Neil deGrasse Tyson debunks moon landing conspiracies, citing physics and the sheer scale of Cold War secrecy, while mocking fringe theories like the 2012 apocalypse and Kubrick’s alleged fakes. He critiques lab-grown diamonds, De Beers’ market control, and conflict mineral exploitation, framing resource extraction as a universal issue. Exploring Mars’ habitability, he argues life could thrive in subsurface energy gradients, not just surface conditions, dismissing "fart theory" with humanity’s advanced scientific tools. The multiverse’s recursive nature and gamma-ray bursts’ extinction risks are discussed, yet Tyson insists terraforming Mars is less logical than fixing Earth’s climate—despite past extreme shifts like Snowball Earth. Their banter highlights science’s power to challenge misconceptions while teasing Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey’s modern revival. [Automatically generated summary]
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Well, it's that shallow sort of interest in a subject where it only allows you to regurgitate the really juicy shit you heard about the planetary Relignment, which is so dangerous because when people are bullshitting, which is most of the conversations we get into, we don't get into serious academic discussions with people who have actually done the homework.
You're just bullshitting with a dude at work, and he's like, yeah, I heard the fucking planets are going to align.
And it's like, they don't even know what's going to happen.
And you're like, whoa, what?
Then you go back to your cubicle, shitting your pants, going, are the planets going to fucking align?
I think one of the cool things about you and your approach to science is I think it's very refreshing that if someone doesn't know something, you're not condescending about it.
You're very enthusiastic about distributing the information, but you're not casting a judgment while you do that.
And that is something that I think has freaked a lot of people out about really intelligent people or scientists or someone who talks about anything where they have no experiences.
There's a sort of a condescending sort of a carrying of that knowledge that you don't have.
You make a really important point, and I... You know, there's the anti-intellectual movement in society and I don't blame them entirely for feeling that way because we all know people, I have many colleagues, where you try to hang out with them and They make you feel bad for not knowing what they know.
And if that's how you interact with people, why would anyone want to be that?
Well, it's a problem of associating with shitty characters.
They're not fun to be around.
And unfortunately, you're associating something that's incredible, like the actual measurement of the universe itself, you're associating that with annoying people.
I can't tell you how many emails I've got or tweets.
People say...
There's a guy who's like seriously geeked and his girlfriend is not interested in him and he says, what he does then shows her videos of me celebrating the universe and she says, oh is that what you do?
Oh!
They resurrect the relationship because she then sees the potential for what the guy can do.
I think the most effective encouragement I gave people during the Mayan non-catastrophe was, I said, all right, between now and December 20th, just convince your Mayan catastrophe people to sign over all their assets into your name.
About every 10 years, somebody comes up with an end-of-the-world scenario.
And keep in mind that end-of-the-world scenarios, no one says, the world's going to end in 150 years, right?
It doesn't work, because you can't gain adherence to your cult that you're building.
It's got to be kind of immediate, but far enough in the future so that you can prepare, but near enough so that you're not going to forget about it at any time.
And everybody thinks that the old folks really understood the universe when in fact they did not.
Well, they understood the little bit of it, but to say that they knew more about the fate of the cosmos than modern day astrophysics, you must have flunked your math class, your physics classes or something.
To think that way, I don't understand what's going on in those minds.
Yeah, well, listen, my issues with not believing that people went on the moon, a lot of it had to do with a friend who had an uncle who worked at Rocketdyne.
And this guy was convinced that there was no way to do it.
He was an engineer.
And he said they were so far away from doing it that the fact that they did it, and they did it seven times...
Since looking at it, the weight of all the evidence, I reserve the possibility that some things were horseshit based on a lot of photographic evidence that they did fuck with, like the Gemini photos.
But the thing about hoaxing things back then, the thing that was so compelling to me was that hoaxing things back then was really sort of the way they did it.
I mean, that's how they got into the Gulf of Tonkin.
Well, while you're looking at it, the way I reflect on people who say we didn't go to the moon, I say, what a compliment it is of our emergent culture, technological culture, that there are members of our society that are so impressed with what we achieved that they can't believe it.
I don't think it's beyond their capacity to believe it.
I think if you had shown them documentaries that...
Didn't have any of the stuff that was in the shit that I saw, whether it was the moon, did we go, or there's another one, a funny thing happened on the way to the moon, where they just show over and over again all this fucked up footage, and it's very confusing to a non-scientifically minded person.
You can get on a long downward spiral.
And this Clinton quote, this fucks with me, just a month before Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague Michael Collins Aboard Spaceship Columbia and walked on the moon, beating by five months President Kennedy's goal of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade.
The old carpenter asked me if I believed it happened.
I said sure, I saw it on television, and he disagreed.
He said that he didn't believe it for a minute, that those television fellers can make things look real that weren't.
Back then, I thought he was a crank.
During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that made me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time.
Yeah, look, that's a horrible quote to hear from the President of the United States if you're a confused young man and you think we maybe didn't land on the moon.
You read something like that and you go, what the fuck does that mean?
The reason why the moon theory is so juicy for people is because there's so much of this stuff that you could point to, and so much of it that looks like evidence of fuckery.
Take for example the assertion that the photos from the lunar surface, since the moon has no atmosphere than a daytime picture, If you're there in the daytime and the moon, you see a full night sky of stars, even with the sun in the sky as well.
You don't see stars in the daytime on Earth, not because they're not there, but because the atmosphere is aglow with scattered light from the sun.
If you take away the atmosphere, the sun will still be there, but the sky goes dark.
That's what the folks get when they go to the edge of the atmosphere, and they're calling that the edge of space.
But when you get to the edge of the atmosphere, the atmosphere is no longer between you and the rest of the universe, and the stars reveal themselves just as they would at night.
So everyone knew this.
So you see these photos from the moon, and there's Neil and Buzz and the lander, and there are no stars in the sky.
It's just dark.
And they'll say, see, it's fake!
And these are people who've never taken photography.
If you are exposed for the bright reflective light of the astronauts in the lunar surface, that camera exposure, even in the Hasselblads that they carry to the moon and use, is too short to take in the dim light from the stars of the night sky.
If you turn the camera to the sky, A much longer exposure with sensitive film.
You'll get the stars, but then you overexpose the stuff in the foreground.
So Photography 101 answers that question.
But there are huge websites given unto this.
And so what that told me was that people simply wanted to believe that it was a hoax.
And then made all the information fit that need without actually caring about the scientific truths that, with any evidence, would Disprove all of what they were thinking.
So at that point I said people just believe what they want.
And so my task was not to debate moon hoaxers as an educator.
My task is to get people thinking straight in the first place so you're no longer susceptible to the kinds of thinking where you become selective about the data that you choose to believe.
Or you get duped by someone who's exploiting the laws of physics for their own financial gain.
Excuse me.
They're exploiting your ignorance of the laws of physics for their own financial gain.
So I see science literacy as a kind of vaccine against all of the world around you that would just simply take advantage of your goodwill and good nature.
So that is a huge problem where, you know, and certainly when I watched my first documentary on the Fox one, when the moon landing, it was a big, the moon did we go...
There was all sorts of compelling evidence that was really weird, like photographs from different spots on the moon, but they had the same backdrop.
And using this idea that they had done these inside some gigantic sound studio.
And when you see something like that on television, you saw Brian O'Leary, who is an astronaut.
And then talking to this dude's uncle, or him telling me what his uncle said actually, it was such a, you know, it's one of those things where you go, okay, we know they lied about this, we know they lied about that, they lie about things all the time.
You're going to hoax a moon landing by telling 10,000 scientists and engineers to keep it secret for 40 years?
That's not how humans behave.
Was it Lemony Snicket who said, I forgot who the author was of this quote, who said, the only way you can keep a secret between two people is if one of them is dead?
It's astronauts, and the conspiracy is that they are either on trampolines or they're on some sort of a wire harness because of the way they're moving, and that they're moving behind the lunar rover, and that's to hide either the trampoline or hide the movement of their feet, like the way the shot is positioned.
I mean, obviously, if you're a person who's not scientifically inclined, and you're prone to conspiracy theories, guilty of both, and you see something like that, you go, what the fuck is going on there?
Is that really the moon?
Are they really jumping around like they're on trampolines?
It looks like a guy's getting yanked up by wires on the moon?
It'd be weird if you otherwise knew that a 33-story rocket filled with fuel launched from Cape Canaveral, took several orbits around Earth, Went to the moon, took pictures from the front side of the moon, the back side of the moon, images from the surface of the moon.
A week later, it comes back.
An aircraft carrier goes into the Pacific to pick up a capsule out of the ocean.
People get out of the capsule, get on the spacecraft.
Well, you know, the idea is not even that it all didn't happen.
The idea proposed in the Kubrick documentary was that the footage was fucked up and that they made a lot of extra footage.
And then a lot of what you see is faked footage where they were worried that they weren't going to be able to do it, so they decided to fake it, and some to see if they could fake it, that there was two schools of thought.
Yeah, or every time they stepped, the dust came up.
So you'd look at all of these cues, and there's so many cues that would happen naturally, if it actually happened, that you'd have to think up and get perfectly...
To fool an expert who knows what they're looking at.
What people, I think, especially people like myself, would have to wrap their heads around, I guess, is that this isn't just a vacuum, but it's also a vacuum and one-sixth Earth gravity.
They went into depth about flag waving, and I thought it was really fascinating to watch where they actually created a vacuum and had the flag wave in a vacuum.
And it's weird because it doesn't...
You know, we have an idea in our head of what it looks like when a flag waves.
Well, that's obviously the wind moving that flag.
But there's wind here.
There's nothing.
There's zero atmosphere.
Now, when someone would run by a flag in zero atmosphere, does it create any wind?
Is there anything?
Nothing.
So if a guy hops by a flag and the flag blows in the breeze, what's causing that?
It could have easily been that some of the footage didn't come out well, or they faked some of the footage, or that was faked, or that might not have been even real Apollo footage.
You're looking at a picture that's relatively low quality, that doesn't see the entire zone around the flag.
You don't have full information.
So, someone goes by and the flag wiggles.
Either this was faked...
And there is air, and the flag is responding to air, or there's something, and the whole Apollo 15 mission didn't happen, if you want to take it to an extreme limit.
Or, there's something that didn't make it into this photo.
No, I look for, you know, they can't control the sun.
So if they film one part of the scene in the morning, another part in the afternoon, the shadow is pointing in a different direction, and they want you to think it just happened ten minutes later.
They can't control the sun.
So they fake the sun in a sound studio, and they have the right color I let that go.
There's so much you'd have to fake.
I swear to you, it's easier to just go to the damn moon.
I understand exactly what you're saying, but it sounds crazy if you think that people actually couldn't get to the moon, then no.
If they actually physically couldn't survive out in the atmosphere of deep space, couldn't survive, what the talk is, the solar radiation, any solar flares, any solar activity would be instant death.
And this has sort of been kind of acknowledged by NASA that they rolled the dice with solar radiation.
So the people that are believing that it's impossible to get through the Van Allen radiation belts, for you to say to them that it would be just, it is false.
Right, but these people that believe that no humans have ever done it before, because the only people that did it were the Apollo astronauts, and no one's been able to do it since.
And every single space station flight, every space shuttle flight, all of them are within, what, 400 miles?
Right, but these are the only times where human beings have ever been past that, was the Apollos program.
So, for the conspiracy-minded, of course that comes up.
Well, no...
You can't survive in deep space.
No one's ever done it except some people in the 60s.
And no one believes that today.
And the reason why you can't get out there is because of solar flares and radiation and all this jazz.
So if they're right, then it would be easier to fake it.
You say they're not right because Van Allen says it's safe to go through the belts.
And then they went through the top, the donut hole.
But realistically, when people look at human beings that have actually been through, the last time someone did it was 1972. Because the last time a human being has been more than 400 miles from the Earth's surface.
That freaks people out.
Because every single technological achievement from 1969 is easier, cheaper, and faster to reproduce today.
Yes, that's the clean, clear answer, but there's a more subtle answer.
When we went to the moon, everyone assumed, because of the way it was marketed, there was the profiles in Life magazine of each of the astronauts, and you saw their families, and the president said we should do it, and it was this grand mission from NASA, a civilian space agency, and The World's Fair in New York, 1964, was all about inventing a future.
So we were living that romance.
All right.
What we were not reminding ourselves is that the only reason why we went to the moon is because we were at war with Russia, with the Soviet Union.
That is the only reason at all.
If you don't You don't carry that motivation with you, and you're only thinking that this is simply the next technological thing to do, that when we learn that Russia is not going to the moon, therefore we have no reason to continue and we stop, you cry foul and you say, well, wait a minute, how about the future?
How about Mars?
And how about the rest of that?
Well, the rest of that was not ever in the plan unless Mars had planned to...
Russia had planned to do it.
And so it was not a natural flow of what our technology would have done because it didn't flow out of our economic creativity.
It came out of our urge to not die.
And so when you have that scenario, of course we didn't go past the moon after 1972. We were no longer competing with Russia to do that.
I understand what you're saying, and if I was more conspiratorially minded, I would argue that that's a nice, convenient thing to say, but the reality is we still kept up as far as other avenues of military, whether it's building better bombs or faster planes.
I completely hear what you're saying, but you are fueling the conspiracy fires, and the people right now are thinking, Neil Tyson is working for the man.
This is what's going on.
He's come on this show to try to explain things in a very logical way.
They're astronauts and aerospace engineers and scientists and entrepreneurs who say, you know, an asteroid the size of The size of a football field has more mineable Rare elements than have ever been mined in the history of the world.
They're going to be heroes that go that far without jerking off, because you're on that thing for like nine months, there and back, and you're all being video-camered the whole time.
We're going to find some real heroes.
We're going to see some real people that really weep the first time to get into a tent on Mars.
There was a man who, they wrote an article about him in Wired Magazine a few years back, where he had acquired some sort of technology from the Soviet Union where they had figured out how to make diamonds.
We visited, they blindfolded me because they don't want De Beers to know about it, and took me to a secret factory, a manufacturing plant, where they're layering carbon onto a lattice in just the way a diamond They're just building diamonds.
Oh, by the way, wait, then I took some of the samples of diamonds that they made and went on to 47th Street in New York, which is the diamond capital of the world, and I showed it to the guys there, and they were purer than any other diamond they had that had been hauled from Earth.
Because they want to know that it was forged in the fires of the belly of the earth and not just out of somebody's back lab.
And I said, okay, but, you know, these are pure diamonds than anything Earth is creating because we can do a better job making diamonds than Earth can.
Does it freak you out when, I mean, obviously you're very technologically minded, but when you realize where these conflict minerals come from, and the actual stuff that's in your iPhone, someone might have dug it out of a hill in a poor community in Africa.
Carbon is the fourth most common ingredient in the cosmos.
And the cosmos is full of places where there's high temperature and high pressure and a lot of time.
And we are delighted but not entirely surprised that there are places in the universe, even entire planets, where a large part of their composition would be pure diamond.
I think in the lingo of economics, if there's a market in something, it means it is traded often enough so that the price at any given moment is the actual price, the actual valuation of that object in the world at that time.
And it presupposes that there's full access to supplies and demand And nothing is being withheld.
So, yes, De Beers is withholding, if not De Beers, someone else, is withholding diamonds from the marketplace to assure a certain price.
They want it to be cancer-causing things that the government is spraying on us in order to lower the population numbers because there's too many of us.
That's why there's lithium in the water supply, Neil Tyson.
I had a conversation with someone who said, do you know there's antidepressants in the water supply?
I go, well, that's because people flush their antidepressants and they pee.
I go, but the amount is so tiny.
I go, this is nothing that you could ever...
It's not psychoactive amounts.
He's like, how do you know that, man?
How do you know that?
I'm like, okay.
I don't know.
How do you know, man?
Go get some water and bring it to a fucking testing facility.
Some places are more geologically active than others.
Places that are geologically active, where you get the occasional 7, 8, 9, or 7 and 8 on the Richter scale, or whatever the scale is called today, Those places, you're getting these low ones practically all the time.
And this is another one of these things where it's partial information scaled up into a catastrophe scenario that feeds people's fears and the kind of fear that people delight in.
And for folks who don't know what we were talking about earlier when we said a caldera volcano, essentially what it is is a volcano that when it blows, it leaves almost like a crater.
It leaves like a gigantic, I think it's 300 kilometers wide or something.
And given its age and the fact that there is no rain or weather systems that could erode them, you can ask, well, what's going on there?
And further analysis shows that Venus completely repaves its surface at regular intervals.
is just liquid rock, right?
It's liquid rock.
You pull it out of the liquefied layers of the planet and put it on the surface, it'll spill out, spread around, and cover up all craters that might have been there before.
It's called a sea because back before we knew anything about the moon, it was a large, dark area, flat, dark area of the moon.
And we imagine that maybe there's water there.
And if there's water there, there are regions called seas.
You know what these actually are?
They're volcanic basins.
When the moon was geologically active, lava spilled out, spread all over the surface of the moon as far as it could reach, and these became what today we call seas.
And you know the seas happen very late because they have fewer craters than adjacent areas.
Where the lava did not spill in.
So you could date the surface of the moon based on how many craters there are within a given area.
Where there are very few craters, when we know there should be many, that tells us that the entire surface suffers from freshened volcanic flow, unlike the Moon, where the last time it laid out these seas is billions of years ago.
So Venus is just constant supervolcanoes all the time.
When you see something like the moon, which is completely covered in meteor impacts, it's one of the things that really sets into my mind or gives me a reference point for time.
Because...
We aren't seeing these big impacts on a regular basis.
And in fact, we've only recorded a few of them.
The recent one in Jupiter, this massive one, which was by...
The tidal forces of Jupiter on a previous pass had broken that solid comet up into two dozen smaller but still significant chunks of comet material.
And it had a trajectory that was headed straight for Jupiter.
And we were ready for it.
And the Hubble telescope was in place and everybody was aiming.
And each one of these blobs of comet that fell into Jupiter...
Plunged into the atmosphere and exploded with more energy than all the bombs in the American arsenal.
And so a better way to say that is it plunged with more energy than the impact that rendered the dinosaurs extinct on Earth.
And so to get a sense of the energetics of the solar system is extraordinary.
So the solar system, to get to your point, is a shooting gallery.
And the moon, which is sitting right in front of our nose, it's our nearest neighbor that, writ large, is the evidence of what Earth plows through daily.
And we are protected by our atmosphere from most of it.
Our brains are wired for understanding whether we'll be eaten by a tiger or a lion, or whether...
Space and time...
Our minds interact with it in very terrestrial ways.
With the advent of the telescope and our understandings of the laws of physics, we've had to come to an understanding of the depth of time and the expanse of space that completely transcends what it is natural for us to contemplate.
And so you have to almost grow accustomed to these facts rather than take them into your heart because they fall so far beyond anything we've been trained to think about.
And that's why it's so hard for anyone to believe that you can go from a microorganism to a giraffe or a human being over the billions of years of the cycle of life.
The depth of time, just like a piece of rock like the moon, where you see all those impacts, you think, how long is that?
What am I looking at?
How much time did it take for all those rocks to fly out of space and hit that?
And as a temporary organism, you being a human being who has this sort of terrestrial fascination, It's got to be almost like a mad race to collect information in an infinitely impossible universe.
Were it not for the methods and tools of science, we would have no clue about the universe of time and the universe of space that exists beyond The physical accessibility of our biological form.
So an interesting analogy to this, I think, is when you look up at a puffy cloud, to you it's just a cloud sitting there and it has a shape.
But we've all seen time lapse of clouds, particularly rain clouds.
That's a turbulent place!
The bubbles of cloud, particularly the cumulonimbus, they're just gurgling up.
They're boiling up through the center, and it keeps regenerating, and rain is coming out the bottom.
And that doesn't take much of a time-lapsed video to capture.
10 minutes?
15 minutes?
But that's not our understanding of clouds.
Our understanding is that there are just these things peacefully floating there.
And that's just human perception versus a 15-minute time-lapse video.
Imagine human perception versus the billions of years of cosmic evolution.
One of them is we don't know how to understand those dangers.
If I say a killer asteroid is going to come every 100 million years, you'll say, oh, don't worry about it.
But when it comes, it'll render you extinct.
And we don't know when it's going to come between now and 100 million years from now.
Do you even have the...
The temerity to say, well, I'd better build a protection plan on the possibility that it comes in my lifetime or in the lifetime of all my loved generations that follow.
The problem is, yeah, we could conceivably blow the thing up, but as Americans, we're really good at blowing stuff up, and we're less good at knowing where the pieces land afterwards.
So I don't want to blow this thing into six pieces and still have all those six pieces headed towards Earth.
So the kinder, gentler solution is to deflect it from harm's way.
And there's something called a gravitational tractor beam, essentially.
I mean, that's the poetic way to say it, the sci-fi way to say it.
But really, you put a space pod out there that has a gravitational field that attracts, slowly, attracts the asteroid into a slightly different orbit.
And if you get there early enough, you don't have to deflect it by much because that deflection accumulates.
And all you need it to do is miss Earth.
Now, it's still out there to harm you another day, but if you get good at this, you just have, you know, just like you have the block protection, nighttime protection force, you know, in the neighborhood, well, you'd have the asteroid protection force, and that would be protecting Earth from asteroids.
It was our urge, given what's called the Copernican principle, to say that we're not special, we're average.
And if we're average, then other solar systems should look like us.
Because the sun is kind of average, and we're not on the littlest planet or the biggest planet.
So you make some assumptions.
As the star systems came into the catalogs, as our techniques and methods to observe other planets in the solar system arose, we started to learn that our solar system is not typical.
That most solar systems, most star systems, have a Jupiter-sized object much closer to their host star than our Jupiter is.
So then we say, well, why is our star system different from theirs?
And so it's a frontier.
It's an active frontier, and no one is putting their bets on any one kind of solar system as being the most representative.
And we're building the catalog now.
So the catalog that has 700 or so exoplanets in it?
That's only 500 star systems.
We're now building the catalogs of the secondary tertiary planets in the star systems that we've already discovered.
Oh, well, first, if you look up at the night sky, almost half of all the dots of light you see, if you pull out a telescope, will reveal themselves to be binary or triple star systems.
It is as common as the breeze.
In the universe.
The challenge here is, what happens to a planet in orbit around a binary or multiple star system?
That would be a concern no matter where the planet is.
But here's the challenge with a multi-star star system.
As the planet orbits, maybe it'll get really close to one star and really far from another, and maybe the orbit is entangled between the two of them, trying to do figure eights.
If you have an unstable orbit, You're likely to eject the planet forever into interstellar space.
And in fact, data are now showing that interstellar space may have more rogue planets that have been ejected For having misbehaved orbits from their star systems than there are stars within planetary systems themselves.
For example, the Juan de Fuca ridge off of the coast of Washington is a vent in the bottom of the ocean that is releasing the heat from below.
And it's an energy source.
It's at the bottom of the ocean where the sun don't shine, where the sun don't reach.
And yet there's life form thriving there, existing on a form of geochemical energy.
It's got nothing to do with the sun.
The fact that we've discovered exotic life on Earth has broadened the net.
that we have cast into space in our search for life in the universe.
No longer do we need to look for the 72 degree pond in an oxygen atmosphere planet in our search for life.
So this Goldilocks zone where everything had to be perfect, we've got life thriving in places that would kill us.
And we are not the measure, the ultimate measure, of what the conditions that life requires to survive.
So now that we're looking with this very broad net, we can say to ourselves, for these vagabond planets, if they still have their source of energy churning within, Maybe there's life there.
And if that's the case, the galaxy could be teeming with life, and the fact that we're focusing our search on planets around stars may simply be limiting all that we can discover in the cosmos.
So this is an astronomer mid-20th century who hypothesized...
That beyond the outermost planet, there would be sort of the leftovers of the solar system that didn't collect into a bonafide red-blooded planet.
But the residue should still be out there.
Because if you're residue in an orbit where a red-blooded planet exists, you're going to collide with that planet eventually.
You're going to merge with the planet and make that planet even bigger.
This is one of the failed criteria for Pluto.
Being classified as a planet because it is in a zone in the solar system that has not cleared its orbit.
It is in the Kuiper belt, in the inner edge of it, yes, but it is joined by countless thousands of other icy bodies.
Earth, yes, we plow through crap in our orbit, but the ratio of the mass of the stuff we plow into to Earth's mass is like gnats flying into an elephant.
It doesn't knock over the elephant.
It is of no concern to the elephant.
Anything that could still possibly collide with us, Earth won't even care.
We'll care because it'll affect the ecosystem, but Earth, the planet, is so much more massive than anything we would ever collide with from now to the end of the solar system.
We have basically cleared our orbit of anything dangerous.
Pluto has not.
So that was a damning fact in the ruling that got it demoted from planet to planet.
I just thought it was fascinating because the idea was that there was a Jupiter-sized planet so far outside of our solar system, or what we consider our solar system, that it was causing some sort of a gravitational effect on the Kuiper Belt.
Let the record show the man's eyebrows moved up into his forehead.
So there was an analysis of the extinction episodes in the history of the Earth that suggested that perhaps they were episodic or periodic.
Every 20 million years or so, there was a little dip in the fossil record.
And we said, well, all right.
By the way, geologists look for indicators in the fossil record.
And in the rock record to demark where one era, one period, one epoch begins and another one ends.
So, for example, the dinosaurs croaked at the beginning, 65 million years ago, at the KT boundary.
It's got some other name lately.
I haven't kept up with that.
But that boundary, they knew it was a boundary, so they dated, they called that a different geologic zone, that which followed 65 million years ago compared to that which came before it.
And they did that long before they knew what the hell happened there.
We would later learn that an asteroid struck, and there surely were some supervolcano activity in what are called the Deccan Traps.
And so there was a lot of bad stuff going on in the Earth at that time.
So it was hostile to life.
We lost 70% of the world's life species in that period of time.
So it was imagined that maybe there's an object out there that's so far away you can't see it.
But it's on this huge looping orbit that comes by the sun every 20 million years.
Because that's the cycle of these extinction episodes.
And if that's the case, no, it doesn't hit us.
It has to stay around for the next cycle, so what does it do?
It has a gravitational field that perturbs these outer comets and sends a rain of comets down into the inner solar system, creating impact extinctions on a cycle of every 20 million years.
This was proposed back in the 1980s.
But it's not an object that anyone has ever seen.
It's an object whose existence was inferred or asserted based on the record of extinction in the fossil record.
A further analysis of the fossil record doesn't actually hold up this cyclical extinction pattern.
It's more erratic than that, and so you can't really...
So it's evaporated as an idea.
But it was clever and intriguing and got a lot of headlines at the time.
The guys were, I don't know if you heard of these guys, astrophysicists John Matisse and Daniel Whitmore from the University of Louisiana came up with a theory that said that something smaller than a Jovian mass would not be strong enough to perform this task.
They believe that there's something up to 25% of them Okay, four times as big as Jupiter could be responsible for sending these objects in our direction.
Is this just a random theory that these guys put together that wasn't completely accepted?
What people are doing, and I don't fault them for it, it's creative, it would make awesome science fiction storytelling, is there's something you need to explain here on Earth.
Somebody went extinct.
There was some wave of comets.
There's some observation that was never repeated.
There's something you've got to come up with.
And so you say, well, we know the Oort cloud exists.
We know you can perturb those orbits and send them careening down towards the inner solar system.
And those that Jupiter doesn't bat away, like batting practice, those that get through Jupiter's gravitational shield could wreak havoc on Earth.
Yeah, but it's inventing a lot to explain something you don't know.
So it's inventing more of what you don't know that could be true to explain that which you don't have any other evidence to support.
And by the way, the universe is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine.
And so to say I need your creativity and...
No, we've got black holes that are flaying stars layer by layer.
Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you'll see the entire future of the universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments, and you will emerge into another space-time created by the singularity of the black hole you just fell into?
That if Mars was fertile for life before Earth, something we learned recently in the last 10 years, that asteroid impacts on a planet.
There you go.
I can be violent enough that they can fling surrounding rocks with escape velocity into interplanetary space where they will drift until they are attracted by the gravity of some other planet and they will then fall and land on its surface.
If Mars was fertile and formed life Microbial, though it may only have been, it's microbial life that can survive dehydration, high radiation, absence of...
We have found what we call extremophiles on Earth, like I said a moment ago, that thrive under conditions that would kill us.
High pressure, low pressure, high temperature, low temperature, high radiation.
All of these conditions the microbes would have encountered On Mars, being thrust into space and making that journey.
Well, if that's possible, and if that's the case, then life on Earth could have been seeded by life on Mars, making every life form on Earth a descendant of Martians.
More importantly, why do we have bacteria that could survive high radiation in the first place?
What business does that have here beneath Earth's protective atmosphere, thriving in places where there isn't high radiation?
We have life forms that can survive what that trip through space would have been subjected to by a trip through space.
By the way, life does not evolve the way anyone typically thinks it does.
You're not some organism that then adapts to a new environment.
No, you just die.
The variation in organisms allows some to thrive in conditions that would otherwise kill you and it's my genetic offspring that continue.
Nobody adapted to anything.
Nature is selecting that subset of the variation in a generation that has survival properties for that next assault in the environment.
So, if Mars is teeming with life and microbes are flying into space as stowaways in the nooks and crannies of rocks, Then that population will be selected for those microbes that can survive that journey through space.
Well, recent evidence suggests that possibly more than half of the mass of biology, the biomass of Earth...
Lives and thrives beneath Earth's surface, not on its surface.
If that's the case, what's going on in the atmosphere is relatively irrelevant.
If you're thriving deep within a nook and cranny of a rock a mile down, But don't they have some air down there?
Yeah, there's some air, but it's not cycling with what's going on in our air.
So the rules become broader or altered from what you would presume the life requires.
So to talk about a planet being habitable, we should no longer think only of what the surface of that planet supplies.
We need to think more broadly about What could go on deep within its surface as well?
We're pretty sure there are no large macroscopic organisms lumbering around, like in Journey to the Center of the Earth of Jules Verne, where there are creatures down there.
No, there's no evidence that we have huge creatures.
The pressures and the behavior of The material doesn't allow there to be huge cavities that haven't, over the billions of years, completely been filled in.
When I say huge, I mean hundreds of miles large.
No, the system would collapse into that rapidly.
You can get smaller cavities like Carlsbad Caverns, that sort of thing, but nothing staggeringly large.
Yeah, there are probably more ways to make life than we haven't thought of than the way to make life that is, that we know of, you know, here on Earth.
We're just not imaginative.
We just don't...
You know, I'm reminded of, if I get a little literate on you for a moment, in the late 18th century, there's a book published called Cosmotheros by Christian Huygens.
And he was a polymath.
He was a great in math and physics and biology.
He wrote a book exploring what life might be like on all the planets.
And listen to this reasoning.
This is hilarious.
He said, Well it's clear it's got an atmosphere because through a telescope you see bands of gas moving across its surface.
Well if it has an atmosphere then life forms there would probably exploit that atmosphere the way we do.
Because it has an atmosphere it means it probably has rain Because we get rain out of our atmosphere.
If it has rain, it must have oceans.
If it has oceans, they must need a means for traveling.
So they would build ships with sails.
And if those ships have sails, they would need rope.
So first, it's a good example in the sense that, no pun intended, in the sense that without Who knows what senses we're missing and therefore who knows what there is to measure in our world around us that we are completely missing?
One of the active ingredients in the smell of a fart is hydrogen sulfide.
It turns out hydrogen sulfide is extremely lethal, is one of the most lethal gases that exists.
Well, why do we have such a good sense of smell for that?
Why don't we smell other gas?
Why don't we smell nitrogen?
Well, we don't need to smell nitrogen because it's not going to kill us because it's 78% of what you breathe anyway.
We have evolved a hypersensitive sense for the smell of hydrogen sulfide.
If you gave birth to someone who said hydrogen sulfide smells beautiful and let's smell more of it, let's get canisters of it, they're dead ten minutes later, no longer able to propagate the gene that liked the smell of hydrogen sulfide.
We had to not like that smell, otherwise we would not have survived By the way, hydrogen sulfide is a byproduct of the digestive activity of anaerobic microbes.
That's why it comes out of your lower intestine, not only where the sun don't shine, but where oxygen doesn't exist.
The microbes that thrive down there, they are anaerobic, and hydrogen sulfide is one of their byproducts.
It has been theorized that there have been places and times on Earth Where the ocean currents stopped.
And when ocean currents stop, oxygen at the surface of the ocean never makes it to the bottom.
So you can't sustain oxygen life forms at the bottom of the ocean.
There wouldn't be any fishes down there if the ocean currents stopped.
Because the ocean currents not only go from one place to another in the world, they circulate top to bottom.
So it's a two-dimensional thing going on, three dimensions actually.
So if something happens on Earth where you stop the oceanic cycles, you can create a condition in the lower ocean Where anaerobic lifeforms thrive.
And if they thrive, they outgas.
And one of their outgases is hydrogen sulfide.
It will gurgle up from the bottom of the ocean, rise up near the shores, turning shorelines into the smell of cesspools.
If you were alive at the time and didn't run away from that, you would have simply died from it.
Therefore, the nose theory, that if we didn't have a nose, we could all just fart.
If we didn't have a nose, we wouldn't have noticed hydrogen sulfide, and humans would not have survived it, and some other creature would be having this interview right now.
I agree with you and disagree with you at the same time.
And here's why.
What you're saying involves real people and real life adaptation to our environment.
What I'm talking about is aliens that are just like farts.
This is why you gave me a crazy, long-winded, really in-depth explanation, but you still don't discredit the possibility that just like the sense of smell.
It exists, but it is invisible.
There could be many things around us that are also invisible, but we have not developed any means to detect them.
So in the early 1600s, two important advances, actually late 1500s, you had the invention of the microscope and you had the invention of the telescope.
This is really the first steps to enhance our senses beyond what our human biology endowed us with.
And upon doing so We discovered things about the world that were previously oblivious to us.
We discovered nose farts.
When Leeuwenhoek brought his telescope, his microscope, to a drop of pond water and saw what were called animacules.
What else were you going to call?
The little things, paramecia and protozoa, thriving in a drop of water.
That was a nose fart, keeping with your vocabulary.
That was something that previously no one had any idea was there.
And my point is, beginning in 1600, And with an ever-improving march forward, the methods and tools of science have served to enhance our senses, increase our senses, increase the range of our senses, but more importantly, give us whole kinds of senses that your five senses could have never even imagined, that our human biology couldn't even approximate.
So what's an example?
Yeah, we don't have sensors to detect magnetic field at all.
That's why you can sit in an MRI chamber and sit there and, you know, whistle Dixie, and you'll have no idea the strength of the magnetic field that's being cast across your body.
So the point is, the radio waves are part of the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
We have access to some of that, and we call that For obvious reasons, visible light.
But outside of the range of visible light, you have ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays, radio waves, microwaves.
So yes, we can't see radio waves, but that would just be an extension of our senses in the way Geordi in Star Trek, the next generation, had his visor.
Well, that visor enabled him to see the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
If we were thusly equipped, you'd walk down the street and the microwave towers would be ablaze with microwaves.
And you tune into sort of ultraviolet and you think twice about going to the beach because that's the stuff that gives you skin cancer, especially people with lighter skin.
If you want to see if there's a burglar entering your house, just shift over to infrared.
If the burglar is warm-blooded, they will show up even if all the lights are out.
So science has broadened our senses and given us senses that our human biology could not have even thought of or invented.
So the notion at this day and age that something is happening on this tabletop That is eluding us I think is just simply unlikely because we're so good now at finding things that previously escaped our notice right in front of us.
Right now that frontier is at the energy extremes of the CERN accelerator in Switzerland.
That frontier is at the James Webb Space Telescope where we're going to look at the earliest formation of matter in the history of the universe.
These are the extremes Of our measurements of nature today.
The biological limitations of human beings, the birth and the death, you know, the fact that we are all born and we all die, do we apply those to the universe for a reason?
Or do we know that there was a birth?
Is that 100% sure that before the Big Bang there was no...
So that's my first and highest level answer to you.
That doesn't mean some people don't have some creative ideas, but the only real answer is we don't know.
And we have top people working on it.
So now some of the creative ideas are quantum physics, which is the most successful theory of physics there ever was, quantum theory.
tells us that the early universe may have been a fluctuation in the laws of physics allowing other fluctuations at the same time so that we are but one bubble of many comprising an infinite set of bubbles Deserving the retrospectively obvious name, multiverse.
Not that we know of, but there could be a way we might be able to invent a multiverse transport kit where you leave your universe and enter another.
But I don't recommend that.
Because if the laws of physics are even slightly different, the charge on the electron, the mass of the neutron, if any of these are slightly different, then everything that holds you together, all the physical laws...
that come together to make you, including all the forces of nature, they would just completely collapse in the existence if you stepped into the zone of this other universe.
Or they take on some other form or shape that we can't even imagine.
So, yeah, I don't want to, you know, that's when you flip, you send in a probe or something, but you don't send yourself.
So that's why I joke about this half seriously, that if an alien comes to visit, I want to make sure in advance that they're not made of antimatter.
So I flip them a coin and they catch it.
If they don't explode together, annihilation, then I'll shake their hand and say, welcome to Earth.
So there's cogent physics reasons to think that there's a multiverse and quantum physics takes us there.
There's also good philosophical reason to think that there's a multiverse, because in our experience discovering the cosmos, the universe never makes anything in ones.
When we thought Earth is it, no, Earth is just one of many other planets.
Well, the Sun is...
No, the Sun is one of a hundred billion stars in the galaxy.
Well, the Milky Way...
No, no, there's a hundred billion other galaxies...
And then it's turtles all the way down, as they say.
Like I said, we don't have a handle on it yet, but we've solved other origin problems, because what started this was your question about birth and death.
There was a time when we didn't know how the Earth began.
We have a good idea of that now, and how the moon formed.
We've got that.
How the sun formed, we got that.
No, we weren't around five billion years ago to watch it, but you don't need to be.
There are very clever ways to know what happened in the past.
Geologists have been doing it ever since the field was born.
There's a record Writ for geologists in the rocks, telling you where they've been, what temperature they were exposed to, and how long they've been sitting there.
We look at the sun.
No, we can't go back in time with it, but we can look at other stars.
There was a fantastic documentary on hypernovas and it was so mind-boggling because they went back to the birth of the discovery of hypernovas and when they initially were theorizing that it was warfare in space.
So in the 1970s, after the United States and Russia, the Soviet Union, signed a surface test ban treaty where you couldn't test nuclear weapons on Earth's surface, there's the old military credo, trust but verify.
We said, all right, we'll sign this treaty, but we're going to keep an eye on you.
So we got together, the engineers and the physicists, and we, my brethren of the day, He invented a kind of detector that was sensitive to gamma rays.
That's one of these bands in the electromagnetic spectrum.
The highest energy band for which we have a word to describe it.
Each with 100 billion stars to give you eight of these a week.
Yeah, so by the way, there's an interesting way that this will render us toast.
So the first wave of gamma rays will take out our ozone layer.
The ozone absorbs high energy radiation.
That's what protects us from – it's what absorbs most of the ultraviolet from the sun.
Otherwise, ultraviolet is hostile to life, to life on the surface, and there wouldn't be life as we know it without this ozone layer on Earth.
But you can overrun the ozone layer.
The ozone is oxygen, and it's O3. The air you breathe has O2 in it, the molecule O2. Ozone is O3. An ultraviolet photon comes in, slams into O3, it breaks it apart into O plus O2. There you go.
It took the ultraviolet light out of the picture.
It's gone.
That's why it protects us.
Okay?
So, if there's a gamma ray burst, more high-energy photons will hit us than there are O3 molecules in our ozone layer.
So, they all hit.
And they break apart the O3s And it's like the first wave of, what are the, cavalry?
Who are the first ones in the battle?
Marines?
They get all shot up, right?
I mean, in the old-fashioned battles.
They run in, they get shot up, okay?
The first wave comes in, protects us from some of it, but it overruns the ozone layer.
The rest come in and basically starts breaking apart the molecular, the complex molecules that exist on Earth's surface.
That's how high energy the light is.
And generally we think of life as complex chemistry.
And the most complex form of chemistry we know.
And so we would not survive that.
That would be an extinction episode for all life on Earth.
Now, if you could burrow underground, that'd be cool.
But it's like our own consciousness is so strung up on the idea of staying in this form, you know, physically alive and keep this thing, whatever this is, going.
Because of our survival instincts, it really sort of confuses and dilutes the whole idea of perception that the universe itself is not just infinite, but infinitely fractal.
It seems like just a step in the stage of innovation.
As long as human beings have access to energy, we're going to figure out how to get energy from pollution and get energy from...
There's going to be...
With the massive amounts of progress that have been made just in the last 200 years, I always like to describe to people, if they really have a hard time wrapping their head around it, That 200 years ago, if you wanted a picture of something, you had to draw it.
Yeah, just think about what's going on in your car's GPS, right?
So it's talking to a satellite and mixing your location on Earth's surface with information that's in the later versions of it in your car updated from the internet.
About what direction the traffic flows on a street you happen to be driving on.
But I think the doom and gloom analysis of we're doomed, there's no way, we're going to run out of food, I think that's kind of a silly way to look at it, too.
It seems to me that if you fly over just the United States alone, God, there's a lot of space to do shit.
Well, I didn't read the full depth of the article, but certainly the warmest on record.
The warmest that we've been keeping records of how warm the earth has been.
But not since like...
Right, right No, no, no, no, no, no, no In any time that Civilization has been around Humans have been around Been concerned about this And so if that's unstoppable, for whatever reasons, political, cultural, economic, whatever, What that will do is simply redraw the map of what is arable and what is not in the world.
And there's good evidence to say that early Earth was a complete snowball, where the ice caps were so large that the North ice cap met the South ice cap at the equator.
It's geologist plus, you know, some, if you look at the history of the sun, the sun wasn't always the same temperature, so you have to fold that into what's going on on Earth at the time and what the state of the greenhouse effect is on Earth, because that also influences the tracking, how high the temperature is versus what Earth is doing with the energy it received.
When you're a snowball, most of Earth's, the sun's light is reflected rather than absorbed.
It grows a little bit and then less sunlight gets absorbed by the earth because ice is white and so it freezes up a little more and then even less sunlight It gets kept, and then it freezes up a little more.
So you can have a runaway ice ball just as you can have a runaway greenhouse.
That's interesting that these two possibilities exist.
And the glaciers, when they melt and they create water, and the water acts as a reflector, and the light goes through the water and melts the glaciers quicker.
Then you maintain your atmospheric temperature and the energy balance of sunlight hitting the earth, some getting absorbed, other parts getting reflected.
But if you tip that balance...
By the way, that can shift.
That's not like a razor-edge balance.
I mean, there's slop in there.
Restorative forces exist.
But if you go outside of what a restorative force can give you, then you overrun the capacity...
To bring you back to any place where you once were.
And then you get a runaway phenomenon.
And so you heat, and when you heat something, it outgasses.
If you heat your soda, the CO2 comes out of it.
It doesn't stay in.
That's why we like drinking cold carbonated beverages.
So if you heat Earth, and greenhouse gases are dissolved within it, then you start releasing those greenhouse gases.
That makes Earth retain even more heat, makes it hotter, And if it makes it hotter, even more greenhouse gases come out.
And so you can imagine a situation where you have a runaway greenhouse where everything goes really hot.
It's whether we, as we have set up culture and civilization and economies, and it's all been set up assuming a certain constancy of the conduct of nature.
And if we now become a force in nature's equation, Creating a cycling of phenomenon that would normally have taken 10,000 or 100,000 years, and we're doing it on a scale of centuries, then we better be prepared to face those consequences.
It flooded Zone A and Zone A was four blocks from me, from my zone, which was Zone C. I walked four blocks, five blocks away and entire underground parking garages were flooded.
Cars were bobbing out of the exit doors of these parking garages.
We have an annual event at the American Museum of Natural History.
That's my day job there as director of the Hayden Planetarium.
Once a year we have this panel and I bring on My colleagues who are active on the bleeding frontier of some topic.
And I put them on stage and we all just fight about who's right or is there enough data?
Should I believe you?
Should I not?
And so it's the annual Isaac Asimov panel debate.
And it's designed to expose An aspect of science that the public hardly ever sees.
They usually see the perfectly written paper and the news report on it and everything is tidily discovered.
They don't see the bloody bleeding edge where the fisticuffs come out.
And so on this particular case, he, Jim Gates, discovered that there's a certain...
In our representation of the universe...
Yes, yes.
In the way we have come to understand the universe and our methods and tools, deep down within that is necessary a code Written in zeros and ones that is a particular kind of error checking algorithm that we invoke daily in the movement of data from one system to another.
It's called a checksum error.
You might have seen that in an error code.
Dump happens on your screen.
Go look in there.
You'll see the word checksum in multiple places.
It's one word, checksum.
And it's like the idiot check on, did this bulk of data get through this portal?
All right?
So, you know, you're looking at sort of the gross thing you can check for.
How many total bits were there?
I don't know if they're the right bits, but I know how many total bits should have come.
So let me check for that.
So that's the kind of thing you do in a checksum.
So he asserts that this exists deep within what we need to represent the operations of nature at its deepest, most fundamental levels.
It is the matrix written deep.
So I was astonished by this, and I paused, and actually there's a YouTube video of me interrogating him.
And now, I don't know that it's seen peer review yet.
He's a friend of mine, so I can just call him up.
But before you start getting...
Excited about it or bent out of shape about it or disturbed about it.
You want it to see peer review.
And the level of expertise in that analysis is above my pay scale.
So it's got to go to peers who do exactly that kind of mathematical physics.
And if they come out with a consensus and they agree, then I'm good to go.
And I'll invest more energy in coming to understand it.
But for every correct idea of how the universe works, there's hundreds and in some cases thousands of ideas that End up in the trash bin of creative thinking.
And so I have to allocate my energies and my budget of time.
And so it's intriguing and I'm happy to know that it exists, but to take it beyond that and wax philosophically poetic about it, maybe over a beer at a bar, but no, not in an actual setting where I'm talking about science.
Or maybe when you're high.
It's great fodder for conversation when you think you're being deep.
If you keep listening to him, he will propose some things that will ruin your brain.
The computer simulation theory has been bandied about in a bunch of different forms, and the idea being that one day we'll have infinite amounts of processing power and we'll be able to create a reality that is indiscernible from this reality.
And once that is done, how will we know when we're in it?
And could we be in it right now?
And this sounds like more high horseshit nonsense, but this is being bandied about by some of the smartest people on the planet.
Because it requires the acceptance that the day will come where our computing power and our storage power, because it's growing exponentially with Moore's Law, you know, it doubles every 18 months or so, in capacity and speed and all the metrics that matter when you're in information technology, The hypothesis that one day we can just upload our entire brain into a computer, or a computer can simulate your brain in some fundamental way, then what do we need you for if we can now just simulate it?
I mean, here in LA, the actor's version of that is they've just digitized your body in every angle, doing everything.
Well, I'm deeply appreciative of that, but let me pose that and let me analyze that in a slightly different way.
I already know that the universe is an extraordinary place, but not everyone else does.
So part of what I do is serve as a conduit between the curiosity in our culture that is embedded there even if you've forgotten it, because I know it's within us all, because it's there in all of us when we're children, AKA, you're a bad motherfucker.