Neil deGrasse Tyson and Joe Rogan debate science’s limits, from unrealistic depictions of nature (like The Walking Dead’s leaves) to debunking UFO claims via sensor scrutiny—citing Planet X and Nemesis as past misinterpretations. Tyson warns against brain-internet tech, calling it a misinformation accelerator, while Rogan counters with Neuralink’s potential for truth detection. They explore the Big Bang’s 13.8B-year-old light revealing galaxies in formation and dark energy’s one-way cosmic expansion, questioning whether some mysteries (e.g., multiverse bubbles) may lack answers. Billionaires like Musk and Bezos reshape society, but Tyson insists curiosity thrives through interdisciplinary collaboration—not pseudoscience like psychic claims or the "10% brain" myth. Ultimately, they agree: real science demands evidence, not storytelling, even as podcasts blur traditional boundaries. [Automatically generated summary]
I say, okay, right now, NASA landed a rover on Mars with a helicopter, and this is at 120 million miles away, controlling it, and it's on Mars where it's 100 degrees below zero.
Meanwhile, Texas, where it's cold, has no electricity.
So all I said was, maybe NASA, instead of politicians, should run Texas.
But if enough people are angry and upset at their own lives and they just decide they're going to attack Neil deGrasse Tyson because he makes a poignant point.
Yeah, but you're a different kind of astrophysicist.
You're an entertaining educator, and that's so important because you make things fun.
You make things fun while pointing out really important points, like really important things that we should probably understand about the way the universe works and physics.
Yeah, I mean, science educators are so important because so many people equate, whether it's mathematics or science or even history, they equate it with boredom.
A lot of like maybe bored, disenfranchised teachers who've been teaching these kids are not into it, you know, and then their hormones are kicking in, so they can't pay attention to anything anyway.
Yeah, you know, it's easy for me to make these statements, but I'm not the one in the trenches there, especially in those middle schools where hormones are riding everything.
And then just trying to get 40 kids or however many is in the typical classroom to pay attention to the same thing at the same time and to be interested in the same thing at the same time.
You know, there's a lot of intelligent kids that get left by the wayside because school, for whatever reason, doesn't jive with the way they learn things.
The educator is someone who faces the audience and wants to know, how is your brain wired for thought?
And if I know that, I have a chance of shaping knowledge, information, insight in ways that can best be received by your receptors.
And yes, if it's a mixture, so you dance a little bit.
You put out some feelers in this way.
So if I have an audience and some of them are over 75, you look for the silver-haired folks, they'll remember the later stages of the Second World War and early stages of the Cold War.
I'll throw in a reference just for them.
You know, the 20-somethings won't know and they won't care.
They probably won't even get it, but I'll go buy it quickly enough that I offer the other community demographic in the audience something else.
And this is my way.
Maybe it's a tennis match.
I'm hitting the ball back and forth to different people.
And that way I can take this body of knowledge that is the universe and have everybody share in it.
Otherwise, I don't know that I can claim to be an educator.
Well, you certainly can claim to be an educator, but maybe you're not making the best use of your particular abilities.
Your particular abilities that are unique to you are your humor and your fun, your jovial, along with being deep and philosophical and talking about very heavy.
It's weird to me that now the Pentagon is saying that these are real videos that they've captured off of naval vessels and they've been hovering over defense systems and they don't know what they are.
They don't know how they operate.
There's a film that was released recently by Jeremy Corbel that also came from the Navy where it shows one that's a transmedium device.
It actually flies through the air and then goes into the water.
Because there's equipment between you and what's going on, typically.
When it's sort of Navy sensors and trackers and that sort of thing.
Other things are people, things people see in the sky with their own senses, right?
Just the light in the sky, and it moves in ways they don't understand or can't explain.
But a point I've made before, I'll just rehash it here.
We live in a time where everyone is equipped with a high-resolution color camera and video recorder.
Basically everyone.
And if you run the numbers on it, it's about, I got this from someone from Google, there's about six billion photos and videos uplifted to the internet every day.
And in that collection, you find really rare things that you only heard about or maybe you saw the results of, but you didn't actually see it happen.
So there are videos of buses tumbling in the winds of a tornado.
Now, in the aftermath of a tornado, there's a bus on its side, and so you knew when took it there, but previously, no one is going to say, oh, that bus is about to lift into the air, Wizard of Oz style, like the house.
Let me go in and get my movie camera and then come back out and shoot this.
No one did that.
If you did, you'd be stupid.
You want to get the hell out of there.
But everybody has a video camera.
So we have images of this rare phenomenon, uncommon, hardly ever filmed, buses tumbling in the air.
We have video footage of animals doing interesting things that we never had video recordings of.
And so it comes, and it goes back, and it gets another stone, drops it in, and every time it drops it in, the water level rises, and it can drink more water.
And so every time we study animals, they're smarter than we ever thought they were.
So maybe for our own ego, we kept building ourselves up, saying how separate and distinct we are as humans in the animal kingdom, when maybe we're not as separate and distinct as we think we are.
So now what's my broader point there that I was making?
You know, the stuff that goes viral is much less than that.
A cat, a kitten that jumps to the table and falls, that goes viral.
You don't think video footage of an alien is not going to go viral instantly?
But there's none.
So I'm just saying, I'm thinking if we were being visited, somebody would have some good footage.
If we were being visited, I'm thinking maybe Google satellite images would catch spaceships that are not airplanes moving on our surface.
If we were being visited, I'm thinking we'd have something better than fuzzy, monochromatic video of objects that apparently reveal themselves only to Navy pilots, right?
You have to say, this is really happening and they're observing us and they're concealing themselves in this particular way.
You have to say that.
So that's sort of, that's your way to maintain your alien belief system by saying that.
And I don't have a problem with it.
Go get them.
Go get them.
But all of what has been put forth as evidence for aliens, to me, is insufficient evidence to excite my interest, my research interest in devoting time to finding it out.
But it definitely has excited other people.
I have not stopped them.
I am not saying defund the military program on UAPs, which of course is just updated UFO.
I'm of the belief that they're probably akin to what we did on Mars.
I don't think there's aliens in them.
I have a feeling that these things are probes.
And I feel like if you just think about biological entities flying through the universe, like, why do that?
When you have sophisticated technology that's good enough right now from our relatively primitive consideration of what we think is possible a million years from now, right?
But we can send that Mars rover around.
We have a helicopter on Mars.
I mean, there's multiple satellites flying through the universe right now taking images.
Right, but if we had something like, are you familiar with one of the most famous cases was a case with Commander David Fraver of the Navy, who encountered with one or two other jets off of the Nimitz.
They encountered this thing that was shaped like a Tic-Tac.
But as a scientist, when you're presenting information, you don't say this thing was at 80,000 feet and it dropped to zero to sea level in one second or whatever it was, the measure.
That's the wrong way to report it.
What you say is we have sensors that told us this is what happened.
So, by the way, this level of attention I'm giving to the detail and the reporting of information, we do that with fellow scientists for much less than if we're being visited by intelligent aliens from another planet.
Go to a scientific conference and watch the level of scrutiny we put on other people's work.
If they have a sensor that has a new result, we'll say, did you calibrate the sensor?
Was Pluto the mass that Planet X should have been?
Everyone assumed it was.
But over the decades, the mass of Pluto got lower and lower and lower as our estimates got more and more accurate.
Then we found out that Pluto is one-fifth the mass of our moon, made of half ice.
And this is why Pluto got into trouble later in the 20th century.
It's not because we had some vendetta against Pluto.
Pluto just never belonged in that list to begin with.
That's really how you need to think about it.
Anyhow, there's still the matter of Neptune's orbit.
Pluto did not have enough mass to make those changes.
So the search for Planet X continued.
So what happens?
All right.
1993, a colleague of mine named Miles Standish, okay?
He's probably related to the Miles Standish on the Mayflower.
He, as an astrophysicist, looked at all of the data people were using to say Neptune's orbit was crooked.
looked at all the data.
Then he found out that at one particular observatory, was it the gearbox or the timing mechanism had just been cleaned or swapped out?
There was some because in the observing log, you write down everything because you just don't know.
Okay, was there a glitch in the current?
Was there a bird flyover?
You make notes of everything.
One of the observatories whose data was being grafted together with the other observatories had this sort of gearbox.
I don't remember if it was a gearbox.
There was some mechanical adjustment that was made.
He said, I wonder if that had an effect on the positioning of this telescope.
He removed those data from his analysis and fitted data to all the other telescopes that he had for the positions of Uranus of Neptune.
When he did that, Planet X evaporated in that instant.
In that instant.
There was no Planet X. All the other data, when he connects across, removing the data from the one where the observing log said they did something different, Neptune fell right onto Newton's laws.
And so since 1993, there is no Planet X. And Pluto, and were it not for that, we probably would have been a long time before we discovered Pluto because no one would have looked for it.
The lesson there is you have information that you think is correct from your sensors.
This was an observatory, a fine observatory.
And you're going to say, this observatory says Neptune is misbehaving.
But then you learned there was something wrong with the data.
You throw it out.
So I'm trying to say this happens all the time in science.
You have to be careful what you're analyzing before you declare that what the thing measured is true and then realign all your resources to address what you think is true when it might have just simply been a glitch or multiple glitches or anything.
Now, I read this quite a while ago, so forgive me.
But there was some speculation that we might be in some sort of a binary star system, and there might be a burnt out star that's way, way, way outside of our solar system.
And that's causing the galactic shelf to drop off, like this Kuiper Belt is responding to some other gravity that's way out there.
There was a while there where we looked at the extinction records of species on Earth and found some periodicity to it.
I forgot, was it every 20 million years or something?
There was some period that repeated where the fossil records showed a dramatic drop or mild drop in the species count from one layer to the next in the geological sediment.
And so if this has a rhythm to it, there is nothing in the solar system that has a 20 million year rhythm.
So someone suggested maybe the sun has a really eccentric, as in its orbit, it's in a binary star system where there's another star that plunges in through the solar system, coming through the Kuiper belt, and then goes back out in this dance with the sun.
So we wouldn't have seen it in our civilization because this is, all right.
But when it does that, it disrupts the Kuiper Belt gravitationally.
And if you do that, you will send a rain of comets down, a higher than average rate of comets down into the inner solar system, and then you could render many life forms extinct on Earth, just the way we lost the dinosaurs from an asteroid.
And they even gave a name for it.
They called it Nemesis.
That was the nemesis double star system of the sun.
But so we took a closer look at the data.
It turned out it had been filtered in a way that revealed rhythms that were not really there.
And if it's orbital, the rhythm should be perfect because Newton's law doesn't mess around and they weren't exactly right.
So that concept has evaporated, but it got people going for a while.
And you think that's a valid way to dismiss the lack of UFO evidence because these people have these phones and they're just all filming and taking photographs and things constantly.
You're perfectly allowed to say what would happen if we were visited by aliens and you crowdsourced the access to aliens among 7 billion people in the world.
Have you ever seen the flight paths of airplanes in a single day, single 24 hours?
It is completely wild.
It's like, what the if you show this to the Wright brothers from 1903, dude.
So, across the oceans, of course, there are traffic paths, right, where you're more likely to find them than in other paths because there's either no destination there or the Great Circle route doesn't favor it.
But you look at how often every single day the sky, the airspace is crisscrossed by way more commercial carriers than military vehicles.
And I'm thinking you'd have an encounter with something that was not a fuzzy object that no one can describe.
They would photograph something through the cockpit window.
Did you have— If you had a guess, if you had a bet, like if you had a pile of money and you have to put it on green for aliens or red for horseshit, where are you putting your money?
And if you, by the way, if you, if this thing that they see out the window, okay, and they don't get a good photo or it's still fuzzy or it's still a light in the sky, and I'm saying, okay, I'm not yet convinced, but it's something fine.
Go invest resources to figure it out, especially if you think it's a security risk.
If you want to believe it's aliens, I'm not.
If they didn't want us to see them, you would never see them.
I'm pretty sure.
If they had enough technology to cross the vacuum of space to reach us, you wouldn't even know they were there.
Now, think of the hubris of us saying this advanced civilization of aliens who can cross the gaps of space are interested in us and our gonads, and they want to paint circles in our crops.
Listen, if you studied us, if you were from another planet filled with things like us, like it was another planet of us and we found a planet doing the exact same kind of nonsense that we do somewhere else, we would be riveted.
I think if they really are using photosynthesis, they're plant-based creatures, they're probably going to be so tired all the time, they're not going to have the will to travel through the universe.
That's, and by the way, I bet, yeah, I'm one of those who's a little worried when we give our return address broadcast out into space because you don't give your email to strangers in the street, yet we're giving the coordinates of Earth broadcast out to the gaps of interstellar space.
So I'm a little worried about that.
But then I think about it and I say, nearly every portrayal of an alien in Hollywood is evil.
Going right on back to War of the Worlds with H.G. Wells.
And I'm thinking, why?
Do we have any insights that aliens would be evil?
Or is it really a mirror to ourselves?
It's not imagined knowledge of how aliens would behave.
Well, no, the War of the Worlds long predates that, but half a century.
Right.
Yeah.
So, but on balance, the aliens are evil.
Okay, that's all I'm saying.
And so we are, I see those portrayals as unwitting mirrors of our own conduct because an alien coming to Earth has a greater technology than we do, period.
That's just the end of story.
So how has it gone on Earth?
Anytime one civilization with higher technology encounters one with lesser technology, it has never boded well for the society with lesser technology.
They've been enslaved, killed, put in camps, exterminated.
So I think we fear aliens because, in fact, we fear ourselves.
I mean, the landscape was ripe for it, but the oh, by the way, was it UFO sightings went up during COVID, I think?
Because everyone was home bored with nothing to do, and you'd go out and look up.
Yeah, there's a lot of cultural statistics related to the frequency of UFO sightings.
But Trump, just before he left office, required, he slipped something into the COVID relief bill, as they do so often in Congress, where you agree with the rest of this, I don't agree with that, but I want to get it through.
The full disclosure, within six months, he wants all federal agencies that collect information on unidentified sky objects to put together reports and deliver it to Congress within six months.
Fine.
I don't have a problem with that.
What's weird, though, is this belief that somehow the government is some repository of knowledge and secrets that we don't otherwise have access to.
That's not the kind of country we live in, nor is the government that competent.
So, yeah, they try to keep secrets, and they keep many secrets.
They tend to be of the uninteresting kind.
But if you have an interesting secret, if you're stockpiling aliens and you're telling me that the secretary, the admin, the janitor, that they're not sneaking out an iPhone photo, really?
Christopher Mellon, who worked for the Defense Department, he came on and was talking to us about-You get all the inside folks here.
And that was, it was an intriguing conversation because he is of the belief that they have had access to some objects and some crafts and some things that are unexplainable and don't seem to come from any technology that we're, and I don't want to put any words in his mouth, but any technology that we're currently capable of reproducing.
I mean, he might have seen something that the military was actually working on that would be mysterious to someone who is only familiar with unclassified propulsion systems and the like.
Do you think it's possible that a propulsion system so outside of the norm, something that is not working off burning fuel, something that's working off some new technology that is, whether it's some sort of gravity distorting or gravity-based technology, that that could actually be conceived in a vacuum where they could get the top scientists that work in propulsion, people that do understand, I mean, as much as we do understand gravity, as much as we understand the possibility of some sort of propulsion system.
Is it possible that this could all be done in a vacuum, that it'll all be done without anybody ever having known about it, and they could produce something that's so preposterously advanced from anything we've been capable of making before?
So if something actually can move the way supposedly these units that they, these various tracking systems that they have that can follow something from 80,000 feet.
And if something can move that way, if it's confirmed that the systems are accurate and that this thing does move that fast and can do things that are beyond our capability currently as far as we understand it, would it be more likely that it would come from some other advanced civilization outside of Earth?
Or would it be more likely that it was conceived in a vacuum here without anybody having any access to any of the technology in these incremental forms?
Sure, but they looked really different and they behaved very differently.
And they had, so yes, it was still incremental, But let's imagine a deep black ops where they're making their own incremental changes, but you don't get to see them.
So by the time it shows up, it looks like it's a big leap, even though they got there incrementally.
Some will go because you can, there is money in the military, but you're forced to work on projects that might not be the most creative investment of your own energies.
You hire a physicist, make a bomb at the end of this.
It had crashed into Antarctica or something like that, frozen forever, and then they discovered it.
They were like digging in, and they found this thing, and then it came out, and it would transform and become like an identical copy of whatever it touched.
When I look at what we're doing with human beings and, you know, the replacing people's knees and replacing people's hips and artificial this and artificial that, and then with CRISPR and genetic engineering, I think it's a matter of time before we are some sort of symbiotic thing.
We're partially created by, you know, whatever technology is available at the time, whether it's 100 years from now or 500 years from now, something that's going to be superior that's not going to provide us with all the problems.
You have, we control your cholesterol, your inflammation, we know how to reduce the chance of stroke.
So you're thinking very narrow on this.
Well, I need a new kneecap or I need a new this.
The fact is, science and technology has already been infused in the human condition in a way that, for example, has doubled our life expectancy within the last 150 years.
So it's already happening chemically.
So now you want to do it mechanically because that requires material science.
And that's a much later field than chemistry was developed in order to contribute to what our lives are.
Now you want to get into our DNA.
That's just the next level.
Okay.
Now, are we going to have some internet infused in our head?
Because when you look at the arc of, there's in science, you want to convert data to sort of facts and facts into knowledge, knowledge into insight, and then ultimately insight into wisdom.
So I hate to name drop again, but I had one of the founders of Wiki in my office, and he wanted to know what does he do about people who are pirating pages?
Because back then, anyone could edit any page at all.
And so the edit index is, it tells you two things.
The rate that people have made changes to that page.
It's one dimension of information.
Another one is, is it an in-situ edit or is it additive?
That's important.
Because if there's some celebrity who dies, you'll edit the page by adding a paragraph, though they died in their sleep or whatever.
So that's editing, but that's not, you're not, that doesn't put the content at risk if you're just adding information.
So if I know that a page has been edited 40 times in the last three days, malarkey, then the likelihood that that information is objectively true is very low.
And so when you're doing a book report or any kind of report and you're citing wiki pages, you would have a side index that tells you this page is rife with conflicting and contested edits.
Now that I know that, here is what they said.
Whereas other pages that are stable, I think we have a good right to say this contains objectively true information.
And you would be able to make the judgment yourself.
And it'd be easy to track that on a computer with all the edits.
And you'll know, did someone just correct spelling?
You give the nature of what the edit is.
And I thought that research is, if you don't know what the answer is, let's at least know how controversial the information is.
This brings up an interesting point because one of the things that we're talking about when it comes to technology, we're talking about improvements in the way the human brain works with a symbiotic relationship to whatever Neuralink or whatever new technology is invented.
If we could come to a point where technology could eliminate deception, how much more information could be shared and how much more could we understand?
What I don't know is if we cannot eliminate deception in ourselves, either self-deception or purposeful deception in others, I don't see how we can program that into our technology.
But I think we can if we can understand whether someone's telling the truth or not.
If it's clear and glaringly obvious, if you and I are talking and I start talking to you and all of a sudden a green light pops up, which indicates I'm full of shit, you'll see it and I'm like, oh, my green light's showing.
You can't then indict me for that truth being wrong if that's how I saw it.
That's like the umpire.
That's how I called it because that's how I saw it.
The umpire is not being evil.
That's just what they saw.
So that's one problem with that.
Another one is there's so many things that are, and that's what makes the world interesting, I think.
So you want an example of where the truth is nuanced.
I can't think off the top of my head, but I'm just telling you that in almost every case where someone wants to turn a question into a binary answer, they're doing a disservice to human intellect, to the real world that's out there.
So you have to have, in addition to your lie meter, you have to judge whether someone is being creative in the thing they're telling you that's not true.
Well, if they say it's a non-fiction book, then they're lying, right?
If it's a fiction book, then they're being creative.
If someone's being deception, deceptive in a non-fiction book, that's a bad person.
But if someone is writing something like Salem's Lot from Stephen King, this crazy story about a town that gets taken over by vampires, that's just fun.
I just think that if technology, to go back to it, we'll come back to the questions.
If technology continues to advance in the direction that it's going, it seems to me that one of the things that's happening is the distance and the distance between us and information is getting smaller and smaller.
Our access to information is getting greater and greater.
And that as this time goes on, it's going to be more integrated into who you are as a person, whether it's through Elon's creation or someone else's creation.
Once that happens, I could envision a language that's being used through which we can communicate with each other that Elon was discussing when he said you're going to be able to communicate without using words.
That once that happens, you're going to be able, whether it's 100 years from now or 1,000 years from now, whatever it is, you're going to be able to display or to communicate with pure intent.
You're going to be able to do things without our ability to use personality and charisma and language and to be more articulate and impressive in the way you talk, to have a different impact on the way a person receives your thoughts.
Instead, it'll be purely your intent and your thought, purely your thought process.
So I'm just because we can extrapolate to a thing doesn't mean that's the thing that's going to happen.
True.
So I'm old enough to remember the 1950s and 60s, people were imagining the future, the home of the future.
Well, technology was automating things.
So everything was a button.
So the home of the future was just a button.
And then people imagine that the future evolution of humans, we'd grow a big index finger because you had to be pushing buttons all the time.
Right.
And now, no, we don't have buttons all over the house.
Not really.
Okay.
That's not the thing.
Well, we have the remote control.
I guess that's buttons, but the button can do a thousand different things, right?
Depending on how it's programmed.
So there are things that take a look at computing.
There was an era where the bigger a computer was, the more powerful it was.
Okay?
Let's go right up to 1968, 2001, a space odyssey.
This is imagining a world in 2001.
Oh, computers will be really big then.
There's that one big computer in the center of the ship.
Oh, no one imagined that you'd have something more powerful than that on your hip.
No one thought that way.
People imagine the future where we have motorized sidewalks and monorails and everything.
And what we didn't get was we thought energy would cost nothing.
So we imagined a world with transportation, motion, and actions that all require energy to enable.
And those worlds came out of the heads of people who extrapolated forward and they did not understand that the real action was in information.
Information is what became cheap, not energy.
And when information becomes cheap, I have the world at my fingertips, even though I still have to walk down the sidewalk and it's not a motorized pathway.
And so I'm not one to just take what's going on now and extrapolate it and say everyone is going to be living that differently.
Because other things come in from the side that you don't anticipate.
And when they come in from the side, it is not an extrapolation of what you're doing now.
It is something you didn't even imagine.
Because an innovative, creative person looks to the left, looks to the right, and says, I can combine these into something that's completely new that no one even imagined.
So that's how the future unfolds.
So extrapolating, you get the first couple of years correct.
Five years, ten years out, you are completely off.
And you said 500 years, 1,000 years.
Let's shorten that a little bit.
Let's say 30 years.
You say, no, that's not much.
You know, we need more time than that.
Ask yourself.
Let's go back to 1960.
We didn't have a spaceship.
United States did not have a rocket to carry people that wouldn't blow up on the launch pad.
30 years later, it's 1990, people have laptop computers.
And we've been to the moon six times over.
30 years.
So when I think today to 30 years from now, I'm saying I don't know that I can predict anything, but there's some things that I know are going to happen in the next few years.
Self-driving cars, it's going to take over like that.
Why?
Because you replace your car every half the people replace the car every five years.
So in five years, if I have a self-driving car and all the HOV lanes are now reserved only for self-driving cars, that's the next car you're going to drive.
And then the government's just going to shut down your car and pull you out.
It's going to shut down the highway because everything's going to be automated and they're going to need access to all the cars just in case it's a high-speed chase.
But it's just these people that are doing this insane innovation like him, like trying to deliver things with drones and trying to spread the business further and further and further.
It's like, you always wonder, like, what is the motivation?
Not that anybody asked, but laid end to end, Jeff Bezos's $200 billion can encircle Earth 180 times, then reach the moon and back 30 times, and with what's left over, make a stack 10 kilometers high.
That's what I pictured there, the $1 bill in the tweet.
I just wanted to sort of, it was a reality check on how much money that is when you can do amazing space things with it, and then you have leftover money.
When you've got a guy like Bezos, though, that is at the helm of this intense empire and also is in many ways, like Elon, fascinated with technological growth, right?
He's got this deep, what is his blue sky, blue origin?
No, I'm not saying that question, but when you're on the frontier, you just don't know.
So I can give an absurd example.
Suppose you posed a question.
You say to yourself, I want to design an experiment that'll visit the moon and test what kind of cheese the moon is made out of.
So you have special equipment.
Is it goat cheese?
Is it Brie, Rogeford?
And then you get there and it's made out of silicates.
The question had no meaning.
Even though nouns and verbs were in the right place and it had a question mark and you were able to design an experiment, the question had no meaning in that realm.
Let me get a more philosophical one.
Visit Santa Claus.
Okay?
Santa Claus on the North Pole, and you say, Santa, which way is North?
And every direction Santa points is due south.
Because on the North Pole, the question, which way is North, has no meaning.
What I'm saying is that Pinocchio cannot interact with its nose in any, with his nose, in any truthful way, because the world of rules associated with his universe prevents it.
Do we have an idea about the birth and death of the universe based on our own biological limitations?
Not that we're not measuring, not that there's not a keen understanding of the radio frequency from the Big Bang and all, but just the idea.
Do we put a limitation?
Do we think of the idea of the universe beginning or ending based on our own idea of life and death, that these things must apply to all things that we see?
No, because we, until 1930s, we had no idea the universe would have a beginning.
It was assumed, other than biblical account, scientifically, the universe just simply always was.
There was no evidence for that, but we had no reason to think any other way about it.
And so we didn't force the universe to have a beginning because that felt good to us.
You're not going to do that unless you have authentic justification for it.
So just no one really talked about it.
I have books from that period.
There is no chapter on cosmology.
It ends with the starry skies of the night.
It's starting with the discussion of the planets, and it doesn't even go there because it doesn't know to go there until you have data forcing the question.
When we look at the Big Bang and we look at the fact that the universe is expanding and they know that there was some sort of an event, by measuring, how exactly do they measure the radio frequencies that come from the Big Bang?
Because visible light, when it enters the sun, the sun is made of plasma, which is a gas where electrons have been ripped off, ripped into the soup.
So you have free-moving electrons and atoms, and it's a soup.
The atoms are not part of the, the electrons are not part of the atoms.
The consequence of that is light interacts heavily with free electrons.
So you try to move light through a plasma, and the light sees an electron, it careens off of it.
And it does not travel in a straight line.
It bounces and careens and scatters.
And so by the time the light comes out the other side, you lost all hope of any information about what was on the other side of the star or on the other side of that plasma.
Okay.
So the early universe was very hot.
You can calculate what those temperatures must have been.
So hot that all atoms are ionized and the whole universe is plasma.
So light is just bouncing around within the universe.
In fact, a lot of visible light is doing this.
Then the universe expands and cools.
The electrons combine with the atoms.
All of a sudden, the beam of light is no longer batted to and fro by these free electrons.
And you reach a point where the universe clears and it becomes transparent to the passage of light.
In that moment, all the light that was contained in that fireball now moves free across the universe.
That light, for the last 14 billion years, has been expanding with the expanding universe, and the energy of the visible light is now microwaves.
You point a microwave telescope in any direction, it is bathed in microwaves from that event.
So how is it we can see the birth of the universe?
That already happened.
It's because it takes light time to travel.
We look out 13.8 billion light years ago.
We are seeing galaxies being born.
Okay.
Wait a billion years.
Now these galaxies are a billion years older.
They're no longer being born.
In fact, they're not giving us this light that I was telling you about that became microwaves.
But wait a minute.
The universe is now 15 billion years old.
I can now see objects that have given their light to me from 15 billion years ago.
They are now being born.
I'm seeing them being born.
So as long as there is a universe out there, and as long as the whole universe had the same birth date, which all evidence points to, I will always see evidence of the Big Bang.
Because that information is always fresh to us from a distance whose light only just now reached us.
So what you're going to look for is the day when this expanding horizon washes over nothing.
If this expanding horizon moves and there's no galaxies there and there's nothing, then all the information about the formation of the universe goes away.
And the Big Bang no longer has anybody telling us it is going through a Big Bang.
That would be the edge of the known matter content of the universe.
When scientists study this information and they look back at this time period of 13.8 billion years and they hypothesize or they try to come up with theories about how far it could go back beyond that.
So the galaxies will no longer be able to hold together because the expansion of the universe is now manifesting at a local level rather than on a much larger level.
So galaxies start getting stretched apart.
And then the planets orbiting stars start getting stretched apart.
And then the molecules start getting broken apart.
And then the atoms themselves.
And then in the limit, this stretching reaches the very pixels that comprise the fabric of space and time.
It's called the Planck length.
That is the very structure of what comprises everything we know in the universe.
And so the expansion will ultimately hit that.
And we do not know.
We don't know what the consequence of that.
You know what we call it?
It's called the big rip.
What happens when you stretch fabric?
There's a point where it doesn't stretch anymore.
And it rips.
That's in between 20 and 22 billion years from now.
If the cosmic acceleration goes unchecked, the world will end in a big rip.
Yeah, well, that's why it's so important for people like that to be out there that have these things that they can pose, these questions and these scenarios they could describe, where your mind is like, wait, what?
And then what happens?
No one knows.
But we have this extreme desire to know what happens next.
Like, what happens?
What happens when I die?
What happens if Austa has five million people?
What happens if they don't get rid of the tents?
What happens if, you know what I mean?
Like, there's always a what happens if.
What happens if there's no more matter in the universe that gets broken down to pixels?
First of all, I thought pixels were just a visual representation of things on phones and screens and laptops and shit.
Did you even know that a pixel was a unit of measurement of the fabric of the universe?
Definitely not.
Proof simulation theory sounds like.
Yeah, right?
If you get further and further out, how much if you had to bet all your money, if you had, again, if you had one-side yes, one-side no for simulation theory.
So now we have the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang.
This has been around with us for 70, 80 years.
And that's pretty stable in terms of our understanding of things.
But now we take quantum physics, which is the science of the small, and add it to Einstein's general relativity, the science of the large.
Now, why would you do that?
Because at the beginning of the universe, the large is small.
So think about this.
We have general relativity, which gives us black holes and all the rest of this.
That applies to big macroscopic things.
I'm good with that.
No problem.
Quantum physics refers to atomic things primarily and molecules and how they behave.
And the two don't talk to each other.
It's like they don't, in fact, they're incompatible.
And this is how you get string theorists.
String theorists say, well, these are incompatible.
Maybe there's a third theory above those two that combines them.
And we have top people working on that.
When you start combining quantum physics with general relativity, because there was a time when the universe was small, then the entire universe behaves in quantum ways.
And so you can create a state of the universe where it's what's called a false, it's in a false state.
So it's a false state.
Let's say you have a hill that goes down, but then the hill goes back up and then it goes down to a much lower point.
So now you take a marble and roll it down.
Maybe it'll just sort of get stuck up there in that first dip.
Well, if our universe is there, we might not become a universe.
But it's possible to tunnel out of that and then slide all the way down to the bottom.
When you do that, you release energy.
And when that happens, you birth a universe.
And it turns out this process is not limited to happening once.
So this can happen multiple times.
And from people I've spoken with who work in this field, because it's slightly outside of my direct astrophysics interests, there are different kinds of these multiverses.
One of them could have the same laws of physics that we have.
That's what leads people to say there's another Joe Rogan, but he's the evil Joe Rogan with a goatee or whatever.
And there's several levels, but the most significant one is one where not only are the laws of physics different, but maybe there's a universe where there are no laws of physics at all.
So all I'm saying is in the last part of the book, we explore all of these exit ramps from the universe that take us to the end of the universe, and we don't even know if we're asking the right question.
But what we share with you is a sense of where the current thinking would take us if you extended it to its limits.
When you ponder questions like this, when you ponder questions like other universes with different laws of physics or no laws of physics or fungible laws of physics, when you sit around, like what is your process?
Do you sit alone in your office and sit in front of a laptop and start writing this stuff out?
When you're trying to think deep thoughts about what might or might not be true, objectively true in the universe, that can be a little more solitary, I think.
And you can come up with ideas anyway.
Forget this, deductive reasoning, inductive, forget all that.
You can have an idea just sitting on a toilet, okay?
And it could be a spark.
It could be because you saw some great work of art.
And so sources of sparks of creativity and inspiration can come from anything.
You could be religious and you want to manifest the glory of God, and that's what's triggering you to have these thoughts.
Okay?
So the creative process is not so regimented as the teaching of scientific method would have you believe.
You go to a science lab.
Well, what is your hypothesis?
What is your this?
Then what is the test of the hypothesis?
You know, I don't even have an hypothesis.
I just, I don't know.
I just wonder.
You know?
So the formality that we are often exposed to is not always how that unfolds.
So on top of that, getting back to your question, often new thoughts, you are alone.
You're just, you know, you're not distracted.
In this world of multitasking, no, no great ideas, I don't think, come out of multitasking.
There are fields within astrophysics that are slightly outside of my research expertise.
And some of those folks have written popular level books.
I'll read those.
Those are fun because they're sort of scopes.
They're review papers that are written.
And for me, new ideas, I mean, think about it.
What is a new idea?
You might even call it the definition of genius.
You see what everyone else sees, but you think what no one else has thought.
But now you want to make sure.
But add to that, maybe you are so diverse in what you expose yourself to that you see more than what other people see.
And when you see more, you have the capacity to make connections that might not have previously been imagined, either by you or by anybody else.
This is the value of cross-pollinating fields.
It's why major discoveries can come in from the side in what is otherwise a very staid path of progress.
So in a hospital, people say, well, how do you want to invest money in physics?
That's so 20th century with the Cold War and the bombs.
Let's invest in biology.
That's the ticket.
So that makes sense, you know, as a headline, but let's unpack that.
Go walk into a hospital and line up every single machine brought into the service of diagnosing the condition of the human body without cutting you open.
So you'd have the MRI, you have the X-ray machines, you'd have the ultrasound.
There's no end of these machines that are in the service of the hospital.
And MRI, admittedly, is the doctor's best friend, okay, in studying what's inside your body.
To a machine, every single one of them is based on a principle of physics discovered by a physicist who had no interest in medicine.
He saw, there's a picture of the bones of his hand.
But he's a physicist.
He's not saying, let me help orthopedic surgeons set bones.
This is not his motivation.
So new ideas, especially new things that can transform society, tend to come from fields that, if they're not tangent to your field, they're just some other kind of way in.
And so some of the greatest advances in my field came about because chemists were in the coffee lounge at the same time we were.
Or biologists walked in.
That informs our astrobiology exploits.
So it's not just, let me sit down alone in an armchair and deduce the nature of the world.
You want to be exposed to what everybody else is doing.
You want to talk to them.
You want to hear their ideas, collaborate.
No one person, you know, the midnight oil, it makes a good TV show, or movie, the midnight loner genius.
But science, most science today does not unfold that way.
So you get, so getting back to my point, you could, I personally, I do a lot of reading, and when I have an idea, then I bounce it off of people who are highly critical and skeptical of any new idea.
And if it survives that, you can't have an ego going into it.
So, like I said, creativity can unfold in many ways, but because he's a biologist and I'm not, he says something and I say, wait a minute, what do you think of this?
And he never thought of what I thought, and I never thought of what he thought.
And so this kind of creativity, this sort of cooperative exploration of ideas, then that gives birth in your mind to the idea of writing a book about something.
It's I'm a servant of your curiosity and his curiosity and her curiosity.
I'm a servant of that.
And as I tweet and as I post and as I walk the streets and as I sit in an airplane with someone next to me who learns that I know astrophysics and I hear their questions and as I reply, do their eyebrows go up and their eyes lighten?
Or do they look bored and want to order their next drink?
I monitor this and I make mental inventory of what excites people in the universe.
And when I'm overloaded by what I know excites people, it's got to go into a book.
And especially my goal is to reignite curiosity within your soul of knowledge and searching that may have once ignited when you were a kid, but has long been dampened because we don't live in a world that promotes curiosity.
And you yourself are a professional comedian among all the other hats you wear.
So I deeply respect your field in that way.
My co-host for Star Talk, the podcast, is always a professional stand-up comedian.
Not the kind who just tells jokes, right?
But the kind that sees the world and explores ways you might not have thought about it, connects it to the topic, and then you end up smiling while you're learning.
And in my experience, if you smile while you learn, you learn better.
You learn more deeply, and you come back for more.
The response is a neurosynaptic snapshot of what people are thinking in response to the very words I choose, to the phrasing.
If I think something is funny and nobody laughs, I want to know that.
That's important information for me.
If I think something isn't funny and they do laugh, if I missed something, if I was insensitive to something that I would have wanted to be had I known, that comes out.
That's there.
And that informs future encounters I have with people, informs sentences I compose for books.
And that's me, in my mind's eye, being a servant of your curiosity.
Your role as an educator and as an educator, a public educator, meaning you're someone who's in the public eye all the time, educating people in a pop culture way.
Well, he's also explaining, clarifying what the actual scientific method is versus just a flat statement like science doesn't need you to believe it's true or however you phrased it.
So that accounts for why you didn't read this link.
Had you read this link, and then I tried to be a little clever, clumsily.
I said, if you and your followers took four minutes to put down your steak and cheese hoagie to read this essay, you would then understand the meaning of that treat and you would not have.
So I said that, and then it became a whole thing.
But that's the nature of social media.
But I realized that I cannot have one tweet reference another because if the previous one is alive and it gets out, no one has any sense of where I'm going.
My following does.
And they would say, oh, fascinating four-minute read.
Thank you.
I see, and I agree.
And I talk about truths.
The three kinds of truth.
Do you know about, do you know about, did I tell you this?
We can call it beliefs, but they call it personal truths.
I'm respecting, if you look at the word truth, the first websites are religious websites.
Truth is a very important word within belief systems.
And so I studied that, and I said, all right, I'm not going to tell them, give me the word truth, because you're not describing truth, you're describing belief.
That's a fight I'm not interested or willing to have.
Okay.
Give them the truth.
Look, look, there are whole posters with a cross, and it says, seek the truth in Jesus, right?
So I'm not going to fight that.
That's a personal truth.
It's another truth, it's a political truth.
A political truth is something that becomes true in your head because it was repeated so many times and aligns with what you want.
Okay?
So hearing Trump talk about Hillary, Clinton, it was crooked Hillary, right?
So what's Hillary's first name?
Crooked.
Because it was repeated so many times.
And our brain gets co-opted because we, in nature, in the Serengeti, if we see something repeating, it gives us a good indication that maybe it's real and we should be careful about it or we can, it's a reliable thing.
In modern times, we have co-opted that feature of human evolution, and now we give you information that has no foundation in truth, but repeat it, and in your head it becomes true.
It becomes true.
Especially if you want it to be true.
I call that a political truth.
But there are other, that's a broad, the third truth is an objective truth.
This is a truth established by the methods and tools of science and verified by the methods and tools of science.
Once that is established, it doesn't later on become false.
For example, under atmospheric conditions, like the fact that Earth orbits the sun, like the fact that Earth is round, the sun is hot, there's thermonuclear fusion in the core, that the universe is expanding, that the galaxy is rotating, that there are other galaxies, that there's such a thing as quantum physics, that there are things called electrons and protons and neutrons and atoms and carbon.
There is a body of objective truths established by the methods and tools of science that when it is established, it is not later found to be false.
You can expand on that truth.
The truth can become deeper, but it doesn't become false.
And these methods and tools have been in practice basically since Galileo and Sir Francis Bacon around 1600.
Before then, some people knew about this process that science goes through, but it wasn't widespread practice, not until about 1600.
So if you're going to say, you can see the responses in here, scientists told us the Earth was flat, that was before 1600.
Scientists used to, oh, we used to bleed you with leeches, okay?
Well, let's go back to when we did that.
All right, this would be biologists doing it, and what was the state of research at the time?
That was a frontier thing they were doing.
It wasn't verified.
It was a hypothesis that they were acting on.
Okay?
So yeah, the bleeding edge of science, most of that will turn out to be wrong.
Most of it.
It's when it gets tested.
And the press gets a single scientific result that's kind of intriguing and interesting, and they report it as a new scientific truth because it was a scientific study.
And especially if it comes from a place like Harvard, where they'll put that up in the front sentence without saying, we don't know if this is actually true.
We need verification from other studies.
They don't say that typically, or that's later on in the article.
So that's how you can go from, oh, cholesterol is good for you.
No, cholesterol is bad for you.
No, cholesterol is good for you.
No, cholesterol is bad for you.
That was an unresolved research result.
But you cited one research result that was consistent with your own desires, and that became your new truth.
That's, in a way, a political truth, if it's repeated enough.
But then you find it's not that.
It's because it's still an actively researched frontier.
There was a neuroscientist, well, a brain scientist who, because you can't do experiments on human brains, that's not ethical.
All you can do is wait till someone gets an accident.
And so there's a nail gun that damages this part of the brain.
Oh, you lost your language.
Damage over this part.
Oh, you lost your short-term memory.
Oh, you lost your long-term memory.
And so you assemble the bits of what the brain is doing by people who were injured.
This is a very slow, clumsy process, but that's all you've got.
The person who had an article said, "The brain is so complex, today we only know what 10% of it is used for." Mmm, and that got-Overnight, that became we only used 10% of our brain.
And that became the mantra of school teachers getting children to rise to their potential, and there was no force operating against that coming into our culture.
What's the difference between you manifesting this yet to be fully harnessed power intermittently and other times it doesn't work for you, but sometimes it does.
So what's the difference between that and you hitting on something correctly at random?
Emergence is a property, a fascinating property of an organism that is not derivable from any of its parts when you look at it.
So for example, you can study a bird and you can know everything there is about a bird, but you would not necessarily, I don't think, been able to predict that birds flock together.
Talk to people that imagined they were going to be rock stars, imagine.
That's correct.
It didn't work out for them because you can't just, they might have really been thinking hard about it all day and night, but you can't just manufacture things from your mind.
But what you can do is have a goal, work towards it, have discipline, have focus, learn from your mistakes, improve upon your approach, and then eventually get to a place where you can look back and say, you know, I did it all with my mind.
I made it happen.
I envisioned it, and I made it happen.
And people are like, oh my God, he's using the secret.
So wherever the moon is in space, the side of Earth closest to the moon is more attracted to the moon than the side that's farthest away.
Okay?
So because the total force is different across Earth, Earth gets stretched a little, elongated.
It's especially visible in the oceans relative to the land, but Earth's physical body is also stretched in a direction towards the moon, except it's a little ahead of it, but we don't have to worry about that for the moment.
So the moon stretches the tide.
That's called the tidal force on the Earth.
Okay, so now watch.
As Earth rotates, we rotate once a day.
How long does it take the moon to go around the Earth?
Once a month.
So here's this tidal bulge.
Earth rotates inside the bulge.
And what you say at the beach, oh, the tide is coming in and out.
No, it is you rotating into and out of a tidal bulge that's fixed in space towards the moon.
But even if you're not talking about yourself in terms of what's happening, if you're working in an emergency room, a lot of doctors will swear that there's more activity during a full moon.
Oh, by the way, what you really have to test is, is there more activity during a full moon when it's overcast at night?
When no one sees the full moon.
So what you have is a self-fulfilling process, physiology.
You read all these stories about acting crazy under full moon.
A full moon is the only phase that rises at sunset and sets at sunrise.
So it's up all night.
You go to the bar.
Most places the bar closes at 2 a.m.
You come out.
The full moon is high in the sky.
And you read all these stories.
And so you're ready to just act crazy.
Okay?
So this is life imitating art in that case.
So what you really need to do is check to see when you don't know it's a full moon because it's cloudy and you overcast and you come out of the bar, do you act crazy?
But how about the delivery rooms where you're facing the other way?
Then the baby is pulled in.
I mean, so this is the absurdity of how you'd have to imagine this would play out.
But also, and you can do the calculation, that the gravity of people in the room on you and the machine, the light fish, is greater than the gravity of the moon on you.
But you're blaming the moon for this.
So here's the thing.
But it is true that in some municipalities, slightly more babies are born during full moon.
So you can say, oh, it's mysterious, it's aliens, it's magic, it's this.
Or you can say, is there another reason?
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
The human gestation period, human-female gestation period, is about 295 days.
That's not what the doctor tells you because the doctor doesn't count it from when you get pregnant.
Doctor counts your gestation period from when you first missed your period.
Okay?
Because that's a very well-known date on the calendar.
So that's how they do their numbers.
So 295 days.
Turns out a cycle of moon phases is 29 and a half days.