

• 23:20Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 23:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Ad Astra, they're always firing their rocket, oh, but it took them three days to get there. In Ad Astra, you can get, you can get to the moon in three hours if you wanted to, you just have to fire your rockets. Right, you're not gonna, but then you're not in free fall to the moon. If you're firing your rockets, you have gravity artificially created by the rockets inside your vessel. As long as your rockets are burning, you will feel that acceleration and it is as though you created gravity.

• 23:47Chuck Nice?

  It creates like a gravity.

• 23:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It creates like a source of gravity. And all the scenes where they're firing their rockets, everybody's floating inside their space. They got that wrong.

• 23:55Chuck Nice?

  They got it wrong.

• 23:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plum wrong, because they think being in space equals being weightless, and that's just false.

• 24:01Chuck Nice?

  Speaking of Newton, that makes sense, because you are the reaction to the action of the rocket being pushed.

• 24:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 24:09Chuck Nice?

  You were now against it.

• 24:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 24:11Chuck Nice?

  So, there you go. That, oh man.

• 24:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If your reaction to the action is the manifest, is manifested as your weight.

• 24:17Chuck Nice?

  As, as, as, as your weight and

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 24:19Chuck Nice?

  Kind of an artificial gravity. And by the way, I liked that movie. Thanks for ruining that for me.

• 24:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, anyway, I just want to make it clear what's going on if you want to think about space as being a place where you are weightless. It is only so because we drift to our destination. You don't run your, so, and when you're in orbit, you don't need rockets to sustain orbit. You just duck every time you come past Isaac Newton's head, alright? And you'll just keep, and so in order to come out of orbit, here's the difference now. To come out of orbit, you have to fire some kind of retro rocket to slow yourself down.

• 25:01Chuck Nice?

  Slow down, yeah.

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? And if you slow down, you can't maintain that orbit. You drop to a lower elevation, and eventually you start hitting atmosphere. And then the atmosphere drags you down to earth.

• 25:13Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 25:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But how about that very high speeds that you had? That's kinetic energy. You got to dissipate that somehow. You need heat shields. We did a whole show on heat shields.

• 25:22Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that was pretty cool.

• 25:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? You need those heat shields to dissipate.

• 25:26Chuck Nice?

  Onion layers that come off.

• 25:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You remember Chuck, good, good memory Chuck. So, you, you ablate the heat shield, this eats up your kinetic energy that you had for going 17,500 miles an hour.

• 25:36Chuck Nice?

  Atmospheric brakes.

• 25:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brakes, it's aero braking is exactly what it is.

• 25:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 25:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So...

• 25:42Chuck Nice?

  Alright, so let me ask you this.

• 25:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, so that means any spaceship that you, where all you did was go up above the, the atmospheric line... Into quote space and then come back to earth. You don't need heat shields. Cause you didn't go eighteen seventeen eighteen thousand miles an hour.

• 26:00Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 26:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't need heat shields. You just so it's a completely different design of rocket. To do a sub orbital thing with and land as an airplane. As it does going into orbit. The shuttle pulled that off. The shuttle landed on a runway, but it also went into orbit. And so what it didn't have its entire belly. The shuttle, the space shuttle pulled that off. Because it had wings and it landed like an airplane, but it also went into orbit. How do you get out of orbit? You need heat shields. It had heat shields. It's the entire belly of the shuttle. The entire is heat shield. Of a of a new generation than the onion peel from the Apollo era. This is a special silicate material. Where I've played with it in a laboratory. Oh, my gosh. You can take a wafer of it.

• 26:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Take a blow torch. Blow torch it until it's glowing red hot. And in the time it takes you to put the torch back down. And you go back to it, it's cool to the touch.

• 26:58Chuck Nice?

  It's already cool. Wow. That's pretty cool.

• 27:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's brilliant piece of material science.

• 27:02Chuck Nice?

  I would love to have a pair of oven mitts like.

• 27:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So, um, so the shuttle, so that's why the shuttle had this very complicated design. And it took like government money and NASA to pull that off. Um, yeah.

• 27:18Chuck Nice?

  All right, so before we go. What is right now I'm reading, I'm reading the, uh, uh, life of Ulysses S. Grant. Cause a friend of mine loves Grant. Right, so I said, all right, let me see what all this hype is about. So what's a good book to read about your man Newton? Or is it, or do you have any suggestions?

• 27:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, well, there's a lot. There's a lot of books. There's an interesting one. Uh, Newton, the last. Alchemist or the last sorcerer, because he was really big into alchemy. He was the transition between old world science and modern science, basically. And he penned more words on alchemy than he did on physics, for example. He was also deeply religious and he wrote more on analyzing chronologies in the Bible. He has a whole book called "Chronologies of Ancient Kingdoms Amended", where he's thinking about the Bible and God and Jesus and the Trinity. And was the Trinity real? And, you know, because the Anglican Church and the Catholic Church.

• 28:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, there's all this other stuff that he did. I'm only talking about his science. So he's a very complex figure. Plus, he never had any romances of any kind that anybody has ever been able to figure out. So he has no descendants. We think he died a virgin, actually.

• 28:38Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow.

• 28:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how we have all this time.

• 28:40Chuck Nice?

  Wonder he had all this time to think of all this stuff? Now I get it. Are you kidding me? No wonder he could look at an apple fall and be like, "I wonder how this relates to the moon."

• 28:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That boy never even thought about it.

• 28:57Chuck Nice?

  Shoot, you know how much I would think of if I never thought about sex? Are you kidding me? Wouldn't he be sitting here right now? Be like Nobel Prize laureate Chuck Nice.

• 29:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Five-time Nobel Prize laureate.

• 29:09Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. Once again, has come up with a design for... I'm kidding me. You got what? Okay, who knew this? All right, all right. Go ahead, Newton.

• 29:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there's another book, Newton's Philosophy of Nature, where they cherry pick his best stuff and they talk about it. And I think Bernard Cohen, I think, is the author of one of them. And there's another one written by an astrophysicist, a Nobel laureate himself, Subramaniam Chandrasekhar, who wrote a book on Isaac Newton and it's like the Principia Companion. So Newton's famous book is The Principia, where he discovers gravity and all this. And this is sort of an analysis of that book. You get to bask in his genius. So there's a few books out there.

• 29:57Chuck Nice?

  All right, cool. I like the last one.

• 29:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you know, his real handiwork is our modern understanding of the universe.

• 30:03Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 30:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe just read the book of nature itself and you're reading Newton.

• 30:08Chuck Nice?

  Wow, you really like this guy.

• 30:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, we gotta take a break there, but when we come back, we're gonna talk about exponents. On StarTalk. We're back. StarTalk, the Things You Thought You Knew Edition. And for this segment, we're gonna talk about exponents. Chuck, I'm gonna tell you about how your brain is wired.

• 30:55Chuck Nice?

  Poorly would be the answer. Okay? Like a, like a house with, with a bad electrician. An unlicensed electrician wired this way.

• 31:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unlicensed, right.

• 31:11Chuck Nice?

  Okay, that's all I'm saying.

• 31:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chewing gum and Scotch tape.

• 31:14Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 31:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, it's not how just your brain is wired, just the human brain. Alright, so, we evolved on the, you know, the plains of the Serengeti, not literally, but that's close enough for this example, where, you know, something's chasing you, and it might harm you, you wanna run away from it.

• 31:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 31:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It gets closer, you go up a tree, whatever, there's certain challenges that we face that require certain solutions. And in almost every case, the solution involves linear thinking.

• 31:45Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 31:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Linear thinking.

• 31:48Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 31:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so...

• 31:50Chuck Nice?

  And by that, you mean sequential, right?

• 31:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sequential, well, it's not, yeah, so, linear, I'm using very loosely here, but sequential thinking, so I'll give an example. So, the tiger is running towards you.

• 32:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or the lion.

• 32:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this would be Africa, so, the lion is running towards you.

• 32:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you say, "This, this thing wants to eat me."

• 32:09Chuck Nice?

  Well, the first thing you say, I don't know how you say, "Oh," in Afri-- in whatever African tongue.

• 32:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Swahili.

• 32:18Chuck Nice?

  Swahili. How do you say "oh crap" in Swahili?

• 32:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know.

• 32:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, go ahead. So, so the lion is chasing after you. And it closed half the distance to you in about 10 seconds, let's say. Okay. So you do a calculation in your head, say, if I don't get completely out of range of the lion in another 10 seconds, I am lunch. Okay, yeah. Okay, okay, alright. So, that's the kind of calculations we do. The lion is not 100 meters away, and then in the next second, 1 meter away from you. Right. That's different thinking. Right? If that were actually happened to us, we'd have a whole other kind of brain wiring. But everything that happens around us, happens in these increments, which when you add up the increments, leads to what happens next. Right. Okay?

• 33:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the conclusion that we're trying to promote or avoid. So linear thinking is, it did this much in this amount of time, it'll do a little bit more in more time, alright, and a little bit more. And this is how you construct your interaction with the world. Right, okay, that makes sense. We have hardly any experience thinking exponentially about the world. Okay. Hardly any, okay? So, you can think, let's, let's give some other examples. You can think back to your grandparents, alright? You surely met them or knew them. I did. Probably not your great grandparents. I knew mine. You did, so you knew them. They lived a very long time. Good genes, yeah. My great grandmother lived a very long time. The grandfather, I think she killed him. Okay. But she was still here.

• 33:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know why that's even plausible, you know? It's like, yeah, you can picture that, right, right, right?

• 34:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But she killed him, but she's otherwise doing fine. Other than that, she was great.

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what's she doing now? Oh, 6 to 10 and sing sing, right, right. So, so, the point is, if I now say... Alright, so that was like fifty, a hundred, hundred and fifty years ago. Now imagine a million years ago. No, you can't. There's no way to do that. There's no, in fact, we weren't humans then, for that matter, okay? So, so, so many things that range in size, greater than just factors of a few, are very hard for the human brain to comprehend.

• 34:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I group this all under the challenge of what it is to appreciate exponentials. Alright, you can go from one to two to three to four to five. In astrophysics, we go from one to ten to a hundred to a thousand to ten thousand.

• 34:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? And the ten thousand is ten thousand times larger than the one.

• 35:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 35:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you're just counting one, two, three, four, or five, five is only five times bigger than one. So, this, so when you're in the world of exponentials, oh my gosh. So, what it takes to sort of wrap your head around it and understand it. So, Earth is big to most people. It's so big to flat-earthers, they think the round Earth is flat. So, if you hollowed out the sun, you could pour more than a million Earths inside of it.

• 35:34Chuck Nice?

  That's insane.

• 35:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And still, a million, and still have room, not ten, not a thousand, not ten thousand, not a hundred, a million. Alright? Now, the sun will one day become a red giant.

• 35:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 35:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it'll expand and engulf the orbits of Mercury, Venus, and, and be on the doorsteps of the Earth. Okay? That sun, if you hollow that out, could fit a million of the suns that we started with.

• 35:59Chuck Nice?

  Oh, Lord.

• 36:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so, in astrophysics, we confront this daily. Not only in size, but in temperature, in time, all these things scale.

• 36:13Chuck Nice?

  I'm, I'm gonna be honest right now. I'm still trying to conceive of a million Earths inside of the, the white-yellow ball that I look up and see in the sky.

• 36:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:26Chuck Nice?

  Because that, I'm gonna, I'm, I don't, I hope this doesn't make me stupid.

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That Chuck, try not to start any sentence with that.

• 36:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just, just.

• 36:40Chuck Nice?

  Right, stay away from that kind of phrase.

• 36:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get any sentence with that.

• 36:42Chuck Nice?

  Right. No, but I'm, I can't conceive.

• 36:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like saying, I'm not racist, but you know.

• 36:50Chuck Nice?

  So true.

• 36:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whatever comes out of your mouth next is gonna be racist.

• 36:53Chuck Nice?

  The most racist thing ever said, right, you know. Or, I don't mean any offense, but, right. In other words, listen, I'm about to offend you, okay. But I cannot conceive. Now, I, okay, so you see these models of the solar system. And you, you see the sun in the middle, right?

• 37:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you can't draw it the proper size.

• 37:15Chuck Nice?

  You can't draw it the proper size. And so now, my brain, as I'm trying to conceive of the actual size of the sun, unfortunately, I am thwarted by the parameters that have been set for me psychologically by these stupid models that I've seen my entire life.

• 37:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Models are interfering, right, right. So they do interfere. That, that, that's right. Because if you showed the sun, sort of large enough to see in the middle of the solar system, the earth would be too small.

• 37:45Chuck Nice?

  You couldn't see the earth.

• 37:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You wouldn't see the earth or the moon or mercury or Venus. You'd see Jupiter.

• 37:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Be a little bigger, but, so you, you exaggerate the sizes of the planets. But at that size, if you showed the sun at its real size, it would be really huge. And then you couldn't fit it all on the same page. Because the distances are also exponentially separated.

• 38:03Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 38:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, so these are the challenges that you face. But as an astrophysicist, we are, we are steeped in it. We are baptized in it. And so we have a slightly better facility, thinking this way, than most everybody else that doesn't have to confront it in everyday life. Okay, so, here's, here are examples of how this can mess with you. And I think you're smart enough, you might get the right answer to this. So, if you discover an algae growing on a lake.

• 38:31Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? And you learn that the algae sort of doubles in the area. Because algae is all about how much area.

• 38:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The lake, it doubles every day, okay? Every day, there's twice as much algae as the previous day.

• 38:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 38:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so you hear that this algae is like attacking the lake.

• 38:47Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and it began a month ago.

• 38:51Chuck Nice?

  Thirty days.

• 38:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you, thirty days ago, and you go there and you see that half the lake is covered with algae. So it took an entire month to cover that half. Okay.

• 39:02Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 39:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So then the question is, how long will it take to cover the rest of the lake? That's the question.

• 39:09Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so it took an entire month to cover half the lake.

• 39:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 39:14Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so then that means the, oh no, but it's doubling. So that means, and it's doubling, that means it's going to double the next day. And that means the next day from that, it's going to double again. And that means the next day from that, it's going to double again. So no, I think to cover the whole lake, maybe a two days?

• 39:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One day.

• 39:38Chuck Nice?

  Okay, there you go.

• 39:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't get too excited, Chuck.

• 39:42Chuck Nice?

  That's what I said. You know what I said? I said one day, right?

• 39:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You went through one day, not the two days. So yeah, so the, the linear brain is saying, oh, it'll take another month. But the exponential brain says it's doubling every day. In fact, it didn't matter how long it took to cover half the lake. If it's doubling every day, it'll take only one more day to cover the entire lake.

• 40:04Chuck Nice?

  Oh my God, and, and in 10 days, it'll cover the earth.

• 40:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, so right, so it's two to the 10th power, and you do the numbers. I got another one for you, right? So Chuck, I can hand you $5 million right now.

• 40:15Chuck Nice?

  I'll take it. Thank you.

• 40:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or-

• 40:17Chuck Nice?

  Thank you very much. I always knew I liked you.

• 40:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Or I can give you a penny a day, but doubled every day for 30 days.

• 40:32Chuck Nice?

  No, I'm gonna take the penny.

• 40:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so you know now, see, I, I see, I'm training you well.

• 40:37Chuck Nice?

  Listen.

• 40:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We just did an exercise.

• 40:39Chuck Nice?

  We just did it with algae. You know damn well I'm not going to do it with money. We just did this with algae. Now we're doing it with money? Oh no, give me the penny.

• 40:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're taking the money. So if you do this, um, after, on the 31st day, in a 31 day month, I'll be handing you $10 million.

• 41:01Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, but I've been handing you money every day up until then. Add all that up, it's basically the same amount as the amount I'm giving you on the 31st day. So you walk away with $20 million, not 5 million.

• 41:14Chuck Nice?

  That's amazing.

• 41:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now, okay, so now, an exponential means you have some number in the exponent of another number and you raise it to that power.

• 41:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 41:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is how you calculate interest rates on mortgages. Okay?

• 41:30Chuck Nice?

  Tell me about it.

• 41:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, it is time raised to some power and it's a factor on your monthly payments.

• 41:38Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 41:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you have a floating mortgage rate, which floats with the moving interest rates, that can have a devastating effect on your monthly payments and your total debt.

• 41:51Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 41:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Had people been fluent in exponentials in 2008, they could have said, when the bank says, "approved", you'll say, "wait a minute."

• 42:03Chuck Nice?

  No, I'm gonna go with a 30-year fix, not that interest only.

• 42:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly. I'm going 30-year fix because I can calculate with a [bleep] exponential and plus I realize you're exploiting me now.

• 42:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so how much of that 2008 collapse of the real estate market and the rest of the economy might have been avoided had people been fluent in thinking about the effects of raising numbers to the powers of other numbers?

• 42:33Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 42:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that is, that's an exponential for you.

• 42:37Chuck Nice?

  That is, first of all, let me just say this. Two things. One, I need somebody to start off with a penny and give me double that every day for 30 days. That's the first thing I took from this. The second thing I took from this is, I need to call a mortgage broker.

• 42:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right now.

• 42:56Chuck Nice?

  Right now. Right now.

• 42:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the one knocking on your door right now, right?

• 43:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's much more about exponentials we could talk about, but I'm just saying, you get the gist of it, right?

• 43:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 43:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and when, when things, oh, it's why people have a hard time understanding...

• 43:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The power of time over that much time, right? So, so you say, "Well, the Grand Canyon, how did that happen?" You can't, "Well, given enough time." Not hundreds of years, not even thousand, but millions of years. Millions, yeah. And you think you understand a million, but you don't if you think it's just a little bit bigger than a thousand. Right. No, it's a factor of a thousand bigger than a thousand. Right. We went from, from our mammal shrew rodent-like ancestors running underfoot of T-Rex 65 million years ago to the entire presence of mammals in the world,

• 43:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  including the, the primates, including humans, in 65 million years. Right. That is even small compared with the time life has been on Earth, but it's way bigger than most people can wrap their head around. And the only mistake in all that time was human beings. Everybody, everything else was running smooth. Everything else was running smooth, man, and we had to come along and mess it all up. So the people say, "That could never happen. How do you go from a reptile to a this? Or how do you go from a bird to this?" These are people whose brain wiring is linear and so they cannot possibly see the full effects of the depths of time. It's so true.

• 44:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And add the depths of space to this and, and basically we're hopeless. That's why in one of my books, The Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, you know how I began that book with a one, one sentence? You know what the opening sentence was? Uh, I forget, but I did know. That's polite of you. I never read the book. I never liked the book.

• 45:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I once knew, but I've, okay. I opened it by saying, "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you." To you. That's correct.

• 45:10Chuck Nice?

  That's very cool.

• 45:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that includes exponential.

• 45:13Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, somebody took that and made a T-shirt out of it. I hope you're getting paid on it. Seriously, I saw that as a T-shirt.

• 45:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You saw it, okay.

• 45:21Chuck Nice?

  I saw that as a T-shirt. I hope you're getting paid. Well, there's a new saying now. You can't say everything's big in Texas. Everything's big in astrophysics. Texas, you lose. Everything's big in astrophysics. That's all there is to it.

• 45:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, my wife is from Alaska, and you can carve Alaska five times and get five different Texases. So, in terms of who's the biggest state, uh, that's how that, how that plays out.

• 45:44Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 45:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anyhow Chuck, we gotta call it quits there.

• 45:47Chuck Nice?

  All right. That was good stuff. Good stuff. Good stuff.

• 45:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This has, this has been another edition of Things You Thought You Knew. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal assistant, as always, looking up.