Neil deGrasse Tyson debunks myths about the James Webb Space Telescope’s $10B power, explaining its infrared precision reveals early galaxies while acknowledging micrometeor risks. He critiques naming conventions in astronomy and warns against genetic homogenization, citing outliers like Hotshot Swanson (4’5”) or Matt Stutzman (arm-free archer) who drive progress. On ethics, he argues science outpaces morality—self-driving cars could save 35,000 lives yearly but disrupt organ supply chains—while dismissing AI doomsday fears, favoring distributed intelligence over brain implants. Racist pseudoscience collapses under data, like Nigerian refugee children outperforming peers in tests, yet bias persists in rigid categories like gender or hurricane scales. Tyson urges humanity to prioritize curiosity over division, leaving with a playful promise of future Rogan wrestling matches. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, so first of all, it's all that, and the excitement was in part because so much could have gone wrong with this thing, and the fact that nothing went wrong, we were ecstatic.
So notice the Hubble telescope, its diameter is the spherical shape that fits in the spherical payload of the space shuttle.
So now we want to put a bigger telescope into orbit.
How do you do that?
And so this is where you need engineers, clever engineers.
We say, here's a rocket, one of the most powerful rockets we can use, but the fairing, that's the place where you hold the payload, can only be so big.
And they say, all right, why don't we fold the telescope?
Now, how are you going to fold the mirror?
Oh, you...
Turn the mirror into segments, hexagons.
Hexagons, one of only three shapes that can tile a surface, a square, a triangle, and a hexagon.
No other shape can do this.
So, well, you can have other irregular shapes that can match up.
You can tessellate what it's called.
But if you have what's called a regular polygon, so here in the image there, what you can see is all of the mirror segments.
Those fold.
Into a narrow structure along with the unfurling solar panels as well as the heat shield.
Notice that it was made in Northrop Grumman.
By the way, Grumman has a long history in helping NASA put stuff in space.
The LEM, Lunar Excursion Module, remember that?
The thing that landed on the moon?
That was designed and built in Bethpage Long Island at Grumman Aerospace.
And you go to Bethpage today, people still stand tall because they had aunts and uncles who worked on that project.
Space is a force of nature unto itself in our sense of pride, in our sense of achievement.
And our sense of what operates on civilization to take us into the future lest we continue to regress and move back into the cave which we came.
There it is all folded up in the image we now see for those who are watching this.
And you slip that into a fairing and then you launch it a million miles from Earth.
So right here, this is the Pillars of Creation, which were so named at the time Hubble first attempted this.
We were gaga over the Hubble image of this.
And now, like the JWST, oh my gosh.
For those who are more prone to religion, some have called this the Hand of God.
Because if you look at the Pillars, you can kind of picture like a thumb and fingers.
So...
But regardless, this is nearby.
This is the telescope peering deep into gas clouds that otherwise would enshroud what's going on.
And you get to see stars being born, planets being born.
And so what's remarkable about JWST is that to be tuned for the edge of the universe and the birth of galaxies is the same properties you would want to see the birth of stars.
A star is born right in front of your nose that would otherwise be cloaked by gas.
And infrared penetrates those clouds and enables you to see it as though the cloud isn't even there.
And you already know this because if you're driving through fog, you put on your fog lights.
The fog lights are not blue.
They're like reddish, amber.
That improves your ability to see through the fog.
If we could see infrared, that's the kind of light you'd use, then you wouldn't even know the fog was there.
That's why self-driving cars will be amazing.
It won't matter if it's foggy.
They'll be able to see everything.
Just give them infrared sensors.
The fog is irrelevant.
They can drive 100 miles an hour in dense fog, and all the cars will see each other.
And they want to change lanes, they tell other cars, I'm going to change lanes.
They'll part for them, open up, and we won't get 40,000 deaths a year as we currently do from automobile accidents.
Well, our detectors are better, and let me remind you that when the Hubble was designed, it was designed in like the 1980s, and it was scheduled to go up, and then we had the Challenger accident.
And that delayed the shuttle program.
So there's Hubble sitting there in mothballs with an old Microsoft chip.
And by the time it launched, it was already not as fast as it could have been.
And so the very first servicing mission swapped all that out and put in better methods and tools for measuring what it is we always needed it to do.
So one sad part about this Is that it's not serviceable.
We have no access to that point in space a million miles from the moon.
We haven't left low Earth orbit since 1972. We're not going out a million miles from Earth to fix a telescope.
And I said, I can't just give them my stump speech as professor of astrophysics.
It has to work in their medium.
And so I went home and stood in front of the mirror.
And had people just shout out things to me, anything in the universe, any idea, object, person, place, or thing.
And I would come up with like three sentences that are interesting, make you smile, and be tasty enough to want to tell someone else the anatomy of a soundbite.
I read an article about the Webb telescope and what they were taking into consideration is the possibility that the Big Bang may be incorrect and that the universe might be larger and older than we think.
It's saying as more data and new information comes in, there is a distinct possibility that the Big Bang might just explain the reach of the technology and not the actual scale of the universe itself.
And this is the way science has worked since basically the year 1600 where Galileo sort of starts codifying what people knew probably should be happening but no one really did it in large scale.
If you have an idea about something, then you test it multiple ways and get other people to test it.
And if the tests give you consistent results, you have a new understanding of the universe.
When that happens, That knowledge of the universe doesn't go away.
It doesn't get undone.
What happens, typically, is you have a deeper understanding of the universe in which that understanding gets embedded.
And you realize that you only understood a small part of a larger whole.
But the small parts you did understand, where you had multiple experiments that confirmed it, that doesn't change.
So the cleanest example of this, and I'll get back to your question, is Newton's laws of motion and gravity.
You know, did anyone see anything move faster than a galloping horse in his day?
Probably not.
And so...
The Newton's laws of motion and gravity worked.
They worked not only for galloping horses, it worked for the moon in orbit around the Earth.
Its shape was not exactly what Newton's laws of gravity would give you.
Its shape could only be accounted for when you throw in Einstein's theory of general relativity.
Why?
Because the Sun's gravity is so monstrous and Mercury's orbiting close enough to it that it's being influenced by extra phenomenon going on in the universe that's the product of very high and significant gravity.
And so, so then do we throw Newton out the window?
No, actually.
You know what Newton's laws are?
They're what Einstein's laws look like when you put in low speeds and low gravity.
If you put in low speeds, they become Newton's laws in that limit.
Newton's laws don't stop working where they used to work.
Apollo, to the moon, used only Newton's laws.
Because Einstein didn't matter at those scales.
The moon and earth and rockets, we're not going fast enough for any of that to matter.
But when you start going fast enough, you cannot use Newton's laws.
You have to use a deeper understanding.
Now, where does Einstein take us?
You go into the center of a black hole, you get black holes from Einstein.
Center of a black hole is a singularity.
All the theories say the matter occupies zero volume.
Thereby having infinite density.
And that's kind of weird.
What?
No, you can't have infinite.
No.
That's a limit of Einstein's theory.
That's where it breaks down.
Some have joked that's where God divides by zero.
Remember in math class, you can't divide by zero.
It's not defined or not allowed.
So in Einstein's equations, we're dividing by zero at the singularity.
So we all know That as brilliant as Einstein was, and as successful as his general theory of relativity has been, it has limits.
And one limit is the center of a black hole, and another limit is the very birth of the universe itself.
Getting back to your question, the Big Bang.
So we have top people working on trying to resolve this singularity problem.
And in so doing, you get to some ideas that, well, maybe our Big Bang, because the Big Bang is not going to go away.
All the data support this.
So now I've got this Big Bang thing, okay?
And, well, is this embedded in something bigger?
So when you put like quantum physics and general relativity and you try to come up with some bigger understanding, deeper understanding, strength theorists have been all into this, you get a multiverse.
We didn't pull that out of our ass.
That came out of the equations.
So how old is the multiverse?
I don't know.
It's definitely older than our universe because it birthed our universe and it births other universes and it births The way the equations drive it, an infinity of universes.
This is the idea that maybe there's a version of us in another where I'm bald and you got the afro, but everything else is the same.
It's like, imagine you're rolling around in a basin, okay?
And you're stable there.
You're just fine.
But then something kicks you out of the basin, and you didn't know that there's a huge hill to roll down after you come out of that basin.
But you didn't know that.
You thought everything was just fine.
You roll down that hill, you're gaining energy.
At the bottom of the hill, something stops you.
And then where does all that energy go?
One of the hypotheses, and I'm highly simplifying here, is that the energy gained by rolling down a hill And these are energy hills that would exist in this sort of higher dimensional space that we're talking about.
That energy has to manifest in that object somehow, and it becomes an explosion.
With enough energy, it gives birth to matter, everything that we know and love, and it expands.
Because when you concentrate that much energy in a small spot, that's the only thing you can do.
Simplify it in the sense that by using this basin analogy and rolling down a hill, that there are equations of the energetics of a system, and this is called a false vacuum.
So you can be in a place that's not the true bottom energy state of the system, but you think everything is fine, but it's not.
If you move around among these hills and valleys, you end up birthing universes out the other side.
And this multiverse concept actually delivers this for you, basically for free.
And not only that, it could be that other Big Bang events It might have a slightly different laws of physics in it.
So you want to watch out for that.
If you cross over from one universe to the other and the charge on the electron is slightly different, all your atoms could just scatter or compress into a pile of goo.
I spent a whole section in this book talking about people who love animals and want to care for them and don't want to eat them, but the only loved ones that are cuddly.
Mosquitoes, you know, the biggest enemy of humans, as big an enemy as we are to each other through warfare and the history of civilization, the greatest enemy to human life has been the mosquito.
Responsible for more than a billion human deaths in the history of civilization.
And so, here we have mosquitoes, ticks, tapeworms, you know, go down the list and you can ask, if you're really into animals and don't want to kill them, if you heard that ticks were endangered, Would you start a movement to protect ticks?
I lived in Colorado for a while next to an ashram and I was visiting the ashram and talking to the woman who runs it and she sprayed raid all over these ants.
And I go, what are you doing?
And she's like, well, it's unfortunate, but we have to address the fact that we have an infestation of insects.
I'm like, you just mass killed all these living beings with poison from the sky!
And by the way, the home where you're saving the mouse...
I did a rough calculation.
It's probably made from the wood of about 50 trees.
Each tree could have lived 100 years but didn't because it was cut down to make your home.
The studs, the 2x4s, the floorboards, the wall panels, the siding.
And each of those trees was home to birds and insects and fungus and squirrels and And every day of that tree's life, via photosynthesis, it created 15 times the mass of the mouse in breathable oxygen.
So I ask you, who do you think nature cares more about?
So to fault a tree or plant life for not having a beating heart, when it's not that they need one and don't have one, it's that they don't need one and never wanted one.
Now, you're talking about the mycelium.
So this is a interconnected network.
It's a fungal network underfoot in a forest where it connects multiple kingdoms of life.
There are four kingdoms.
You might have learned that there were two.
We've upped it since then.
Those two kingdoms are still intact, but like I said...
Now, there's more.
It's embedded in a larger truth.
There's the plant kingdom, animal kingdom, fungal kingdom, and then we have a kingdom that includes all of the bacteria and archaea and other microscopic life forms.
And so, here's an interesting fact.
I lost sleep for a week over this.
Ready?
If you look at the common ancestor between fungus and animals, Because the tree of life ultimately has one taproot.
And as it splits, it speciates, and you get all these things.
The diversity of life on Earth is enabled by the fact that life can speciate.
You look at the common ancestor between animals and fungus.
The common ancestor between humans and mushrooms split later.
Than its common ancestors split with green plants.
What that means is we and mushrooms are more alike than either we or mushrooms are to green plants.
When people have these near-death experiences, okay?
Or one where they're dying on a table and they are commonly described.
They leave their body and they look back on themselves, okay?
That's a thing going...
That's something, okay?
Let's investigate this.
Okay?
So, the test for whether you really left your body or whether you were hallucinating it is get some writing that faces the ceiling up above your body.
Okay?
They've done this experiment.
And if you're floating above your body, above that piece of paper, when you come back to life, you should be able to say what's written on that piece of paper.
So like, hey, I know this guy's about to die, but instead of concentrating on bringing him back to life, let's write down on a piece of paper and leave it on the show.
In 1895, after Wilhelm Röntgen discovers x-rays, and they find out it penetrates your body, and you can see bones inside your body, you know what they did?
But hold on, if it's useful to you, and then that usefulness to you actually manifests itself in something that gets created because of this experience, like Kerry Mullis created the PCR method because he had an acid trip, and during the acid trip came up with this idea.
So, what we'd have to ask is, how frequent So you get everybody who takes trips of any kind, be it mushrooms or acid, and look at the body of their new thoughts that have come from them, For them having, when they credited, okay?
And Carl Sagan was a big pothead, okay?
And highly productive scientist.
So the question is, does it give you some insight, which when you were not under the influence, gets you closer to an objective reality?
Well, I can ask, are those thoughts more connected to reality than if you were not so influenced?
I did an experiment with myself, okay?
When I first started writing in graduate school at a monthly column, You know, there's that stereotype of Hemingway with a drink, you know, and they're writing, and that's their creative moment.
I said, I don't really like hard liquor, but I like wine, so I said, let me get a bottle of wine and drink wine while I write.
And I said, yeah, this is good, this is good, and I'm doing it.
And then...
I did it without wine.
This is an experiment I conducted on myself.
And it was not as fun composing without the influence of just some, you know, a smooth, sort of low-level sort of wine buzz.
But I looked at the two There was no contest.
My completely sober writing was vastly better than what I was writing under the influence of several glasses of wine.
He's like, you should write about things that you're thinking about and things that are, like, important or things that are on your mind, and then he would, like, let it sit, and then he would smoke pot and go back to it.
Well, I don't know if new creative things will come out of you, but I think thoughts will come out that probably wouldn't exist without them.
And when you're talking about like really breakthrough psychedelic moments like DMT or mushroom psilocybin, one of the really fascinating things is they mimic neurochemistry.
Like, DMT is in the brain, and it's in all the organs, and it's a part of natural human neurochemistry.
Well, it certainly can kill you today because so much of it is laced with fentanyl, which is one of the number one killers of young people, unfortunately, is fentanyl contamination of drugs.
But I'm interested in pharmacology.
I'm interested in what happens to the mind when it's under the influence of different substances.
Listen, I've had many, many conversations with people on this podcast about that because I've worked with my friend Josh Dubin who was originally an ambassador for the Innocence Project and has done a bunch of stuff on his own where he's gotten many, many, many people out of jail.
The rest of us, you know, figured it out after the fact that I would just testimony is one of the least reliable forms.
The third time I was rejected from jury duty, I show up dutifully, okay?
And they...
The third time, they said there was a woman who was robbed on the street of her groceries and her purse.
And they had the person who she accuses, positively identifies, and her.
And it's a literal he said, she said, okay?
We read the particulars of the case.
She said he robbed her, the groceries took it, and then ran off.
When the cops found the guy, he was not in possession of anything she said he took.
They looked in the area, if anything stashed in dumpsters or anything, they didn't find anything.
Okay, so that's the state of the case.
And the judge reads the particulars and goes to the, I'm down to the last 15, I'm almost on a jury!
For the first time I'm out, I'm almost there!
And said, do you have any...
Does anyone think they would not be able to convict based on the kind of information and evidence that's been presented?
And they said, juror 14, whatever you're numbered, right, until you're selected.
I said, yes, I'd have a problem.
If the only evidence available is eyewitness testimony, then everything I know about it Tells me I should not trust it on the level where you end up putting someone in jail.
So I could not convict if that's the only evidence you have.
What the judge said next was, are there any other jurors, like juror 14, who needs more than one witness before they would be able to convict?
And I said, should I jump in now and say, that's not what I said.
What should I do?
The person in front of me said, Your Honor, that's not what he said.
Ah!
Okay?
And I said, oh, thank you.
Thank you, Jesus.
He said, that's not what he said.
And I resisted with all my might to say, Your Honor, you were eyewitness to what I said 20 seconds ago and got it wrong.
Yes!
But I resisted, but I was nonetheless on the street 20 minutes later.
So, in one of the voyages, they went on some stretch of time and they didn't have food and they had Indians that they brought on board as well as some of their own crew.
And people were dying.
And so, at sea, what do you do with a dead body?
You throw it overboard, of course.
So, a person who's keeping notes said all the Indians they threw overboard Floated face down.
But now we have his handwritten notes in his testimony of something that is completely fulfilling his own worldview's expectations of how things should be.
So in the whole sort of law and order chapter, I just pick all that apart and just try to say, you know, why not have jurors that are really good at data analysis?
As they've done many times in psychology class, the class is unfolding, and they stage some violent thing with an explosion, and then they say, write what you just saw.
Do you realize that the first time anyone ever did that to realize that maybe there's some interesting result here was after The invention of algebra, trigonometry, geometry, and calculus.
If you run the statistics on it, it would be odd if you went your life—presuming you have a normal life and you know people and your school was big and all of this, okay?
You didn't grow up in a farm with nobody—you didn't know anybody.
It requires some basic number of people.
So there's a lot of errors of statistics that we make of probability and statistics.
The sad part of it is there's an entire industry that has risen to exploit that fact.
And they're called casinos.
The fact that you could go to a roulette table and somebody's got a lot of money on seven.
I said, why do you have money on seven?
It's due.
What do you mean it's due?
Well, look at the previous roles because they'll show you the previous roles and seven hasn't appeared in 20 roles or whatever the number is they put.
So it's due.
No, it's not due.
This is a failure of the human brain to understand and interpret probability and statistics.
There are people who are going to roll dice, okay?
If they need a low number, they'll take the dice and like gently roll them.
If they need a high number, they'll throw them hard.
That the very knowledge of math that would undermine the ability of the state lottery to make money is not a required part of the math curriculum in kindergarten through 12. But you don't think that's why.
I'm just playing with it.
No, I don't really think that's why.
Right.
Okay, so I see what you were doing there.
You were assuming that I was totally in on this conspiracy theory and I have charts on my wall and websites devoted to it.
No, it just crossed my mind how odd it is that when you know enough about probabilities, you bet less.
And when you bet less, the revenue to the state would drop, and that's the revenue that would go to education.
So it has the power to plant the seeds of its own undoing.
Just removing ourselves from the conspiracy theory aspect of it, do you think that it would be beneficial to teach probability and statistics to people?
Because we think we have an understanding Of what is random and what is not.
There's the one, they did this, but actually their analysis was flawed, but the basis was well placed.
So the idea, you're playing a basketball game, and somebody hits a few shots in a row, he's got a hot hand, give it to them.
They don't have a hot hand.
It is the natural consequence.
If you're shooting 50% in a game, or 40%, and you take, I don't know how many shots, you take 30 shots, you can look at the probability that you'll have multiple shots in a row that are made.
And it's very high and it's very real.
So it's not something special happening.
It is the randomness of the statistics that's happening.
Okay, but this is talking about statistics, but from an individual basis.
Do you discount the idea that sometimes people feel really good and they have a very good sense of where the ball's going, where they're more loose or relaxed or more practiced, whatever it may be, and they're more accurate because of that?
Do you realize last year we lost as many people in the United States to traffic accidents...
As we did in all the years we fought in Vietnam.
Look at the effort we put up as a country beginning maybe 1967, certainly 68, to stop the carnage And that's just the American deaths, not to mention the millions of deaths of the Vietnamese themselves, North and South.
Point is, our reactions to statistics are very different depending on what caused it.
And I'm intrigued by that.
I don't have a good understanding of it.
Any laws that treat it are going to have to fold in people's emotions.
Here's an example.
You shoot deer with your bow and arrow.
There's a certain number of deer deaths and human deaths by cars hitting deer in the roads, especially in suburban, rural places, okay?
Because the government would be introducing an animal that killed your children, But no one's looking at the hundred people that were, whatever the numbers were, it was a factor of three or so.
There's a bear walking down a highway, and there's a tipped over traffic cone, and it looks at it, and then it writes it back up and keeps walking by it.
Wow.
And I say to myself, because I have a chapter in here called Body and Mind.
I don't want to say that's evidence of intelligence so much as it's evidence of more going on inside the animal's head than any of us would have previously ever credited.
In another example, and I get this example in body and mind again, there's a magpie Bird, who there's a bottle of water in some playground area, park area, and it goes up to the bottle of water and it dips its beak in to drink from it.
Okay, here it is.
See this?
Okay, it goes in and drinks from it to watch.
It's going to drink.
But the problem is there's a limit to how far its beak can reach inside of it.
And so it gets a stone that fits inside the bottle, which raises the water level so that its beak can continue to drink from it.
We beat out Whales, we beat out dolphins, we beat out elephants.
Then there are those who are fans of those who say, well, you want to do it lean weight because the dolphins and whales have a lot of blubber and the brain is not having to control the blubber.
So cut away the blubber.
That boosts them, but they're still not as high as us.
So we walk away saying, we're at the top.
However, what they did not say, which I had to, 40 years later, I learned this, That we do not have the highest brain-to-body weight ratio among animals, only among mammals.
The magpie has a higher brain-to-body weight ratio than humans do, as do all other mid-sized birds, like crows, owls, eagles, these folks, okay?
Mm-hmm.
We all have a higher brain to body weight ratio than humans do.
So that rule that put us at the top was specifically for mammals.
And I'm angry that I didn't think to hear how specific that was when I was taught that in eighth grade.
All I can tell you is any animal that we have ever got to study in more detail than we previously did has shown to be more intelligent than we ever gave it credit for being.
And you know who has the biggest brain to body ratio of any creature on earth?
Some species of ants really 15% of the body weight is their brain And it's kind of obvious some of them like the whole front section is their head, right?
It's kind of in retrospect It's kind of obvious and ants are very busy doing some complicated things and we don't know what they're doing especially leaf cutter ants that they're busy carpenter ants leaf cutting ants and crossover into termite land I don't know how big their brains are, but they're busy building stuff.
One of my favorite cartoons was two dolphins swimming together, and there's a human up, you know, it's like one of these water parks, right?
And one dolphin says to the other, they, speaking of the humans that are up on dry land, they face each other and make noises, but it's not clear they're actually communicating.
So, I'm just saying, we have a picture of an ant, remember?
That's the only way you can distort it to fit it onto a flat plane, because it's looking at a full sort of 360, well, 180, and it's trying to get it in.
But what happens if you take that horizontal line, the horizon, and put it below the midplane of the camera?
It then bends the other way.
Ben's the other way.
In fact, I have a tweet that did this.
Look for Felix and throw some keywords in there with my Twitter handle, and I have the example of the photos.
So, no, he didn't see the curvature of the Earth, but you think he did, and he's high up, and what do we need NASA for, right?
He's one dime thickness.
Elon Musk authentically goes into orbit, because they didn't go into orbit.
They went up and fell back to Earth.
He authentically goes into orbit.
So he is a centimeter.
Well, not even.
Let me see.
Yeah, a little less than a centimeter above Earth's surface.
The folks who really saw Earth were the folks that went to the moon.
We went to the moon nine times, three astronauts a pop.
27 astronauts have seen Earth from the moon.
And that'll change you.
Do you know Apollo 14 astronaut, Edgar Mitchell?
I have a quote from him that opens this book.
And that's all you have to read because the whole book issues forth from that quote.
Here it is.
Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14. You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.
From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty.
You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter million miles out and say, look at that, you son of a bitch.
Yeah, I've spoken with him about it, and he was one of the, was he co-founder of the Noetic Institute?
He was a big fan of the possibility that there was a deeper level of consciousness, and I don't think it involved drugs, but just that there was a deeper level of consciousness That the brain might be capable of if subjected to the proper influences and He told me how he came across this.
Okay, I'll tell you They're on their way back from the moon and they're in the capsule and the capsule rotates It helps to stabilize it among other reasons for that happening and he happened to be positioned in the capsule for three days and Where the windows to the capsule were aligned with the plane of the solar system.
Which means every time the capsule rotated, what came in and out of view was the Sun, the Moon, Earth, and all the planets.
And so he's there for three days watching this drift by.
And he felt like he had descended or ascended into a trance state that was beyond what he had ever experienced here on Earth.
By normal things you encounter just being a human on Earth.
And that led him to wonder whether this was an achievable state by some other means By some other forces that you could emulate here on Earth.
And because he experienced that and I didn't, who am I to say?
I think the cleanest way to say that is he believed there was much more capacity of our mind than we had previously tapped.
And that opens up the gates to all these other things.
But I was just sharing with you the experiential origins of why he thought that way.
But the point is that that can change you.
And in the chapter Earth and Moon, I talk about cosmic perspectives.
As you ascend, the Earth does not look like the schoolroom globe.
Color-coded countries?
You know, only as an adult did I look back on that and I say, you trained me.
From elementary school to know who my enemies are and who my friends are by color-coding contiguous land masses on a globe to teach me about the planet Earth.
And when you go into space, the country borders go away.
Except for two places.
There are two places.
You can still see two borders from space.
One of them in the daytime.
You can see the border of Israel with surrounding deserts.
Because Israel irrigates.
And so it's green.
And the surrounding areas are brown.
You can see that from space.
Another border, which you can see from space at night, is, of course, North and South Korea, right there.
And that's punched up.
I mean, if you were in the dead of night, You don't know the difference between the ocean and the land as your sightline crosses North and South Korea.
If you look at the GDP per capita differences between Israel and surrounding nations and South Korea and North Korea, it's factors of 8, 9, 10, 12. Space can reveal economic inequities in at least those two places, which is itself kind of a stunning fact.
So I want to tell Elon, you're now neighbors with him, right?
Get him back here and say, Elon, build a bus, a space bus.
We have an Airbus.
Why not a space bus?
A space bus where you put all the warring leaders And have them send them to the moon, have them look back on Earth.
Ritual, because now we'd have what's called service observing.
You just write in what things you want to observe on what nights for how many hours, and then they send you back the data.
There used to be a pilgrimage to the top of a mountain, and you'd live nocturnally, and you'd go to them and be up all night with the telescope and the universe.
There's a certain almost spiritual connectivity that When it's just you alone.
And there are moments that mountains are high up enough so that if clouds roll in, you're above the clouds.
In the southern hemisphere, only 15% of humans live there.
So there's essentially no light pollution anywhere there.
85% of all humans in the north, you're hard-pressed to find a completely dark sky in the north, leaving you to think that there's something magically beautiful and different about the southern sky.
You're observing the northern sky.
Hawaii's like 15 degrees north, so it's a lot of the southern sky as well.
Point is, you have the best observing site in the world.
Which is why they wanted to put a 30 meter telescope there and there's some conflict with the indigenous groups regarding that and whether the mountain is sacred and in what ways it's sacred and the like.
And so that's still going on, last I checked.
But...
I'm not surprised and I'm delighted that you had that experience.
And now you know how I feel when I look up.
I was baptized, emotionally, psychologically baptized with the night sky in New York City's Hayden Planetarium.
Because as a city kid, I grew up in the Bronx.
We don't have a relationship with the night sky.
We might see the moon and an occasional planet.
The setting sun, that's it.
Couple of dots for stars.
That's it.
You see the tall buildings.
Back then there was air pollution, light pollution.
So my first night sky was the Hayden Planetarium.
And to this day, I was nine years old.
To this day, when I go to mountaintops, just as you experience, and I look up, I said, this is so beautiful.
I want to quickly comment that there is an entire indigenous community in the world that is very concerned about the loss of very dark night skies because so much of the culture Relates to that night sky as part of what it values and what it passes down from one generation to the next and it goes beyond just the light pollution because now folks like your boy Elon Is
launching And I don't like the fact that they use the word constellation to refer to satellites.
Do you think that that is an evolutionary advantage that in some way people are developing in this manner so that they can concentrate on things like technology, like astrophysics, like these very specific things that require immense amounts of concentration?
And extreme focus.
Do you think there's possibly that human beings are developing in that way, specifically to accentuate our ability to innovate?
So it would be very hard to draw that conclusion as some kind of modern force of evolution, because for that to be the case, What would have to happen is those who had this sort of autistic level of focus, so high functioning autism, they would have to be making more babies than other people.
So they'd have to be making more babies relative to everyone else to affect the evolutionary path of modern civilization.
And it's not clear that that's what's actually happening.
So we have to ask, did that have any value historically?
I mean, in the history of the evolution of our species.
So, in the chapter Body and Mind, I go over the variations that exist within our species.
Huge variations in height, in weight, in speed, in all kinds of things.
And you can ask, well, then what is normal?
The day that we control the genome, is there going to be some place somewhere where there's a normal human and you're going to take your genome that you're about to control in your unborn child and say, let me adjust it so that it matches this so that all your senses are working as they're supposed to and all the proportions.
Is that the future?
We should ask that.
Because if that's what you're going to do, you're going to homogenize the species.
Okay?
Do you realize, I have a run here of content.
I have a run of descriptions of what people have accomplished, okay?
So, for example, there's a guy growing up, he wanted to play basketball, okay?
And he wanted to be a professional basketball player.
Again, this is in the body and mind chapter where we explore Here it is.
I had the wrong ear.
How about a letter written on April 10th, 1930 to Captain Von Beck of the US Line's SS President Roosevelt?
That's Teddy Roosevelt, of course.
The captain had given a tour of the bridge to a passenger who later that day waxed poetic About the experience.
Again, I stood with the captain on the bridge, and he was quiet and composed in the presence of a million universes, a man with the power of a god.
In imagination, I saw the captain standing on the bridge, gazing into the wide canopied heavens and seeing the darkness sprinkled with stars, systems, and galaxies.
That passenger was Helen Keller.
A 1904 graduate of Radcliffe College.
Okay?
So, what...
My point is...
And I have other...
There's a whole run of pages of things...
And there's a whole description of Hotshot here.
Okay?
From the Harlem Goat Trust.
My point is, the moment you homogenize and, quote, normalize who and what humans should be...
You have cut off so much of what has enriched civilization simply because people were different.
That's when no batter gets a hit in the entire game.
There have been about 320 no-hitters in Major League history out of 220,000 games played.
Due to a congenital birth defect, Jim Abbott was born without a right hand.
Is Jim Abbott disabled?
Is he?
He pitched a fucking no-hitter for the New York Yankees.
What I'm saying is, obviously not everyone who has a disability will achieve this way.
Don't get me wrong here, but what I want to say is...
Look at what people would have told, and I have six other examples here, one right after another.
What people would have told them coming up.
And Temple Grandin among them.
Probably the most famous autistic person there ever was.
She's professor of farming at, was it the University of Colorado?
Somewhere in the West.
Where because she sees the world the way animals do, she could advise farmers in ways they can handle and herd cows that does not create stress in them.
And he slides it in there and sinks rear naked chokes on people.
And he also developed a style that didn't rely on grips.
He developed a style that's overhooks and underhooks, which became modern nogi jujitsu, which is incorporated in mixed martial arts because in mixed martial arts they don't wear the kimono.
And people who saw Jean-Jacques Machado as a child said, oh, this poor child, he will never reach his full potential, and turned out to be one of the greatest ever.
If he has a love interest, he doesn't know the next time he sees that person whether that was who he had the conversation with.
Okay?
In 2012, after a lecture on hallucination at Cooper Union College in New York City, I asked him, if you could go back in time, would you take a magic pill in your youth to cure your neurological disorder?
Without hesitation.
He replied, no.
His entire professional interest in the human mind was inspired by the very disorders in his own brain.
So all of this you'd expect to happen on some kind of spectrum of severity, let's call it, or featurity.
And depending on where you are on that spectrum, you will have certain access to ways people have never thought before, ways people have never done things before.
Have you seen the video of the woman somewhere in East Asia who has no arms?
And she gets out of bed, folds up her, takes care of her child, puts on her makeup.
So maybe our species and civil, I'm just spitballing here, that our species and the advance of civilization itself has pivoted on the fact that in the variation of who, what and what we are, some of us can focus and solve a problem like what and what we are, some of us can focus and solve a problem like it was the most important thing we would Yeah.
And end up doing so, thereby pivoting civilization into some future that would have not otherwise been realizable.
Yeah, I mean the diversity of human beings and their interests and what they look like and their sizes and the way they interact with the world is one of the reasons why we can create such an amazing world.
But consider also, and it goes beyond just this, what we call these disabled features, right?
People with disabilities.
It goes to other things.
For example, you must know that it was not until 1987 where the American Psychiatric Association, with some names such as that, but the psychiatrists, Removed homosexuality as a mental disorder from their records, from their encyclopedia.
1987, a disorder.
And so, what does that even mean if whatever the number is, 10, 20% of people or higher are on a gender spectrum as measured in the multiple dimensions that have been revealed in recent years?
If you had control over the genome of your children 50 years ago, and if homosexuality has a genetic component, would you say, I don't want that?
That's abnormal, because you're going to go through that list of what is normal.
And you're going to say, I don't want any abnormalities in my children.
Not at all.
So there's an entire ethical frontier that is yet to be touched.
When you have, and this is what I wanted to get to, when you have things like CRISPR and you have what could be legitimate genetic engineering of fetuses and of embryos.
Part of the diversity of who and what we are is who...
Who you love, what you want to look like, you know?
This resistance to the gender spectrum concerns me because it's a force of restriction on people's freedom.
And somewhere I read that America is like pursuit of happiness.
I read that somewhere, some document, right?
And so if someone Wants to dress in whatever way they want, and if it doesn't conform with your binarity, you're going to create a law to prevent them from doing it?
Are we any longer in a free country if you have that power over me to express my happiness?
And another thing we're not good at And I gotta go, like, soon.
So Hurricane Irma goes from low Category 3 to high Category 3. They're just, oh, it's just Category 3, Irma.
It goes up one mile an hour?
It's breaking news.
Hurricane Irma strengthened to Category 4 just this past hour, and everybody crowds around the TV set.
So our brain doesn't allow a continuum.
We can't...
So what happens?
Are you a boy or are you a girl?
You have to be one of...
Maybe there's a continuum.
Okay?
Oh, you want to talk X chromosome, Y chromosome?
We can do that.
Fine.
All right.
So biogenetically, I can say that there's a boy and a girl or some variant on that, which is in the rare case where you have doubled up on the chromosomes.
Mike, my wonder is, if you try to look at what human beings are capable of doing now in terms of genetic engineering and what the hopes are, where do you think this leads us if this is allowed?
It's not whether or not it's going to be allowed.
It's going to happen.
Where do you think this leads us to?
When you look at the archetypal alien, What is it?
So if they incorporate that into the human genome, then you're going to have people that have incredible amounts of muscle mass, and they don't even have to do anything to achieve it.
What are your thoughts on human neural interfaces, like things like Neuralink and these technologies that are being proposed that would allow human beings to integrate with technology in a physical way, symbiotically?
Yeah, so I have a chapter in here called Exploration and Discovery, where we talk about the rapid pace of Technology and its impact on civilization, which is extraordinary.
But most predictions are wrong.
You get it right in the first few years and after a few decades.
But then it gets to a point where people are making the argument that wild pigs are no longer invasive because they've been there as long as the humans have.
Neuroscience and our understanding of the human mind will become so advanced that mental illness will be cured, leaving psychologists and psychiatrists without jobs.
In a shift that echoes the rapid conversion from horses to automobiles in the early 20th century, self-driving electric vehicles will fully replace all cars and trucks on the road.
If you want to be nostalgic with your fancy combustion engine sports car, you can drive on specially designed tracks akin to horse riding stables of today.
Very nostalgic.
The human space program will fully transition to a space industry supported not by tax dollars but by tourism and anything else people dream of doing in space.
We develop a perfect antiviral serum and cure cancer.
Medicines will tailor to your own DNA, leaving no adverse side effects.
And this is in response to your earlier question.
We will resist the urge to merge the circuitry of computers with the circuitry of our brains.
Right, but if they do increase the capacity for human knowledge and your access to information substantially to the point where someone with a neural interface has an enormous advantage over anybody who doesn't.
We will learn how to regrow lost limbs and failing organs, bringing us up to the level of other regenerating animals on Earth, like salamanders, starfish, and lobsters.
Instead of becoming our overlord and enslaving us all, artificial intelligence will be just another helpful feature of the tech infrastructures that serve our daily lives.
Those are my predictions to be found wrong in 30 years.
It's spooky because, again, we don't have the ability to sort of extrapolate and look at the future in terms of like how all these things are implemented and what the overall result is going to be.
Which is another thing with the variation of what we have in the world.
Just a point I want to make.
When European anthropologists started running through Africa and started describing what they saw, their urge was to say, Everyone in Africa is this thing, and they have dark skin, woolly hair, and that is a thing.
And they called it a race, and they called it the Negroes, okay?
And this is our attempt to classify into few categories something that might actually, in real life, be on a spectrum.
We know that the human species began in Africa.
And everybody who populates everywhere else in the world came out of Africa to do that.
What that tells you is that the genetic diversity within Africa as the origin of our species is greater than it is between any other two people anywhere else in the world.
But because the anthropologists were not thinking genetic diversity, they're thinking skin color.
They put them all in one bin.
But if you have the most genetic diversity, then in practically every way humans vary, you would find the extreme of that in the African continent.
Where would you find the tallest people in the world?
The Europeans did not look for people smarter than they were.
And to this day, where they find evidence where that might have been the case, you have people saying aliens did it.
Egypt is, of course, in Africa.
A brilliant civilization.
Oh, my gosh.
While Europeans were still either disemboweling heretics or whatever the hell they were doing, Even before that, thousands of years ago.
So my point is, if you don't look for it, and you don't find it, and you're going to create a map of humans of the world, you're going to put yourself at the top.
1785, speaking of the Negroes, comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me that in memory, they are equal to the whites, in reason, much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid.
And in imagination, they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.
But whatever were his observations and objections to black people, he had no hesitation continually mating with at least one of them, producing six children.
So you know what I did here?
Oh, then there's a guy who wrote a whole book comparing black people and white people, a book that was used into the 1960s.
It was called The Origin of Races by Carlton Kuhn.
He wrote, if Africa was the cradle of mankind, which he recognizes, it was only an indifferent kindergarten.
Europe and Asia were our principal schools.
So these are people putting themselves at the top.
He's white, so he's got to put white people at the top.
Then I thought, suppose anthropologists We're black racists instead of white racists.
When you have that mindset, and you have to put yourself at the top, and all people with dark skin are one entity, you're not looking for people smarter than you.
There's other evidence here.
Do you realize that the people who get the highest scores on standardized tests in England are immigrants from the Igbo tribe in Nigeria?
And their kids outscore all the, quote, native white people in the town.
If you're not looking for them, you're not finding them.
On May 1st, 2021, a talented chess player reached the title of National Master for having achieved a U.S. Chess Federation rating above 2200, landing among the top 4% of 350,000 rated players in the world.
A rating achieved that was 500 points higher than that of his chess coach.
Just a few years after learning how to play the game.
That prodigy is a 10-year-old boy named Tani Tolua Adewumi, the son of Nigerian refugees to the USA in 2017.
His family spent a brief time living in homeless shelters in New York City before his parents established stable employment and permanent residence.
I played a brief chess game against the little fellow in March 2021 on Grandmaster Maurice Ashley's Twitch platform.
A live streaming social media interface.
The game was indeed brief.
Yeah, he wiped.
wipe the floor with me.
Speaking of Nigerians, immigrants to the U.S. enjoy an 8% higher household income than the national average.
Nigerian immigrants to the United States.
And ethnic Nigerian children in the United Kingdom, especially those from the Igbo tribe, consistently attain higher test scores on average than their white children.
Occasions to pause and wonder what depths of intellect...
These are occasions to pause what depths of intellectual capital in math, science, and engineering or any field lay hidden deep within the African continent or anywhere else on earth, lost for now or lost forever for want of an opportunity to flourish.
I'm going to leave you with a fast list.
I want to tell you what my racist black anthropologist found.
Let's go back to the 19th century and let all anthropologists be black racists instead of white racists.
We just need to find similarities between chimps and white people, and that would be surefire evidence of their less evolved state.
Because that's what people were saying.
The blacks were still evolving, and they show a chimp, a black person, and a white person.
And so you can enslave black people and laws against them.
It's a way to justify it, because of course you're going to put yourself at the top.
So now, hypothetical black racist anthropologist.
Chimps and other apes.
So this is a list.
This is in a book that was never written.
Chimps and other apes grow hair all over their bodies.
The hairiest people you've ever seen have been white people, with mats of hair across their chests and ascending their backs.
Their body hair can even reach upward and out of their shirt collar.
Black people do not remotely approximate this level of hairiness.
There was no mention of this in any of those books.
Distinct from their face, hands, and feet, part the hair of most chimpanzees the way they do to each other when checking for lice, and their skin color is white, not any shade of black or brown.
Chimps tend to have big ears relative to their head size.
After decades of ear-watching, I can attest that the biggest ears I've ever seen on humans have been on white people.
Have a look yourself, next time you're in a crowded public place.
Doubtless there's strong overlap, but the size of black people's ears can be as little as half the size of white people's ears.
You might now ask about the famously large ears of President Barack Obama.
But he is precisely half white.
Just as much white as black.
So maybe his big ears come from the white half of his family.
For most of the 20th century, Neanderthals were portrayed as stupid and brutish.
Turns out, beginning in the 1990s, genetic research revealed that Europeans are between 1 and 3% Neanderthal.
Africans, zero percent.
That can't be good for Europeans.
Time to clean up that backward primitive image.
Since then, published references to Neanderthals instead comment on what must have been their creative, artistic, inventive, and articulate ways crafting sophisticated tools and technologies to shape their world.
Look how easy it is to be racist.
Let's continue.
Chimpanzees invest quality family time pruning each other's hair.
We've all watched them do this.
Apparently, the lice they find must be tasty, because whoever plucks them from the other chimps' head also eats them.
Ever hear of a lice outbreak among black children?
Probably not.
White children are 30 times more susceptible to lice infestation than are black children.
The parasite simply likes to lay eggs in the hair of chimpanzees and white people more than on the hair of black people.
This goes on.
This could have been included and they would have said, well, wait a minute, maybe all humans are together and chimps are something completely different.
But they didn't go there.
Their bias prevented their analysis of information that stares flat into their face.
Do you anticipate that as people get more education, more information, and as we evolve, that we'll stop doing that and we'll start recognizing the importance of diversity?
This is a quote, a short quote from Horace Mann 200 years ago.
I want this on my tombstone.
I beseech you.
Nobody uses beseech anymore.
I love it.
I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words.
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
Our primal urge to keep looking up is surely greater than our primal urge to keep killing one another.
If so, then human curiosity and wonder, the twin chariots of cosmic discovery, will ensure that starry messages—these are messages from science, from the sky, from the universe—continue to arrive.
These insights compel us, for our short time on Earth, to become better shepherds of our own civilization.
Yes, life is better than death.
Life is also better than having never been born.
But each of us is alive against stupendous odds.
We won the lottery only once.
We get to invoke our faculties of reason to figure out how the world works.
But we also get to smell the flowers.
We get to bask in divine sunsets and sunrises.
And gaze deeply into the night sky they cradle.
We get to live and ultimately die in this glorious universe.