Feb. 21, 2017 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:14:10
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Four, three, two, and boom. | ||
| That's a nice hat. | ||
| I've told you already, but live, I gotta tell you, that is a nice... | ||
| It's very, uh, kind of Indiana Jones, but... | ||
| It's not quite that, and not quite cowboy, yeah. | ||
| But it's kind of, yeah, you're like in the middle of that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You're riding the wave. | ||
| You're dancing on the edge. | ||
| Well, I have a really fat head, and so there's this website called, like, bigheads.com. | ||
| There's a website for it? | ||
| Yes, a total website for fat-headed people. | ||
| I gotta get my friend Burt Kreischer a hat then. | ||
| I put his hat on. | ||
| I couldn't believe how big his head was. | ||
| There was like an inch gap all around my head. | ||
| I thought I had a big head. | ||
| Yeah, so if you know your head size, do you know your head size? | ||
| No, I do not. | ||
| So it turns out if you know your head size, that number comes from somewhere. | ||
| Can I tell you what it is? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So if you measure the circumference of your head, just get a tape measure, like you're measuring your waistline, but do it around your head. | ||
| And take that number, divide it by pi, then that's your hat size. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whoa. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Seems complicated. | ||
| Divide by two? | ||
| Why can't it be just like your waist, 32? | ||
| You know, your waist is what your waist is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I know. | |
| It just is what it is, right? | ||
| Why can't it just be the circumference, right? | ||
| So what it turns out to be... | ||
| So what that means is, if you're dividing by pi, you're getting the diameter of the circle That has the same dimension as the circumference of your head. | ||
| So if you have an oblong head, then what it's doing is finding out what the circle is, the diameter of the circle that has that same circumference as your head. | ||
| That's what that's doing, for whether that helps the hat maker. | ||
| So, immediately I started thinking about Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live as a conehead. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| Remember? | ||
| Well, then you need a tall hat for that, too. | ||
| Yeah, there's an issue there. | ||
| So, dude, you're still doing stand-up? | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Constantly. | ||
| I'm loving it. | ||
| And I caught you a few months ago. | ||
| You were emceeing some MMA, was it? | ||
| Well, I'm always doing that, yeah. | ||
| Oh, you're always doing that. | ||
| I only catch some of it then. | ||
| I think it's great you stayed in shape, because I'm a fat slob right now. | ||
| Well, you were ripped back in the day, man. | ||
| I saw a picture of you when you were wrestling. | ||
| And I was like, damn, Neil, you look good. | ||
| I had some street cred back then. | ||
| Do you exercise at all now? | ||
| It's not that I don't have the energy to. | ||
| It's trying to find the time. | ||
| There's you back in the day. | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| Shred it. | ||
| How much did you weigh back then? | ||
| Let me guess. | ||
| Oh, go on. | ||
| 176. No, no, no. | ||
| I'm 6'2", so I'm 190 pounds in that. | ||
| Oh, you look great. | ||
| I have big thighs and stuff. | ||
| Other wrestlers would have skinnier thighs and things. | ||
| So I was also taller than anyone I wrestled. | ||
| So since we're the same height, it meant they had bigger muscles, actually. | ||
| Because we're the same weight, right? | ||
| Did I say that right? | ||
| I'm taller, but we're the same weight. | ||
| So that means they have bigger muscles. | ||
| Because none of us have fat, right? | ||
| So I had to do things that my lankiness would enable me to do and to accomplish that they couldn't. | ||
| So I have long reach, you know, this sort of thing. | ||
| I scoop an ankle, that kind of thing. | ||
| There's great advantages to having long limbs in martial arts, particularly in wrestling, grappling, because of leverage. | ||
| Yeah, also if you're quick and with long limbs, and I was both, but if they got me in their grip, it was hard for me to get out. | ||
| So what kind of exercise do you do these days? | ||
| No, that's not, no. | ||
| No, I'm trying. | ||
| Yeah, I'm trying. | ||
| When I'm in, I'm good. | ||
| But I've just got so much going on. | ||
| I have to make the time. | ||
| That's a problem, right? | ||
| When you become a little bit too successful for your own good? | ||
| I saw some food. | ||
| There's a lot of food documentaries trying to get you to eat differently. | ||
| So I thought I'd watch them all. | ||
| I binged on them one weekend while I was doing other stuff. | ||
| Got hungry? | ||
| No, one of the guys, he was trying to lose 100 pounds or something. | ||
| So every 15 pounds he lost, he put a bowling ball up on the counter and said, that is what I'm not carrying around with me. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whoa. | |
| Because a bowling ball is about 15 pounds. | ||
| And I said, wow, he's measuring a weight in bowling balls. | ||
| That's something. | ||
| Because we say, I'm three pounds less and two pounds less. | ||
| That doesn't hit you emotionally the way a bowling ball does after you've lost 15 pounds. | ||
| Because no one wants to be carrying that around. | ||
| So psychologically, I thought that was quite potent. | ||
| That is potent. | ||
| I think we do need some. | ||
| I usually use like plates. | ||
| I think of weight plates or dumbbells. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Yeah, that works too. | ||
| I started doing intermittent fasting pretty recently where I only allow myself to eat 10 hours in a day. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's it. | |
| 10 hours out of the 24-hour day. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| So 14. I had Terry Crews on my radio show on StarTalk. | ||
| My boy is ripped. | ||
| He looks great. | ||
| And he's like 47 or something. | ||
| So he doesn't eat until 12 noon. | ||
| Oh, same sort of deal. | ||
| And then he doesn't eat until after 10 o'clock. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah, 10 hours. | ||
| And then he doesn't eat after 10. It's a 10-hour thing. | ||
| And so he's watching everyone else have brunch and breakfast. | ||
| And so he's got to overcome that. | ||
| So it's a little bit of fasting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Each day. | ||
| Intermittent fasting. | ||
| Just to keep the discipline. | ||
| At the end of the day, it's really just discipline. | ||
| Well, it's not just that. | ||
| It also forces your body to burn fat instead of carbohydrates. | ||
| And when it forces your body to burn fat, that state of ketosis is actually easier to maintain because you don't get hungry. | ||
| Yeah, then there's no roller coaster. | ||
| Yeah, the crash, the carbohydrate crash that you get. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Is that outside of the realm of possibility for you? | ||
| No, I can totally... | ||
| I'm a ketosis guy. | ||
| Anything involved in science? | ||
|
unidentified
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Come on. | |
| It's in there, baby. | ||
| It's in there. | ||
| I once got raked over the coals, not by everyone, but I tweeted once. | ||
| I said, if there was a diet book written by a physicist, it would contain one sentence. | ||
| Consume calories at a lesser rate than Consume calories at a lesser rate than you burn them. | ||
| That is sort of true. | ||
| That's the one sentence diet book. | ||
| No, it's more complicated than that. | ||
| And everybody just try to get all, no, it's this, it's that, it's that. | ||
| And one of the great things of physics, when you do physics, is all the details are just cut off. | ||
| It's window dressing, and you get down to the window itself. | ||
| And that's what the analysis works on. | ||
| I have rarely seen you attacked, but I did see you attacked when you were celebrating Sir Isaac Newton's birthday. | ||
| Oh, ha! | ||
| I was like, people were so mad. | ||
| People lost their minds. | ||
| They lost their mind when you were, by the way, incorrect in the date of Jesus' birthday. | ||
| That is not the date of Jesus' birthday. | ||
| Yeah, Jesus was not born on the 25th. | ||
| No, I mean, it's just... | ||
| Right, plus I didn't even mention it. | ||
| So what I said was, by the way, that to this day is my highest retweeted tweet. | ||
| I tweeted it. | ||
| I retweeted it. | ||
| So you remember, it's actually a couple years ago now. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So it was, so on December 25th comes... | ||
| There it is. | ||
| A child was born who by age 30 would transform the world. | ||
| Happy birthday, Sir Isaac Newton. | ||
| So on this day long ago, a child was born who by age 30 would transform the world. | ||
| Happy birthday, Isaac Newton. | ||
| Born December 25th, 1642. 79,000 retweets. | ||
| 86,000 likes. | ||
| People just lost their mind. | ||
|
unidentified
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They were so mad. | |
| They were angry, and I thought, well, interesting, because I'm just speaking the truth here. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He transformed civilization. | ||
| Actually, he did it by the time he was 26. So, yes, it's provocative, because you're expecting that Jesus is going to end that. | ||
| But I thought I'd share some actual truth with people. | ||
| And so, some people celebrated it, deeply religious people. | ||
| One had a headline saying, Neil deGrasse Tyson's trolling Christians on Christmas Day. | ||
| And I said, Newton at least has the benefit of actually having been born that day. | ||
| Then later on, it's actually more subtle than that with Newton, because he was on the Julian calendar, which is 10 days shifted from the Gregorian calendar. | ||
| So if you ask what would his birthday be today, it would be January 4th, not December 25th. | ||
| But when he was born, his mother was celebrating Christmas, so that's really what matters for that tweet. | ||
| Well, it's such a bizarre thing anyway, because if you're a real Christian, you would understand that the birthday was shifted in order to comply with pagan religions. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It landed. | ||
| I don't know how many people know that, actually. | ||
| I mean, you're a well-read guy. | ||
| But so if you give me a minute to just explain that. | ||
| So December 21st, we know, is the first day of winter, shortest day of the year. | ||
| And what makes it short? | ||
| Short is daylight of the year. | ||
| And what makes it short? | ||
| The arc of the sun across the sky is very low. | ||
| The sun doesn't get very high. | ||
| And it doesn't stay up for very long. | ||
| And it's been coming a lower and lower arc every day en route to December 21st. | ||
| The ancient peoples were worried about this because everyone worshiped the sun because it made your crops come and it gave you warmth. | ||
| And you say, well, if this keeps going lower and lower in the sky, we're going to lose the sun entirely. | ||
| December 21st, the sun slows down and it stops this drop in its movement across the sky from day to day. | ||
| So that stopping of the sun is solstice. | ||
| That's Latin, the stationary sun, like armistice, stationary arms, right, from the end of the First World War, November 11th that was. | ||
| Armistice, solstice. | ||
| So the movement of the sun lower in the sky stops. | ||
| But that doesn't mean it's going to come back. | ||
| It takes a few days for us to slow down, stop, and then reverse. | ||
| He says, oh, it is coming back. | ||
| Let's celebrate that. | ||
| And that's a few days after December 21st. | ||
| It's about December 25th, a pagan holiday celebrating the return of the sun. | ||
| Christianity is trying to take foothold. | ||
| Where pagans once roamed. | ||
| And you put celebrations that match theirs just so that the shift is not as hard for you. | ||
| And the unknown birthday of Jesus was then assigned this pagan day of celebration to make that transition easier for the pagans to become Christians. | ||
| And sure enough, it remained Christmas Day ever since then. | ||
| The birth of Jesus. | ||
| The speculated birthday of Jesus is like the spring, right? | ||
| The spring. | ||
| There's some passages, of course, in the New Testament that reference what the sheep were doing. | ||
| Plus, there's a census being taken by the Romans, and Mary goes to the manger. | ||
| The animals are not in the manger. | ||
| So there's secondary evidence for that it's probably happened in the spring. | ||
| Now, with the advent of commercial space travel, which seems inevitable... | ||
| Seems inevitable, right? | ||
| Love your segues. | ||
| Do you think that it's possible that maybe you could even offer up a Flat Earth Believer tour where you take them, like at the very least, take them up to Alaska where it's light for 23 hours a day? | ||
| Do you have Flat Earthers calling into you? | ||
| Tweeting me constantly. | ||
| Tweeting me constantly. | ||
| Yeah, calling me a sellout. | ||
| I'm a sellout. | ||
| I'm a round-earth sellout. | ||
| Like as if there's some round-earth money. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You're on the payroll. | ||
| I'm getting some checks. | ||
| I'm getting some round-earth checks to keep the nonsense going. | ||
| You're getting some round-earth payola for your show. | ||
| I'm sure you've seen the basketball player who graduated from Duke. | ||
| From Duke. | ||
| That was hitting the news the last couple of days. | ||
| I saw that. | ||
| And he believes that dinosaurs are fake and that the world is flat. | ||
| Okay, so here's the thing Joe, okay? | ||
| I've thought about this. | ||
| I bet you have! | ||
| As an educator, I've thought about this, okay? | ||
| So here's what matters. | ||
| We live in a free country. | ||
| People should be able to think whatever they want, whenever they want, provided it doesn't subtract away from someone else's rights. | ||
| Okay, so thinking the earth is flat doesn't harm anyone unless You want to run for office. | ||
| Or you want some position of power over other people. | ||
| That's when it's dangerous. | ||
| I'm thinking of elevator banks where they have numbers. | ||
| I have a photo essay of what elevators look like inside. | ||
| I know it's just... | ||
| You mean the gears and all that? | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Not even that geeky. | ||
| Just what are the numbers on the panel? | ||
| Oh, without the 13, you mean? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, exactly. | ||
| So about 80% of buildings taller than 12 stories don't have a 13th floor. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And so this Trixideka-phobia is... | ||
| Again, in a free country, if you want to be afraid of the number 13, go right ahead. | ||
| It just seems to me you should not be tasked with designing elevators if that's your fear. | ||
| Find something else to do. | ||
| Holding aside the fact that I'm a little scared that in this 21st century United States of America, we have people walking among us afraid of the number 13. What does that mean? | ||
| I don't know in the long run. | ||
| But if you keep to yourself, don't harm others, think whatever you want. | ||
| So the rubber hits the road is you now have power over others. | ||
| And that's where the failure of the educational system actually manifests. | ||
| That's how societies and cultures collapse. | ||
| Right, but it's not that they don't know that there's a 13th floor and that you're just calling it the 14th floor. | ||
| I want to take my Sharpie, cross out the 14th floor and say, that's the 13th floor. | ||
| You're not fooling anybody. | ||
| Now, when you see it on an elevator and you see no 13th. | ||
| Plus, they try to fake you out. | ||
| How do they do that? | ||
| So they go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. And then you have to go to the next row to begin for the 14. So you don't see 12 right next to 14. And some modern buildings will put their... | ||
| The heavy machinery, like the HVAC, on the 13th floor, so that there's no residency there, right? | ||
| But they could still say it's the 13th floor, and then there's the 14th floor. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Does anybody ever have a dummy 13th button where you press it and it never lights up? | ||
| Like, I don't get it. | ||
| I can't get in there. | ||
| Oh, that's interesting. | ||
| That's what I would do. | ||
| Oh, you just put it there to satisfy me, but still nobody lives there. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's too clever. | ||
| Oh, this is one of the 20% of people that makes sense. | ||
| What a great building. | ||
| Meanwhile, there is no 13th floor. | ||
| It's just a dummy button that never lights up. | ||
| Remember that Twilight Zone episode with the mannequins? | ||
| They went up to the 11th floor, but there is no 11th floor, and the mannequins come to life at night. | ||
| Ooh, I forgot about that one. | ||
| Yeah, they leave the store floors, and they all go up to 11, and they have a cocktail party, and they vote which one of them is going to go out and become human for a day. | ||
| The Twilight Zone was so good. | ||
| I think it was the best television there ever was. | ||
| Like, still, to this day, ever. | ||
| You've used up so many great premises. | ||
| Great premises, great actors, great cinematography, and it was in black and white, so shadows were completely dark. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because shadows don't have much meaning when you film in color, because everything is just there. | ||
| But in black and white, the shadows create moods. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And, yeah, so... | ||
| I watched To Serve Man the other night. | ||
| I hadn't seen it in a while. | ||
| To Serve Man. | ||
| I had it on the DVR. I'm like, let's just sit down and watch this one. | ||
| And then they had Big Guy who played Lurch on The Addams Family. | ||
| Yeah, that was a great one. | ||
| Because it was just like it had all the elements of people going, well, you know, they seem nice. | ||
| They seem nice. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And they solved all of our war and our famine. | ||
| It's a cookbook! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| God, it was great. | ||
| Another good one was The Invaders. | ||
| Do you remember this one? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| This was a one-woman performance. | ||
| And I forgot who it was. | ||
| Was it not Agnes Moorhead? | ||
| One of these women of that era. | ||
| It'll come to me in a minute. | ||
| And she's living alone in a farmhouse. | ||
| No electricity. | ||
| She's got a farm. | ||
| And she's alone. | ||
| And some alien spacecraft lands on her roof. | ||
| And it's got these devices. | ||
| It's got these saws and lasers cutting through things. | ||
| And she's freaking out. | ||
| She's got the pan and the pots and the rolling pin. | ||
| And then she gets the shotgun. | ||
| And she's attacking this thing. | ||
| And you don't know what it is. | ||
| And it's got lights and a thing. | ||
| And it's this tiny little thing. | ||
| It's like three inches across. | ||
| And it turns out that's the thing that's attacking her. | ||
| And then she finally comes. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| See the little robot? | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And... | ||
| And then... | ||
| I gotta give it away. | ||
| The show is 40 years old. | ||
| I can give the punchline. | ||
| So she actually successfully damages the thing. | ||
| And then you zoom in on it. | ||
| And then you hear a radio transmission from the aliens that are inside. | ||
| And it says, yeah, hello, hello, Houston, there's a giant who's trying to attack us. | ||
| We need help! | ||
| Send backups! | ||
| Oh, it was great. | ||
| We were the invaders. | ||
| That was us. | ||
|
unidentified
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Landing on her home on some other planet or some parallel earth from some other dimension. | |
| It's just this small are we know no no no Okay, I get it. | ||
| So she's what's another planet? | ||
| She's the she's the giant where they're saying there's a giant attacking us, but the whole show you have her point of view these aliens are trying to hurt her when they're just it was our space probe just trying to explore its environment But isn't it possible that it's like another dimension? | ||
| It's us in another dimension and they are landing on Earth? | ||
| Except they were speaking English. | ||
| But couldn't they have just parallel evolution? | ||
| Well, isn't that the definition of infinity? | ||
| That somewhere, if there is really an infinity, there is not only a you and an I, but there's a you and an I and everybody else we've ever met and all the exact events and the exact same order have gone down an infinite number of times, including this conversation. | ||
| Okay, except. | ||
| Except. | ||
| There is... | ||
| I don't know how many people know this, but often it's mind-blowing when you learn that some infinities are bigger than others. | ||
| Joe Rogan just leaned two feet away from the microphone. | ||
| Not all infinities are the same size. | ||
| But if it's infinity, then it's infinity. | ||
| It's infinity. | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| Don't you remember when you were a kid? | ||
| What's the biggest number you know? | ||
| A million. | ||
| Well, there's a million and one. | ||
| Okay, how about a billion? | ||
| Well, there's a billion and one. | ||
| The annoying kid always added one to it. | ||
| Okay, how about infinity? | ||
| Well, infinity and one. | ||
| Okay, well, it turns out infinity and one and infinity are the same number. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So, for example... | ||
| The number of counting numbers, so 1, 2, 3, up to infinity, okay? | ||
| Right. | ||
| The numbers you would use to count things, that's infinite. | ||
| The number of irrational numbers, so the numbers that you cannot represent as a fraction, okay? | ||
| There are more of those than there are counting numbers. | ||
| By far. | ||
| So these are orders of infinity. | ||
| Then there are more transcendental numbers than there are irrational numbers. | ||
| What's a transcendental number? | ||
| So that's a number that you'll never find as a solution to an algebraic equation. | ||
| So pi is a transcendental number, e is a transcendental number. | ||
| These are magic numbers that show up in mathematics. | ||
| And there's turns out there's like an even bigger infinity of those Than there is of these other two classes of numbers. | ||
| And they use the Hebrew letter Aleph in ranking. | ||
| So Aleph 1, Aleph 2, Aleph 3, Aleph 4. I think there are five levels of infinity. | ||
| So my point is, just because there's infinite universes to me doesn't mean there's infinite conversations that have happened. | ||
| And I'd want to really explore the depths of infinities before I say and agree with you that this conversation has happened a million, you know, an infinite number of times in just this way, except you have a different engineer sitting next to us. | ||
| And an infinite number of times where it's been Jamie, too, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In principle, I mean, that's the argument that's given. | ||
| But I think that there's some nested infinities in there that deserve some explanation. | ||
| My feeble brain is not handling this well. | ||
| Well, that's fine. | ||
| You know... | ||
| As I've said, as I say in the epigraph of the book. | ||
| Book that's not available yet, but I have a copy. | ||
| Ha ha! | ||
| Astrophysicist for people in a hurry. | ||
| Astrophysics. | ||
| Physics for people in a hurry. | ||
| But you've got to say it right. | ||
| Not astrophysicist for people in a hurry. | ||
| You come over to their house. | ||
| Hey, what's up? | ||
| Astrophysics. | ||
| For people in a hurry. | ||
| Oh, you got to say it quick. | ||
| You got to say it because you're in a hurry. | ||
| So the epigram on that is the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. | ||
| That's rational. | ||
| That makes sense to me. | ||
| And so it makes sense to you that the universe is under no obligation to make sense. | ||
| So it's okay if your brain hurts when I say there's a ranking of infinities, but you shouldn't say that doesn't make sense, therefore it is not true. | ||
| I definitely wouldn't say that. | ||
| But what confuses me is the word infinity, because I had always taken the word infinity to mean something that has no end. | ||
| So how can something that has no end be larger than something else that has no end? | ||
| So the way they do that mathematically, the way to demonstrate that mathematically is you map one item in the set of this infinity to corresponding items in the set of the other infinity. | ||
| And so you do this. | ||
| So you take the one and you map it to the first transcendental number. | ||
| You take the two to the second. | ||
| You just keep doing this. | ||
| And when you do that mathematically, you find that one infinity outstrips the other infinity. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| And then you're left with more numbers. | ||
| So that shows you that you have a bigger infinity. | ||
| Now, when you find... | ||
| I mean, there's a new NASA announcement that's supposed to... | ||
| Is it Monday that's supposed to be announced? | ||
| Or tomorrow? | ||
| Is it tomorrow? | ||
| The exoplanet announcement. | ||
| Yeah, it's a Wednesday. | ||
| Yeah, so it's Wednesday. | ||
| I don't have a secret... | ||
| I'm not authorized to. | ||
| If you did have juicy details, is there a time? | ||
| Let me invent some juicy details that it could be. | ||
| So NASA... He's been good at segueing lately. | ||
| I'm just jumping into questions. | ||
| He's just jumping. | ||
| I know I only have you for a short amount of time before you've got to get that red eye. | ||
| Yeah, I'm flying back to... | ||
| Thanks for fitting this in, Joe. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Anytime. | ||
| I would open this place up at 3 in the morning for you. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| I feel the love, so thank you. | ||
| So... | ||
| Here's some things it could be, because NASA is saying that it's a stunning new announcement. | ||
| Well, what could be more than the fact that we already know that there are Earth-like planets orbiting in the Goldilocks zone of the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri? | ||
| Can you do better than that for me, NASA? I don't think so, unless you've got some extra stuff you're going to tell us, like What's been a cottage industry in the last couple of years is the observation of planet atmospheres as the planet passes in front of the host star. | ||
| Light from the host star passes through the atmosphere and the light signature is altered by the chemistry of the atmosphere. | ||
| So depending on what the chemicals are, it'll influence the spectrum that you get. | ||
| And when you do that, you can say what the chemical composition of the atmosphere of that star is. | ||
| There's certain There's certain combinations of elements that we would call biomarkers. | ||
| No, we can't look down to the surface of the planet and look at cities, if there are any. | ||
| But there are consequences in the atmosphere to there being life on the surface. | ||
| Such as, is there oxygen there? | ||
| I used to think when I was watching Star Trek when I was a kid, because I saw it in real time, that's how old I am, when it first came out, original series. | ||
| Star Trek characters never wore spacesuits. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You ever wonder? | ||
| I mean, you ever thought about that? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| What happens is they visit planets that have nitrogen, oxygen, atmosphere, Jim. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, that's what our atmosphere is. | ||
| So they find planets with nitrogen, oxygen. | ||
| They go down. | ||
| They don't need a space suit. | ||
| So they've actually thought about that, and that's their solution. | ||
| So that must mean there'd be planets that you could find. | ||
| Well, here's the thing. | ||
| We have oxygen on Earth only because of There is life on Earth. | ||
| Not any kind of life. | ||
| Photosynthesizing life. | ||
| We have life that takes sunlight Turns it into chemical energy into itself, into wood, into plants. | ||
| And one of its byproducts is oxygen. | ||
| Oxygen is chemically active. | ||
| If you took away all plants tomorrow, that oxygen would slowly get absorbed chemically into the environment. | ||
| And then you would not have oxygen there to be viewed by aliens trying to see if we have life here. | ||
| And it's pretty surprising to people to note that we're mostly nitrogen in our air. | ||
| Oh, yeah, we're 78% nitrogen in our atmosphere. | ||
| You know what happens if you have too much oxygen? | ||
| If you have, like, let's say 50% oxygen or more. | ||
| You get really high, right? | ||
| Isn't that part of it? | ||
| No, what happens is, like, a forest fire would never go out. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, because oxygen feeds combustion, and so you could basically burn all vegetation in the world if the oxygen went above certain thresholds. | ||
| So you need it high enough so that you can still have oxygen metabolism, but not so high that it's bad for lightning-triggered forest fires. | ||
| So if they see that... | ||
| I don't know the announcement, but I'm just guessing here, because it's been a cottage industry the last couple of years. | ||
| Let's find these biomarkers. | ||
| Do you have unstable chemistry going on in that atmosphere? | ||
| Because if you do, it means something's generating it. | ||
| And certain combinations of chemistry tells you there's likely to be life of some kind. | ||
| Now, just a couple decades ago, we had speculation of other planets, but we really didn't have any tangible proof. | ||
| In fact, anytime I give a public talk, you can do this in your gigs. | ||
| Ask who here is born since 1995, okay? | ||
| And your audience leans young, so there'll be some fraction of the audience that'll raise their hand. | ||
| And so what I do is I knight them as Generation Exoplanet. | ||
| Because 1995 was the first year that a planet outside of our own solar system was discovered. | ||
| So they have been alive only during a time where we've known of other star systems. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| Generation exoplanet. | ||
| I want to start that movement. | ||
| It's so crazy. | ||
| That's so recent. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I was living out here. | ||
| Yeah, it's 24 years ago. | ||
| 22 years ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| If you stop and think about it, what a short period of time that is. | ||
| And in that period of time, we've discovered... | ||
| There's like rising through 3,000 exoplanets. | ||
| This is the advance of tech. | ||
| That's not just science advance. | ||
| That's engineering and technology and telescope quality and imaging quality. | ||
| And there's a lot that goes on to the advance of science. | ||
| It's not just how clever you are in an Einsteinian way. | ||
| It's, do you know good engineers to build a device to make the measurement? | ||
| This is how we discovered gravity waves. | ||
| What's your take on that planet that's supposed to be outside the Kuiper Belt? | ||
| Planet Nine. | ||
| All the data look convincing. | ||
| So what they've done is they've looked at other objects in the Kuiper Belt. | ||
| These are colleagues of mine at Caltech. | ||
| So it's Mike Brown. | ||
| I get blamed for killing Pluto, but I was an accessory for sure, but I definitely didn't kill Pluto. | ||
| That dude killed Pluto. | ||
| He found another object that was basically the size of Pluto out there. | ||
| So either you make that a planet... | ||
| Well, you demote Pluto. | ||
| And how much smaller is Pluto than, let's say, our moon? | ||
| Oh, so don't get me started. | ||
| Our moon has five times the mass of Pluto. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So Pluto was lame from the beginning. | ||
| We thought it was big. | ||
| We wanted it to be big. | ||
| We made it one of us, one of the nine, and its size didn't settle out until the late 1970s, where we had better and better, more accurate ways to measure its size, and that's when we learned. | ||
| It's small even compared to our own But, granted, we have a big moon, but if you're not going to think our moon is a planet, you're certainly not going to think that Pluto is a planet. | ||
| So this object, let me just tell you how they did it. | ||
| So they found these other objects out there, the same team, Constantine Batingen and Mike Brown, both at Caltech. | ||
| And they found these objects in the outer, the Kuiper belt, of icy bodies, of which Pluto is a member. | ||
| You track their motion. | ||
| And you say, okay, if I add up all the gravity that's affecting them, they should move this way. | ||
| But they don't. | ||
| They move another way, a different way. | ||
| So either Newton's laws of gravity are failing in the outer solar system, or there's some object out there whose gravity you have yet to reconcile with the motions of these objects. | ||
| So they said, let's assume Newton is right. | ||
| What object do we have to put out there, at what distance and at what size, to influence the movement of these Kuiper Belt objects in the way we see it? | ||
| And did they do this through Bode's law? | ||
| No, no, we're way past. | ||
| Thanks for remembering Bode's Law, but Bode's Law was an early measure of where you might find a new planet. | ||
| And it was based on mass and gravity? | ||
| No, no, Bode's Law was a simple arithmetic tool. | ||
| All it did was basically double the distance with a certain additive parameter. | ||
| Double the distance of known planets? | ||
| So for example, and there's a factor in there that helped the inner planets come out right. | ||
| But let's look at Mars. | ||
| Mars is like two and a half times Earth's distance from the Sun. | ||
| What comes after Mars? | ||
| Jupiter. | ||
| Jupiter is five times Earth's distance. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| Saturn is ten times. | ||
| So it went from two and a half to five to ten. | ||
| So Bode's Law is just a simple arithmetic scheme. | ||
| It's not based in any known physics. | ||
| And it was only based on the solar system itself. | ||
| On the solar system itself. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And it worked, and you have to fudge your way to get Mercury to work in that. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| And it didn't have Pluto. | ||
| Of course, Pluto wasn't a planet anyway. | ||
| But anyhow, it was a... | ||
| It was a fudgy way that was mostly right by accident. | ||
| And this was in, like, what year was this? | ||
| Oh, that was 1800s, basically. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah, so now we have advanced computer programming, very high precision modeling, and they're saying there's got to be a planet somewhere here in this arc. | ||
| Of the sky, let's look for it. | ||
| Because we think that's what's affecting the orbits of these other objects. | ||
| And that is a completely noble way to discover a planet. | ||
| That's how Neptune was discovered. | ||
| Everyone looked at the orbit of Uranus and said, you know, Uranus is not following Newton's laws. | ||
| Maybe Newton's laws don't work that far out. | ||
| It's never been tested that far. | ||
| And they say, well, let's assume it works and ask what would have to influence it. | ||
| And by the way, it's a difficult mathematical calculation because you're not saying, here's the object, what's the gravity field? | ||
| You're saying, here's the gravity field I need. | ||
| Where must the object be and how massive must it be? | ||
| That's a much harder mathematical problem to solve. | ||
| And so once the errant orbit of Uranus was known and calculated, they started looking for another planet, and that's how they discovered planet Neptune. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| So now, when they're looking at this Planet Nine... | ||
| I hope I said that right. | ||
| It was the movement of Uranus's orbit was not following proper laws. | ||
| And they inferred the presence of Neptune. | ||
| They said, look here, tomorrow night. | ||
| And they looked there, and they found it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yes, it was a brilliant display. | ||
| And no, we're going back to the 19th century. | ||
| So, I mean, people were badass. | ||
| Every generation's got their badass scientists. | ||
| Now, how much further out from the known solar system is this unknown planet supposed to be? | ||
| So, I'm not quick to call it Planet Nine, because... | ||
| So far out there? | ||
| It's 20,000 times farther away from the sun than the Earth is. | ||
| So, I'm not... | ||
| Sorry, you're not in the family. | ||
| You're not in the neighborhood. | ||
| No, you're not in the hood. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Sorry, I'm not feeling it. | ||
| It's like calling Connecticut New York City. | ||
| I'm not feeling it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not feeling it. | |
| But it's something massive, right? | ||
| It's like six times the mass of the Earth? | ||
| Yeah, I forgot what mass they were assigning it, but if that were in our solar system, there'd be no question you would label it as a planet. | ||
| And it wasn't their one-time speculation that it was some sort of a burnt-out star that existed? | ||
| No, not at that mass. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Too small? | ||
| No, you might be thinking, if that's what I think you're thinking, you've got good memory. | ||
| Long ago, in a galaxy far away, so I'm talking about the 1970s, people looked at the extinction record on Earth. | ||
| And every 20,000 years, they found a little blip, a little dip in the fossil record where we lost some species. | ||
| And people were wondering why. | ||
| Could there have been some flux of comets raining down periodically on the Earth, wreaking havoc on the ecosystem, rendering species extinct in these periodic intervals? | ||
| If there is, maybe there's some double star to the Sun. | ||
| Right, binary star system. | ||
| Some binary star system. | ||
| So they invoked it, and they called it, they gave it a name. | ||
| They gave it a name. | ||
| And so you know what period, orbital period, that object must have. | ||
| It's got to match the extinction period. | ||
| Periodicity. | ||
| And so it's got to be a 20,000-year period. | ||
| But people looked for it. | ||
| They couldn't find it. | ||
| And then you reanalyze the extinction records, and you had to fudge it to make it look like it was periodic. | ||
| So basically, we've abandoned the idea of Nemesis. | ||
| And aren't binary star systems really common? | ||
| Yeah, more than half the stars you see in the night sky are binary or multiple systems. | ||
| In fact, the iconic image from Star Wars, the original Star Wars movie, before they numbered them, I think, Star Wars 4. Tatooine, right? | ||
| Is that where they were? | ||
| Well, yeah, whatever that desert planet that Luke was on. | ||
| And he comes out after visiting his, what is his step-parent? | ||
| No, his... | ||
| Adoptive parents. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't remember. | |
| Whoever he was visiting, he comes out and you see a double sunset. | ||
| So that's basically the only accurate science in the entire series. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| Star Wars series. | ||
| That was another thing I really enjoyed, is you're taking a part of Gravity, the movie Gravity, and how many people got mad at you for that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The movie. | |
| Yeah, you know, so I stopped commenting on movies. | ||
| I don't need to... | ||
| Piss people off? | ||
| When I watch a movie, I'm having those thoughts anyway. | ||
| So I might as well share them with people if you're interested. | ||
| So I did just that. | ||
| And then people, the last time I did it was for Star Wars, The Force Awakens, Star Wars 7. I had a series of tweets. | ||
| You know, one of them was, BB-8, a smooth, rolling, metal, spherical ball, would have skidded uncontrollably on sand. | ||
| People got angry. | ||
| Someone tweeted back, shut the fuck up, okay? | ||
| So I said, okay, I'm not here to get people angry. | ||
| I'm just here to enlighten, to help people enhance their moviegoing experience. | ||
| But to the extent that it is not accomplishing this, I don't need to do it. | ||
| I'm just saying. | ||
| I'm an educator. | ||
| I thought I was being nice. | ||
| I don't need to do this. | ||
| I haven't tweeted about a movie since then. | ||
| Don't let them stop you. | ||
| I have tweets I could post about Arrival. | ||
| Please do. | ||
| I didn't watch that. | ||
| I watched a little bit of it, but I shut it off. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| No, you've got to give it a chance. | ||
| As soon as I see a movie that starts out, spoiler alert, starts out with a sick kid, I'm like, fuck you. | ||
| I know what you're doing. | ||
| No, in fact, it's very not about the kid. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| That's what I keep hearing. | ||
| It's totally not about the kid. | ||
| Jamie hated it. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, you just give it a chance. | ||
| But anyhow, so I just stopped. | ||
| Maybe I'll come back, but I'm... | ||
| Do it! | ||
| People need to know. | ||
| Gravity. | ||
| That was good that you explained that not only is this not plausible, those two satellites aren't anywhere near each other. | ||
| Oh my gosh, there they were said, oh, there's the International Space Station and I'm on the Chinese Space Station. | ||
| Let me just jetpack my way there. | ||
| Do you realize? | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| Lady, do you... | ||
| Hey, lady! | ||
| Do you know how far away these are from one another? | ||
| You can just jet around from one space station to another. | ||
| No! | ||
| Can't do it. | ||
| They're tens of thousands of miles from one another. | ||
| For goodness sake. | ||
| So, but anyhow. | ||
| So, yeah, you remember these tweets. | ||
| Please keep doing it. | ||
| It was like 15 tweets. | ||
| And I didn't know. | ||
| That was when I realized. | ||
| Like, the press was reading my movie tweets. | ||
| And those tweets... | ||
| Now, a couple years ago, when Gravity came out, Sandra Bullock and... | ||
| What's the dude's name? | ||
| George Clooney. | ||
| So I tweeted it and they got talked about on the Today Show, the weekend Today Show on NBC. Then it was talked about on NBC Nightly News. | ||
| Then my tweets were talked about on Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update. | ||
| It was the NBC trifecta. | ||
| And I said, my gosh, that was not the point. | ||
| I didn't seek this. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| I'm glad they are reacting this way, because that means they care about the science, maybe. | ||
| But what Seth Meyers did, because he was doing Weekend Update at the time, he said, That's hilarious. | ||
| I think Sandra Bullock's still younger than George Clooney, though. | ||
| So they should have got their facts right. | ||
| Yeah, but not by much. | ||
| I mean, yeah, they were in the same neighborhood. | ||
| Yes, they were in the neighborhood. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's important. | ||
| I think you enjoy the movie. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It's fun and everything like that. | ||
| But it's important to point out what the science errors are. | ||
| I think... | ||
| I think the movie could have done better, honestly. | ||
| I think they could have made the same movie with correct science. | ||
| By the way, I did like the movie. | ||
| People thought I didn't like the movie when all I was doing was pointing out things they got wrong. | ||
| By the way, they did some stunning things correctly. | ||
| For example, this is brilliant. | ||
| If you're in zero G, a fire basically puts itself out. | ||
| So think about it. | ||
| When you burn a candle on Earth, so you light the wick. | ||
| Does people have candles anymore? | ||
| They forgot what a candle is. | ||
| You light it with a match that you used to get from smoking lounges at bars. | ||
| Alright, so you light the candle and it stays lit. | ||
| The fuel is the wax. | ||
| The oxygen continually comes in because it heats the air around it and the air rises. | ||
| Hot air rises. | ||
| And fresh air comes in from below and has fresh oxygen. | ||
| So the candle will stay lit until it burns all the way down. | ||
| In space, if you light a candle, you can light the candle. | ||
| It'll heat the air, but the air will not know where to go. | ||
| Because it's not lighter than everything because it's in zero G. It'll stay clustered around the candle. | ||
| The candle will use up all the oxygen in that bubble, and then it'll put itself out. | ||
| They did this in the movie. | ||
| So why do they have some good science? | ||
| Because you can't think of everything. | ||
| Why don't they just have you on staff? | ||
| Bring you in. | ||
| What's wrong with that shitty movie? | ||
| So you can't think of everything. | ||
| So I wasn't judgmental so much as this movie. | ||
| The fact that it got so much right is what put it on my map to criticize what it got wrong. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes! | |
| Like the hair. | ||
| It earned the right. | ||
| Oh, the hair. | ||
| Her bangs should have been floating. | ||
| Floating all over the place. | ||
| Now, if you might think, am I nitpicky? | ||
| No. | ||
| Because if you look at any picture of somebody with hair, okay? | ||
| In space, in zero-G, their hair is flying everywhere. | ||
| It's the first thing you notice about them. | ||
| It is so obvious, like, wow, that's the cool... | ||
| You're not thinking about the spaceship or the TIE technology. | ||
| You're looking at the hair doing stuff you will never see happen on Earth, unless someone is, like, underwater and they're jiggling their head. | ||
| So they would have to film it all in Zero Gravity. | ||
| They would have to film it all in one of those drop things. | ||
| Yeah, or the drop thing. | ||
| They'd have to be clever about it. | ||
| And she only had bangs. | ||
| That's all you had to figure out. | ||
| They did other clever things. | ||
| So anyway, that's all I did. | ||
| By the way, in all fairness to movies, I'll call out something that's good. | ||
| A science that a movie got right that otherwise got no science right. | ||
| I'm the first in line to do that. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| Oh, in the movie Monsters, Inc.? | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| You didn't think I was going there, did you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Those doors were four-dimensional portals to another... | ||
| That's possible? | ||
| Well, if you had four dimensions, that's what it would look like. | ||
| Do you remember the movie? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They take the doors home. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They open the door, and they're in the closet of the kid that they're going to terrorize. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's a wormhole. | ||
| That is what access to the fourth dimension looks like. | ||
| Do you think, scientifically, that's possible one day? | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| Because here's the example. | ||
| We've got a nice broad desk here at this interview, right? | ||
| So, desk is two dimensions. | ||
| It's got length and width. | ||
| And I can start putting papers on this desk, and I can lay them out mosaic style. | ||
| And then, all of a sudden, I have no more room to put a sheet of paper. | ||
| If I'm an ant living in this surface of the desk, I say, no more room. | ||
| But wait a minute, we are three-dimensional people, and I can put an organizer and stack things vertically. | ||
| So I can take a sheet of paper, and now I can put it higher up than the surface of the desk. | ||
| The ant will say, where did it go? | ||
| Oh my gosh, it disappeared in some portal! | ||
| No, no, what is that? | ||
| It went into the third dimension, and the ant, bound to, it obviously is a three-dimensional thing, Imagine it only lives in two dimensions. | ||
| You would have made that paper disappear into a third dimension. | ||
| And it will have no clue where it went. | ||
| Because you had a portal. | ||
| You had access to that extra dimension. | ||
| So, look at how much you can store on a desk when you have access to a third dimension above it. | ||
| Vastly more than just papers mosaicked out on the surface. | ||
| So now let's up this example by a dimension. | ||
| You're storing boxes in a room. | ||
| Oh, I ran out of room. | ||
| No, you didn't. | ||
| Let's open this four-dimensional door. | ||
| You open it, put the boxes through the door, close the door. | ||
| Box is gone. | ||
| That'd be awesome for hoarders. | ||
| You look around the other side of the door, there's nothing there. | ||
| Your side of the door, nothing there. | ||
| It's just a door. | ||
| That is a portal to a fourth dimension that can hold vastly more content than what you're stuck storing in the three-dimensional space of your room. | ||
| So that's a brilliant concept. | ||
| And even though it has monsters that don't exist, that all speak English, and one of them is a cyclops, and one of them is a, you know, I'm not judging the biophysiology of these creatures, but they got the physics of four-dimensional portals completely accurate. | ||
| Now the concept of dimensions is where it gets really abstract with people. | ||
| I love me some dimensions. | ||
| And it is abstract. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And that's why you let the math take you into those higher dimensions. | ||
| Because our intuition will fail for us. | ||
| Right, but that's where it gets weird when you say take the math, or let the math take you. | ||
| So like when quantum physicists use these legal notepads, those yellow pads, and write all that crazy stuff down that nobody but you and maybe them understand, and when you look at all those equations... | ||
| No, it's them, maybe me, not me, maybe then. | ||
| You probably understand it, right? | ||
| But I definitely don't. | ||
| My point is, what are they exactly figuring out that allows them to say there are... | ||
| I think they say... | ||
| At one point in time it was 11, but I think they've expanded that, right? | ||
| What are they saying now? | ||
| I don't have the latest dimension count on the universe, but what... | ||
| The way it works is you're trying to make sense of the world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so you take some leaps, some philosophical leaps, some mathematical leaps. | ||
| You say, all right, maybe all particles that manifest as an electron, a proton, a neutron, maybe quarks, maybe they're just strings of energy vibrating at different frequencies. | ||
| And we sense these different frequencies as different particles. | ||
| Let's just go there for a minute. | ||
| Well, if you're going to do that, what are the consequences to it? | ||
| And how many dimensions do these vibrating strings require to have the properties that we see in our dimensionality? | ||
| So the exercise of explaining what you see takes you to places that you've never been before. | ||
| And that's fine. | ||
| Intellectual places that have been previously unplumbed. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with that. | ||
| We've done that before. | ||
| That's why we know what is happening in the center of the sun. | ||
| Have we ever been there? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| But we know how matter behaves under pressure and temperature. | ||
| We can do that in a laboratory. | ||
| We've got a sun sitting out there with a surface temperature, a mass, a certain luminosity. | ||
| And we say, what must be going on down in the core? | ||
| Let's bring our best physics, our quantum physics, our chemistry, our nuclear physics, bring it all together, and we have a complete understanding of what's going on in the center of the sun, and we're on to other problems now, even though we've never visited there. | ||
| So when they're going over the mathematics, observable things that we have right now are at the atomic and subatomic level. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| You can't see. | ||
| Do you realize the electron? | ||
| I did a whole series of this. | ||
| There's something called the Great Courses Lecture Series. | ||
| Oh yeah, it was a sponsor of this podcast for a while. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Okay, great courses. | ||
| So, cool. | ||
| So, I was once invited to be one of their professors for the great courses. | ||
| And I taught a very short, most of them are like 30 lectures. | ||
| It's like a whole college semester. | ||
| So, and I don't have the time, the energy, so they let me do like short bits. | ||
| So one of them was only six parts, and it's called The Inexplicable Universe. | ||
| And it's six parts of everything about which we know nothing in this universe. | ||
| And you might say, well, that's a pretty easy course to give. | ||
| Dark matter? | ||
| Having a clue, okay? | ||
| On to the next lecture. | ||
| It might be something. | ||
| Dark matter? | ||
| Yeah, could be something. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| Stay tuned. | ||
| But it's interesting to learn how we come to know what we don't know. | ||
| And so it's an exploration of our ignorance. | ||
| And I'm very proud of it, because it's not what you'd normally find in a lecture series. | ||
| And it's still out there. | ||
| But one of the things I will tell you, and I'll tell you now, the electron has no known dimension. | ||
| It is smaller than the smallest we have ever had the capacity to measure. | ||
| So as far as we are concerned, it is infinitely small. | ||
| We have no way to even know how to measure. | ||
| By the way, how do you measure something small? | ||
| You get something smaller and find out how many of those it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my head. | |
| My stupid head. | ||
| No, think about the challenges at each extreme. | ||
| Ask me, how big is the universe? | ||
| And I'll say, it's as big as, well, I got nothing. | ||
| What am I going to say? | ||
| Right? | ||
| There's nothing as big as the universe. | ||
| So, at the biggest end and at the littlest end, there's not something else. | ||
| It doesn't work as well, okay? | ||
| To try to say what it is relative to something else. | ||
| Do you entertain the possibility that the biggest end and the littlest end are the same thing? | ||
| Meaning that at the smallest measurable point, that literally might be a whole other universe? | ||
| That might be fractal? | ||
| It's fun to think about. | ||
| You mean, all the way down? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's fun to think about. | ||
| Like infinitely down. | ||
| However, and people, by the way, in the 1920s, when we discovered the atom and its structure and that there's an electron in, quote, orbit around a nucleus, everyone said, wait, we've been there before. | ||
| We've got planets orbiting the sun. | ||
| And so this, so maybe it's a mini solar system. | ||
| Maybe it's solar systems all the way down. | ||
| I'm glad you brought this up. | ||
| I'm glad we brought this up because I wanted to bring this question that I almost forgot. | ||
| There's a photograph of a brain cell and side-by-side with a photograph of the known universe, and they look eerily similar. | ||
| So you're talking about the large-scale structure of the universe where there's clumping of galaxies. | ||
| So I'll get to that in a minute. | ||
| Pull that up, Jamie. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I'll get to that. | ||
| Do you ever tell him just pull up his own damn images? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, but I can't put it on the TV, so he has to do it. | |
| So here's why that's not likely. | ||
| It was an entertained idea, but here's why it's not likely. | ||
| The manifestation of the laws of physics are different at the atomic scale than they are at the macroscopic scale. | ||
| They're just simply different. | ||
| A planet can take any orbit sensible for its velocity around a host star. | ||
| An electron cannot. | ||
| Its energy levels are predetermined and quantized. | ||
| Hence the word quantum, the prefix quanta in quantum physics. | ||
| So if it was a continuum of matter and energy following the same laws of physics, Then I would say then it's solar systems all the way down. | ||
| But the rules completely change. | ||
| And so things can, on the surface, seem similar, but when it comes time to understand them and to analyze them and to manipulate them and to exploit their conduct and their behavior for other means, as we have done with atoms and molecules for the entire IT revolution, No longer are they the same, and you abandon this romanticized concept. | ||
| So now, with the neurons, the network of neurons, and the clusters of galaxies and galaxy superclusters, that would be on the right, neurons on the left. | ||
| That's so eerie. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So, yeah, they can look the same, but they are operating under completely different laws of physics. | ||
| So, in other words, the laws of physics that dictate what's going on in brain cells have no relationship to what's going on in the universe. | ||
| Brain cells, you're undergoing, we can tell you what forces are operating. | ||
| It's electromagnetic forces. | ||
| Brain cells use electrical impulses, chemical impulses. | ||
| This is why drugs can affect the brain. | ||
| Alright? | ||
| There's chemistry going on in the brain in its natural state. | ||
| You disrupt that, enhance it. | ||
| You just put down some chemistry in your stomach that's now affecting your brain. | ||
| What'd you just drink there? | ||
| What was it? | ||
| Alpha Brain. | ||
| So you're entering the chemistry. | ||
| So it's chemistry. | ||
| What's going on on the large-scale structure of the universe is not chemistry. | ||
| There's some chemistry deep within, but the chemistry is not what's making that pattern. | ||
| And because of that, it becomes an artistic curiosity, not something that has any kind of deep scientific insight. | ||
| So it's just a fascinating similarity. | ||
| Yes, it's a fascinating similarity. | ||
| Put them up together and it's fun to think about it. | ||
| It's fun to think about it artistically, but not scientifically, no. | ||
| It's great if you're hanging out with your friends going, wow, man. | ||
| It depends on how high you are. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But now, when you're looking at subatomic particles, and you're looking at these, like, when they observe particles in superposition, where they're moving and stationary at the same time, where they blink in and out of existence, like, when you get down to that... | ||
| And I repeat the opening page of the book. | ||
| The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh yeah, for sure. | |
| It definitely doesn't. | ||
| So at that scale, things that go on with atoms and molecules fall outside of your life experience. | ||
| You don't hang out at the bar with protons, nucleons or other nucleons or molecules. | ||
| You just don't. | ||
| So what they do in their day It's completely foreign to you. | ||
| So now you shrink down to that size, and particles are popping in and out of existence. | ||
| They become conjoined, quantum mechanically conjoined, and it's completely weird, and you would say, none of this makes sense. | ||
| And this is observable in a visual sense? | ||
| Well, it depends, depending on how big the phenomena is. | ||
| Otherwise, you can see other things that would happen That you know that are the manifestations of that happening. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So an electron is smaller even than that? | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| By how many factors? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| We don't even know. | ||
| We don't know how small an electron is. | ||
| We've never measured the size of an electron. | ||
| The concept of superstring theory. | ||
| So these vibrating strings are smaller than that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The strings would have to be smaller, thinner, smaller than the electron itself. | ||
| By many, many... | ||
| That I couldn't quantify for you. | ||
| I've got to bring in a string theory person. | ||
| So it's like... | ||
| At the bottom of what we can observe. | ||
| Well, that's a great question. | ||
| What is the bottom? | ||
| And you know the word Adam, which was introduced by the Greeks, you know what Adam means in Greek? | ||
| It has a translation, you know what it means? | ||
| Indivisible. | ||
| So they imagined that all matter was you'd come down to something that was indivisible. | ||
| How the hell did they figure that out? | ||
| No, they didn't figure it out. | ||
| They supposed it. | ||
| But it's amazing that they were right. | ||
| Because at first they were wealthy and had free time. | ||
| And when they weren't waging war, you could think. | ||
| And what we think of as philosophy is traceable to a lot of what they were doing back then. | ||
| And the origins of what science is are traceable to back then. | ||
| You have an idea that applies to what the universe does that enables you to predict future behavior. | ||
| That is science. | ||
| And so the atom, it turned out, is divisible. | ||
| It's divisible into subatomic, subatom particles. | ||
| So you get electrons, protons, neutrons, and a whole host of other particles less familiar. | ||
| There are neutrinos and other things. | ||
| Then it turns out protons and neutrons are further divisible. | ||
| You get quarks out of those. | ||
| And as far as we know, there are only four fundamental particles in the universe, and The photon, which is light. | ||
| The electron, of which there are several species. | ||
| There's the anti-electron and this and this. | ||
| But just stay simple here. | ||
| The photon, the electron, the quark, and the neutrino. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Everything in the universe that we've ever observed is made out of that stuff. | ||
| So, those are, quote, the atoms of the universe. | ||
| The indivisible parts, if you will. | ||
| Now, this is a good opportunity. | ||
| By the way, dark matter could be made of yet another kind of thing that we don't know yet. | ||
| But we got top people trying to figure out what dark matter is. | ||
| We've measured it out there. | ||
| We just don't know what it is. | ||
| Well, it's something like 90-something percent of the universe itself. | ||
| If you add dark matter and dark energy, it's 95% of all that drives the universe. | ||
| And we can measure the existence of both, yet we have no idea what's driving them. | ||
| This is an awesome opportunity for you to illuminate this often. | ||
| But it's all in Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. | ||
| It's out in May. | ||
| It comes out in May. | ||
| You can pre-order it, which, by the way, publishers love it if you pre-order. | ||
| Isn't it adorable? | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| It's a good size. | ||
| It's adorable. | ||
| You can pre-order it on Amazon? | ||
| The reason why publishers like you to pre-order it is so that they can accurately. | ||
| They don't want to overprint. | ||
| They don't want to underprint. | ||
| So they get a sense of the pre-ordering. | ||
| Because you're not charged until they ship it. | ||
| So it's a pretty harmless exercise. | ||
| While we're on this subject of subatomic particles and weirdness, I wanted to, if you could, illuminate this often misused explanation for the observer effect. | ||
| Because you know the particles, waves, and you watch them, observe them, and it changes the reaction? | ||
| It is heavily misunderstood. | ||
| It's misunderstood because people want to attribute it to magic, the magic of the mind and the consciousness looking at it. | ||
| But isn't it, in fact, just measuring it? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Please explain. | ||
| Next question. | ||
| Explain to people because I'm so tired of talking to hippies. | ||
| Joe, you're good. | ||
| It just drives me nuts. | ||
| You gotta carry your people with you. | ||
| I try. | ||
| Where are they coming from? | ||
| Where are you pulling? | ||
| What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Where are you getting your people? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, I don't own them for sure. | ||
| You don't own them, okay. | ||
| So they're definitely not my people. | ||
| They vary greatly. | ||
| You can't even loop them together. | ||
| I know. | ||
| You have an admirably diverse following and that not many people can claim that. | ||
| And it's probably because of your diverse profile, right? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Well, I'm as open-minded as I can be. | ||
| But on top of that, you're smart, and you read, and you're thoughtful, and you're also, on some level, respectful. | ||
| You'll hear somebody out, and you got your MMA thing. | ||
| So, no, you're in a lot of places, in a lot of spaces, and that's a good thing. | ||
| I mean, we need more unity in this world. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So, please explain what people are getting wrong. | ||
| They're very simplistic. | ||
| It's much simpler than you think. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right, you ready? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So, I'm looking at you. | ||
| The only reason why I can see you is because there's light reflecting off of your face, your body, into my eyes. | ||
| So there's light. | ||
| Oh, by the way, these are stars. | ||
| That's beautiful. | ||
| Yeah, those are Hubble photographs. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| Yeah, those are images from the Hubble. | ||
| I didn't notice that when I walked in. | ||
| They're sheets that you put over the fluorescent light cover. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very nice. | |
| And so when we look up, we actually see the real images from the Hubble. | ||
| So you're pretending it's the night sky. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah! | |
| Well, it doesn't look as cool as it could be. | ||
| And you're not in a completely cavernous recording studio. | ||
| Well, what I want to do in the future studio, I want to actually build a glass ceiling and have a full-scale image, high-resolution image of the stars. | ||
| So, a planetarium. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You're describing a planetarium. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Call it that. | ||
| It's a planetarium. | ||
| Well, something like that. | ||
| But I just wanted an image. | ||
| Is there a way to do it? | ||
| Tell me how to do it. | ||
| I'll do it. | ||
| No, do better than that. | ||
| You get a curved version of those very high-resolution LED screens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Curved? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you put any image up there you want. | ||
| And then it's the night sky tonight. | ||
| It's what the sky looks like from Alpha Centauri. | ||
| Oh, so like when you go to see one of those star shows at a planetarium and they show it on the ceiling above you. | ||
| Well, yes, but nowadays, the ceiling itself is the source of light. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's not projected from something else. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So then you just feed that with image data, and then it becomes whatever you want. | ||
| Can you hook me up with someone who knows how to do that? | ||
| Yeah, I can totally. | ||
| Oh, I'm excited! | ||
| Yeah, you don't know people? | ||
| I got people. | ||
| Well, I mean, people that do planetariums. | ||
| You need my people? | ||
| You need my people for something? | ||
| Well, you know the real people. | ||
| I thought you had people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But you know the people at the top that would teach the people. | |
| So we'll go with them. | ||
| Okay, so here it is. | ||
| I'm looking at you, all right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And... | ||
| I see you. | ||
| I want to know where you are. | ||
| So I turn on the lights and I say, there you are. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Now, let's make you tinier. | ||
| Let's make you mini-me. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Like in the movie. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So now there's a tiny version of you, a mini-me version of Joe Rogan. | ||
| Now you're little. | ||
| I turn on the lights. | ||
| You're still there. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because if the lights are not on, I can't see you. | ||
| I don't know where you are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's that simple. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| When you start becoming the size of molecules, right on down to the size of an atom, and I ask the question, where is Joe Rogan the atom? | ||
| And I turn on the light. | ||
| To see you there, because I think you're there, the photon comes in, hits your atom, and pops you into another location. | ||
| The very act of trying to measure your position prevents me from measuring your position. | ||
| And it doesn't have jack shit to do with your consciousness or your mind or your eyes or anything. | ||
| It has to do with the fact that to know you're there, some information has to come from you to me. | ||
| Like shining a light on you. | ||
| And the smaller you are, the more susceptible you are to the energy of the light changing your position in space. | ||
| So my question is, how do they know? | ||
| You know what it's like? | ||
| You ever, I don't know if this still happened, a quarter spills out of your pants pocket in the backseat of a car, and it's there in the wedge between the bottom and the backseat. | ||
| And so you try to reach in to get it. | ||
| And the act of reaching for the coin makes the coin move farther away from you. | ||
| The act of reaching for it. | ||
| Right, because you separate the cushions. | ||
| You separate it and it just slides down even further. | ||
| That's not your mind making that happen. | ||
| It's the act of the measurement that is affecting what it is you're trying to measure. | ||
| And this was discovered in quantum physics to the point where that's actually, it's a Heisenberg uncertainty principle. | ||
| It's one of the basic foundations of all of quantum physics. | ||
| And it's profound. | ||
| But when it's described in the woo-woo way, they show these particles going through these slots, and then observing them changes the pattern that they go through with. | ||
| And there's a horrible cartoon that you see in that movie, What in the Bleep? | ||
| I couldn't get through that movie. | ||
| I tried. | ||
| Did you go crazy with the bad science? | ||
| No, can I tell you where I turned to? | ||
| Please. | ||
| Well, here's what people don't know. | ||
| A lot of that is from a cult. | ||
| That I didn't know. | ||
| The woman who is the main woman. | ||
| I don't mind a cult movie. | ||
| She's a channeler. | ||
| She's speaking as a character. | ||
| Do you know that one blonde woman, older blonde woman that's in that movie? | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| When she speaks, she's speaking as a character. | ||
| Okay, I didn't know that. | ||
| She's a part of this very bizarre sort of cult. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Should I tell you where I tuned it out or do you want to finish? | ||
| Please do. | ||
| No, go ahead. | ||
| Okay, so I just couldn't watch it. | ||
| There's a point where they were talking about natives in the Caribbean seeing European ships. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then they said, well, because they'd never seen a ship before, The brain didn't register it as anything, and then it just disappeared. | ||
| Bullshit. | ||
| And I'm thinking, no, that's not how the brain works. | ||
| Excuse me, that's not how this works, okay? | ||
| What would happen? | ||
| They might not know what they're looking at, but they'll know they're looking at something. | ||
| And they've had ships. | ||
| They went from island to island. | ||
| That's how you get from island to island. | ||
| They say, well, that's a really big version of what we're doing. | ||
| We've never seen anything that big before. | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| I don't know where it came from. | ||
| But I want to find out. | ||
| I want to study it. | ||
| I want to protect myself. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| So just because you've never seen it doesn't mean you're not going to register it. | ||
| Excuse me? | ||
| No! | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| No! | ||
| I said, no, I can't waste my... | ||
| I got other things I got to devote my brain energy to instead of this. | ||
| But someone else said, oh, it gets better later on. | ||
| So I said, maybe I'll one day... | ||
| Oh, no, it doesn't. | ||
| It does not. | ||
| It gets more confusing later on, and it does a better job of confusing you as to what science has shown and what they haven't shown. | ||
| Now, by the way, just in all fairness to what they... | ||
| I think the point they were trying to make, there are things that if you don't know to recognize them... | ||
| They would go undiscovered. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| But that doesn't mean you wouldn't see them. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So, for example, let's say you're walking and you didn't know that you were walking over this huge burial mound because the slope was really shallow. | ||
| And you're just walking. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Well, you didn't notice that. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So you need a different way to see it in order to know. | ||
| So from space, from an angle, measure the height, whatever. | ||
| So there are ways to miss things. | ||
| And that happens all the time. | ||
| But if it's something there on the horizon, my gosh! | ||
| This is why we have eyes. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Now, they're not the best data-taking devices, but if there's come time to tell you whether there's a ship or not a ship that you've never seen before, it's a ship. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I mean, there's so much evidence of that when people discover new animals. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| They've never seen things before. | ||
| New anything! | ||
| Anything. | ||
| New anything! | ||
| There's no record of it whatsoever. | ||
| People find it and they can still see it. | ||
| Most scientific discoveries, you discover something we've never seen before. | ||
| Ramtha. | ||
| That was the woman's name. | ||
| That was the person that she was channeling. | ||
| That's a cool channeling name. | ||
| If you had to have a channeling name. | ||
| If I were a channeler, I'd be Ramtho. | ||
| I found that after the movie was done, after I watched it. | ||
| They got me with a lot of things. | ||
| I was like, wow, is that true? | ||
| Is that real? | ||
| And then I started reading. | ||
| Fortunately, that movie came out in the 2000s instead of in the 90s. | ||
| Because if it came out in the 90s, we would have all got duped. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Because we wouldn't have had the internet. | ||
| We wouldn't be able to research all the shit that's wrong with it. | ||
| But in the 2000s, I started researching it. | ||
| And then I would send it to my friends. | ||
| Like, look where the fuck this came from. | ||
| And then you go, oh, that's a cult? | ||
| Yeah, it's a cult. | ||
| The lady's a cult. | ||
| She's talking like she's an alien. | ||
| She's supposed to be an alien, right? | ||
| Isn't that... | ||
| Do you see it in there anywhere? | ||
| Again, I don't mind if people think they're channelers. | ||
| I just don't put them in charge of anything. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| Well, it's not that I mind. | ||
| It's just that you should probably say that when you get going with that thing in the beginning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, in advance. | |
| Yeah, up front. | ||
| Yeah, so I know exactly what I'm getting involved with. | ||
| She's not going to say this is a cult. | ||
| Nobody's ever said that. | ||
| She just calls herself Rampa. | ||
| They think it's real and genuine, and they're very sincere, because they've duped themselves. | ||
| So what you need is some foundation of science literacy so that you can inoculate yourself against those who would exploit Your absence of knowledge of how the science works for their own gain. | ||
| Well, not even for their own gain, just YouTube videos. | ||
| I mean, someone could make a very compelling YouTube video where they get you convinced that, oh my god, dinosaurs aren't real. | ||
| They start playing these things for you, they tell you about the- Or cell phones can pop popcorn. | ||
| You ever see that one? | ||
| Oh, I have seen that one, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you line them sometimes and then they start popping. | ||
| Yeah, you gotta like direct them at the kernels. | ||
| That was a fun one, yeah. | ||
| That can't really happen. | ||
| No, no, of course not. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| Can you imagine if it could? | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| We'd be like, what are we doing with these phones? | ||
| But there's a ton of those out there where people... | ||
| See, it's one of the problems with a lack of dialogue. | ||
| With someone who just has one narrative. | ||
| Like, you sit down, you edit something, and you just talk. | ||
| You know, it's very similar to, like, even if you write a blog. | ||
| I mean, it's one thing if you're writing a blog, like, say, if you're an expert in electronics, you write a blog about how a television works. | ||
| But if you're just a person, and you don't really understand what you're talking about, but you write something, and you use the right words, and you say it in a very compelling way, like an attack piece on someone that really has no basis in reality, you can have someone convinced this person's a terrible person just by writing something. | ||
| Without them having to respond, like, hold up, stop, never did that. | ||
| I tweeted a few weeks ago. | ||
| I'm not going to botch it because it's way better as the tweet than I will ever remember it as the tweet. | ||
| So it was one of the great challenges in life is knowing enough to think you're right, but not enough to know you're wrong. | ||
| Ah, yeah. | ||
| Well, that is a big problem with a lot of people that watch these YouTube videos, right? | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| They say, oh, this is right, oh my gosh, but they don't know enough to know why it's wrong. | ||
| Well, this is what I want to talk to you about. | ||
| What is it about people that there's this very compelling need to find something out that other people don't know, like the world is flat, like dinosaurs aren't real? | ||
| Like, that kind of stuff is very compelling to people. | ||
| So what I do in those cases in the... | ||
| Bigfoot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what I do is I would say, instead of debating them, and some of your listeners are listening to this right now, all I would do is say, what is your best single bit of evidence for what you're claiming? | ||
| And what would it take to show that you're wrong? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Alright, well let's go with a simple one. | ||
| So that's what I would ask. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And I've done this exercise and it doesn't work. | ||
| You know why? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| Because there was a guy who didn't believe we went to the moon. | ||
| We spent a third of our time in our last session there. | ||
| Someone I know who doesn't believe we went to the moon. | ||
| Let me just say he's skeptical. | ||
| So I said, what kind of evidence would convince you? | ||
| He said, images of the landing site of the Apollo missions. | ||
| So I said, okay. | ||
| Here's a website where we sent, in fact, it wasn't West, it was the Chinese, I think it was the Chinese or Europeans, sent a probe, an orbiter, to the moon so that it was close enough, because ground-based telescopes are not, they don't have the resolution to see the landing sites. | ||
| But if you get close enough to the moon, you can. | ||
| It photographed the entire surface of the moon, and there were the landing sites, and you saw the rover tracks and the base for the lunar module. | ||
| And so that night, he went home and found it. | ||
| Then he came back and says, well, NASA could have faked that. | ||
| Well, I'm done with you. | ||
| We have no more to talk about. | ||
| Because he's not ready to be convinced. | ||
| Well, that's a weird one. | ||
| Because I gave him the evidence he asked for. | ||
| Exact evidence. | ||
| That would convince him, and it did not convince him. | ||
| That's a singular event. | ||
| So I said, I have no other... | ||
| Conversation with that's a singular event which you could say in one way or like it is Possible that someone could fake a singular event. | ||
| They can't fake whether or not the world's flat Right like that to me is the scariest one that there's so many people out there that believe the world is flat because You could you could literally see the curvature of the earth from a plane I mean you can get to parts of the you look at the images from the space station where they circle the moon and Or they circle the Earth, rather. | ||
| I mean, there's many, many satellite images of the Earth in its entirety. | ||
| And one of the things that the argument was, is how come every photograph of the Earth is a compilation of photographs? | ||
| Well, because they're all taken from 300 miles up, the Earth is huge! | ||
| Yeah, the Earth is way bigger than 300 miles. | ||
| You have to take compilations. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| That's the only way to get images of the earth. | ||
| Except for the Apollo photo. | ||
| The Apollo 17 coming back has the earth. | ||
| That's the famous one that has Africa and Antarctica in view. | ||
| It's the full earth. | ||
| Very few full earths. | ||
| It's very hard to get a full earth single photo. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And when we went to the moon, the moon missions, when they're coming back, think about it. | ||
| To get full earth, means the Sun is behind the astronauts on the way back to Earth, which means the side of the moon facing Earth is not lit. | ||
| But that's the side of the moon they came from. | ||
| So they want to visit the moon while it's sunlight there. | ||
| They don't want to need flashlights when they get to the moon. | ||
| So they visit the moon while there's sunlight. | ||
| Earth, the view of Earth, at that time will not be full. | ||
| So Apollo 17 was there long enough so that by the time they left, The moon was basically a new moon, Earth was full moon, Earth was full Earth, and then they got a full Earth photo. | ||
| Those packs that they have on their back that regulate their temperature, that allows them to walk on the surface of the moon when it's 250 degrees above zero? | ||
| Well, the side that's facing the sun is more than 200 degrees, and in the shadow it drops. | ||
| 250 degrees below, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So can it switch back and forth between those two environments? | ||
| No, you just insulate. | ||
| The astronauts insulate it. | ||
| And so when you're insulated, those temperature extremes are not felt. | ||
| They're minimized. | ||
| And it's regulated by the pack in some sort of way. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It's a life support. | ||
| The pack goes warm or cool. | ||
| It's not only oxygen and... | ||
| No, it maintains the temperature. | ||
| But it's capable, obviously, of warming and cooling. | ||
| In the face of what's going on, it maintains the temperature. | ||
| That's how you need to think about it. | ||
| Okay, so regardless of what... | ||
| It's not that it's cooling one side of you and heating the other side. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's maintaining a temperature for you. | ||
| And when you are in space, like say where they're doing a space walk, like on the space station, same thing. | ||
| Same thing as being on the surface of the moon. | ||
| Because there's no atmosphere. | ||
| On Earth, you are in this cocoon, dare I say, of atmosphere. | ||
| So all the air in this room is the same temperature. | ||
| Because the air can communicate... | ||
| A difference in temperature to itself, equilibrating it across the whole room. | ||
| If you don't have air, then your temperature is measured by where's the energy coming from that's hitting you. | ||
| And if the sun is hitting you, all that energy will be raising your temperature, and the side of you that's not facing photons, that temperature will drop. | ||
| So you could survive it if you put yourself on a rotisserie, figure out the right rotation rate. | ||
| And even then, you'd have to spend pretty quick in order to balance it all out. | ||
| I'd have to calculate that, yeah. | ||
| You'd have to figure out what the right rate is. | ||
| Now, when you get in a debate with a guy like that, B.O.B. guy... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't debate people. | |
| I don't debate people. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, when you discuss, educate... | ||
| Because as the saying goes, when an argument lasts more than five minutes, both sides are wrong. | ||
| Well, that's a terrible saying. | ||
| It's definitely someone wrong and the other person's stubborn. | ||
| It could definitely last for hours. | ||
| That's not true at all! | ||
| It's true 80% of the time. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| But you got into it with that rapper that thinks that... | ||
| I'll tell you why, B.O.B., because in his Twitter stream, he was saying he was invoking physics. | ||
| And I said, I gotta deal with this. | ||
| And so he showed a picture from Bear Mountain, which is a mountain in slightly upstate New York, where Manhattan is in the sightline of the summit of this mountain. | ||
| And he says, given the curvature of the earth and this formula, you should not be able to see Manhattan at all. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It depends on the height that you're viewing it from. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Well, so you do the math and it turns out Manhattan the island would not be visible at all. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But any building taller than 15 stories Would rise up above the curvature of the earth and you will see it. | ||
| And if you look at the photo, you see the tall buildings rising above 15 stories. | ||
| It's exactly what the correct formula shows. | ||
| And not his formula, which was wrong and misinterpreted, claims to show. | ||
| Well, it's just bizarre because snipers have been using the literal curve of the earth to plan where bullets go. | ||
| That's how you plot out. | ||
| You have to when you shoot at a mile. | ||
| You know, when you're shooting like well out over a thousand yards, those factors... | ||
| So let me think. | ||
| A mile, I have to ask, how much curvature of the earth do you get after a mile? | ||
| It's an interesting question. | ||
| Well, you also get drop. | ||
| You get drop and curvature. | ||
| That'd be gravity drop. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then curve. | ||
| Yeah, so both of those. | ||
| Well, here's a thing to say to someone. | ||
| If you have a bullet in your hand and you shoot a gun, which bullet drops faster? | ||
| Generally, they get the wrong answer to that. | ||
| They drop at the exact same rate. | ||
| They'll hit the ground at the same time. | ||
| Exact same time. | ||
| And that blows people's minds. | ||
| They can't believe that's a fact. | ||
| But you do that in Physics 101. It's a physics demo. | ||
| So that's why physics is so important. | ||
| You know, people say, oh, let's take biology and this. | ||
| Great. | ||
| But don't leave out the physics, because that's where the fundamental operations of nature are to be found, of the physical universe are to be found. | ||
| So what you have is, you have a gun at one side, It's like a thing that shoots out a projectile, and we'll call it a gun, at one side of the stage. | ||
| And then you have like a little stuffed animal at the other side of the stage, held up with an electromagnet at the top of its head. | ||
| And these two are exactly the same level. | ||
| As the projectile comes out from this mini cannon, it trips an electric circuit that releases the electromagnet at the top of the stuffed animal. | ||
| The stuffed animal begins to fall. | ||
| The bullet moves horizontally, but also falls. | ||
| Because gravity is pulling them both. | ||
| And you watch the projectile curve down, you watch the stuffed animal curve down, and it hits the stuffed animal every single time. | ||
| The only factor that would change that would be if you put wings on the bullet and it was dealing with the wind. | ||
| Wings, yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah, wind would affect it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do they have bullets with wings? | ||
| I haven't seen that. | ||
| No, they don't. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| No, but if they did, you know, if like you shot the bullet and then they figured out a clink and the wings came out. | ||
| I saw that on some James Bond movie, I thought. | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just got to be frustrating for you when these things come back around. | ||
| Like, there was no flat earth theory when I was in high school. | ||
| Well, there are other things, though. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| The President Reagan. | ||
| Oh, let's talk about that. | ||
| Nancy Reagan had an astrologer. | ||
| So today, you don't see much of it. | ||
| Is that all nonsense? | ||
| Unless you talk to Steve Maxwell. | ||
| But it's still there. | ||
| It's just not manifesting in public policy. | ||
| Some people believe in it deeply. | ||
| I agree, but it's not up there in public policy. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, Nancy Reagan was really the only one that made it public policy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Wasn't she? | ||
| But at the bar, do you hear people saying, what's your sign? | ||
| Oh, hell yeah. | ||
| Is that still a pickup of tonight? | ||
| Oh, hell yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
100%. | |
| Don't know. | ||
| Let it not be true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Especially. | |
| Listen, dude, you're married. | ||
| On Tinder? | ||
| I know I've been married. | ||
| You're an older man. | ||
| I'm out of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Excuse me. | |
| You don't understand. | ||
| If you want to get laid, you've got to talk nonsense to people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've got to talk nonsense to people. | |
| Well, I'm a Scorpio, and if you're a Taurus, we should just stop talking now. | ||
| I misled myself. | ||
| I thought it was fading, but Nancy Reagan was the big proponent at the time. | ||
| It's nonsense astrology now. | ||
| It's not like someone who really understands astrological charts and can plot it, and the moon's in retrograde, and you were born, and Celsius is rising, and all that crazy crap that they tried. | ||
| I don't know what they're doing. | ||
| I was on a talk show with an astrologer. | ||
| A real one? | ||
| Apparently, yeah. | ||
| She's... | ||
| A real one or a fake one, right? | ||
| How do you know? | ||
| She says she's real. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And I trust her because she talks about how fake other astrologers are. | ||
| Oh, she's a hater. | ||
| She's a hater. | ||
| Don't trust her. | ||
| And she was saying that the Kennedys all... | ||
| Died during a lunar eclipse. | ||
| Oh, scary. | ||
| And, you know, this is a very checkable statement. | ||
| She just says this and everyone's listening and believing and says, wow, that can't be by accident. | ||
| Well, I don't know when other Kennedys died, but I know when... | ||
| Jack Kennedy died, and it was November 22nd, 1963. So I don't need to know if there's an eclipse then, I just need to know what phase the moon is in. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because you can only have a lunar eclipse when the moon is full. | ||
| So the moon was nowhere near full. | ||
| It was like two weeks away from full. | ||
| Even if there was an eclipse, It didn't happen during an eclipse, is my point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course, because it was daylight. | |
| Well, you can have a lunar eclipse at any time. | ||
| You can have a solar eclipse at any time, too. | ||
| It's just not for you. | ||
| It's just not for you. | ||
| It'd be for the other side of the Earth. | ||
| Somewhere else in the world. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Don't be so centric. | |
| In fact, when there's a lunar eclipse, anyone on the side of the Earth that sees the moon will see the lunar eclipse. | ||
| So, by the way, lunar eclipses, you get several per year, by the way, partial eclipses as a minimum. | ||
| And every couple of years, there's full lunar eclipses. | ||
| So, these are not rare things to start. | ||
| They're not rare, okay? | ||
| So I said, you know, he was shot when the... | ||
| I forgot what moon it was. | ||
| First quarter moon. | ||
| And she said, oh, well, this counts if they're anywhere within two weeks on either side of the eclipse. | ||
| What? | ||
| That's a month. | ||
| That's a month out of 12. What? | ||
| No. | ||
| Let me just shut up here and let her keep... | ||
| What did she say? | ||
| We were sharing the time... | ||
| Pharrell had a talk show. | ||
| We were both on Pharrell's talk show. | ||
| And he likes science, by the way. | ||
| He wore a NASA shirt at the Academy Award group photo. | ||
| So I've got to give him some props for that. | ||
| So I just say I have nothing more to say here. | ||
| Hence, my argument with her lasted less than five minutes. | ||
| Now, when they're trying to decide what your personality would be and what you can dictate from your birth date and what time you were born, what are they exactly trying to connect? | ||
| So, I had a deeper awareness of this recently when I learned that people take the names of things very seriously. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Names mean things to people, regardless of what the thing actually is. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So what might we mean by this? | ||
| So, let's, like, astrophysically, I say we have this thing called dark matter. | ||
| We don't know what it is. | ||
| Well, it's got to be some kind of matter. | ||
| No! | ||
| No! | ||
| It shouldn't be called dark matter. | ||
| It should be called FRED. It shouldn't lead you to think anything about it, because we do not know what it is. | ||
| We shouldn't really call it dark gravity. | ||
| It is gravity that we have measured. | ||
| We don't know what's causing the gravity. | ||
| To call it dark matter implies you think it's matter. | ||
| Some people do, but we don't know. | ||
| So explain to me, what is this based on? | ||
| Like when you say dark matter, what is it based on? | ||
| I'd like to just call it Fred for now. | ||
| Okay, let's call it Fred. | ||
| And I'm saying we don't know what it is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| How is Fred measured? | ||
| We measure the gravity of this stuff. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's out there. | ||
| It's six times the gravity of stuff that's ordinary matter. | ||
| We don't know where it's coming from. | ||
| We don't know the source. | ||
| We don't know the origin. | ||
| Is it a parallel universe? | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| And how are we measuring it? | ||
| By its effect on the motions of objects. | ||
| So a certain strength of gravity will force you to move at a given speed as you near it and as you pull away. | ||
| And we see this in galaxies, galaxy clusters, binary galaxies. | ||
| And they've measured entire galaxies that are made completely out of this FRED. At least 80% of the force of gravity manifested in these galaxies is FRED, yes. | ||
| Why are they calling it dark matter? | ||
| They shouldn't, in my opinion. | ||
| They should call it dark gravity. | ||
| Because that's literally what it is. | ||
| So it's gravity that cannot be measured or gravity that's not completely understood. | ||
| It's not understood, correct. | ||
| So it's mysterious gravity. | ||
| Or it can't be completely measured. | ||
| No, we measure it. | ||
| But you can't narrow down what the root of it is. | ||
| We measure its gravity precisely. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay, so you measure it, but you can't determine the origin? | ||
| Because we don't know what it is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| My point is, because someone called it dark matter. | ||
| It has swayed everybody into thinking that it is matter of some kind. | ||
| It has constrained people's thoughts about how to think about this problem. | ||
| Okay, so now, the ancients looked up and they saw these stars. | ||
| And they put their culture on the sky. | ||
| So there's centaurs. | ||
| There's, you know, there's a centaur archer, so it's Sagittarius. | ||
| We have Orion the hunter. | ||
| We have Taurus. | ||
| We have sea serpents. | ||
| We have rivers. | ||
| We have stuff that mattered to people back then. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| We have Aquarius. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| What's the water bearer? | ||
| Oh, the water bearer. | ||
| That must mean that when the sun is in Aquarius, it's going to rain more on Earth. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because the ancients called it the water bearer. | ||
| And all of a sudden, the name reigns supreme. | ||
| Over the fact that it is a random set of stars, widely separated in space, that don't even look like people holding a pitcher of water. | ||
| Of the 88 constellations, about six of them look like what you're told they're supposed to look like. | ||
| The rest require opium-induced imagination to establish what they are. | ||
| So, they all have names. | ||
| Then you go to the astrologers' tables, and they say, oh, this is the rain sign, or this is a drought sign, and they take the names of things, and those names are what they interpret, based on where the moon is, the sun is, where the planets are, and whatever the angle configurations there are, and each angle has a certain latitude over which they'll count it as a hit. | ||
| Rather than as a miss. | ||
| And so this gives extraordinary capacity of the astrologer to tell you what's going on in your life. | ||
| Oh, so it's bullshit. | ||
| But they did have this real fascinating connection with these certain constellations and all of the different things that they thought were attached to these certain constellations. | ||
| You know what it'd be like? | ||
| It'd be like a geologist going up to the border of Colorado trying to understand the shape as a geologist. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| It's an arbitrary shape. | ||
| Colorado is a square on a curved surface. | ||
| It's amazing how much confirmation bias is attached to astrology, though. | ||
| It's not bounded by a river. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Wiki has a great website on cognitive bias. | ||
| And there's like 20 or so well-known by every person. | ||
| This should be a course called Cognitive Bias 101. Forget college. | ||
| Every high school should have a course, Cognitive Bias. | ||
| And the entire course should be about all the ways we fool ourselves. | ||
| Don't you think that would be very important? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And you know what science is? | |
| I've tweeted this too. | ||
| Science. | ||
| The only point of the scientific method... | ||
| Is to make sure you are not fooled into thinking that something is true that is not, or thinking that something is not true that is. | ||
| That is the only point. | ||
| And therefore, the scientific method could be anything you invent. | ||
| Just take better notes. | ||
| Take a chart recorder. | ||
| Be more awake next time you take the data. | ||
| Bring a friend to observe it with you. | ||
| Whatever it takes to minimize the chances that you will misinterpret what you're looking at so that you don't think something is true that is not or think something is not true that is. | ||
| Do whatever it takes To support that mission statement. | ||
| That's what the scientific method is, and that's what we do as scientists, and that's why when you bring all of these things that people do, so it's the astrology and the crystal healers and the therapeutic touch people. | ||
| Oh, don't mess with them, dude. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| No, that's real. | ||
| You don't even understand. | ||
| I'm a healer. | ||
| I'm an intuitive healer. | ||
| It goes on and on and on and on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And these are the things that fail in the double-blind science. | ||
| And why do you do double-blind? | ||
| So you don't fool yourself into thinking something is true. | ||
| That's why you do double-blind. | ||
| And if you don't, and you want something to be true, even if you're surprised by something that might have been true, that you were against, Still, you need someone else to check it. | ||
| And you only get an emergent scientific truth when you have agreement among different people's experiments. | ||
| So even if you get a result that you're happy with, it is not yet a scientific truth until you can confirm it by other people who have no investment in you, who don't care about you. | ||
| In fact, we're trying to show that you're wrong. | ||
| This is what made Einstein so great, because no one believed his relativity, and they kept devising ever more accurate experiments to show he was wrong, and it ended up showing that he was right by ever higher precision. | ||
| Do you think that we're doing ourselves a disservice by not teaching people how the mind works, how confirmation bias works? | ||
| And shouldn't that be a big part? | ||
| We're teaching the wrong things in school. | ||
| I'm working on this. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| In a few years, I'm going to have something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why not? | |
| No, because I'm busy. | ||
| My kids are in school right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm busy. | |
| Excuse me. | ||
| I can't be. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| But let's discuss it because I think it took me a long time. | ||
| The curriculum has to include an entire course on cognitive bias. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If we are going to emerge as adults no longer susceptible to charlatans. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Who are either well-meaning and just misguided or who are explicitly exploiting your ignorance. | ||
| And it's a major factor in our culture. | ||
| A major factor. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| When it comes to politicians. | ||
| It drives. | ||
| It's a major factor when it comes to bosses. | ||
| It's a major factor when it comes to how you choose what you do for a living, how you choose to live your life. | ||
| All of human interaction and human interaction with nature itself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, we are constantly trying to manipulate and control other people's biases, behaviors, the way they think, the way they act. | ||
| And we're very vulnerable in some senses because this is not something that's taught to us at an early age. | ||
| You know, and I think that it takes a long time to figure it out on your own. | ||
| And I've often thought, like, man, why wasn't I explained this when I was young? | ||
| Yeah, because the curriculum wasn't thinking about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, we're thinking about just giving people facts instead of teaching them how to manage your mind. | ||
| We're thinking that your head is this vessel into which you pour information. | ||
| And nowhere and at no time are we trained how to turn a fact into knowledge, knowledge into wisdom, and wisdom into insight. | ||
| I think that full sequence needs to be in there in the academic system. | ||
| K through 12, 13 through 16. 13, 14, yeah. | ||
| College. | ||
| It's got to be in there somewhere. | ||
| Without it, you're just this vessel of facts. | ||
| And even the people we call smart... | ||
| In class, these are people who get A's on everything and they know everything, but do they have the deepest insight? | ||
| Do they really understand what it is that they're putting back on the test? | ||
| I don't think all of them do. | ||
| I think they have good short-term memory, some of them, and they do well on the exams because of that fact. | ||
| So they're good at acquiring data and maintaining it? | ||
| Acquiring information and then bringing it back on command. | ||
| Not all. | ||
| Some are deep thinkers, and I don't want to take that away from them. | ||
| All I'm saying is that the curriculum, I think, needs these other dimensions of survival, really. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| It's survival in a world. | ||
| And when a scientist says this is true, you can ask, well, why do you think that's true? | ||
| Exercise some healthy skepticism. | ||
| I don't have a problem with that. | ||
| Say, because of, look at this evidence. | ||
| Do you know how to read evidence, by the way? | ||
| And look at this evidence. | ||
| Look at this chart. | ||
| Look at this experiment. | ||
| And this is why we conclude, overwhelmingly, that this is going to happen in our future. | ||
| Ah, you pointy-headed scientist, what do you know? | ||
| By the way, give me my cell phone so I can call my grandmother, okay? | ||
| While I use GPS satellites to know when to make a left turn. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm going to call my astrologist. | ||
| To tell them these scientists got their head up their ass, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think also it would be really beneficial to teach people how to manage perspective and how to look at life in a way that's going to be beneficial to you. | ||
| We're not really given very many tools to manage the mind. | ||
| Like philosophy. | ||
| There's some philosophy classes that can help that. | ||
| Sure, but even philosophy... | ||
| Not all philosophy, but... | ||
| Yeah, it's very rare that they... | ||
| Philosophy of life, you know, just... | ||
| How to think about decision making and the causes and effects and consequences. | ||
| There's not enough of that either. | ||
| Maybe they're relying on that to happen at home. | ||
| But not all homes are intact. | ||
| In fact, perhaps most are broken homes or separated homes. | ||
| So I think the school system... | ||
| School needs to be rethought, and I'm trying to think that through. | ||
| It'll be a few more years. | ||
| Well, anytime you talk about alternative schooling, people look at you like you're some sort of a hippie freak who wants your kids to eat granola and live in the mountains and get their own spring water. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's what they think of when you say alternative schooling. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I'll train them at home. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| As soon as you say homeschooling, oh, you're a religious nut. | ||
| I mean, that's immediately the perception. | ||
| That's the fastest growing sector of the homeschooling sector. | ||
| They don't want you clouding your head with all that evolution talk. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Do you ever talk to that Ken Ham guy? | ||
| Have you ever sat down with that guy? | ||
| No, but Bill Nye has. | ||
| I mean, Bill Nye debated him. | ||
| I mean, I can't debate people. | ||
| It's not what I do. | ||
| You just can't do it. | ||
| I just can't do it. | ||
| It's not what I do. | ||
| I'm an educator, and I want to educate you so you can think for yourself. | ||
| Then I go away. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| To debate someone implies that whoever is most convincing is correct. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's not how knowledge works. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's just too much charisma involved. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Whatever charisma level I have or not have, I don't want to hinge what is true on that fact. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Alright, so I'm an educator. | ||
| I will teach you the causes and effects of knowing what science is and how and why it works. | ||
| Which is why it's critical that you continue to criticize science fiction movies. | ||
| It's very important. | ||
| Don't you back off now. | ||
| We need you. | ||
| There's a lot of people that wouldn't know that that Chinese space station is nowhere near the American space station. | ||
| And that her hair would be moving all over the place. | ||
| Her hair would be everywhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, but my favorite one is, remember when he's at the end of a tether? | ||
| And she wants to save him, but she doesn't have enough oxygen to do it. | ||
| So he lets go of the tether. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And that way she can't save him before she can save herself. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then he flies away. | ||
| It's like, no. | ||
| They're like floating in space. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He lets go of the tether. | ||
| It just stays there in his hand. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He would be right there. | ||
| He would be right there. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| He lets go. | ||
| Nothing happened. | ||
| Wouldn't be like a bungee cord. | ||
| Now, if she were swinging him in circles, and he'd fly off at a tangent, but that's not what was happening. | ||
| Nor were they rotating. | ||
| I would check what they were relative to Earth below. | ||
| That was not what was going on. | ||
| She could have just given a slight tug, and then he would have drifted towards her. | ||
| That could have even been a little romantic. | ||
| Just a little baby tug. | ||
| Yeah, baby tug would do it. | ||
| They would slowly drift towards one another. | ||
| No, I hate that movie. | ||
| And then the helmets would hit, you know, and then they would... | ||
| That movie makes me mad. | ||
| Oh, and then the helmets would break, and then they would be freezing to death. | ||
| Instantly, right? | ||
| You'd suffocate. | ||
| Oh, that too. | ||
| And then freeze to death, right? | ||
| What movie nailed that? | ||
| There was one movie where they were off in space, or they overdid it? | ||
| Well, there was... | ||
| People want you to, like, explode in space. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| No, no. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Well, they want you to freeze solid, too, instantly. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| No. | ||
| And even in, was it Armageddon, where the sun rose over the comet, and he didn't have his visor down, and he was blinded by the sun! | ||
| It's like the same sun in our daytime sky. | ||
| The atmosphere doesn't protect you in any way? | ||
| The Earth's atmosphere takes out, you know, a few percent. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| A few percent. | ||
| Well, in the middle of daylight at the top of the sky, it's a few percent. | ||
| Now, he'll get more UV. He'll get more UV. That's important. | ||
| Get a little more brown. | ||
| Yeah, but... | ||
| Yeah, death in space is nowhere near as spectacular as movies would have you think. | ||
| Yeah, they make it seem like if you take that helmet off, you just immediately freeze up. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I mean, you can go into very... | ||
| What happens is there's nothing making you cold other than you radiating heat from your skin. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| So you'll only get as cold as quickly as you can radiate away heat. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| So it would take quite a while. | ||
| Oh, yeah! | ||
| You just have no air, so you'd suffocate quicker. | ||
| Yeah, you'd suffocate. | ||
| Oh yeah, you'd suffocate long before you saw anything like that happen. | ||
| So just think about it. | ||
| There's nothing touching you that's making you cold. | ||
| It has to wait for you to radiate away. | ||
| That's what's happening, okay? | ||
| And so, yeah, you'll feel very cold very quickly, but you're not going to die from that fast. | ||
| Now, when Stephen Hawking... | ||
| Oh, by the way, you also have dissolved gases in your body, which will try to come... | ||
| Because in the vacuum of space, you don't have the air pressure tamping down the dissolved gases. | ||
| So you take away the air pressure, then the dissolved gases will begin to bubble out of your blood. | ||
| And it's the same problem when you have the bends. | ||
| When you come up from low altitude and you go to lesser pressure. | ||
| So you want to do that slowly, so that it's a very slow thing, but the hazards of... | ||
| Why would you be butt naked in space? | ||
| I mean, you're going to have a space suit on. | ||
| Well, you just want to prove to everybody that you can do it. | ||
| Well, they did it in 2001 in Space Odyssey. | ||
| They basically did it right. | ||
| The guy, without his helmet, went through the airlock and just held his breath. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, that's all he did. | ||
| Oh, well, that's way more reasonable. | ||
| Well, because it was a reasonable movie. | ||
| It was a reasonable movie. | ||
| It was a good movie. | ||
| It had real advisors. | ||
| Stanley Kubrick. | ||
| Well, he was a really interesting guy, too, because he was a mathematician. | ||
| I didn't know that about him, but I knew he cared about that level of detail. | ||
| He used to do complex math for fun. | ||
| So there's a failed bit of physics in 2001. You want to hear it? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| One day I'll talk about 2001. The monkey suits? | ||
| The monolith? | ||
| Which was it? | ||
|
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No, no. | |
| So, remember when he's on one of the moon crafts, and he's orbiting the moon, and they give him food, all right? | ||
| And there's a tray of nasty food, obviously. | ||
| It's like astronaut food. | ||
| Remember, this is 1968, so everything here is a visual taste of the future. | ||
| So, he has another packet where he extends a straw from that plastic packet. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Oh, there he is. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| You're getting a good photo. | ||
| You're good. | ||
| Your boy is good right here. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Yeah, there he is. | ||
| So, he sucks up the straw. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this is in zero G, so stuff is floating around. | ||
| He sucks up the straw. | ||
| Then he goes to another straw, and the liquid in the straw goes back down. | ||
| That's gravity. | ||
| Oh, they fucked up. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Oh. | ||
| He totally fucked up. | ||
| No, so that one, obviously, he can't get everything right. | ||
| But it's fun to notice the things he couldn't get right, or didn't think to get right. | ||
| So, to me, it's a celebration. | ||
| Here's another one. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The rotation rate of the space station. | ||
| I calculated that, and I calculated what g-force would you have on the outer perimeter of the space station in 2001. And I did the math, and I forgot the exact number, something like between two and three g's. | ||
| And I said, why would you do that? | ||
| That's stupid. | ||
| You wouldn't do that. | ||
| And I realized, if they rotated it at the rate that would give you one g, it would be way too slow to make an interesting scene. | ||
| So I gave it to him. | ||
| I said, I'll give you three Gs. | ||
| Because the Strauss Waltz, as the thing turns, and the space shuttle that's approaching it matches its rotation rate with the opening in the center of the space station. | ||
| This whole ballet, this entire ballet... | ||
| Wow, that's cool again. | ||
| ...happens at a stately but real pace. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| But that pace gives him three G's of gravity. | ||
| So it's 3x the correct pace. | ||
| The correct pace would be much slower. | ||
| It might have been two and a half, but I forgot the number. | ||
| But it's multiples too high. | ||
| So that is possible? | ||
| But it looks good. | ||
| So I let him do it. | ||
| It looks good. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| That's artistic license. | ||
| That's Mark Twainian license, where he says, first get your facts straight, then distort them at your leisure. | ||
| That is what I'm holding artists to. | ||
| So now, when you're looking at a space station, they're in zero gravity when they're in the space station. | ||
| No, they are in 1G on the edge of the space station. | ||
| On the edge? | ||
| Yeah, on the turning edge. | ||
| Yeah, that's the whole point. | ||
| You mean that thing? | ||
| I mean a real space station. | ||
| Oh, our space station? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Oh, so it's zero G, yes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it is possible... | ||
| It's zero G because it is in free fall towards Earth. | ||
| So it's constantly in free fall, but it's just going around the... | ||
| Yeah, it's in free fall towards Earth, but it's going sideways so fast that the amount that it has fallen equals precisely the curvature of the Earth. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| Is that more proof that the Earth is round? | ||
| Is it? | ||
| If you've had physics 101, yes. | ||
| But is it possible to generate gravity in a space station? | ||
| Only if you rotate it. | ||
| Only if you rotate it. | ||
| It's not gravity, it's simulating gravity. | ||
| But according to Einstein, they're indistinguishable from one another, so you can do it. | ||
| So it is possible to do something where you can send people into deep space and generate gravity through some sort of rotation? | ||
| At least two ways. | ||
| One of them you just rotate it, and all the good sci-fi movies have rotating sections of a space station. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And there's some that have rotating opposite ways so that they can spin up against one another, right? | ||
| And so there's some clever ideas out there with space stations of the future for long voyages. | ||
| Because I had Commander Hatfield on the podcast. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Who came back from space and was talking about the excruciating difficulty he had readjusting to gravity after being in a zero-gravity environment for so long. | ||
| He's just showing off because he's, like, setting records for being... | ||
| Wasn't it like six months, I believe? | ||
| Yeah, it was a long time. | ||
| He showed, yeah, I couldn't handle life with you lowly Earth people. | ||
| He was talking about his body. | ||
| It took over a year before his bone density came back. | ||
| Well, this is partly addressed in the film The Martian Kid. | ||
| He's born on Mars, comes to Earth. | ||
| Which one's that? | ||
| Born on Mars? | ||
| Yeah, the kid born on Mars. | ||
| Get your guy to research this now. | ||
| What's the name of the movie? | ||
| It's... | ||
|
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Recent? | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Oh, The Space Between Us. | ||
| Oh, what the hell's that? | ||
| You gotta get out more, dude. | ||
| I do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that's beside the point. | ||
| So this is a Martian colony where the first community... | ||
| What movie is this? | ||
| This came out a couple months ago. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Oh man, I'm so behind. | ||
| Is this out on iTunes yet? | ||
| So that's the Martian colony. | ||
| And one of the female astronauts they send... | ||
| That one there happens to be, they learn, is pregnant, and they can't bring her back, and so she gives birth on Mars, and the first person who is ever born on Mars. | ||
| And then they keep it a secret, and then he comes back as a teenager that falls in love. | ||
| See, there's the fetus. | ||
| So, anyhow, he has a hard time on Earth, because his heart... | ||
| Developed in Martian gravity, which is only 38% Earth gravity. | ||
|
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|
Oh, wow. | |
| And then on Earth, he just couldn't, they had to, you know, figure out what to do with him. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Yeah, that's on Mars. | ||
| The kid was born on Mars. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Don't spoil alert me, Jamie. | ||
|
unidentified
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Shut that up. | |
| That's why, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So, what were we talking about? | ||
| Generating gravity in stellar travel. | ||
| Yeah, so one way is to rotate it up. | ||
| Another way is if you're headed somewhere, you just have a huge fuel tank and just always run your rockets. | ||
| Oh, so you always have G-force. | ||
| There's always a G-force. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| So if you accelerate at 1G towards a destination, then you'll always feel Earth's gravity, and you'll get there awesomely fast. | ||
| But you would have to have so much fuel or rely on something new. | ||
| Well, you need filling stations en route, this sort of thing. | ||
| And if you do this, you accelerate 1G halfway there, then you turn the spaceship around, then you decelerate at 1G, For the other half of the trip, so that when you get there, you're not whizzing past it in a flyby. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| That way you have 1G the whole trip. | ||
| That's how you would do that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So the momentum when you would precisely hit halfway there. | ||
| If you accelerate it at 1G, oh my gosh, you hit near the speed of light very quickly. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| I mean, I forgot. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| I have to calculate it. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| The acceleration of Earth's gravity, if you actually move that fast, that's head snapping. | ||
| Now, would they have to have some sort of a crazy propulsion system in order to do something along those lines? | ||
| How fast will 1G get you there? | ||
| One year. | ||
| Yes, so... | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| 1G would take... | ||
| One year plus the distance in light years. | ||
| Approximate Centauri 4.2 light years, for example, would take 5.2 years. | ||
| So the distance in light years plus a year. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow! | |
| That's crazy. | ||
| So that gets you basically 20-25% the speed of light. | ||
| But what happens if you just run into stuff on the way? | ||
| There's a lot of stuff out there, right? | ||
| Isn't that a giant issue in getting to Mars? | ||
| Well, space is actually quite empty, but if you do hit something, that's the end of everything. | ||
| So it's a low-risk, high-consequence... | ||
| Thing that you gotta put in play. | ||
| How much of a risk is the space junk that we've left in the environment? | ||
| We were freaking out the other day about how many pieces are up there. | ||
| There's countless thousands of bits of space junk. | ||
| From chips of paint that fell off of the space. | ||
|
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To bolts. | |
| To bolts and nails and retro rocket boosters. | ||
| Yeah, it's all up there. | ||
| And I'm wondering whether we haven't been visited by aliens yet because they saw the space junk orbiting Earth and said, forget that. | ||
| I'm going to visit some other planet. | ||
| I'm going to risk my life. | ||
| Crazy, short-sighted approach to space travel. | ||
| Yeah, so if you bring up the NASA Orbital Debris Office website, you can actually see the debris that NASA's tracking. | ||
| Basic, almost in real time. | ||
| It's crazy how much there is. | ||
| And it's like a beehive around the Earth. | ||
| So, you got it? | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| That's the debris around the Earth that NASA tracks. | ||
| There's a failed Japanese experiment to try to... | ||
| And that outer ring that you see, that's the altitude of geosynchronous satellites. | ||
| And that inner... | ||
| There should be a video of that. | ||
| Go to the bottom right. | ||
| Go to the bottom right. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| Click on that. | ||
| Play that video. | ||
| It's not a video. | ||
| Why isn't that a video? | ||
| I'm sure there is a video somewhere. | ||
| Yeah, there's a video on that site. | ||
| So you can just see... | ||
| The movement of these pieces and it's so launch windows have to know when to not hit stuff. | ||
| So when you have launch, it's not just is everything aligned, right? | ||
| Will you successfully get past the debris? | ||
| And there was a Japanese, they had an experiment to try to capture it with nets. | ||
| It was a recent mission. | ||
| Didn't work. | ||
| The problem is the low orbit stuff will eventually fall in and burn up. | ||
| The high earth orbit stuff will never go away. | ||
| There's nothing to destroy it. | ||
| And so they can't capture that stuff? | ||
| Well, you need a very clever... | ||
| The stuff is moving 18,000 miles an hour. | ||
| So, what's your net? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
|
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Oh, yeah. | |
| There you go. | ||
| There's the video. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Go higher res on that. | ||
| I know there's a higher res. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| That's 1080? | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| It's not from NASA's YouTube panel. | ||
| It's from some others. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Somebody else. | ||
| But that's the kind... | ||
| So all of that's debris that you're looking at there. | ||
| So anyway, yeah. | ||
| So your concern for debris is well-placed. | ||
| And we may be putting so much debris in space that we will close ourselves off from space travel because of the dangers it would take to get through our own garbage heap. | ||
| That's so crazy! | ||
| And this was all started in the 1940s, 1950s, like when did they start shooting stuff up there? | ||
| Oh, no, 1950s, Sputnik. | ||
| Yeah, 1957. That was the first satellite, right? | ||
| First anything, yeah, first anything in orbit. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, God. | |
| And that short amount of time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, it's like a dumpster. | ||
| 60 years. | ||
| Planetary dumpster. | ||
| They ruined the whole thing. | ||
| Ruined the whole thing. | ||
| They've had it for billions of years. | ||
| In 60 years, they filled it up with junk. | ||
|
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|
Yep. | |
| Okay, there it is. | ||
| Oh my god, that's terrifying. | ||
| See that? | ||
| Yeah, that's going around the earth. | ||
|
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|
Oh my god. | |
| All of that. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| And has anybody ever hit anything while trying to do something? | ||
| Well, so what exacerbates it is, remember when China, when was this, 2004, 2003? | ||
| China destroyed one of its own satellites? | ||
| Yeah, what was that about? | ||
| I remember some of that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, and they basically did a kinetic kill on a satellite. | ||
| So a kinetic kill, for those who don't know, is you don't need explosives if the speed of the projectile and its kinetic energy is higher than the energy that would be in the explosive shell itself. | ||
|
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Oh. | |
| So it's a fascinating calculation to make. | ||
| So here it is. | ||
| So I have this delivery system with a warhead and I put some bomb device in the warhead and you can calculate how much energy that is. | ||
| Then I send it and it hits and it blows something up. | ||
| But suppose I send this thing really, really fast. | ||
| Really, really, really fast. | ||
| I can calculate how much kinetic energy this thing has. | ||
| There will be a point where I give it so much kinetic energy, the kinetic energy is greater than the chemical energy of the conventional explosive that I put in the warhead. | ||
| Oh, like Shoemaker-Levy. | ||
| Well, for example. | ||
| I'll give you a terrestrial example. | ||
| It's what we call a high-speed collision. | ||
| This is more than you bargained for in our time together, but I'm going to tell you. | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
|
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Okay, you ready? | |
| Perfect. | ||
| The argument for the longest time that the craters on the moon were calderas from volcanoes and not asteroid impacts, the geologists argue strenuously these can't be asteroid impacts. | ||
| They've got to be calderas, these thousand craters on the moon. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because everyone is a perfect circle. | ||
| And if asteroids are coming from space, they would come from all angles. | ||
| And if you come in at a shallow angle, you get an oval. | ||
| And even shallower would be more oval. | ||
| So you'd have a whole range of circles and ovals and ellipses. | ||
| You don't see that. | ||
| They must be calderas. | ||
| Explain a caldera. | ||
| It's a volcano that explodes and it leads a crater. | ||
| Volcanic crater. | ||
| Like Yellowstone. | ||
| Yeah, it's a volcanic crater, that's all. | ||
| And it's a little more poetic, a caldera. | ||
| But it's a crater left by a volcano that has exploded. | ||
| Like the boom was so big, the mountain's gone, and now it's just a big hole. | ||
| Or at the top of the mountain, there's a crater at the top of the mountain, like Crater Lake. | ||
| That's a round hole in the top of a mountain. | ||
| Was that once a volcano? | ||
| I don't know, but it's a hole. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So, in the 1970s, we were able to do calculations with high-speed computers, with good computers. | ||
| And what we found was, if the object is moving faster, if the kinetic energy of the object... | ||
| Is higher than the energy that's holding the thing together. | ||
|
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Ooh. | |
| Okay? | ||
| So what's holding together a rock? | ||
| The chemical connections of the silicon and the oxygen and the iron. | ||
| Everything that's making the rock that's holding it together. | ||
| You can calculate how much energy is holding it together. | ||
| And if it's going 45,000 miles an hour. | ||
| So write down that number. | ||
| Now I send in the asteroid with a kinetic energy higher than the energy that's holding it together. | ||
| On impact, it explodes. | ||
| Because all that energy goes back into the rock because the thing isn't moving anymore. | ||
| Where did the kinetic energy go? | ||
| It digs a crater, number one, by virtue of putting all that energy back into the stone. | ||
| And that explodes it. | ||
| So on impact, even at an angle, it is a singular point explosion. | ||
| And that's why every single crater is a perfect circle. | ||
| We call that a high-speed impact, where the speed is greater, the energy of the speed is greater than the energy that's holding it together. | ||
| Now, you have experience in this, okay? | ||
| Have you ever thrown a... | ||
| Do this next... | ||
| Oh, we're in California. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Snowballs? | ||
| Snowballs. | ||
| Take a snowball. | ||
| Go to Big Bear. | ||
| They have snowballs up there. | ||
|
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Take a snowball. | |
| And face a barn wall and throw the snowball at it. | ||
| And it'll make a little circular mark on it. | ||
| Now change your angle to the wall. | ||
| And throw the snowball again. | ||
| It'll still make a small round mark. | ||
| And it'll keep doing it. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because the speed with which you threw the snowball, that energy is greater than the energy that's holding the snowball together. | ||
| Because hardly any energy is holding the snowball together. | ||
| It's just loosely packed snow. | ||
| So when you do it against the wall, you see the snowball completely disappear in a mini snowball explosion, if you will. | ||
| So this works for any comparison of projectile speed and what we call the binding energy of the object itself. | ||
| This is why the intercontinental ballistic missiles never carried conventional warheads. | ||
| Because there's speed coming out of space, because they leave the atmosphere, go from one continent to the other, and then they fall out of the sky. | ||
| That speed gives them more kinetic energy than any conventional warhead would have had. | ||
| But then we figured out how to make small nuclear warheads. | ||
| The nukes! | ||
| Now you're talking energy. | ||
| The kinetic energy of the ICBM is not higher than the nuclear warhead that we now put in. | ||
| That's why all ICBMs are nukes. | ||
| The V2 rocket basically didn't need an explosive warhead in its tip. | ||
| It came out of the sky going five miles per second. | ||
| There was none of this... | ||
| That implies you're hearing the thing. | ||
| It's coming in supersonically. | ||
| You're sitting there at a cocktail table on a block, and then the block is obliterated in the next instant. | ||
| You didn't even know to look up. | ||
| They added an explosive anyway, but they probably didn't need to. | ||
| Now, to go back to Shoemaker-Levy, there was a comet that slammed into Jupiter. | ||
| Now, Jupiter's a gas giant. | ||
| I've always been confused as to what that means. | ||
| Oh, most of its mass is in the form of gas. | ||
| Most of its mass. | ||
| Oh, yeah, 90-something percent. | ||
| So when Shoemaker-Levy slammed into Jupiter and made an explosion... | ||
| It was going so fast, the gaseous atmosphere was like hitting a brick wall. | ||
|
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Whoa. | |
| That's how fast it was moving. | ||
| So that's why the explosion was bigger than Earth. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So all of its kinetic energy that it had got put back into the object itself because it slowed down very quickly relative to its speed. | ||
| So here's this comet. | ||
| I forgot how big Shoemaker-Levy was. | ||
| So now it goes into the atmosphere and you say, oh, isn't it just clouds? | ||
| Watch how fast it's going. | ||
| You can ask the question, over how much distance will it plow through its own mass worth of gas? | ||
| That's the question, right? | ||
| It has to plow that much mass out of the way. | ||
| That's an important resistive force, right? | ||
| So, how much atmosphere? | ||
| Well, that's a lot of atmosphere, because it's gas, and this thing is solid. | ||
| However, the thing is going, what, 15, 20 miles per second? | ||
| It's falling into Jupiter at 20 miles, whatever the speed was. | ||
| If you go at 20 miles per second, you will cover that much atmosphere in a fraction of a second. | ||
| So in a fraction of a second, you go from 20 miles per second to zero, or to a tiny fraction of that speed, all that energy has to go somewhere. | ||
| It goes back into the system. | ||
| It's a comet made of ice. | ||
| Ice is not held together very easily. | ||
| The whole thing explodes on impact. | ||
| That was another terrifying statistic that I read about the impact that hit the Yucatan and killed the dinosaurs, that how deep it had gone into the Earth's surface within the first second. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| These are numbers that are staggering once you calculate what they are. | ||
| And like I said, if you come in fast enough, Earth's atmosphere might as well be a brick wall to you. | ||
| And by the way, you go 60 miles an hour down the road, roll down the window, just stick your hand out the window. | ||
| You have to use muscle energy to not have your hand blown backwards against 60 miles an hour of air against your open palm. | ||
| Just try that next time. | ||
| See what kind of energy that requires. | ||
| And that's 60 miles an hour. | ||
| Now imagine 5 miles per second, 10 miles per second, 20 miles per second. | ||
| You toast. | ||
| How deep did the asteroid that hit and killed the dinosaurs? | ||
| How deep did that thing go in the first second? | ||
| Oh, so what was that? | ||
| That was a 150-mile diameter crater, something like that. | ||
| I forgot the exact numbers. | ||
| So there's a relationship between the depth of a crater and the diameter and the mass of the thing. | ||
| So, no, it goes miles down. | ||
| I mean, it's... | ||
| Miles? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Well, let me think. | ||
| And Earth rang for like a million years? | ||
| What happens is... | ||
| Let me take that back. | ||
| I don't know if it's miles. | ||
|
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It's... | |
| I think it was what I had read. | ||
| I don't remember the exact statistic. | ||
| Excuse me. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It's got to go miles down. | ||
| Because the thing is, the asteroid itself was the size of Mount Everest. | ||
| So the asteroid itself is like five miles across. | ||
| So it's deep. | ||
| No, you just don't mess with this. | ||
| By the way, the crater in Arizona, called Meteor Crater for obvious reasons, that can sink a 60-story building. | ||
| And that's not even a mile across. | ||
| And now we're talking about a crater more than 100 miles across that took out the dinosaurs. | ||
| That famous one in Arizona can sink a 60-story building? | ||
| If you put dirt up to the rim of that crater, you can bury a 60-story building. | ||
| Wasn't that an instance where this is your whole calculation about explosions and about the amount of energy? | ||
| They were looking for the raw materials that caused that crater. | ||
|
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Correct. | |
| Because they thought that they could mine it. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| They first thought it was volcanic, and the geologists thought it was volcanic again. | ||
| But one geologist, in particular, Eugene Shoemaker, who was in line to be on one of the lunar missions, and then he had like a heart murmur, and then they sent Jack Schmidt in his stead, who was also a geologist-turned-U.S. senator from... | ||
| Arizona? | ||
| Where is he senator from? | ||
| I forgot. | ||
| But can you look at Jack Schmidt, where he was senator from? | ||
| Forgive me for forgetting, because I'm friends with him, so I should have known him. | ||
| NASA. Jack Schmidt. | ||
| S-C-H-M-I-T-T. There's no D in it. | ||
| So... | ||
| Yes, I was right. | ||
| Oh, I said Arizona, so New Mexico. | ||
| But anyhow, he's saying, no, this is an impact crater. | ||
| And well, if it's an impact crater, where is the meteorite? | ||
| It must be buried down here. | ||
| And so there were miners. | ||
| There were iron miners who bought the land so they can get this huge meteor that they were sure was just sitting down there that they could mine for its natural resource. | ||
| They could not find the meteor. | ||
| That's because it hit at high speed velocity. | ||
| It was a high velocity impact, which means its collision energy was greater than the binding energy even of the iron atoms itself. | ||
| And 90% of that thing vaporized on impact. | ||
| My brain just went like this. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
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That looks more impressive even than I remember it. | |
| Okay, there are pieces. | ||
| That's nice low angle shots so you get the shadows of the rim. | ||
| That's in Arizona. | ||
| Where in Arizona? | ||
| It's near Winslow, Arizona. | ||
| Where would that be near? | ||
| Is that like if someone wanted to fly in to see that? | ||
| Oh, here it is. | ||
| If you go to the Grand Canyon, then you drive to this and it's a couple hours, a few hours. | ||
| Okay, there's Meteor Crater. | ||
|
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I might have to go. | |
| The map is coming up. | ||
| And where's the Grand Canyon? | ||
| There's Meteor Crater. | ||
| And Grand Canyon, which is also in Arizona. | ||
| Flagstaff. | ||
| You can drive that. | ||
| See that? | ||
| Grand Canyon to Meteor Crater. | ||
| Through Flagstaff? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you're not going to fly that. | ||
| You just drive it. | ||
| It has Yelp reviews? | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Look at that when you get highlighted. | ||
| It's got five stars. | ||
| You can't Yelp review a crater. | ||
| Look at it. | ||
| Come on now. | ||
| Why doesn't it have all the stars? | ||
| Look. | ||
| I know it should have every goddamn star ever. | ||
|
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No! | |
| Only 3.9! | ||
| People are so picky. | ||
|
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It's a fucking meteor crater! | |
| It's not that big a deal, man. | ||
| I could dig a hole better myself. | ||
| Oh, by the way, so this hole was, this meteor crater was dug in like, you know, a few seconds this crater was made. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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Just... | |
| And how many years ago was that? | ||
| 50,000 years ago. | ||
| That's nothing. | ||
| Approximately. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Wow, there's probably some form of human living here then. | ||
| Oh yeah, yeah, early humans. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I don't know if they were in North America yet. | ||
| They say 40,000 is the most recent, right? | ||
| Yeah, it's when they crossed the Bering Strait. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's when they would have just arrived. | ||
| Man. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| I'm going back. | ||
| Have you gone to that? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Multiple times. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Is it freaky? | ||
| What's freaky about it is you walk up to it, you can't see it because the rim of the crater, it just looks like a ridge, a ridge line. | ||
| Ah. | ||
| The rim is raised above the plane of the area, right? | ||
| Because when you press down, it raises it up a bit. | ||
| So you just walk up to it and then you come up to the ledge and then it's like... | ||
| And you realize what it is. | ||
| This is nearly a mile diameter hole in the ground. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It's a stunning encounter with the forces of nature. | ||
| And the fact that there's so many of those particles just floating around out there that could easily just slam right in. | ||
| How big was that one, you think? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That was about, I don't know, 20 yards across, something like that. | ||
| Oh my god, that's nothing. | ||
| That's nothing. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| 20 yards? | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| Between 20 and 40 yards. | ||
| 20 yards is the size of this building. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| From that garage to that front door is exactly 19 yards. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's the kind of thing that can get close enough that you don't even see, and then it's too late. | ||
| And those things do sneak in. | ||
| Of course, that's not going to render you extinct. | ||
| That's not going to make us extinct, but it'll make a very bad day for a city. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Well, yeah, the city's done, and most likely the power grid's jacked for a long time, too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What time is it? | ||
| Is my plane left yet? | ||
| Ten till. | ||
| No, you have ten more minutes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I had to get the Stephen Hawking's quote out for you. | ||
| Stephen Hawking was talking about the possibility of alien life discovering us. | ||
| And that it would be a terrible, terrible thing if it did happen. | ||
| If you look at what has happened to other primitive life forms when we discovered them, primitive cultures when we discovered them, do you share that same opinion? | ||
| That if something did find us, I don't have a strong opinion on that question, but I have an analysis of his comment. | ||
| He is worried about the possibility of aliens enslaving us based on the reality that we've done that to ourselves. | ||
| Just think about that. | ||
| His fear of aliens derives not from actual knowledge of aliens, but from actual knowledge of ourselves. | ||
| Any time a more advanced civilization has come upon a less technologically advanced civilization, it did not bode well for the less advanced civilization. | ||
| And that happened in North America, South America, North America with Europeans, South America, the Spanish, Australia with the Brits. | ||
| It never boded well for the less technologically advanced civilization. | ||
| His factual knowledge of that Leads him to suspect that aliens would be exactly the same. | ||
| And I'm not that skeptical. | ||
| I don't think all lifeforms in the universe have the basal... | ||
| Primal, violent attitudes that we do as a species. | ||
| I've not been given reason to think so. | ||
| But don't you believe that things advance because of competition and competition forces things to be fairly ruthless? | ||
| It has been argued that if you colonize, if you're a civilization that colonizes the galaxy, that it's a self-limiting exercise. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because here you go. | ||
| You ready? | ||
| We start here on Earth. | ||
| It's you and me, boy. | ||
| Alright? | ||
| And you take that planet, I take this planet. | ||
| And now we both have offspring that are just like us. | ||
| And we want more planets. | ||
| Alright? | ||
| We reach a point where expansion is not possible because we are warring with ourselves to gain the territory that each other has obtained. | ||
| So it has been argued sociologically that That the very act of wanting to colonize is self-limiting against successful colonization of the galaxy. | ||
| Because to colonize the galaxy has to be done in an organized way. | ||
| You take this sector, I take this sector, but if I want territory and I want it now, and my kids want it now, I want that territory, not this other one. | ||
| In fact, I want it all. | ||
| That kind of attitude breeds violence. | ||
| It breeds war. | ||
| Intragalactic war. | ||
| So it may be that the very kind of civilization that could peacefully colonize a galaxy It's not the kind of civilization that would colonize the galaxy at all. | ||
| Oof, that's heavy. | ||
| Very heavy. | ||
| What about the idea that any advanced... | ||
| That's my first comment about Stephen Hawking. | ||
| He made another comment about we should be a multi-planet species. | ||
| What the hell does that mean? | ||
| To protect ourselves against an asteroid rendering one extinct. | ||
| It makes a good headline and it sounds like it makes sense, but I'm not there with it. | ||
| Yeah, of course I want to... | ||
| Back up. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Let's be a multi-planet species. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| But I would do it for different reasons. | ||
| I would do it because it's cool. | ||
| Not because I want to protect Human species from extinction. | ||
| No, that wouldn't be the reason to do it. | ||
| Can I tell you why? | ||
|
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Please. | |
| List every reason why you think we go extinct. | ||
| One, we trash Earth. | ||
| And we can't live off of it anymore. | ||
| An asteroid is coming. | ||
| There's some nanobot gone astray. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Pandemic. | ||
| Virus pandemic. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So... | ||
| It seems to me that if we want to be a multi-planet species, Mars would be the one, because it's a 24-hour day. | ||
| It's got seasons. | ||
| We would have to terraform it first, but then we'd all move there. | ||
| We'd just ship a billion people there. | ||
| Here's my point. | ||
| Whatever it takes to terraform Mars and ship a billion people there, it's got to be easier to deflect the asteroid. | ||
| Whatever it takes to terraform Mars to turn it into Earth... | ||
| If you had the power of geoengineering to do that, then you have the power of geoengineering to turn Earth back into Earth. | ||
| But there are occasionally things that we miss, right? | ||
| Because of the way that... | ||
| So? | ||
| So you say, okay, whatever it takes to geoengineer Mars and ship a billion people there, it's got to be easier to create a perfect viral serum that makes us immune to all possible disease. | ||
| It's got to be easier. | ||
| Whatever that takes. | ||
| But isn't it possible that there's some asteroids that we just will not see until it's too late? | ||
| Then you put up... | ||
| Whatever that takes! | ||
| That's what I'm saying! | ||
| I mean, whatever! | ||
| Terraform Mars and ship a billion people there! | ||
| A billion. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Why wouldn't it be? | ||
| What, are you going to put ten people there? | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| You want to split your species, okay? | ||
| And if an asteroid is coming that you can't deflect, which would surprise me if you could ship a billion people to Mars, you just let them all die? | ||
| You're going to let all the Earth people die and the Mars people survive just so you can save the species? | ||
| Don't save everybody! | ||
| I'm not buying into the premise, this cable car-ology premise, that you have to save one to not save the other. | ||
| You know, cable car-ology. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| The cable car, you know, someone's in the tracks. | ||
| You let them go. | ||
| You let them go. | ||
| You steer it out of the way, but then you actively kill two people instead of passively killing one person. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| I'm not buying into that premise for this question. | ||
| I'm simply saying... | ||
| That whatever it takes, it's got to be easier to put up some kind of net that finds any asteroid that could possibly harm us and zaps them out of the sky. | ||
| It's got to be easier. | ||
| This is the last question. | ||
| Is it possible that the reason why we are never visited by extraterrestrials is because the way civilizations advance? | ||
| It's because of the space debris. | ||
| One. | ||
|
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Two. | |
| Is it because the way civilizations... | ||
| They have visited. | ||
| They visited during Comic-Con. | ||
| Nobody noticed. | ||
| They don't like cosplay. | ||
|
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|
Three. | |
| Their costumes weren't as good as ours. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Three. | ||
|
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Three? | |
| Three. | ||
| They've observed us and judged. | ||
| There's no sign of intelligent life on Earth. | ||
| Okay, but is there another possibility that civilizations don't ever get to travel like that? | ||
| Because what happens is, as they advance, and as their technology advances, they become, instead of a biological entity seeking to spread its genetics throughout the universe, they become some sort of symbiotic artificial life. | ||
| That as they create, as they advance their technology and as they continue to innovate, they reach a limitation in biology and then eventually create artificial life that sees no desire whatsoever to travel. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| So I would say, that's a great philosophical question. | ||
| I would say that the day we create AI, if the AI is everything we are except more, And not emotional. | ||
| And not foolish. | ||
| Then it would have been urged to explore. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Otherwise, then it's not us. | ||
| But wouldn't it create those doors, like in Monsters, Inc., and start going dimension to dimension instead of fucking around with jets? | ||
| With chemical jets? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Right, right, right, right, right. | ||
| Yeah, they figure out the fourth dimension. | ||
| Yeah, wouldn't that be the best way to do things? | ||
| And then they figure it out. | ||
| And then they would figure out a way to travel better than any way we could. | ||
| But the fact that we want to travel, and we're creating versions of ourselves called AI... I don't see why AI wouldn't want to travel. | ||
| But why would it be curious? | ||
| If AI... If it is us, this is my point. | ||
|
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|
If it's not biological. | |
| Then it's not... | ||
| Well, if we create every neurosynaptic map of our brain into silicon, into a computer... | ||
| And recreate our consciousness as humans. | ||
| The human brain. | ||
| But wouldn't that be just one version of AI? Sure. | ||
| Wouldn't there be like an infinite version of AI that AI could create itself? | ||
| It could. | ||
| And why would it limit itself to all of our emotions and sexual desires and jealousy and all the ridiculous things that are holding us back? | ||
| It could. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| No, I'm not as fearsome of AI as others are. | ||
| We're not going to make an AI-looking human being, because a human form is not the best or ideal form for anything. | ||
| Did you see Ex Machina? | ||
| Yes, I did. | ||
| Did you love it? | ||
| Did you love it? | ||
| It was good. | ||
| You didn't love it? | ||
| Good moments. | ||
| You didn't love it? | ||
| No, it was good. | ||
| I loved it. | ||
| I want to marry it. | ||
| You want to marry it. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Well, that's the first thing you use. | ||
| It's the sex bot. | ||
| No, it's not even that. | ||
| It's one of my favorite movies. | ||
| That's where the money will be, for sure. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| But I'm just saying it's one of my favorite movies. | ||
| I want to marry the movie. | ||
| It's just an awesome movie. | ||
| So then marriage would no longer be about sex or just be about reproduction because you just go to your room with your sex bot. | ||
| Well, I'm hoping that that's one of the first things that people figure out they shouldn't do anymore. | ||
| Once they get smart enough to symbiotically attach themselves to artificial intelligence. | ||
| I was watching, what was it, Family Feud? | ||
| One of the questions was, if you're... | ||
| We asked 100 married women, if you could have a second husband for only one purpose, what would it be? | ||
| Something like 70% of them said, just for sex. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| A second husband for only one purpose. | ||
| Just for getting stuffed. | ||
| That's rough. | ||
| That's a fucking wake-up call for a lot of dudes out there. | ||
| A lot of guys! | ||
| Let's end on that. | ||
| Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysics for people in a hurry throughout May. | ||
| Thank you so much, sir. | ||
| You're a gentleman and a scholar. | ||
| Love you, man. | ||
| I love you too, brother. | ||
| Thank you so much for coming here. | ||
| And thank you anytime. | ||
| Open invitation. | ||
| Call me up. | ||
| Middle of the night. | ||
| Come down here. | ||
| We'll open it up. | ||
| And you gotta wake him up. | ||
|
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He'll do it. | |
| He's down. | ||
| He loves you, too. | ||
|
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All right. | |
| Thank you, sir. |
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