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Oct. 29, 2015 - Art Bell
02:23:55
Art Bell MITD - Neil deGrasse Tyson
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All right, a little bit of news before, and by the way, we've got Neil deGrasse Tyson here tonight, probably the world's premier astrophysicist.
The world's, actually.
So anyway, a little news first.
You know the big blimp, right?
Everybody's seen it now, the one that drifted into Pennsylvania and then deflated into a tree.
Well, the news is there is no news.
In other words, they don't know what happened.
I have my own theory.
Remember when you were a kid and mom gave you a balloon and you held on to it.
Mom said, don't let go.
You held on to it and you held on to it, but finally you couldn't stand it.
You just let it go.
We remember that?
Well, I think probably some airman was sitting there bored to death, tired of seeing that thing in the same old place and went, we, I don't know.
Anyway, um, That's the blimp, such as we don't know anything.
So let's see, what do we know?
What happened today?
Quite a bit, actually.
The Senate marched Thursday toward a final vote on a two-year budget debt deal.
It's not such a good deal, really, because a president can spend as much money as he wants.
Maybe he'll spend a little on space.
It's kind of scary, you know.
We don't like the government shutting down, but it allows for Virtually unlimited spending, and in the hands of the wrong person.
Actually, that's the whole government we're talking about.
The success or failure of the Syrian peace talks this week, fat chance, is tied to the fate of one man who's not even at the table, President Assad of Syria.
So, Iran, Saudi Arabia will be there at a table, along with their powerful partners, Russia and the U.S.
Again, I'm going to say this, I think the whole mess in Syria is the most dangerous damn thing anybody's ever seen in their life.
It's a proxy war going on there.
Russians are bombing the rebels who want to overthrow Assad, and the Russians don't want Assad overthrown.
We probably have mixed feelings on Assad now, but we're bombing ISIS.
And today also the Pentagon said, by the way, that it's going to be boots on the ground, actual combat in Iraq.
Deja vu, right?
All over again.
I'm very worried about that.
One mistake and we sort of do a reset on the planet.
China has now made the decision to abolish the one-child policy.
Now this may have to do with Their lack of growth recently, not lack of growth, the slowing of growth.
So I guess if you can have two children, you have more productivity, question mark?
You have to feed a lot more people, certainly.
I wonder if they did it because of growth.
Okay, so George Bush emerged from the third Republican debate In crisis.
Supporters struggling to understand why they should keep giving him money.
Trump Corps said he was one of the winners.
And one other item.
Tonight, XDS, we feed XDS, it's a satellite service, and they tell me That there may be a brief interruption at some point in the show, in which case they'll just put up a backup show for about two or three minutes, whatever happens.
So if that happens to you stations, blame AT&T.
I know I blame them for mostly everything else.
One last item, there was a 767 aircraft, another one, in as many months, That caught on fire on the runway.
It was not a pretty sight.
Everybody got out, but there were about 15 injured.
Some of those were actually pretty serious.
So, here we go again.
Engine fires.
All right, stay right where you are.
Coming up in a moment, Neil deGrasse Tyson will honor the show with his presence.
I'm Art Bell.
From the middle of the desert, just adjacent to Area 51.
You hear that, Neil?
This is Midnight in the Desert.
Coming up now, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson was born and raised in New York City, where he was educated in the public school system, clear through graduation from Bronx High School of Science.
Tyson went on to earn his B.A.
in physics from Harvard, and his Ph.D.
in astrophysics from Columbia.
Neil's professional research interests are very broad, but include star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the structure of the Milky Way.
Neil is currently kicking off the second season of National Geographic Channel's Emmy-nominated Star Talk on Sunday, October 25th at 11 o'clock p.m.
Eastern.
Don't miss it!
He also hosted NOVA's Science Now in Cosmos, a space-time odyssey.
Neil is the fifth head of the world-renowned Hayden Planetarium in New York City, and the first occupant of its Frederick B. Rose Directorship.
He is also a research associate of the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History, and the man who was at the very least an accessory To the premeditated murder of the once-glorious planet Pluto.
Welcome to the show.
Okay.
How you doing?
Second to where you are on the Pluto debate.
Nowhere, really.
I just read that and I thought, that's cute.
Well, you antagonize well.
Yes, well, it is said.
Since we have it as a subject, actually I'm nowhere on the Pluto debate, I just thought it was cute.
The question is, why did you think that Pluto should be demoted as it was?
Well, just to be clear.
I got implicated going back now 15, 16 years.
We were redesigning the Hayden Planetarium and the facility, the building that contained it.
And in that redesign, we're creating an entire new modern astronomy museum.
And in that museum, we're cutting metal.
And if we're going to cut metal, we want content of high shelf life.
And so we looked at Pluto and said, you know, Pluto It looks more like these new things that have just been discovered.
These Kuiper Belt icy bodies in the outer solar system.
They look more like each other than either one of them looks like any of the other planets in the solar system.
So all we did was group it with this new sloth of newly discovered real estate called the Kuiper Belt.
We didn't demote it.
We didn't give it a new name.
That all came from other people.
But this got noticed, and people said, how come you didn't group it with the rest of the planets?
You must be anti-Pluto.
And that's when all the hate mail started coming in from primarily third-graders.
Really, third-graders.
Yes, indeed.
And a few years later, an official vote would be taken by the International Astronomical Union, formally demoting it from its planet status to a dwarf planet, with new definitions of what that even means.
Well, it's all over the Internet that you were part of that.
Okay, I'll admit to driving the getaway car, but you have to have been the one who discovered these other objects in the outer solar system which forced the conversation.
I was an accessory, for sure, but not more than that.
Okay, all right.
Well, let me now ask that we've had a good look at Pluto and the amazing geography on Pluto, and the fact that it's a little bigger than we thought it was.
Have you reversed your position?
Oh, no.
In fact, it's not like I... It remains true, no matter what, that it and these other objects are more alike than any of them are like the rest of the eight.
And it was a little bit bigger, like by a few inches.
You know, this is not like, oh, it's twice as big.
No, it's like a little bit bigger.
And we were all delightfully surprised by how many surface features manifest in these
high-resolution photos that have no real explanation beyond something happening from within.
Many people expected it to be sort of, it surfaced to be a victim of collisions, so
it would be cratered perhaps, or ice freezing and refreezing.
But it's got like mountain bridges and valleys, and so fascinating features that deserve much
more attention than Pluto has gotten in the past.
Since we thought it was basically I think pretty much a billiard ball and we've now found out what it really is does that say to you One of two things, either Pluto came and got captured from elsewhere, where it really was active, or it really has a lot going on internally.
Okay, so I'm not the best expert on Pluto compared with my colleagues who study it professionally, but I can tell you that Pluto has a large moon of its own, a moon called Charon, large relative to it.
In fact, it has the largest moon relative to it as a host planet than any other planet in the solar system.
Next comes Earth.
We have a pretty big moon compared to us.
On top of that, it's got other moons in orbit, and it's hard to capture a rogue ball With all of its moons intact, it doesn't really work out that way dynamically.
Good point.
So, unless there's some result I have yet to see, I don't know anyone who is thinking that this was just a captured object and it works well just as having formed with everybody else.
It orbits in the same direction around the Sun as the rest of the objects in the plane of the solar system.
And so, even though it's Tipped pretty far out of tip nearly 30 degrees out of the
plane of the solar system one of the oddball features of Pluto that left people suspicious of its
Planetary allegiance that going back 40 years by the way, but so so
Generally if you're captured, it's you you have an orbit.
That's that's more weird than even Pluto's orbit Sure, sure.
So that means internal heat?
Volcanic stuff?
Radiation?
Something?
Yeah, I mean, if you're gonna make mountains, something's moving around on the surface of your object.
And so, no, it remains a frontier.
And the data are coming back slowly, because to get the spacecraft to Pluto as quickly as We managed, I mean my colleagues, managed to get it there.
Because the number one rule in all of science is you want your experiment to be finished before you die.
And Pluto is really far away.
So the way to accomplish this is you make the lightest possible space probe.
And you put it on your most powerful engines, and this gives you very high acceleration away from Earth.
In fact, it passed the orbit of the moon in, like, nine hours.
Wow.
Something of that order, whereas it took the astronauts three days to get to the moon.
That's how fast this thing was moving.
Ooh, it was screaming!
Yes, so the reason why I'm dragging you through those details is that they could have given it Multiple means of transmission and data taking and high bandwidth, but that would have cost weight and then it would have taken much longer to arrive at its destination.
So as it is, the transmission back to us and the data taking of Pluto itself happened through sort of the same channels within the electronics.
And so it's a very slow going in the obtaining of the data from Pluto, and they'll be continue to feed us for many, many months to come.
What's the baud rate coming back?
Do you know?
I don't know the exact rate.
I don't know that it's high enough to, you know, so you're not there forever.
But the point is, it could not give us data simultaneously while it was flying by Pluto.
So all of our knowledge of what it was doing, was on sort of models of its trajectory and what we expected it should have been doing while we were not communicating with it, because it needed every bit of its electronics to obtain the data during that flyby.
And there it is, traveling for nine years, and then it's like a few hours in a flyby of Pluto before it emerges on the other side, headed for other destinations in the Kuiper Belt.
All right.
Well, now I want to ask you about the really, really, really big story I sort of broke this early on.
Not the first, I'm sure, but probably the first big one.
It was in the Washington Post.
I'm talking about this star that has, and the headline was, serious scientists talking about an alien megastructure.
I call it KIC 8462852, I believe.
KIC seems like an easy name.
Yeah, that's right.
Kepler, of course, is now conveniently disabled for the moment, so we can't continue to look with Kepler, but what they did find caused one scientist to really, you know, open her eyes quickly, pass it on to Scientist Jason Wright at Penn State, and he said the word aliens.
I would think that Before any scientist, any astrophysicist would utter that word, they would think about their career, their family, their life, everything ahead of them before they would even suggest that word.
It is, though, a fascinating story, and I'd like your take on it.
Well, sure.
So, no, no, you know, we all love the aliens.
Don't get us wrong here.
The issue is, if you If you come upon something that you do not understand, and
you are a scientist, history of the exercise in coming upon things you don't understand
tells us that, to echo a comment I first heard made by Carl Sagan, the most
extraordinary explanation is not likely to be the most likely explanation.
This is just a simple recounting of the things scientists have come upon that they did not
understand in the past.
So for them in a press release to say, we don't know what it is, could be aliens, we
It could be a new kind of star system that we haven't studied yet.
It could be a new kind of orbital dynamics that we haven't learned yet.
I would go through a list of maybe 150 things, personally, before I would land on Aliens as a possible explanation for it.
I don't know if their list was that long, but they did say they virtually went through everything they could think of before they got to anywhere near that word.
I guess the one standing item that still could be would be a comet swarm, they're suggesting, but the odds of that are very, very low.
Yeah, whatever those odds are, It is surely higher than it being an intelligent alien civilization.
That's all I'm saying.
Just the history of this exercise, that's all I'm saying.
You could spend your life as a scientist exploring the least statistically, when I say statistically likely, again I'm basing it on the things that were mysteries in the past that got solved.
Okay?
And we learned that they were not solved by aliens, or new forces of nature, or God, or spirits.
They were solved by known laws of physics in a new way that we had yet to explore.
Given that track record, I'm simply saying that I would not lead with that explanation, and I would make sure I could rule out comets.
And then, by the way, I would still say, you know, I just don't know what this is.
And I would need better data before I start commenting that it might be intelligent aliens.
By the way, I'm not faulting people for arriving at conclusions to interpret things you don't understand.
We have an urge to need to have an answer to things.
This is one of the greatest drivers of sort of religious text.
Because you go to your religious text because it has answers to things you don't know anything about.
Like what happens after you die and how did it all get here?
And then you have an answer and then there's comfort in having an answer.
Whether or not you choose to investigate the answer to see if it's in fact held up by data.
It doesn't matter.
You have an answer.
The most successful scientists are not the ones who invoke answers that have no supportive evidence in the face of ignorance.
They just say, I will pose more experiments until I have enough information to judge what it is I'm looking at or what it is I've tested.
And that's what distinguishes successful scientists from not.
Well, I'll tell you this, it got everybody excited enough so that virtually every radio telescope on Earth right now is pointed at that listening really closely.
Exactly, because we don't know what it is.
Not because we think it's alien.
There's an important distinction there.
We are perfectly content standing on the precipice of what is known, peering into the unknown and saying, I have no idea what's out there.
Let me, and I have a hint!
Here's something in particular I don't know what it is.
Let me design more experiments to find out.
And then when I have something reliable, I'll report on it to you.
You'll be the first to know.
1500 light years away, something like that, right?
I forgot how far away it is.
Pretty close, way out there.
Every radio telescope now pointed in that direction.
I don't think we're going to get a discrete signal.
Nothing in Morse code, nothing like that.
Keep in mind that the signal that was obtained, what Kepler telescope does, in case people haven't read up on it, it was a telescope.
It's run its useful life now, by the way.
It was conceived and designed for one purpose, to discover Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars.
And so it had a target list, and it focused in one direction in the sky.
And because planets are so dim relative to their host stars, the way this was going to measure it was to look for what we call transits of the planet across the surface of the Sun.
And which would require, of course, that the star system you're observing is edge-on to you.
Because if it were face-on, then the planets wouldn't go in front of the star, and then you would see nothing.
There's nothing to notice.
So, if it passes in front of the star, and you're monitoring the intensity of the light carefully, you will see the light dip ever so slightly.
because the planet is blocking out some of that light.
And then the dip comes back up as the planet moves off the sun's surface from transiting across.
And then if you see this repeat, then you have things like the size of the planet,
you have the orbital time, you can deduce a lot of information.
And the Kepler telescope produced a catalogue, released a catalogue of 1800 planet candidates.
And by the way, there's more data in the pipeline still to come.
But those are the ones that were secure enough to actually put out a press release on.
And in there is this one object that has this peculiar eclipsing pattern,
this peculiar darkening of the star relative to all the other planets that have been discovered,
and any expectation we would have for what's going on around it.
And we discover new stuff all the time in the universe.
And for that reason, I think astronomers are some of the more humble among professions
who are out there because we are dumbfounded all the time.
We discover black holes.
Who ordered that?
The expanding universe.
Who ordered that?
You know, dark matter, dark energy.
We'll get to all of those, but you've got to admit, 22% occlusion is just incredible.
I mean, 10%, 12%, 22%?
It's a mystery.
There are plenty of mysteries.
I mean, Venus would only dim it by, what, one percent?
Yeah, yeah.
It's one one-hundredth, less than that.
It would dim it by less than one percent.
That's correct.
So something big is going on?
Yeah, but like one-tenth of one percent Venus would dim our sun by if somebody else were looking at it from afar.
So it's some huge thing.
We don't know what it is.
So it's cool.
And by the way, any time there's something that we don't know what it is, like you just noted, People bring all the armament to bear on it.
Every possible telescope, even if you had a different observing plan set up for it, you will turn the telescope in that direction.
Because we have more powerful telescopes on Earth than what Kepler was.
Kepler is basically a discovery telescope, right?
And so it's tuned for this one specific purpose.
You take the big hammers down here on Earth and focus on that star.
Now you have a pre-selected star where you know something interesting is already happening.
All right.
Doctor, if they come up, if the radio telescopes come up with nothing more than a rise in noise floor as they're aimed at this star system, Would that raise your curiosity level another notch?
I mean, I don't imagine a single signal, but I do imagine the possibility of an industrial alien society using a lot of electromagnetic stuff.
So let's go there.
So that's a good hypothesis.
So let's back up to the Kepler telescope, however, and let me just affirm for you that it was only using visible light.
And that's how it noticed that the light of the host star dimmed.
Gotcha.
So now, if it is an alien, if it is something that we don't understand, but could be, have some intelligence, and if it has some intelligence, and it would also have to have technology, because presumably we counted ourselves as intelligent as a species long before we had technology, right?
So it would have to have intelligence, as we know it, and technology.
technology communicating with itself with others than there'd be radio signals.
So you take a largest radio telescope, aim it at this, and look to see if your
radio signal goes up, whether or not you can interpret it.
Like you said, it could be that before the noise level goes up, that means some
extra, even though you don't know what it is and can't decode it, some extra stuff
is happening there.
And you compare the noise level to the noise level you'd expect just for the native emissions of the star, because you don't want to read something that is natural to what you already know we would be emitting.
So it'd have to be above all of that.
Then that would be interesting.
then by the way that could be just some new radio phenomenon and that alone
would not presume that it has intelligent aliens with technology.
No, I said raise the interest level by a notch is what I said.
It would definitely, that's the right way to say it, it would further raise the
interest level. Now if you take the radio telescopes and point it
there and there's no increase or blip going on, by the way you have to do this
at many frequencies.
We're at a break point.
It's the long one.
Enjoy it.
Yeah, of course. You spread it out, and if nothing's there, then we bring optical telescopes back to bear on it
to see if we can try to get an image of it.
Alright.
It's interferometry.
Doctor?
And all the other secondary means.
Hold on for a sec, we're at a break point. It's the long one, enjoy it. We'll be back.
Dark Matter Network News. This is Amy Martin.
A Saudi blogger, Raif Badawi, convicted of insulting Islam, is expected to receive the second 50 lashes of a 1,000 lash sentence soon, according to reports.
Slashings are to be carried out 50 at a time for 20 weeks in a row.
According to The Atlantic, the 30-year-old founder of the website Liberal Saudi Network, which was dedicated to fostering open discussion of religion and politics in Saudi Arabia, was just awarded the Sakharov Human Rights Award by the EU Parliament.
His sentence and punishment has been condemned by many prominent political figures, including several foreign governmental and UN leaders and eight U.S.
senators.
Also, according to The Atlantic, flogging as a means of punishment is prohibited under the Convention Against Torture, an international treaty to which Saudi Arabia is party.
The Kingdom is also member to the UN Human Rights Council, where it heads an influential panel.
A plane has caught fire on a runway in Fort Lauderdale Thursday, just prior to takeoff.
More than 100 passengers had to quickly evacuate the Boeing 747 using emergency slides.
One person was seriously injured during the incident.
Evolution may happen faster than we'd previously expected.
A new study of chickens could overturn the popular assumption that evolution is only visible over a long timescale.
For a long time, scientists have believed that the rate of change in the mitochondrial genome was never faster than about 2% per million years.
The identification of these mutations shows that the rate of evolution in this pedigree is in fact 15 times faster.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has successfully completed the third in a series of four maneuvers propelling it toward an encounter with the ancient Kuiper Belt Object 2014 MU69 a billion miles farther from the Sun than Pluto.
The targeting maneuver performed with the spacecraft's hydrazine-fueled thrusters started at approximately 1.15 p.m.
on Wednesday.
It lasted for about 30 minutes, surpassing the October 25th propulsive maneuver as the largest ever conducted by New Horizons.
The four maneuvers are scheduled to alter New Horizons path to send it toward a close encounter with MU69 on January 1st, 2019.
The flyby would be part of an extended mission that NASA still must approve.
Based on its brightness and distance, MU69 is estimated to have a diameter of only 20 to 30 miles with an orbital period of about 293 years.
New Horizons is currently located about 122 billion miles past Pluto.
Just imagine how far it will have to travel over the next three years to reach its next targeted flyby.
This has been Amy Martin for Dark Matter Network News.
...this night with the presence of Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.
And, uh, John, I guess my pre-show notes, uh, just can't be right, um, judging from what I've heard.
I mean, it says here that he was prepared to come on tonight and completely reverse his position on the frequent transit, uh, in our atmosphere of UFOs.
So, guess I was wrong about that.
Doctor?
Hey.
Hey.
So you're putting words in my mouth?
Is that what you're doing?
No.
I'm kidding.
I know that you're not a real UFO kind of guy.
Well, I don't know that I have a position on anything.
I'm just thinking that if they were to visit us, we wouldn't require somebody's eyewitness testimony.
You'd have way better evidence than that.
I want to keep looking for him.
Go ahead.
I'm not going to stop you.
But I have judged what people seem to be so low a likelihood of them being real as to not trigger any interest in me at all.
But I'm glad some people are because one day you'll find one and then you won't need no one will have to believe what you say because you'll be Walking down the street towing a flying saucer for everyone to investigate, and then we're done.
And then you were right all along, but now you have actual material evidence.
If I get to actually tow a UFO, then probably I'm going to claim a better technology.
Maybe somebody's truck.
We've got trucks towing all kinds of stuff.
I bet we can find one.
My favorite scene in in the movie Independence Day was when the alien sort of
crashes in the desert and Will Smith pops the hatch, punches the alien in the
face with it.
Welcome to Earth.
You know actually I think that's about what would happen in real life.
Let's say... I think it's so too.
Yeah, if something landed, the door opens, the ramp comes down, a little green guy starts down the ramp, he would be so full of lead before he got to the bottom of that ramp that he'd be rolling.
300 million guns in the United States would greet him first.
Then we'll hand him over to the military.
Yeah, that's right, I'm afraid.
All right, let's move on to other things.
While we have not left alien life, the big question, is it your view that somewhere out there, almost unquestionably, there is life?
Well, the way you have to approach that is not saying yes or no.
You just have to sort of assess likelihoods.
How about probably?
Yeah, so I would say likely.
That there's life elsewhere in our galaxy, certainly the universe.
But I'm not basing that on wishful thinking.
You base it on an analysis, what I would think is a sensible analysis of how long the universe has been around, how many stars there are, now the likely and better determined number of planets.
that would be exists around those stars and how long did it
take life to start on earth actually it started pretty quickly within a couple
hundred million years of when it could have possibly have started right by the
way it's it's not that life
took eight hundred million years from like four point six billion
to three point eight billion correct with a report three point seven billion
no Because the first half a billion years on Earth, we were still being heavily bombarded by the accretion of the leftover things in the solar system that were basically still making the planets.
So it's not fair to begin the stopwatch then.
Wait until that cools off.
Now you can make complex molecules.
And because under high temperatures, complex molecules don't form.
So, start when you can.
Now you start the stopwatch, and then 200 million years later we have simple life, but self-replicating life.
And then, yes, it would take another 300 million years before you had complex life, but life itself happened pretty quickly.
And the ingredients on Earth are the same as the ingredients practically everywhere in the solar system.
Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen.
These are some of the most common ingredients of the universe.
If we were made of something rare, you might have an argument.
Like, I joke about this, an isotope of bismuth.
If life on Earth were based on that?
Then you say, hey, we got something good going here on Earth, nobody else has got this, or they can't possibly have it in large numbers.
But we're made of the most common ingredients, like it or not.
And so, given these factors, it is easy to think that life, even possibly as we know it, could have formed in countless places across the galaxy and the universe.
And now you want to ask about intelligence, that's like another level.
And of course, who are we to even say that we are intelligent?
Because we invented the test to decide who's intelligent and who isn't.
And humans win that list and no other creature does.
So the hubris of that, for me, is laughable.
But, even accepting that, it's not clear that intelligence is inevitable.
Because if the asteroid never took out the dinosaurs, our mammal ancestors would still be there, having not
evolved into something more ambitious than themselves.
And because the dinosaurs were around on Earth for longer before the dinosaur hit than the
time that has elapsed since then.
Now this is a profound fact because it argues strongly that were it not for the dinosaur,
the asteroid, the dinosaurs would just simply still be here.
And we'd be running for cover under their feet the way rats and mice run for cover under our feet.
And so there would be an Earth without intelligence, but teeming with life.
You don't think that other ecological changes would have taken them out eventually?
They were going for hundreds of millions of years.
What's another 65 million?
Which is the time that has elapsed since they've been extinct.
65 million is small compared to how long... Now, by the way, we use the word dinosaur, but that refers to many, many species, some of which came and others went.
Not all the dinosaurs you see in the cartoons.
Or in any authoritative source, we're all alive at the same time, right?
So, I say dinosaur as just this dominant lizard, reptilian thing on Earth, but T-Rex surely would have had his run and then maybe gone extinct, but other dinosaurs would have risen up.
As had happened over the hundreds of millions of years that preceded it.
But there's no indication that these big-brained mammals, derived from tree rodents of the day, would have evolved to anything more ambitious than what they were at the time.
Dinosaurs originally, I guess, were, or birds of today, are descendants of them, right?
Some birds?
Yeah, they're a branch of what we would think of as, and I learned all this, I work at the American Museum of Natural History, which has an entire department of Vertebrate paleontology.
That's how much the study of life goes on in the museum, that they can separate life forms that have vertebrates from life forms that don't in the two different departments in the museum.
So vertebrate paleontologists, these are the dinosaur hunters.
And I learned from them.
I didn't know before.
I mean, I've been at the job for 20 years, but being near them sensitizes me to all these things that they know and that they study, including the fact that birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs.
But, colloquially, when we say dinosaur, no one is thinking bird.
We're thinking T-Rex, we're thinking the dinosaur formerly known as Brontosaurus, you know, the classical dinosaurs that you see in movies.
Sure.
Okay, let's change to the large... Oh, before we do that, I actually heard you on another podcast, Joe Rogan.
And I really, really got a kick out of the talk you had about, you know, people who think that the world is going to end.
September was a very interesting month, because I talked to a lot of these people.
And there were at least three separate... When the first date came, I can't remember what it was now, and the world didn't end, they were kind of upset and set a second date.
That passed.
They set a third date.
That too passed.
I haven't heard from them since.
They're probably warming up for something new.
But the world should have ended in September, according to all these folks.
My God, I got a lot of email about that.
Well, so what I find fascinating And somebody should study it, if not psychologists or cultural anthropologists.
Somebody should study the fact that there are communities of people who are predicting the end of the world and then are upset when the world does not end.
What is that about?
They should be happy that they were wrong.
Yeah, what's that about?
Why would they be upset?
I don't know.
This is what I'm saying.
Somebody's got to study it and figure out what's going on in the human mind, in the
human brain where there are people who are only happy when they're sad.
Apparently so, yes.
Well, you're right about that.
They kind of slunk away.
And there's a great website.
You can Google it for ends of the world and it is an endless list of predictions made
for the end of the world.
They go back thousands of years, and not all of them give a date.
They say, oh, sometime in the next ten years or so.
Ten years goes by, and it makes a note that the world has not ended yet.
But what's interesting to me about the end of world scenarios is, whoever is telling it to you, it is very likely, I would say, a certainty, that they're telling you the world will end in our lifetime.
And if you become a believer of that, then you end up joining the movement, and then they become the head of a movement.
Whereas if they say, oh, the world is definitely going to end in 150 years, no one's interested, nobody cares.
It's less potent an argument to give to grow the cult or whatever it is you're creating for yourself.
But there are people not in cults who follow this.
I mean, millions of them, literally.
It's amazing to me.
So I thought that was a good discussion.
Anyway, on to the Large Hadron Collider.
That's news right now.
They're powering it up to apparently a power they've never reached before with two things in mind.
One, possibly it's said or it's rumored to create a mini black hole, and or two, to connect with another dimension.
What can you say about this?
Yeah, so, so, I mean, my specialty is astrophysics, not particle physics, but I can tell you what I do know from my, I have a lot of friends who are particle physicists.
So, first of all, just keep as background information that when modern physics makes discoveries, typically, it's because an experiment has been designed that enters a regime Of energy, or force, or pressure, or some measurable quantity that had never been reached before.
And that's not fundamentally different, as a goal, from the astrophysicist saying, I want to now have the biggest telescope there ever was, because that will enable me to see dimmer things than ever before, and farther than ever before.
And any time you push such a frontier, you are bound to make some kind of a discovery.
Because you're entering what we call a parameter space never before explored.
So with the Large Hadron Collider, with this new round, if you will, they'll reach higher energies with that, as you'd expect every next time they do this, once you refine the operations of it.
Plus, they got the Higgs boson out of the way.
You know, now let's keep going.
So, now mini black holes, these are fascinating things because they're not particularly stable and they evaporate essentially instantly by Hawking radiation.
They just evaporate.
Higgs boson evaporated pretty much right away too, right?
What say again?
Higgs boson pretty much evaporated.
So we wouldn't say, in that case we wouldn't say evaporate, it can decay to another particle
or another kind of, but a black hole, I mean we literally, there are particles that were
inside the event horizon that now emerge from outside the event horizon in the space.
around the black hole and then the black hole loses mass and then the black, and this continues until the black hole
loses mass entirely and then it disappears forever.
So if it makes black holes, there'll be tiny black holes and there'll be of no real, they might be fun to study
but they're of no danger or consequence. So there's no danger they'll create a black hole and it'll just
not disappear, so that'd be problematic.
You mean if it just decided to eat everything?
Yeah, starting with the Collider, I'm sure.
Yeah, back when they first flicked this on the switch of the Collider, there was a YouTube clip of like the security camera of the parking lot outside of the CERN facility, and it had a countdown clock near it, and it was ticking until it turned on, so it turns it on, and then This hole opens up in the parking lot and all the cars fall in.
Really?
You know, creative videographers, you know, especially when inspired by science catastrophe, makes for some entertaining viewing.
So, there is no risk of that.
And by the way, your concern is healthy, but unfounded.
What I mean by healthy is, one should always ask, what is the risk?
Could this happen?
Could this possibly be?
And if you look at the history of these kinds of experiments, everybody's worst nightmare was never realized.
And because the worst nightmares that people came up with were not based on the reality of the calculations that were actually done.
And so, yeah, we'll just look for more discoveries of things.
And I don't even know what next particle they're looking for.
Maybe next time we talk I can come in with a With a portfolio of what remains to be discovered.
Something smaller than Higgs.
I know that smaller than Higgs.
Exactly.
Well, consider that there are three kinds of discovery.
There's, I think something will be there, and I'll look for it, and lo and behold, I find it.
And that gives credence to my hypotheses that I put forth to begin the experiment.
But another one is, it should be there, and I look, and it's not there.
That's almost as interesting, maybe more interesting than finding what you're looking for.
It's not finding what you're looking for.
And then a third one is you find stuff that you never even dreamt should be there.
And these are three fascinating outcomes.
All right, how about this one?
Something happens that you weren't prepared for.
Yes, that can happen at any time.
Yes.
Yes, well that's the one everybody worries about.
And I'm not saying it's going to happen, but if you were to ask a scientist at CERN, what is the risk of something catastrophic occurring?
How would they answer, do you think?
I don't know, but that's a great... Let me think of a way to pose that question slightly differently.
So it would be, are you prepared For something to happen that you're not prepared to happen.
That's kind of what you're asking.
And I guess by definition, the answer is no.
By definition.
However, you can quantify some of those risks.
For example, at a baseball game, there's a ball thrown 90 miles an hour.
There's a bat swung at 90 miles an hour.
And if any of those gets loose, it can fly into the stands and hurt you.
So you say, watch out for the possibility of these flying into the stands and hurting you.
And you can ask, what would a rotating bat going, you know, 90 miles an hour do to the human body?
You can calculate this and figure this out.
And so, even if it never happened, of course it has happened, but even if it never happened, you can judge what kinds of things can go wrong based on what you know you do on the baseball field, or based on what you know you do in a particle accelerator.
There's a limit to how much energy can possibly leak out because you know how much energy you're putting in.
You don't get energy from nothing.
So you can contain your concerns in some way.
But I have to concede.
At some limit, if you never can anticipate it, something could happen that you've never anticipated.
Well, in a major league ballpark, you can put up a fence.
And so you probably limit your liability when somebody gets whacked, because they're not going to get whacked.
Exactly, yes.
So maybe my example wasn't as good as it could have been.
So I'm not sure putting a fence up around CERN is going to cut it.
Well, the Mets are in the World Series, so I have to mention a baseball.
No, that's fine.
But yeah, a fence, that would be interesting.
It would keep the baseballs out of the turn, but that's about it.
Keep the nutcases out, maybe.
So, this is about to happen, I guess, within the next few days, or it's happening now.
I don't know.
I don't remember when the next phase is, but it's soon.
It's very close.
Black holes are really interesting.
By the way, I've got to tell you.
We would have had something three or four times more powerful than this had the budget not been cut to zero by Congress in 1993.
We were building the superconducting supercollider in Texas.
Not many states are large enough to have contained the size of this circle, of this particle.
They actually started digging.
They even had a hole dug.
That's right.
And you can read the reports and they say, oh, well, budget overruns and We have to conserve and all this, and I have a different interpretation of what happened.
It's very simple.
That in 1989, peace broke out.
Because any previous budgets that funded particle accelerators got funded.
Because people knew in the 20th century that physics mattered.
A physicist is an expert in matter, motion, and energy.
And what is war if not the simple transfer of energy here to energy there?
And money from here to money.
And when you're at war, Cold War of course that was, money is flowing like rivers.
Dr. Tyson, we're at a break.
This is what I want to talk about when we get back.
Not only as it relates to the Hadron Collider or the collider that could have been in Texas, but I want to talk about the space program.
I am so sad about our space program.
We'll be right back.
This is Midnight in the Desert.
Probably the nation's Absolute premier astrophysicist, probably so in the world.
And you're not going to want to miss his Star Talk on Sunday, October 25th at 11 p.m.
Eastern Time.
That's going to be quite a show.
Now, I want to jump because I want to talk a little bit about what Look, when I was 13 years old, I got my ham license and I went into radio.
I was deeply into electronics.
I loved and still love electronics.
I'll be a ham till the day I die.
More ways than one.
And it was a wonderful, wonderful time to grow up.
I grew up watching the space program.
I grew up watching man stand on the moon.
I grew up seeing all of that and it's all, I don't want to say it's all gone, but I don't know.
The spirit that America had, what we were, looking to the future the way we did, it's just not the same.
Dr. Tyson, would you care to comment on that?
Sure.
So, what distinguished the 1960s from all times that followed it And of course the 1960s ended in like 1972, 73, I guess with the end of the Vietnam War and when we stopped going to the moon.
And of course the 60s began when the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan.
So that's the operational definition of the 1960s.
And so in the 60s, every single space mission was more ambitious than the previous one because there was a goal set That had not yet been reached.
And so Gemini had two astronauts and not one.
And each Gemini mission was testing spacewalking and docking and maneuvers that you would need to execute in order to go to the moon.
When the last Gemini spacecraft was retired, there was the Apollo spacecraft waiting in the adjacent launch pad Ready to start its rounds of tests and culminating in, of course, the landing on the moon with the Apollo 11 in July 1969.
When you look at modern times, where people are getting excited about the space shuttle or the space station, you're advancing a technological frontier to build a space station the size of a football field orbiting the Earth.
No doubt about it.
But as far as, for my money, you're not actually advancing a space frontier.
What you're doing is you're boldly going where hundreds have gone before, into low Earth orbit.
And so that's why people are accusing, people are asserting that, oh, well, space is just not interesting.
Well, it's not interesting because there's not an advancing frontier to garner the headlines, such as what happened in the 1960s.
Nor do they seem willing to admit how many things came out of the space program that we take for granted now.
Yeah, that's a whole other conversation.
It is.
Perhaps the most under-heralded aspect of the space program was the need to miniaturize electronics to save on the weight of the launch vehicles.
And so every functioning piece of electronics, from the computers to the communication devices, everything, a lot of engineering brain work went into make them small.
And the act of doing so then led Earth people to say, hey, This radio that used to be a piece of furniture in my grandparents' living room, maybe I can fit that on my hip.
Clearly, no one in the 1920s was looking at the radio saying, I want to carry that around with me, and one day I will.
No one even knows how to have that thought, because that's not the mindset at the time.
So much of what we count as As modern access to computing and electronics as being portable are traceable to the trend that was initiated by NASA simply to go into space.
And that's not simply a patent.
It's not a spinoff in any literal sense.
It is a trend in what you needed to do to get the job done and what impact that had on the innovation of everybody else here on Earth.
So what's happened to us?
In other words, why can't this case be successfully made to those who hold the purse strings for whatever we want to do?
Well, so I wrote a whole book on this.
It was called Space Chronicles Facing the Ultimate Frontier.
And by the way, that book, the title I submitted it with to the publisher was not that title.
The title I submitted it with was Failure to launch.
The dreams and delusions of space enthusiasts.
And the sales people said, oh, we can't sell a book that has the word failure in it.
And I had a whole argument with them that I lost.
So here's the thing.
Many of us who remember the space program, we will recount it as being the deeds of You know, the deeds of explorers.
It's in our DNA.
Perhaps not only as a species, but as Americans.
Look what we did.
And there's a lot of that going around.
But consider, we were at war.
We were at war with a sworn enemy.
And in fact, almost every single metric of success in space, we did not win.
The Soviets won.
They had the first satellite.
They had the first non-human animal.
They had the first human.
They had the first woman.
They had the first black person.
They had the first space station.
They invented the rocket equation that tells us how to actually design rockets to have them launch to go to our destinations.
What we did, and they didn't do, we landed on the moon.
So we did this one thing, and then we said, we win!
Yes, and they now virtually hold the keys to the space station.
They're the only ones who can get us up there.
They're the only one.
And I used to say that we hitch a ride with them, but in fact, no, we're paying tens of millions of dollars per seat just to get to the space station.
So it leads you to wonder, do we need to be at war in order to stimulate a moving frontier in space?
Because there is no question that that's what stimulated it the first time.
And I joke about this.
I imagine visiting China and going to visit the head of China and whispering in his ear and saying, I just want you to leak a memo.
That had to be true.
Just leak a memo that says you want to put military bases on Mars.
And then we would design, fund, build a spacecraft and launch it.
We'd be on Mars in 10 months.
Wonderful.
For sure.
No, that's good.
I'd rather not have to go to war to achieve it, but you know what?
Right now, if you look at what's going on in the world with Russia and Syria and the proxy wars and all the rest of this baloney, China with their islands, us with sailing by them, we're getting closer to the old Cold War by the minute.
Yeah, that's a scary prospect because things are not becoming less tense.
They're becoming, it appears, more tense.
And with us putting our warships near the Chinese islands that they're building, in that same article that I read of this was when I learned that the Chinese had put one of their warships off the coast of Alaska when President Obama was visiting Alaska.
So it's like tit-for-tat kind of war games going on.
And so I don't know what the long-term future of that is, but maybe the only thing that'll keep us safe is that everybody's in debt to everybody else.
Well, there is that.
I guess if we got into a tiff with China, we would suddenly just say, all right, we're keeping our money.
Right, right.
And they don't want that.
And so maybe it's the economies that are preventing it.
But I have another plan.
I don't want to call it a plan, an idea, I'd rather say.
And that is for a nation to grow economically and to maintain a sense of security and health and wealth.
It will require innovations.
We know this.
Innovations in STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering and math fields.
These are the engines of tomorrow's economies.
We've known this since the Industrial Revolution and before.
So with this, we can pose the question, what is the greatest driver of innovations?
And what we have today are people saying, I know what we have to do.
Let's create programs that get kids interested in STEM fields.
That'll fix everything.
No, it's not.
You know why?
Because adults outnumber kids five to one.
And adults vote.
And adults wield resources and funding.
And adults are in charge.
And if you have scientifically illiterate adults, I'm not waiting around 30 years for the eighth grader to become president and then solve these problems.
There's an adult problem, an adult science and literacy problem, that is in the way.
So what I would suggest is, if the government says, we are going to go into space in a big way, then it becomes highly visible, as going to the moon was highly visible.
The government said, we're going to put people on Mars, and you know who those astronauts will be?
They're in middle school today.
Let's select The Mars astronauts today, and it'll be 50 middle school students from across the country.
Team Beat will follow them, and we're all going to want to know, are they eating their three square meals?
Are they getting good grades?
And we would grow up with them.
and they would be the first pioneers to Mars.
And to do that, you're going to have to innovate in countless ways
to get people to Mars safely and have them return.
Plus, you're going to have to use materials on Mars if you're going to spend any time there,
unless you send cargo ships in advance.
But all of this has never been done before, which means you're going to have to innovate.
And that will turn a sleepy nation, a sleepy country into an innovation nation.
And when you're an innovation nation, you know that there's something cool about innovating.
You have the same attitude towards innovation that Elon Musk has.
He wouldn't sit there isolated as a lone genius trying to solve all of our problems because we'd all be part of that same solution path.
So I see space as a force operating on our urges to be innovative, whether or not you are actively engaged in aerospace fields, and that would be transformative of our nation.
Okay.
If you were in charge, if you were in charge of NASA and you had lots of money and you could set the agenda for our next big goal, what would it be?
So, that's a great question.
I'm going to give you an unorthodox answer first, and then the longer real answer.
My unorthodox answer is, I don't want to be head of NASA, because the head of NASA reports to the President.
But we as citizens, the President reports to us.
And so, the real power is not in who's head of an agency.
The real power is in the electorate.
So, if the electorate understands the value of this, then they would only elect into office the people who resonate with that valuation.
And then NASA wouldn't have to run to Washington every two years with hat in hand saying, please top up my budget.
Those folks would already be in place.
Well, I've been watching these silly debates, and not once have I heard a question about space.
Precisely.
Or science, even.
Forget.
But science or technology, as though this is some optional thing that maybe we'll get to if we have time, when there is no health, wealth, or security without it.
So I am astonished that it has not only not been addressed directly by the candidates, the journalists are not going there either.
Maybe they think that science is not going to sell in the debate ratings.
I don't know.
But it's a travesty if we're going to have debates where science is not the theme, at least one of the topics of the debates.
Because somebody's got to recognize that there is no modern society as we have come to build it, without the contributions of science and technology to it.
That's all there is.
Pure and simple.
Okay, well here's another mystery you can try and explain.
While there is not much interest among the public, or maybe that's wrong, there is.
While there's not much money getting poured into it, if any at all, look at Hollywood.
That's all they're doing.
Did you see The Martian?
A great movie, actually.
I think that Hollywood is a litmus test for what the appetite Yes.
that exists for people to want to think about space, to go into space, to dream of tomorrow.
And the great thing about The Martian was science and technology were themselves characters
in that film.
My favorite thing to say about The Martian was they had the clichéd scene that any astronaut
movie is going to have, where one of the astronauts is looking at a video screen of their spouse
That's right.
When you're coming home and they touch the screen, when they did that in this film, I'm thinking, could you hurry that up please?
I want to see if the experiment's going to work.
And that's normally the most touching scene in any of these other films.
And this one kind of got in the way, because the science and technology was where all the suspense was, and the action.
So, now to answer your question, what I think we should do, and I would offer this to people and they can decide for themselves.
I don't start movements.
I'm not hitting people over the head.
I want people to vote freely according to what their own thoughts are, provided they're informed thoughts.
So I'm going to give you some information.
My sense is that if you set the next goal as a destination, such as Mars, you might get stuck with the moon problem.
What was that?
It was, we're going to the moon.
And then we got to the moon, and then NASA was not designed to do anything else, because so much money got pumped in to make that one result happen, that the rest of the solar system laid untouched, because it all got focused in a singular goal.
What I would suggest, Don't even make Mars a singular goal.
You say, let us create a suite of launch vehicles that have the capacity, depending on combinations of strap-on boosters, you can go to any destination you want.
Ooh, I like that.
When we built the interstate system for the United States, they didn't say, let's just connect LA and New York.
No, let's build the roads everywhere.
Because I don't know in advance how creative people want to be in this part of the country versus another.
So let us enable all transportation.
So, if so, if you can do this, then sure, there'll be scientists who want to go to Mars and look for life, there could be miners who want to extract mineral resources from asteroids, and maybe robots will do that first, or people.
We might want to put a telescope at one of the Lagrangian points on the other side of the moon, tourist jaunts to the far side of the moon, and then all of the solar system becomes our backyard, and you're going to have to innovate to make all of that happen.
And then, once those frontiers are touched, and the routines are established, then you cede that to private industry, which then makes a buck off of it.
And then the solar system becomes our intellectual and vacation playground.
Well, listen, Hollywood's still all aglow with it, and as an example, The Martian drew in hundreds of millions of dollars.
It did very well.
That indicates the American public is still very, very interested.
So, it's just like a lack of a goal.
We don't have a goal.
Oh, and that interstate system you talked about?
We've got potholes in it!
Potholes!
Yeah, it's... the infrastructure, that's a whole other conversation, of course.
Sort of.
I don't know what country this is sometimes, when I look around.
I'm old enough, maybe as are you, to remember in elementary school they would show these film loops of other countries, you know, and it would be like, you know, United Nations Week or something.
And you'd see these like third world countries, as they were known back then, where, you know, oxen drawing plows, driven by people flies were on their faces roads were
washed out we had a certain smugness about it so we're americans they need our
help and then i can hear in the twenty-first century
the economy tanks the uh... new orleans floods
uh... you know uh... bridges collapsed trains collide and i look at it i would
country is this We don't have the tallest buildings anymore.
Who would have thought that our planes would be flying slower today than at any time throughout the 1960s?
You know, I was expecting that today we would have, like, suborbital flight.
You get to Japan in 45 minutes.
But no.
But no.
You know, we used to have the longest tunnels and the longest bridges.
And for a while, as a kid, I thought, well, this is just kind of like a peeing contest, you know, of what good is that?
And then I realized that if you build the tallest building, you have to innovate to do that because you're doing what no one has done before.
Patents will be awarded.
And so the very act of the very audacity of wanting to extend a technological feat Yes, there's pride and some ego involved, but at the end of the day, some new discoveries are made that, in essentially every case, apply to the rest of society in ways that move our culture and our nation forward.
Well, I don't think that the decaying infrastructure and our apparent non-interest in space are different.
I think it's all wrapped up together.
In a malaise.
In a malaise, yes, indeed, a malaise.
And we're not fixing things, we're not building things bigger, as you point out.
Something has happened to us.
Perhaps you ought to be in the business of starting a movement of some kind.
I don't know what that would be.
As an educator, I'd rather educate people and occasionally enlighten them so that what the country does is what the electorate wants to do.
I don't want to drag people.
You'll not see me hitting politicians over the head, no matter what they say, because they're representing an electorate.
So if they say something, and even if it's scientifically illiterate, and they're gaining votes, that means they're being supported by people who resonate with that science illiteracy.
As an educator, it's my duty, I think, to alert people of things they might not have known that they should know before they make judgments, before they formulate opinions, before they vote.
And then, if after I tell them what I think they need to know, they still want to vote for the person, fine!
It's a free democracy.
That's how it's supposed to work.
But I fear that many people are simply unaware.
of what perhaps they need to know to make informed decisions about this, the 21st century.
I wouldn't even, if somebody said, well, okay, who do I vote for?
So I get exploration, I get money to NASA, we, you know, we begin moving ahead.
There ain't no such candidate.
You know who came closest to that candidate was Newt Gingrich back in, was it 08?
Oh, the moon stuff.
Yeah, he was talking about how people made fun of him.
I know him, we've met a few times, but I wouldn't count myself among his great supporters or anything.
Nonetheless, he says, let's have moon bases.
People mock him for that.
And I can tell you that given the state of technology, for him to suggest moon bases is not as crazy as President Kennedy saying, let's walk on the moon at a time when we had no spaceship at all.
So think about how big a step that was for Kennedy to say, let's put a man on the moon before the decade is out.
Not as big a step as saying, let's put moon bases on the moon, now that we already have a space program.
Alright, question for you.
Are moon bases actually sustainable?
Could we do it?
Is it just a matter of money?
No, so moon bases, you'd have to, it's an outpost, so you'd have to, you'd need a supply chain.
You're not going to grow anything on the moon.
That's what I meant.
You'd have to have modules, right?
You'd have to do what Matt Damon did on Mars.
But you're not really living on the moon, you're living On Earth, on the moon, right?
You're creating a 72 degree habitat with a farm inside.
And I would question why you might do that.
It seems to be much more fun to just have a quick vacation there.
And then come back, not try to just live there.
I mean, I don't see the point of making that your permanent residence, since it is supremely hostile to human physiology to step outside.
So it would be doable, but the question is why?
Yeah, I mean, definitely have an outpost.
Like we have an outpost on Antarctica.
There are no permanent residents of Antarctica.
For example, and by the way, Antarctica is balmer and wetter than Mars.
And I don't see people lined up to live in condominiums in Antarctica.
So the same challenge would apply to Mars.
You'd have to terraform Mars to make it someplace you want to go hang out.
And I don't have a problem with that, which is nowhere near You know, we can't predict next week's weather, much less terraform an entire planet and turn it into Earth.
So, we're a long way... I don't know how long, you know, a hundred centuries away, perhaps?
Don't know, but... We better find somewhere to live.
The way things are going right now, we may need it.
Well, so, that's a common argument that, in fact, Stephen Hawking... You're in good company.
Stephen Hawking made a similar argument, as did Elon Musk, that we want to be a multi-planet species.
In case there's some catastrophe, an asteroid, or a virus, or nanobots take over.
And on the surface that sounds good, and it makes good newspaper copy and clickbait on the internet.
However, if you have the resources, if you have the geoengineering power to terraform Mars, turning it into Earth, then it seems to me that you have the power to deflect an asteroid from hitting Earth in the first place.
People say, we're trashing Earth, we need another planet.
If you have enough resources to terraform another planet into Earth, you can terraform Earth back into Earth.
That's true.
So I don't see, I don't agree with the practicality of making humans a double planet species.
Because whatever that effort is, it's got to be less to permanently inoculate ourselves from any bad virus.
Whatever effort that takes.
That's got to be easier than shipping a billion people to Mars.
That's all I'm saying.
Do you worry at all about the possible ramifications of nanotechnology?
I thought a lot about that.
So a couple of things.
Just so you have a way for your brain to enter that conversation.
Your ability to build things or to manipulate things Or to invent things, that is to create objects, are intimately linked to the size of the tools you're using.
So if you are constructing an office building, you're not using tweezers and a microscope, you're using bulldozers, and so the size of the tools are commensurate with the size of the project.
So now you have a surgeon operating on your eye, so now the tools have to be small, or on your brain, they have to be even smaller.
So now, when you think of nanotechnology, possibly making robots or machines the size of, let's say, human cells, You need tools as small as human cells to make these things.
That's right.
Or you exploit biological, molecular activity so that it makes a sort of, you deputize molecules in the service of your machines in some way that has not yet been achieved.
That would be the merging of biology and technology.
My point is, if you want to go there, you have to have tools that size.
And if you have tools that size, oh my gosh!
You could manipulate viruses.
I mean, that's an extraordinary frontier.
And of course, there's a dangerous side.
There's a dangerous side when we invented knives, right?
You can kill people, or you can kill your food.
So, I'm not saying there aren't hazards, and I'm not saying that we should not have A growth of moral turpitude, is that the right word?
Turpitude?
Fortitude, to accompany such discoveries.
But when I pause and reflect on the power we would have over our genome, over our medicines, and how much that could help the human species, I'm not even thinking about what bad it can do.
You'd set up laws that say, thou shalt not do these bad things with this technology.
And of course there'll be bad people who will.
You find them and arrest them and put them in jail.
Just as there are bad people who will stab you with a knife or shoot you with a gun.
You take them and put them in jail.
So we'll need laws to grow up alongside it.
But there is no doubt that so many of the things that we fall victim to, it's
simply because we don't have the tools and the knowledge of how to use such tools, even if we did
have them, commensurate with the size of the actual phenomenon going on that we would want to
manipulate. There's just been one big change in the world, doctor, since what you're talking
about now, and that is, back then, we could depend on mutual assured destruction.
You know, somebody pushed the wrong button.
Now, we have people in the world whose very, the center of their ideology is to bring upon us Armageddon, to start the war of wars that will essentially end everything.
So, if something gets in their hand that would accomplish that, they don't mind dying.
They're ready to give up their life to end it all.
You're right.
That was a game changer.
And for us, stateside, that all changed, of course, on September 11th, where at any minute before September 11th, we would have said to ourselves, yes, negotiate with the terrorists.
Maybe we will survive.
As long as nobody's surviving, all bets are off.
All right.
Good.
Hold it right there.
Good long break.
Seven minutes and we'll be back.
Dark Matter Network News.
This is Amy Martin.
The United States House of Representatives has selected their new Speaker, Republican Paul Ryan, Thursday morning.
The 54th Speaker of the House won in a 236 to 432 vote, with Democrat Nancy Pelosi trailing at 184 votes.
An intergalactic mystery has puzzled scientists since Voyager 1 passed into interstellar space
in mid-2005.
A strange magnetic field was observed, something inconsistent with what we'd imagine to see, even leading some to doubt that Voyager had even made it through the heliopause, or that outer edge of our heliosphere, which is like a bubble around our solar system where solar winds slow and begin to cease.
Adding to the mystery, researchers have found that the magnetic field direction observed by Voyager deviated by an angle of more than 40 degrees from what was expected.
But what could account for these odd magnetic readings as Voyager left our solar system?
A recent study shows that the initial direction of the magnetic field observed by Voyager is deflected by the heliopause like an elastic cord wrapped around a beach ball.
Therefore, the spacecraft is moving through a special region of space where magnetic fields are rotated away from true magnetic north.
This means that while Voyager 1 did cross through the heliopause in 2012, it is still traveling through this muddied magnetic field region and won't reach the pristine region of interstellar space until at least 2025.
With this recent discovery, scientists now know they'll need to wait at least another decade before Voyager enters the region of interstellar space that is beyond the reach of the Sun.
Since the dawn of the Space Age, humankind has never passed through and explored this far-flung pristine environment.
We'll soon be able to answer further questions about the nature of cosmic rays and magnetic fields, as well as probe many long-standing mysteries of deep space.
A new study suggests that researchers have achieved the most realistic robotic implementation of human walking dynamics that has ever been done, which may ultimately allow human-like versatility and performance.
This work opens the door for robots to be more fully integrated into our daily lives.
Mimicking human gait, responsible for balance and walking, has been a problem plaguing robotics researchers for decades.
A new system based on a concept called spring mass walking combines passive dynamics of mechanical systems with computer controls.
It provides the ability for robots to blindly react to rough terrain, maintain balance, retain an efficiency of motion, and essentially walk like humans do.
This new technology also holds promise for biomedical applications.
Have a strange story or a news tip?
Email amy at artbell.com.
This has been Amy Martin for Dark Matter Network News.
Just to finish up on my thought, in the old days, we were worried about the Russians, they were worried about us.
We all knew what would happen if some idiot pushed the button.
Today, I somehow imagine, I guess, some guy named Mohammed, dressed probably in classy black ISIS attire.
With a little test tube full of something called grey goo.
You know, there wouldn't even be a discussion about whether it's a good idea to let it loose or not.
They'd just let it loose.
Be that quick.
So, that's what I was talking about, Dr. Tyson.
It is, verifiably, a different world.
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things we need to think of as modern civilization If we're going to respect people's belief systems, that's what you would defend in a free society, of course.
Of course.
One of the things that distinguished the United States from so many other countries that came before it, or have come since.
So, the difference, however, is that Belief systems are not founded in objective truths, they're founded in personal truths.
So it's your personal truth if Jesus is your Savior, or if Muhammad is your, that's your person who is responsible for your spiritual fulfillment.
Sure.
And you go around the world and people have their personal truths.
But when it is time to establish governance in a pluralistic society, You cannot create laws based on personal truths if you plan on those laws to govern everyone.
So you need to take a step back and say, what are the objective truths that we know about in this world?
Well, we have methods and tools to establish objective truth.
It's called science.
And I've been quoted as saying, as I said I think once on Bill Maher, that the good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe it.
So it's something that applies to everyone.
You base your laws and your nations and your legislation on that, and that then can protect the freedom you would have to have whatever belief system you want.
If you have an entire community of people who do not care if they remain alive, because they want you to have their belief system, That is a destabilizing force, not only in a nation, but in civilization itself.
Sure is.
Sure is.
And they wouldn't hesitate for a moment.
If they had something like that, they wouldn't even have a discussion about whether it was ethical or not, or a good idea, or suicide.
They are ready to become martyrs to bring upon the end of the world.
And so they would do it.
Hopefully nobody who... Go ahead.
You know what I wonder is if, this is more hopeful thinking here, if that kind of attitude and that kind of state of mind is actually incompatible with wielding weapons of the power to actually effect that kind of outcome.
Because you have to know how the laws of physics work.
You'd have to if you want to blow up the world.
You have to study to learn how to do that.
At some point, maybe you'll question the role of your personal beliefs in inflicting it upon other people, no matter what your personal beliefs are.
Or taking it or trying to convince people because you preach to them.
It's another thing to bring them on by force.
And by the way, many of the successful religions over the years accomplish their success by just such activities, right?
We can speak of peaceful Christians today, but there were whole episodes where that was not the case, as we all know.
So we're talking about modern society, post-Dark Ages modern society, and for that to function as we would hope, as civilized people, then something's got to give.
Well, as Lenin said, if you could make it so, would there be no religion?
I know, that's a gotcha question.
I'm a fan of a free society.
You can think whatever you want.
Just don't require that other people think it as well.
Then you've made a dictatorship.
And it's no longer a free society that our founding fathers had imagined for us.
So, I don't run around chasing people and their religion.
It's not what I do, and that would be a violation of the freedoms that guaranteed all of us in the Constitution.
It's your freedom of speech, and what goes with that is your freedom of thought.
You have that, whatever you want.
But, for example, let's say you have a cult that is afraid of the number 13.
What is it?
Trixadecaphobia?
Fine.
Fine, okay?
Go ahead.
But don't be tasked with designing elevator banks and leaving out the 13th floor of office buildings.
They do.
That shouldn't be your job, if that is what you're afraid of.
Yes, indeed.
All right, so here's something I'm sure you can warm up to.
are combining pop culture and science in this new TV show, StarTalk, right?
I would guess this is what you were talking about earlier, an effort to get people involved.
And if it takes pop culture to ease them into science, so be it.
Yeah, I think, yes.
So I think of it in a slightly nuanced, different way.
Okay.
And that is, um, I realized over the years that I was doing something that I didn't even know I was doing until I look back and I say, wow, that's what I was doing.
And now I can say like I've known it all along, but really I had to even discover this in myself.
What I realized is that if you take science and embed it in pop culture, Then it is a ready-made vessel for people to embrace the science, because people already know pop culture.
That's the definition of pop culture.
for example to weekend three weekends ago two weekends ago i've finished watching a movie and i had a half hour before
my next tv show i was watching and i thought you started channel surfing is
any you know red blooded couch american does channel surfing and i stumble
on the cincinnati bangles going into overtime with the seattle
seahawks perfect i got thirty minutes
it's a fifteen minute overtime let's just walk it's something good some good is gonna
happen sure something interesting at the start
a suspenseful is gonna happen so after the the the first round of exchange
possessions the cincinnati bangles comes into position of a winning
field goal kick So there it is.
At height, the ball goes 42 yards as it tumbles through the air in this long, arching trajectory.
And it hits the left upright and then deflects into the goal posts for the winning kick.
The Cincinnati Bengals win by three.
And I looked at that and I said, oh, I've got to tweet this.
So I get on Twitter and I say, OK.
The winning field goal overtime kick by the Cincinnati Bengals was likely enabled by a third of an inch drift due to the rotation of the earth.
And people, like, it blew people's minds.
People were like, oh my gosh!
Now, here's the thing.
I didn't have to explain what football was.
I didn't have to explain a field goal kick or overtime or who the Cincinnati Bengals were.
Not everyone is football fluent, but enough people are for that tweet to matter to them.
And it got picked up by the sports networks and everybody was talking about it.
And it was no effort for me.
I just happened to know what these deflections are.
I mean, I did the calculation some time ago and I just carried it forward into this moment.
So in StarTalk, The more I can find ways to embed science in pop culture, I think the more accessible it is to people, without dumbing it down.
I'm not dumbing anything down.
Right.
I'm telling you like it is.
Sure you are.
Right?
Yeah, and so that's the subtle difference.
It's not that I'm trying to use it to soften it.
I'm using pop culture as this moving vessel that's already coming through your living room, and then the science is for the taking.
And that's what it has been, and StarTalk is the television embodiment of that.
Of course, it's based on a radio show of the same name that posts 50 times a year, but National Geographic Channel has sort of plucked their 10 favorite guests each season, and they get lifted up and jump species onto television.
That's amazing.
Well, maybe, you know, that's just you walking your walk, the one you talk about, and I hope it works.
I hope it succeeds.
What's the response like?
It's been very warm.
In fact, the first season this past spring got an Emmy nomination, and I was very flattered by that.
It meant that we didn't win, but we got noticed.
And you win an Emmy because people in the television professional community vote for it, right?
It's a peered award, in a sense.
It's not a committee.
It's not someone up on high.
So the fact that it got noticed told me that maybe when you combine the fact of how well Cosmos did appearing on Fox, not in the science ghetto channels of the upper dial, but Fox, On Sunday night, where everybody's home already, would you look at the success of Collins.
And the fact that I have, I mean, every morning I wake up and I look, do I have how many Twitter followers?
4.6 million Twitter followers.
That's a lot.
Should I remind these people that I'm an astrophysicist so they can still pull out if they need to?
And look at the success of, it's not just me, look at the success of the Big Bang Theory television show.
It's the number one show on television in any genre.
It's pulling down $330,000 per 30-second commercial.
Though they be caricatures, their banter is legitimate science unfolding right before our eyes.
And we said earlier in the broadcast, look at the success of The Martian.
and interstellar and gravity.
And you have a biopic on an astrophysicist called Stephen Hawking,
where the lead actor wins the Academy Award.
A biopic on Alan Turing with marquee actor Benedict Cabbage Patch.
What's the guy's name?
Well, my point is all of this should somehow translate, you know, into the American people demanding that people who represent them start looking again at science, at space, at things that we... That's a completely rational thought.
And I'm thinking, maybe delusionally, that the demographic who knows that are people who are 35 and under.
These are the people who grew up with the iPhone and smartphones, and they know what value technology is to them, and they don't want to live without it.
And these are the people who didn't necessarily become scientists, but they took science in high school and maybe even in college, and they liked it.
And they want more of it, and they want to consume it in one way or another.
So that is the community, in fact, who grew up with Bill Nye, the science guy, in their classroom.
And so it's a different approach to science than what an older generation had seen or experienced.
And this demographic, however, is not yet old enough to run the country, right?
They're just coming into the age of, you know, none of them are on boards yet, but some of them actually are self-made entrepreneur billionaires, right?
And they see that.
They're one of them, right?
How old is Elon Musk?
You know, how old could he possibly be?
Or the founder of Twitter, or Facebook, or of any of these other sort of moguls, really.
They all come from that demographic, and they know it's technologically driven.
So, however delusional I am, I'm thinking that as they move up in the ranks... Oh, by the way, they also lead the country in support for social causes, in the sense that if you ask, who is a fan, who is a... Do you object to same-sex marriage?
Okay?
The objection fraction is like, 10% or 15% for the 35 and under, and it's like 80% for 65 and over, right?
So there's a definite social trend, as well as a scientific technological trend.
And look at how many people go to Comic-Con.
Maybe you've been to San Diego during Comic-Con.
You can't even believe it!
Hundreds of thousands of people show up there.
And it surely began as just a small illustrators conference, you know, decades ago.
Now look at what it is.
By the way, I've said this before, I have this fear that we have actually been visited by aliens, but they happened to land in San Diego during Comic-Con and nobody noticed!
That's a puzzle!
Alright, so when I asked about the reaction to StarTalk, it wasn't so much about the awards, though I'm very, very pleased that you came close to getting it.
What I meant is, are you getting a lot of emails, I hope, from young people inspired by it?
Yes, yes, there are people, and of course, good news for you as well as others, the fact that people spend time in cars and in fitness centers and other places, the audio medium has previously, I think, was given up for dead a few years back, has risen.
The growth of podcasts and the ways that people obtain information today may be primarily through just the audio medium.
And so there are many people, so I listen to you on my drive, and I listen to you on the treadmill, because each of these shows that go to National Geographic Channel also airs as an audio podcast.
And on Sirius XM radio as well.
It's roaring back, Doctor.
Remember the old days when you'd see a kid going down the street with a transistor radio plastered to his ear?
Okay, today they're plastered to hips and pocketbooks and they're called iPhones and Androids.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
With a Bluetooth headphone connection, you don't even see the device anymore.
So, yeah, there's no end of communication on this.
And by the way, just in case people haven't seen or heard an episode, if I can spend 15 seconds describing the structure, I'm the host and I'm a scientist, and my guests are hardly ever scientists.
They are hewn from pop culture.
And my conversation with them orbits, if I may use the word, all the ways that science has influenced their lives or their livelihood.
And that way, their fan base gets to see them in just such a conversation.
So I'd like to think that StarTalk not only attracts people who know they like science, it also attracts people who don't know that they like science.
Or better yet, people who know that they don't like science.
And these people, how would you ever get science to them if they didn't simply follow their people wherever they went as a fan of who happens to be my guest?
And then the way I make this work is I have a comedian who is a professional stand-up comedian as my co-host.
They provide levity when necessary.
And then I bring in, if necessary, an academic expert.
Because not all the topics I talk about are astrophysics.
It could be neuroscience, or it could be philosophy, whatever.
I bring in an academic expert, and they provide a sort of a gravity valve.
So I have a levity valve and a gravity valve.
And I, as host, I adjust those valves so that I can hit a consistent delivery of of humor, of pop culture, of science.
And what I'd like to think of as a tapestry that gets woven during the show, so that at the end of the show, you now have a cozy blanket to cuddle with.
Well, it's apparently working.
And that's why I asked you about the emails.
Hopefully you're firing people up.
We need it.
If we don't start pretty soon, I don't know, there could be a sort of a A break point where if we don't begin educating people, if people don't dive into math, if they don't become entranced in science, with science rather, it may become too late and we may not have enough to lead any longer if we're even leading now.
I'm not so sure about that.
You put the nail on the head there because having lead is not a guarantee that you will continue to lead.
And, you know, I think we got kind of lazy.
We got complacent and lazy because we basically led the world in every metric of scientific and technological advance in the second half of the 20th century.
Yes, we were behind the Russians in those checkpoints, but by and large, if you look at the strength of our economy and other factors, it was America's century.
And it's the way we're going, it is so not going to be our century going forward.
And if we don't embrace this in just the recitation you gave, in the way that you described it, then someone, some other country will.
And you know, science and technology does not have nationality branded on it.
It exists to be discovered in nature.
And if we don't do it, somebody else will.
And if that's the case, we will dance to the tune that they play.
You bet.
Hold on, Doctor.
One last question, then I've got a million people who want to talk to you.
With respect to the Large Collider, I did ask you about the possibility of a miniature black hole, as well as one that could eat us all.
But I did not ask you about the possibility of either opening or discovering or communicating with another dimension.
Yes, you did ask, and we got distracted by the black holes.
So, there are suggestions that the manifestation of particles in higher dimensions has certain testable, measurable implications in our own dimension.
And so this is how you can actually propose a scientific test for something that you know is not within your reach.
Because maybe the thing that's not in your reach has indirect consequences for things that are in your reach.
And so, yeah, there's some hypotheses that the higher dimensionality which we think we live in You know, 10, 11 dimensional space that you surely heard about from others on this show.
That, you know, we only experience our three spatial dimensions in one time dimension.
But in the realm of a particle accelerator, you're extending beyond what your life experiences are.
And so to the extent that higher dimensions exist and manifest in our own, There could be some experiments to test for that.
That would be a fascinating space moving forward.
Do you think other dimensions are likely?
I don't see why not.
Why should the universe stop at the number of dimensions that we sense?
Why are our senses the measure of anything other than just our ability to survive on On the plains of Africa, and not get eaten by a lion.
Right?
I mean, that's really what our senses are tuned for.
They're not tuned to decode the operations of the universe outside of those regimes.
And this is where the methods and tools of science get invoked to do so.
And that's why the universe has no obligation to make sense to us.
Because the definition of making sense is that it happens in our life experience.
Outside of that, it just is what the measurements show it to be.
So for some people, it's uncomfortable, or they want to stand in denial of it.
When I say the whole universe was once the size of an atom, they say, well that can't be so, that doesn't make sense.
Precisely!
It doesn't matter.
Yes, like with the miniature black hole, it would be an amazing discovery, of course, but should we do that and connect with another dimension in any way at all?
Possible danger?
You know, I've been reading about higher dimensions ever since I was a kid, and some of the most fascinating mind-expanding thoughts you can have is imagining a cube in four dimensions.
In five dimensions.
And you know how many sides would it have?
What would the sides look like?
Just as a square has four sides that are lines, a cube has six sides that are squares.
And a hypercube has eight sides that are cubes.
And now this is where your mind starts blowing, because, like, what does that even mean?
But I'm just following a mathematical sequence here.
And so, it is possible to formulate what the behavior of things would be in higher dimensions, because you can see the trend line going into them from one, two, and three dimensions that we're familiar with.
But that doesn't mean they'll be easy to understand, and they might even be impossible to understand.
That's why the mathematics matters.
And so, to access another dimension, if we could, that would just be kind of cool, I would think.
I mean, I see all this as amazing frontiers, not as something to fear.
Perhaps another dimension.
Do you think it might be detectable by gravity?
Well, so gravity is a fascinating force, because in fact, it can, it has, I don't call it the power, but it has the properties of where it can emanate from our, from our manifold, from from our universe and be felt by adjacent universes to us.
So if there's a multiverse, the different universes can, in principle, feel each other's gravity.
It's significantly weaker, but they can, and this would be a way to know the presence of a parallel universe without actually venturing there.
Which could possibly be quite dangerous for you, if the laws of physics are slightly different.
And your body will collapse into a pile of goo, because the intermolecular forces are different, and they can't maintain the molecules that make up you.
So, yeah, I will not be the first one to voyage into such a universe.
But given the fact that gravity, as we know it and understand it, can penetrate those
membranes, whereas other forces cannot, that's a fascinating fact that I think deserves much
further exploration.
Boy, it sure is.
You know, given a choice, if a scientist has put in, I don't know, a decade's work on some
project and he's got an on button and an off button.
button and the on button is going to initiate the experiment, whatever it would be, he might
sit there for a few moments thinking about the possible implications, side effects of
pushing the on button, but in the end he's going to push it, right?
Yes, for sure.
Now consider that rarely is that experiment so out there that it would completely transform
all of life and civilization as we know it.
What is more typical is that there's some other experiment that someone had done, and this person says, I think I can make that a little better, or a little faster, or a little cheaper, or a little stronger.
And so then they build an increment on that, and then they push the button.
And so, generally this button pushing is going on as this person, one person, steps on the shoulders of someone who came before them.
They rarely, if ever, We have a brand new thing out of the box that no one knows anything about, and they push the button and the world ends.
Okay, well I'm going to be watching the parking lot at CERN.
We'll find out.
I'm sure it's still on YouTube.
It's really cute.
Okay.
Here's Sean for Dr. Tyson.
Hi.
Hello.
Hello, Sean.
Hey, Aaron.
How's it going?
Fine.
Hey.
It's an honor to be talking to you, Dr. Tyson.
Oh, thank you.
No, don't even.
I'm just here to share knowledge.
So I have two questions.
The first one is a yes or no question.
Is there going to be a second season of Cosmos?
Thanks for asking.
So Seth MacFarlane, as you may know, was a co-executive producer of the Cosmos, which is part of how it landed on Fox, because he's in a sense a Fox property with his family guy and his other projects.
So he and Andrean, who is the co-writer of Cosmos, not only this one, but the original one with Carl Sagan.
They're both working to get this thing in motion and greenlit.
And I don't have the latest from them, but they're working hard to make that happen.
And at different dinners that we've had over the past months, different parts of the band have gotten back together.
So we'll see.
It's likely to happen, but I don't want to I don't want to jinx anything, but let me just say that people are working hard to make it happen.
My second question is, what are your best guesses as to what happened before the Big Bang?
My best guess, based on cogent ideas that are emerging from cosmologists, is that we're one bubble in a multiverse, and the multiverse would be the entity that We're not familiar with thinking about and interpreting, but if you have a multiverse that is birthing universes that come in and out of existence, we're just one of them.
So our whole world, our whole sense of the world, begins when our bubble started expanding.
But if you go back to before the bubble, there's this multiverse there.
Now here's something that may force you to lose some sleep.
Our experience tells us that the universe hardly ever makes anything in ones.
We thought maybe Earth was special.
No, it's one of eight or more planets.
How about the sun?
No, it's one of like 400 billion stars in our galaxy.
Well, the galaxy?
No, there's 50 billion galaxies in the universe.
Well, the universe?
Well, maybe there's a multiverse.
Well, how about the multiverse?
Professor, I've got a question for you.
What's that?
Who blew the bubble?
You mean, how does the bubble begin?
We're still trying to understand the multiverse, but to finish the point of that, maybe there's some other kind of entity that is comprised of multiple multiverses.
That's an interesting, I mean, it's turtles all the way down, is an interesting question here.
And so, it is a frontier To pose and answer the question, what was around before the Big Bang?
Or how did it begin?
We have top people working on that.
And so we just don't know.
We're close, aren't we?
Who blew the bubble?
We don't know.
And who implies that it is a who?
Well, that was a cute way.
Of course, of course.
But you have to be careful how you word a question.
Because it could bias an answer into a place that you're hopelessly looking for an answer.
Like asking, What kind of cheese is the moon made out of?
Well, if that's your question, then your answers and the experiments you devise will fail, because it's not made of any kind of cheese.
So, yeah, I knew you were having fun with it, but it has a serious response.
Okay.
All right, let's go outside the U.S.
to Raymond, wherever he is.
Raymond, where are you?
Hi, Ray.
I'm in Scotland.
Scotland.
Okay, you have a question?
My question was, how long do you think it'll take man to actually land on Mars?
You know, that is such a good question that has possibly no real answer to it.
You know, I can tell you this.
That if we find oil on Mars, we'll be there really soon.
I don't think, and this is my candid read of human behavior, I don't think it is enough
motivation for any of our species to spend the money to get to Mars to just say, it is
our destiny or it is the next frontier.
That kind of talk hardly ever comes along with the money necessary to make it happen.
The money that gets spent is almost always driven by the desire to make more money, the
desire to protect your security, or that's it kind of.
In the old days, you would do it for kings and queens and gods.
Nowadays, those are diminished forces in making things happen.
So, in other words, we need an economic reason or a war.
My read of history tells me that.
And I wish it were not so.
And nobody wants a war, I presume.
And so, it means an economic reason.
Now, does it mean finding oil on Mars?
No.
There are other ways you can construct an economic reason, as I hinted to earlier.
Where you just do it, and then the whole country, the world, sees, wow, this is a cool thing to do.
I want to discover as well.
I want to explore.
I want to innovate.
And then everybody becomes an innovator, no matter what they do.
And that would transform an economy.
It'll transform a culture.
And you'll turn the world into the world we all thought we'd be living in.
The tomorrow that never came.
That's what we'd be living in.
Indeed.
All right.
Barry Ohio, I guess.
You're on the air.
Hey.
Hey.
Can you hear me?
Yes, the light.
Hello.
Hello.
Oh, hi.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, hi.
Neil, Art, this is, yeah, this is legendary.
Okay.
I remember watching an episode of Cosmos that you did a while ago, and you talked about Venus, how it's very similar to Earth, and how, like, if all the volcanoes went off and everything, like, if we exhaust all our resources, Earth would be a lot like Venus.
And it really kind of shifts my paradigm a bit.
And I, you know, I'm hearing all this talk about Mars and you know, how there's life on Mars.
And I guess my question is, could maybe Mars not have had like old life on it,
but maybe Venus did?
Well, I haven't heard about life on Mars, really.
Yeah, but these are good questions.
So Venus, you know, is kind of a hopeless cause today.
I mean, it's 900 degrees Fahrenheit.
And I did the calculation where you can cook a 16-inch pizza on the windowsill in 9 seconds.
And then someone geekier than I was said, no, you did the calculation wrong.
You left out the radiative effects of the atmosphere.
In effect, it will cook in 2 seconds.
So, I got schooled on that one.
So it's a two-second pizza instead of a nine-second pizza.
So, an interesting question is, on Venus, before it had this runaway greenhouse effect, or on Mars, back when we know it once had running water, Could there be evidence of civilizations that have come and gone?
And that's an unknown question.
I mean, it's a perfectly legitimate question that has no known answer at this point, and will require... Look at what we're discovering even on Earth, but it requires major excavations.
We didn't know about Pompeii until, what was it, 18-whatever?
Pompeii is a modern discovery, yet that thing was around 2,000 years ago, and that's on our own Earth.
So, it's intriguing to imagine that these are dead planets of lost civilizations, but it will take much more of a space program than we currently have in order to investigate that.
Cool, yeah.
Thank you very much.
You're very welcome.
Take care.
Since you mentioned greenhouse stuff, I guess it's worth asking, runaway greenhouse, is that possible here on earth, in your opinion?
So, when I first looked at this problem, it turns out I overestimated I was thinking that if we were not careful, we could become Venus.
Because we're flanked by two planets that have gone... something's gone wrong.
Something's gone bad.
Venus with a runaway greenhouse effect.
Mars, once having water, now it doesn't.
And we're sitting exactly in between them.
Which way are we going to head?
But when I spoke with some colleagues of mine, and then I came to realize that if you burned all the coal And all the gas and all the sequestered carbon for fuel that is there, that we were already pulling out of the ground.
We will not have a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus.
What we'll have is an Earth with no ice caps and a very different coastline and all the greatest cities of the world will be completely flooded.
But we will not have a runaway greenhouse because you just have to go back to a time when there was no buried carbon.
And we did have high carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and it's called the Carboniferous Period on Earth, where there was heavy growth of plants and trees, and the trees didn't have anything to have them decompose, because bacteria had not gotten savvy enough yet to figure out how to digest the lignin or one of the molecules in the tree that made it strong.
So the trees grow and they die, they fall over and they do not decompose.
And so the world is accumulating this layer of vegetation that is not decomposing, and that would ultimately become the oil reserves.
So there was a time when the dinosaurs were around, there was no ice anywhere in the world, and they had much less land because of that fact.
Well, what about our submerged cities, Doctor, and the fact that any good growing would move from the central part of the U.S.
way up north into Canada somewhere?
Yeah, exactly.
I think you could probably move farms fast enough to keep up with this change.
Where it was previously not arable, now it is.
And maybe it was and now it's not.
You could do that.
Because what are you moving?
You're just planting your seeds in a different place.
The hard part would be the cities and all the people whose entire lives, you know, when you flood the coastlines, Rich people lose their second home, and poor people lose their only home.
Look at how many poor people live in poor countries on the coast, because that's where transportation or commerce or whatever else is conducted.
So we're now making that happen at a rate faster than we could possibly respond, given the locations of the major cities in the world, which historically have always been on the river's edge or on the ocean's edge.
All right, very quickly.
We don't have a lot of time.
Chelsea, hi.
You're on with Dr. Tyson.
Hello.
I'd like to know what the nature of the edge of the universe is, if there is an edge.
Yeah, that's a great question.
So there's a little bit of confusion about that, so let me just straighten that out right now.
We have what we speak of as the edge of the universe, but it's not an actual edge any more than Your horizon at sea is an edge.
It's just, it's a horizon.
It's a visible horizon beyond which we cannot see.
Alright?
And that's this, you know, when you look out, that's where the cosmic microwave background emanates from.
And we have no reason to think that the universe doesn't continue well beyond that horizon.
For the same reasons that the ocean continues beyond your horizon when you're on a ship at sea.
And the analogy is very potent for this case.
So the question is, how much bigger than our horizon must the universe be?
And there are people who have estimated this based on some plausible arguments, and forgive me, but I forgot the number, but maybe a factor of tens larger, or possibly infinite, but we know it's bigger than our horizon.
And so In that sense, there's no edge where you get to the edge and fall off, especially if the actual universe is infinite.
But our visible edge, that's just there like any horizon at sea that you'd have if you viewed it from a ship's masthead.
Cool.
Thanks.
All right.
Thank you, Chelsea.
And take care.
Let's go outside the country to Carl.
Hi.
I just wanted to ask Dr. Tyson where exactly the expansion of the universe takes place.
I understand that we see it through Doppler shift of distant galaxies and whatnot, but I just wanted to know where exactly it takes place.
Okay, Carl, where are you please?
I'm in Hungary.
Hungary, okay.
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
Thanks for calling in from abroad.
We're stuck in a paradigm of mind where when an event happens you can go point, oh it happened right there.
But we're less, in our minds we don't think of events happening at a time in a coordinate.
So the Big Bang happened everywhere 13.7, 13.8 billion years ago.
So I can point to it But I'm pointing backwards on the timeline to show you when it happened.
And the when is no less legitimate than where when I'm localizing things in space and time for you.
So everything you see participated in that expansion and continues to do so.
And if we drop one of the dimensions of this analogy, to perhaps shine a little better light on it.
And you probably heard this example before.
You think of an expanding balloon.
So now all space is now the surface of a balloon.
The surface is expanding if you inflate the balloon.
And you say, well, where is the center of this expansion?
Where's it coming from?
It's not on the surface of the balloon anymore.
It is back through time.
So you have to look in the time dimension back when the balloon was smaller.
And then you can point to that exact moment in space and in time when the universe began.
OK, very quickly to the phones.
You're on there.
Hi Hello hello, yes, hello Go ahead Caller, you're on the air.
Going once, going twice, gone to Manitoba.
Hello in Manitoba.
Hello Art, thank you so much for taking my call, and hello Dr. Tyson.
Yeah, hello.
I just actually wanted to ask, if time travel would be possible, should we say, master the,
I guess, energy output problem?
So, I always...
Yes, so it turns out that if we had the power over the fabric of space and time enough to
build wormholes, then there are trajectories around and through wormholes where you can
come out in a different time from when you left, like in your past.
And this is kind of scary, because let's say you did that, and then you prevented yourself from building the wormhole to travel back in time to see your past.
You have a time paradox.
And so there's some people, I think Stephen Hawking included, who are thinking that though we have not discovered it yet, that eventually we will find a fundamental law of physics that prevents backward time travel.
Just so that we don't suffer from that paradox.
All right.
But we're not there yet.
All right, Doctor.
Hold on.
We have one last segment.
Sit tight.
All right.
It's the long break, and try to be there if you can when we get back.
Dark Matter Network News.
This is Amy Martin.
For the week of Halloween, The Star has published a laundry list of various incidents reported by UK authorities about UFO and extraterrestrial calls to 999 emergency services.
The list includes calls about alleged alien threats over Wi-Fi signals, aliens offering meat to locals, and extraterrestrial house guests that just won't go away.
While authorities are bemused by pranks which interrupt emergency services, they point out, there are, however, certain examples where people have reported noises at a property and they believe it to be ghostly or extraterrestrial-related activity.
Officers must still respond to ensure that a burglary or other form of crime is not being committed.
See this list of strange reports for yourself over on thestar.co.uk.
Officials say a Portland man has been arrested for breaking into a neighbor's home and stealing women's underwear.
The 24-year-old reportedly told police he had thought about breaking into a neighbor's home many times just to see if he could get away with it.
The couple living there has chased him out and called the police.
He was booked on burglary and criminal mischief charges.
Astronomers have located a previously unknown component of the Milky Way galaxy.
By mapping out the locations of a class of stars that vary in brightness called Cepheids, a disk of young stars buried beneath the thick dust clouds in the central bulge has been found.
The ages of these classical Cepheids provide solid evidence that there has been a previously unconfirmed, continuous supply of newly formed stars in the central region of the Milky Way over the last 100 million years.
But this wasn't the only remarkable discovery from the survey.
Mapping the Cepheids, the team traced an entirely new feature in the Milky Way, a thin disk of young stars across the galactic bulge.
This component to our home galaxy has remained unknown and invisible to previous surveys, as it was buried behind thick clouds of dust.
A couple has claimed that they have encountered a giant beaver in northern Minnesota.
The man says that he and his wife were in the wilderness of the region between the United States and Canada when they spotted the animal in 2007.
He told Cryptozoology News, The man, who claims to be a UC Berkeley graduate, says that he has a degree in the biological sciences and that he is, quote, very familiar with North American mammals.
The creature, he explains, was approximately 5 to 6 feet long, not including the tail, and thought to be a giant beaver that went extinct around 10,000 years ago.
So far, no evidence of the beaver has emerged, and no word yet on this interesting observation reported in any peer-reviewed sources.
This has been Amy Martin for Dark Matter Network News.
Okay, concerns of wormhole.
Now, I've watched Jodie Foster in a wormhole.
If we were actually able to transit in a wormhole, do you have any imagination that tells you what it might be like?
No, I don't.
And you know, I just go with how wormholes are traditionally portrayed as this sort of vortex through the fabric of space and time.
I think if If the folks back in the year 1968, when they made the film, 2001, that if they had a sort of deeper sense of the vorticity of a wormhole, that they might have shown those psychedelic scenes a little differently.
Because as they were, you would look like you were moving through parallel sheets.
And they might have made it sort of more circular, more cylindrical.
But no, I have no idea whatsoever.
I'm wondering if you wouldn't feel the journey through the wormhole, you just sort of step through this portal and come out the other side and bada-bing, you're there.
Right.
And because that's what it's doing.
You know what it's like?
It's like the doors in Monsters Inc. Those are wormholes, right? They take a
door manufactured in the factory and they open the door, and they show up in the child's
closet ready to terrorize them.
There's no journey that they take, because the door is the same door. And so maybe that's
really what it's like. It would be less cinematic, though, if they portrayed it.
Doctor, are you the one who coined the phrase, death by black hole?
Well, that's the title of one of my books.
The best-selling of my books is Death by Black Hole.
It's still out there.
I'm flattered, because there's a lot of energy that I put into its contents, and it's how I communicate, and it's called Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries.
So, yeah, that's the title of one of my books.
Okay.
All right, Roxanne.
That's how I want to die.
I want to send me into a black hole.
That's way funnier than getting hit by a bus.
Roxanne, hello.
Hi, I also want to plug Art Bell Time Travelers on Facebook.
And I want to thank you very much for having Dr. Tyson on.
You're very welcome.
Time Travelers is merely a little club we have that allows you to listen to every program we do, you know.
Thank you, Roxanne.
Oh, cool, cool.
Anyway, I do have a question.
The elite few.
I do have a question I wanted to ask you for many years, actually.
Have you ever seen a UFO, a ship, and knew that it wasn't from the Air Force or anyone?
So I've seen, as is true with most astronomers, particularly those who began as amateur astronomers, as I did, and amateur, used in that context, is actually a badge of honor.
amateur astronomers know the night sky better than any other people on Earth.
And so, you would never go to an amateur neurosurgeon, right?
But if you went to an amateur astronomer, you can guarantee that they'll give you a
tour of the night sky.
In that capacity, where I'm looking up every night and I know the sky like the back of
my hand, enough to tell Jim Cameron...
that his sky was wrong just on a glance above the sinking Titanic.
So that's not special talent, that's a talent that any astronomer would have who was an
amateur astronomer.
Okay, spill it.
What do you see?
So not only that, so now I also know weather phenomena, because I'm looking up and I'm
trying to get the weather the hell out of the way so I can see the stars.
So I have seen things that would have stumped me if I didn't have the body of knowledge
that I do about what is possible to be seen in the night sky.
And so I have never seen anything that I did not fully understand in the context of either weather phenomenon or astronomical phenomenon.
Okay.
Well, that's your answer, Roxanne.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Hey, thank you very much.
You were very interesting, and I love the way Art can sit back and listen, and we can all listen and enjoy a guest for a change.
That's what it's all about.
Thank you.
Okay, excellent.
Thanks.
Okay.
I had the experience of seeing something that Doctor, I guess I can't help myself.
On the way home from Vegas one night, in a car with my wife, after working a show in Vegas, and my wife said, what the hell is that?
I said, what do you mean?
Something behind us.
All right.
We get out of the car.
Real quick story.
We look up.
Here comes behind us, at about 150 feet, this giant triangular craft.
Looked very metallic, very quiet here in the desert.
You could hear crickets a quarter of a mile away.
This thing passed directly over our heads, continued out toward, by the way, Area 51, which is just adjacent to us here, and was defying gravity.
Was not flying, not aerodynamic flight.
So it was either lighter than air or defying gravity, one of the two, and it was gigantic.
The moon, the stars went away, you know, the classic stuff.
I saw that.
If you were to see something like that, how would your mind, being a scientist, digest it?
Okay, I'm guessing that this was at night.
It was.
And most of these kinds of sightings happen at night, where you've lost all sense of relative scale.
Yes, sir.
Because now it's just there in the darkness.
Not all sense of scale.
I mean, we had the moon and we had the stars.
No, no, no.
My point is, if this is an object that you've never seen before, and there's nothing else adjacent to it that is familiar to you, Then, to assess its size becomes essentially impossible.
You saw, Shirley, yesterday, the images of the military blimp, okay?
Yes.
If you just see the blimp in the sky, in those images, you have no idea how big that is.
True.
Is it a half a mile across?
Is it a toy blimp?
Until it came near the trees, and something behind it and something in front of it.
So it makes judging the size very difficult.
uh... at night there at this piece the things you can't see and that's why so
many such sightings reported at night rather than in the day time so i
generally have binoculars with me at all times i'd pull up my book binoculars and
try to find out what it is and i don't know what it that i can't figure out
what it is i thought it's a mystery and what it was some cool over an area fifty one
Well, that's my guess.
This thing was about 150 feet above me.
I'm telling you, Professor, it was close.
And get this as a follow-up.
Um, about a week later, the local newspaper made an inquiry of the Air Force Base Nellis.
Nellis reported back in the newspaper, oh yes, there was a secret mission at about that time that flew over the Trump Valley.
It was a C-130 aircraft.
I was in the Air Force, Professor, and I flew in C-130.
It's a large craft.
I guarantee you, it would have rattled my teeth at that altitude.
Yeah, you can't mistake a C-130, but it could have been a drone, for example.
You know, drones are pretty silent, and they would move exactly as you're describing.
You're saying defying gravity, therefore it must have been lighter than air.
No, it could have had propellers.
You know, silent plastic propellers, like a drone.
Could have.
Yeah, but binoculars help because they not only help you see things close up, they also detect much more light than your human eye does.
So you can see other textures and things that would otherwise go unnoticed by your unaided eye.
So, carry binoculars with you so next time that happens.
Or, take a big net and capture it.
That'll be way better than your eyewitness testimony of what you saw.
All right, Simon, outside the country somewhere, you're on the air.
Hi, I'm a huge fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson.
The multiverse as a comic book fan, I'm already familiar with it.
I was wondering if I would ever be able to meet my doppelganger out there.
Yes, so what you're implying there is that given the multiverse, there would be countless other universes in every possible combination of atoms and events and probabilities, and so there's surely one that has a person just like you out there, or maybe exactly you.
It's an intriguing thought.
I have my skepticism of how large these infinities are.
It turns out they're hierarchies of infinities.
Some infinities are larger than others, and I plan to do some calculations on this to confirm for myself how big that infinity is, because if it's not a big enough infinity, we're not going to get you.
We'll just get sort of other universes.
The variations in all those universes will not be enough to find a universe that will make someone just like you.
It's much more likely that you'll find someone else who looks like you on Earth.
So why don't you start there and be happy with that.
Because the multiple of you is a long time coming.
Okay Simon, thanks for the question.
Where are you by the way?
Toronto, Canada.
Toronto, okay.
You're not actually supposed to be on that line, I should have asked.
Binghamton, New York on the phone, hi.
Hey, all right.
So you guys know the parallel planetary theory?
No, right?
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
Parallel.
I mean, theoretically, if you met yourself in another universe, or whatever, if you could take a spaceship, then you flipped a coin like You know, I'm sorry, I had my phone, or the thing's going off.
Are you talking about parallel universes, Collar?
Not parallel planets, right?
Yeah, parallel universe theory.
Oh, okay, okay.
So go on, yes.
If you flipped a coin, if you met yourself, you know, if you could fly to another parallel universe and you flipped a coin, like, what would it land at?
Well, we have to be careful about other universes because the same concepts that lead to the prediction of other universes also prescribe that they have slightly different laws of physics operating within them.
So, you can bring a coin, but does the coin remain a coin in that other universe?
Does the structure of matter, is metal metal in that universe?
You don't know.
So what I would do with a coin is flick it from my universe into that universe and see what happens to it.
If it survives that trip, then maybe I'll dip my toe in.
And then go meet myself.
Maybe you just flipped that coin into an antimatter universe.
Oh, that as well.
If an alien lands, don't shake his hand until you toss it a coin.
If the alien spontaneously annihilates, then you say, that was an antimatter alien.
They probably would have annihilated by coming in contact with Earth's atmospheric molecules to begin with.
But this is what led to the idea that the Tunguska explosion might have been an antimatter chunk that exploded in midair.
But you don't need antimatter to make that explosion.
An ordinary asteroid or comet will do.
So yeah, you want to make sure they're not antimatter.
That would be a bad situation.
Certainly would.
You'd have to apologize because there'd be nobody left to apologize to.
By the way, there was an idea a few years ago that all the antimatter that should have been in our universe It's funneled out to make its own universe, and so you have creatures and planets and stars that are all made of antimatter, and it's regular matter that's exotic to them.
Wow.
So that's something to think about.
That's an out there idea.
Yeah, it is.
Michael, wherever you are on Skype, hi.
Hi, Mark, and great show tonight, guys.
Thank you.
I have a couple questions.
One is, I'm wondering if your guest knows what these small lights that everyone sees in the night sky, they look kind of like stars, but they're moving way too high for a plane, sometimes changing direction.
A lot of people I know have seen these.
Well, until you got changing direction, I would have said satellites, but changing direction is a problem.
But don't satellites just, like, orbit with the Earth?
Wouldn't they just move along with... Sped away along.
No, Art is right.
A satellite is a ballistic trajectory in orbit around the Earth.
The satellites have no rocket control or anything.
An orbit is a stable thing that requires no fuel to maintain, unless you're very low and your atmosphere is eating up your energy, and you have to boost yourself back up.
But otherwise, no.
If it's changing directions, it's definitely not a satellite.
It's something else.
And who knows what it is?
And by the way, I'm perfectly content looking up and saying, gee, I don't know what that is.
And then, you know, try to figure out a way to figure it out.
And that's a healthy posture.
It's very different to say, I don't know what that is.
Therefore, it's intelligent aliens visiting us from another planet.
You know, if you don't know what it is, there is no therefore that follows that sentence.
I don't know what it is.
Right.
Do you have another question, Collin?
Yes.
Could the human body act as a capacitor, absorbing electricity And then discharging it just like the Dark Lord in Star Wars.
So here's the problem.
We're not good at holding electricity the way a capacitor is designed to do.
We're very good at transmitting electricity.
So that's why when you rub your feet on the wool carpet, bada bing, it comes right out to the to the doorknob.
Well maybe you could, you would have to need an insulating layer that you can release And then the electricity comes out of you, and then you can aim it at whatever is your target.
But you would need a system of insulators that can de-insulate you on command.
Then you can walk around with stored electricity, for sure.
But one other thing about the lights.
What you should do, as I said earlier in this a few minutes ago, carry binoculars with you.
You know, do further experiments on this, and see if it happens in the daytime.
We have a better view of it.
This is the investigation that any good scientist will do when they confront something they've never seen before or don't understand.
Professor, if you saw something that was so indisputably, impossibly from Earth, would you go home and think about it before you made a public statement?
No, I would try to get data on it.
I would get video cameras, I would get sound recorders, I would try to observe it in different wavelengths of light, as much data as I possibly could.
Then I would say, here's something I saw last night, and here's the data on it.
And I would publish that.
For sure.
Well, that'd be great, if you had all those things handy.
But, you know, a lot of times when you see these things, A, you're in shock, and B, nothing's handy.
No, no, I will so not be in shock.
I'm trained to study that which I do not understand.
That's what I do.
I live my whole life doing that.
And so, I would get as much data as I could.
If I could get no data on it, it would be an interesting cocktail party discussion.
But there's nothing to go public on, because I have no way to confirm for people what I saw, other than eyewitness testimony.
And in the court of science, that is the lowest form of evidence there is.
Which is odd, because in the court of law, it's one of the highest forms of evidence there is.
And it's also why we have a lot of innocent people on death row.
Precisely because of failure of eyewitness testimony.
And we know this.
Psychologists know it.
We've known it in science forever.
And so, even for lesser things than visiting aliens, do we not use each other's eyewitness testimony?
You know what?
We're done.
The show is over.
There's nothing I can do about it.
We can go on and on.
You're way back on the East Coast, right?
I am, yeah, it's three in the morning here, but that's fine, it's just the night.
Thank you so much, it's been an honor having you on the show.
StarTalk... Oh, thanks, and the questions were great, and thanks for fixing that StarTalk began October 25th, but it goes every week for 10 weeks, yeah.
Okay, alright.
People think you went back in time, you see, you gotta watch out for that.
You're time-traveling.
I'm constantly watching out for that.
Thank you, Doctor.
Yeah, okay, great.
Good night, my friend.
Bye-bye.
That was something.
That was really something.
Truly an honor.
Very, very, very bright man.
And by the way, I never mention it.
We do have something called the Time Travelers.
Cute name for the ability for you to listen to any program we've got, any time.
Just RSS feed it down and listen.
That, and of course, the ability to send wormhole messages during shows like this.
So, check into it.
I keep forgetting to mention our time traveler group.
Just go to artbell.com.
It's that easy.
You can learn all about it.
From the high desert to all those time zones out there.
Kind of a time travel, right?
Good night.
Midnight in the desert, and there's wisdom in the air.
I've been looking for the answers, all my life I've held you there.
Have we lost our intuition?
Are we running out of time?
Midnight in the desert And we're listening Ooh, we're listening And we're listening Ooh, we're listening
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