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Dec. 6, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
47:04
20241206_neil-degrasse-tyson-on-elon-musk-mars-trans-sports
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Terraforming Mars vs Earth 00:09:14
What I can imagine happening is we feel geopolitically threatened and we say we got to put astronauts on Mars and NASA says oh my gosh We don't have a spaceship.
Let's look around and Elon says I have a spaceship.
Okay, and so then the United States pays Elon to ride his spaceship to Mars.
You had a little disagreement about the science of trans athletes in women's imagine the future of sports does not distinguish sex and sorts people by hormone ratios.
You get a hormone test, you're in this range, and then you compete against other people with the same range of space.
That's ridiculous.
Neil, that is ridiculous.
No, it's not.
I'll tell you why it's not.
You're going to give every single America in totality.
It's one of the fattest countries in the developed world.
It just is.
And by the way, we're in no position to lecture you over here either.
You're fish and ships is a whole other gas and oil right there.
The world's most famous astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, made a lively appearance on Bill Maher's show recently.
His answer to a particular question said him on a cosmic collision course with the world's most famous engineer.
How soon could Elon Musk realistically send humans to Mars?
I have strong views on that.
My read of the history of space exploration is such that we do big expensive things only when it's geopolitically expedient, such as we feel threatened by an enemy.
And so for him to just say, let's go to Mars because it's the next thing to do, what does that venture capitalist meeting look like?
So Elon, what do you want to do?
I want to go to Mars.
How much will it cost?
A trillion dollars.
Is it safe?
No, people will probably die.
What's the return on the investment?
Nothing.
That's a five-minute meeting and it doesn't happen.
Well, Musk's response to deGrasse Tyson on X was tetchy, to say the least.
He wrote, wow, they really don't get it.
Mars is critical to the long-term survival of consciousness.
I realize that it makes no sense as an investment.
That's why I'm gathering resources.
So does one of the world's finest minds really just not get it?
Let's find out.
I'm rejoined on Uncensored by Professor Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Neil, great to see you.
Yeah, thanks for having me back.
Good to see you again.
You just don't get it, says Elon Musk.
Your response.
Well, first of all, I'm not a fan of commenting on what other people commented about what was commented upon.
That's just fuel for clickbait on social media.
So rather than just respond to what people responded, let me just say I've read extensively about the history of big expensive projects in our species, going from the pyramids to the Great Wall of China to the Manhattan Project.
And you go down that list and the greatest of them, the biggest of them, the most expensive of them, related to the survival of who participated in it.
They felt threatened.
And so, well, sorry, the pyramids was not that.
That was praise of royalty or deity.
That's another big driver that existed in the history of our species.
Much less of that happens today.
And most of it is driven by the, I don't want to die gene.
And so we went to the moon, we felt threatened by the Russians, the godless commies, you know, around the world.
And so these are the motivations that enable people to write checks.
And at any time, people said, let's do it because it's the natural next thing to do.
It just never happens.
If you go back to the Apollo era, while we were going to the moon, people forgetting that we went there as a militaristic statement, people who forgot that said, oh, we're on the moon by 1969.
We'll be on Mars by 1985.
They were just extending a timeline that they thought was a natural, inevitable thing.
And nothing that's expensive is ever inevitable.
So that's the foundations of my comment.
And in terms of going to Mars as a survival plan, if you think about what could put life at risk here on Earth, that could include global, very serious pandemic or asteroid strikes or we trash the climate, whatever.
To think of Mars as Earth 2.0 could only really happen after you terraform Mars.
And the point I made, which was not in your clip, was if you have the power of geoengineering to terraform Mars, then you have the power of geoengineering to fix Earth and turn Earth back into Earth as opposed to Mars back into Earth.
So just realistically, shipping a billion people to Mars or however many, by the way, I have nothing against that.
I just don't see it happening based on my read of human behavior.
So a lot to unpack there.
Look, you know I've got massive respect for you.
I also have a lot of respect for Musk.
I also like the fact that he dares to dream very big.
And I actually had the honor, actually, I would describe it, of spending a couple of hours with him down in France in the summer, where we got into the colonization of Mars and why he felt so passionately about it.
And he said a few things.
One, he said we have to do this because at some stage, planet Earth is just not going to be a viable place anymore, was his belief.
Secondly, that inevitably at some stage, planet Earth will be incinerated by the sun anyway.
We don't know when that'll happen, but one day it will happen.
I'll get your response to that.
We do know when it will happen, but yeah.
When will it happen on that point?
Oh, yeah, let me check my calendar.
No, the sun will.
Do we have any idea when that may?
The sun will transition into a red giant phase, assuming it behaves like every other star just like it.
And as it does, its outer shell will expand, and the surface of the sun will get closer and closer to Earth, and it will evaporate.
Our oceans will come to a rolling boil and evaporate into the atmosphere.
The atmosphere will evaporate into space and Earth will be a charred ember that will get swallowed up.
Why are you laughing?
Neil, this is not funny.
You're painting a picture of utter extinction and apocalypse.
Why are you laughing?
Yeah, that's it.
No, no, no, because it's not that it's funny.
It's that it's in five billion years.
So we have a whole lot of other sort of prioritized things we should be thinking about between now and then.
But on the previous time.
By then, we might have colonized other star systems.
Right.
Here's the thing about Mars.
He said, look, if we're going to do this, and he believes passionately we need to do this as a kind of backup really for the survival of the human species.
He said, you have to replicate exactly the conditions of Earth.
And he said, for example, if you forget about one vitamin, everyone would die up there, right?
So everything has to be replicated in a way that you can replicate exactly what happens here on Mars.
From an astrophysicist's point of view, is that actually technically possible?
Is there any reason why we couldn't colonize Mars from just a pure technical point of view of recreating the conditions in which human existence exists here?
Yeah, so just let me unpack that, what you said.
So first of all, at the core of this, other than living in habitat modules, either underground or just wherever, they have to be heated because Mars is very cold and Mars has barely any atmospheres, you have to pump that in as well.
Short of that, Elon has great ambitions of terraforming Mars.
I love it.
I once stole a coffee mug from SpaceX that had Mars on it, and I kept it on my shelf for a very long time.
I don't drink coffee much, but I enjoy space-themed coffee mugs.
Then one day I said, I'm going to have a hot chocolate.
And so I put hot chocolate in there, which heated the mug.
And while the mug heated, Mars terraformed into Earth.
So I said, That's a classy move right there, Mr. Musk.
So I didn't know that for like a year because I don't use them.
I just collect them.
But my point is that if you want to ship humans from Earth to Mars, Mars needs to kind of look like Earth.
And by the way, it's tantalizingly close in properties relative to other planets.
Venus is 900 degrees Fahrenheit.
You're not going there.
Mars is tipped on its axis.
It has seasons.
It has approximately 24-hour day.
It has polar ice caps as we currently do.
And so it's been the object of people's fascination for hundreds of years.
So I don't have a problem with any of that.
I'm just describing the practicality of it.
And if you have the technology and the power to terraform Mars and ship people there, you probably have the ability to bat asteroids out of the way that might have been headed towards Earth.
Private Space Ventures and Vanity 00:09:22
So I'm just speaking in practical terms.
I'm not trying to stop anybody from dreaming.
I love dreaming beyond Horizon.
Well, that's the point I was going to make to you.
I think it never got done.
Because I was watching the Bill Maher show live, actually.
And that was the thing that struck me: here's Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of the great dreamers, right?
I mean, you literally have dreamed big your entire life.
This is your raison d'être is to think the biggest things imaginable, right?
And there you were, it appeared in the moment to be kind of pouring a bit of cold water on probably the biggest thinker on the planet right now and his massive biggest dream.
And that was the only thing I was, I thought, well, the next time I talk to you, I'm just whether you were aware that that was the way you were coming over.
So I'm just trying to be real.
I mean, I'm in my old age.
I've just seen how people behave.
I see how things get funded.
Now, of course, Elon plus one or two other, that's all it would take, one or two other very wealthy people in the world, could, if they wanted, as basically a vanity project, send astronauts to Mars.
But if you want to think of the return on that investment, SpaceX is a corporation, all right?
It's not just some private venture.
He's getting money and contracts and he's paying salaries.
And I presume there's a board helping him make decisions about that.
And so in the real world, there's certain things that are more likely to happen than others.
But if you push it, let me challenge you on that.
So let's go back to the start of the 20th century, okay?
When there would have been people around who were saying, you know what, let's go to the moon.
And people would have dismissed them and said, don't be so ridiculous.
It's massively, prohibitively expensive.
We don't really have the technology to do this, blah, It was only really the power of people's dreams.
Now, ultimately, you're right.
There was a military context to why we did it.
The West wanted to beat Russia up there.
I get that.
I get that.
But at the same time, I remember the great speeches by Kennedy, you know, about all this.
And it was exciting.
It was thrilling.
The world watched as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon.
And those dreams that were dismissed at the early part of the century actually came true.
They happened.
Could it be that you're just hesitate to say this, Neil?
But could it be you're just, you know, you're one of the doomsayers of the earlier 20th century saying we should never go to the moon because it's too expensive.
It can't happen, blah, blah, blah.
Which they must have been saying at the time.
I am way more deeply informed than your previous sentence implies.
So a couple of things.
Going up to the launch of Sputnik, most naysayers about the moon had no confidence that we would ever accomplish such a feat.
And they didn't have an understanding of the progress of science and technology and engineering and political will, geopolitical will.
So that was not in the equation of how they were thinking about their future.
And so now when Sputnik got launched, what happened?
Oh my gosh, space was pierced.
And if it's pierced, that means we can do anything in space.
And beginning in the early 1960s, the predictions about the future flipped.
And it wasn't, oh, we'll never do it.
They'll say, we'll do it all.
And that's why we'll have colonies on Mars.
Do you know Werner von Braun was even quoted as saying, by the year 2000, we'll have the first human born on a moon colony.
So highly ambitious statements, but why didn't any of that happen?
Because we didn't go to the moon because it was the next, because it's in our DNA or it's because, no, we went because we were scared.
And the speech you remember from John Kennedy, where he says, we'll put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth, that's a stirring speech.
And the hair rises up on your back of your neck.
You can hear him in his Brookline, Massachusetts accent reciting this.
But that's not what wrote the checks.
That same speech, May 25th, 1961, to a joint session of Congress, six weeks after Yuri Gagarin had come out of orbit, six weeks, wouldn't utter the man's name.
Before that, part of the speech that we all remember and that's chiseled in the granite at Kennedy Space Center, there's a part that's not chiseled in the granite.
You know what it says?
I'm paraphrasing.
If the events of recent weeks couldn't mention, couldn't even say Yuri Gagarin, if the events of recent weeks are any indication of the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, then we need to show the world the path of freedom over the path of tyranny.
That was the battle cry against communism, and that's what wrote the checks in Congress.
Right, but you're not going to be able to do that.
My science, 20 years after we landed on the moon.
Okay, but let me challenge you on that.
Again, I just think you're missing one very, very important factor in this.
Musk is not only the richest man in the history of planet Earth and going to get exponentially richer, by the way.
He's already made 100 billion since Trump was elected just from Tesla stock, right?
But also he talked me through the Optimus robot, humanoid robots, and he said everyone's going to have one.
They're 20 grand apart.
And he's going to be, he said, my wealth at the moment will be completely dwarfed.
I suspect he's right.
I'm going to buy about five myself.
I get to do all my chores.
So he's got all this stuff going on, right?
So he's going to be staggeringly, staggeringly rich.
And he's got access to other staggeringly rich people.
So the money part of it, coupled with his ambition, which is enormous, because I've heard him articulate it in person, it was incredibly inspiring and impressive.
But he's also an engineer.
I mean, this is not just some rich guy playing with a few toys.
You know, Musk from the age of like 10 has been doing data code writing and so on.
He is a proper engineer to his bootstraps.
And it's to me, it's the combination of a big dreamer who's a very brilliant engineer plus the money to do this stuff makes me think, well, why couldn't he do it?
Why can't he be the guy that does this?
I thought I was clearer than I guess I was.
I'm not saying he can't do it.
If he does it, it's not a business project.
It's a vanity project.
Vanity, I don't mean that in a critical sense.
I'm saying he'll do it because he has the money, but there's no business case for going to Mars.
And if it's not a business case, the history of that kind of exercise tells us that it's not a sustainable activity if he's running a business.
But if he does it because, and by the way, we have this SUV-sized rover on Mars right now that brought a helicopter with it.
So I'm not here to say we can't go to Mars or don't know how to go to Mars or can't figure it out.
No, that's not where I'm coming from here.
I'm just being real.
I'm just trying to get real.
And so, so, yeah, he could do it.
The question is, why?
Because he wants to.
And if you're rich enough and you have that kind of background and visionary, yes, he'll do it.
And but what I said on Bill Maher, which was not in the clip that you said, what I can imagine happening is we feel geopolitically threatened by whatever forces out there.
And we say, you know, it's like the space race all over again.
We got to put astronauts on Mars.
And NASA says, oh my gosh, we don't have a spaceship.
Let's look around.
And Elon says, I have a spaceship.
Okay.
And so then the United States pays Elon to ride his spaceship to Mars.
I can see that happening geopolitically.
If he's watching this interview, what's your message to Elon?
I don't have a message.
Listen, it's because of Elon that anyone has a daily conversation about electric cars.
All right.
He's a force of nature, force of culture on modern civilization.
And I know the guy.
It's not like we're like sworn enemies or anything, but we've corresponded.
We're actually friendly.
I'm just saying that, oh, something else that got dusted up was I commented that what he's done in space had already been done by NASA, which is normal when private enterprise comes in after expensive, geopolitically inspired steps are done by countries.
After Columbus went to the new world, it was only after that that the Dutch East India Trading Company figure out, oh, maybe we can make a buck off of this once the geopolitical forces established where the friendlies were, where the trade winds are, what products you might be able to exploit.
And so it's normal for a corporation for expensive projects to come in after the government does it.
For things that are not so expensive, yeah, corporations do it.
They have an R D budget and they take it to the bank.
No problem.
But if you're going to do something that no one has ever done before and it costs a trillion dollars, if you can pull it off, go for it.
My read of history says it needs different drivers.
Okay.
Categorizing Athletes by Hormones 00:15:23
I wrote a whole book on this.
Okay.
There's a whole other book I wrote called, well, I got to tell you, the original title of the book was Failure to Launch the Dreams and Delusions of Space Enthusiasts.
And I handed that to the public.
We can't have the word failure in the title.
And so it has a different, softer, toothless title, which was Space Chronicles Facing the Ultimate Frontier.
And that's my entire analysis of why we ever did anything in space.
So you're talking to a man that my favorite TV show when I was a kid was Star Trek, the original great TV version with Captain Kirk and Spock with the original cast.
And of course, their mantra was to boldly go where no man has gone before.
And I want us to keep doing that.
I want to just segue from that.
You've been interesting about some of, well, the sort of Trump landscape we're heading to has a number of things which enter your wheelhouse.
One of which Scientific America said, for example, about the appointment of RFK Jr., Trump has promised he would allow Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Go wild on medicines, food, and health.
With that, a radical anti-establishment medical movement with roots in past centuries could threaten the achievements of a science-based public health order painstakingly built since World War II.
Do you agree with their categorization of the way this could go?
Yeah, I don't have a crystal ball of how actual politics unfolds.
What I do know is that in the U.S. government, no matter what people say, at the top, what matters is how money gets allocated in the federal budget.
And you can say, oh, I hate science or science is this or that, but if the money goes to the property to the agencies, then the career scientists who work for those agencies will do their job.
And by the way, leaders come and go.
Heads of agencies, especially if they're presidential appointees, come and go.
The scientists are there for their careers.
And so in the end, the scientists will do what scientists must do.
And I have full confidence that we will not lose the mission statement of these very important scientific institutions.
By the way, just a quick bit of history.
Abraham Lincoln in 1863, when he clearly had other things he needed to be worrying about, signed into existence the National Academy of Science, having seen in Europe the role of science in shaping their future of their economy, of their culture, of their civilization.
And so this was set up as an independent agency with scientists choosing other scientists in their community to participate to advise, independently advise the executive branch and the House and the Senate on policies that relate to the country.
And so I have the confidence that that kind of mission statement will prevail.
Somebody like RFK.
As it has in the past.
Right.
Someone like RFK, he's got obviously some outlandish ideas.
He has some very good ideas.
I mean, you're looking at America in totality.
It's one of the fattest countries and unhealthiest countries in the developed world, right?
It just is.
And by the way, we're in no position to lecture you over here either in the UK.
So I'm not by any means taking the high moral ground, but it's a reality that America is a pretty unhealthy and fat country.
Is there anything wrong?
Yeah, you're fish and chips.
You're fish and chips is a whole other bath and oil right there.
But my point is, I always remember my favorite statistic when I was a newspaper editor when George W. Bush became president.
Under Freedom of Information, we got access to all the people he had sent to the death chamber, the execution list when he was governor of Texas.
And it was like 160-odd people.
It was the greatest number of people executed by one governor in modern history in America.
And as part of the Freedom of Information, we got access to what their last meal request was in the days when they used to make a last meal request and they could have whatever they wanted.
80-something percent wanted a Big Mac and large fries.
True.
Piers, first of all, that's creepy that you would do that, okay?
That's just real.
Well, no, it was actually, it was actually, the whole point of it was this guy was, he killed a lot of people when he was governor and he executed a lot of people.
And it was quite informative about the kind of president he may be.
That was the point.
But the detail was fascinating about, and what it said to me was, yeah, America is a fast food country.
I mean, it just is.
So is there anything intrinsically wrong in principle with a bit of a disruptor like RFK going, you know what, we're just going to attack all this.
We're going to try and make America a healthier place.
Even if, albeit, he has some pretty out there views about things like vaccines.
I have to see the details.
I don't know where he will land in these things yet.
Things he said previously, but not everything he said even agreed with itself.
So it's hard to predict where that's going to land when he takes office.
But I can tell you that in the end, nature is the ultimate judge, jury, and executioner of what is objectively true in this world.
And so you cannot rise to power, declare something that is true that has no scientific support.
You can get away with it for a little while because you can drum up support, especially on social media, but that you're building a house of cards that will ultimately collapse.
Or if you manage to shore up the house of cards with more things that are not objectively true, other countries will rise up and they will lead the world in ways that we once did.
And I've come to realize that we are highly reactive rather than proactive as a country relative to our place in the rest of the world.
And I fear that we may have to sink a little lower in our sort of scientific prowess before everyone wakes up and realizes we're not on the right track, yet other countries are.
And because you and I, we're same age-ish.
You know, we lived the second half of the 20th century with the United States leading in practically every metric in science and technology.
And I just got very accustomed to that, frankly.
Yeah.
And I'd like to see that continue.
Yeah.
And it's been overtaken by a lot of countries, a lot of Asian countries in particular.
Let me, this brings me neatly actually to another part of that Bill Maher interview, which I really enjoy.
Love watching your Bill Maher.
But you had a little exchange, disagreement about this very hot potato issue about the science of trans athletes in women's sport.
Let's take a look.
Engage with the idea here.
What I'm asking is Scientific American is saying basically that the reason why an NBA, WNBA team can't beat the Lakers is because of societal bias.
What you're saying is not Scientific American says that.
An editor for Scientific American says that who no longer has the job.
So don't indict a 170-year-old magazine because somebody, okay, this is called Scientific American and they're printing something because someone enters the cesspool that is social media and then participates in that exchange.
So why can't you?
Let's talk about science.
Why can't you just say this is not scientific and scientific Americans should do better?
So I have been on this issue for a long time.
And I am surprised, given your earlier statement just now about the importance that we have a fact-based society, where science is based on reality and everything else, there is, is there not?
I would put it to you, Neil.
There is a cold, hard reality about this whole trans issue, which is that I, I'm sure like you, I absolutely want all trans people to have utter equality and fairness in the way that I do and you do.
Absolutely.
I've never said anything different.
However, not to the point where it erodes women's rights to fairness and equality.
And there is clearly, clearly a growing unfairness and inequality from the issue of people who are born biologically male identifying as women and being allowed to compete against biological females and then beginning increasingly to be quite dominant to the extent where we saw people winning in the boxing in Paris Olympics.
We've seen the Footballer of the Year, Women's Football of the Year in the UK, voted by the BBC, Barbara Banda from Zambia, also has been banned for sex-related issues in terms of not being allowed to compete in previous tournaments and so on and so on.
The UN just had a big report which said that 900 medals around the world in competitive sport had been deprived from female athletes because trans athletes had won.
So I put it to you that you're a scientist.
It is clearly an indisputable scientific fact that biological males have a superior power and stamina and lung power and all these other things to biological females, because if they didn't, we would never separate the sexes in sport.
The Olympics would be gender neutral.
And they're not for a reason.
Women wouldn't win anything.
So when I hear you try and justify it or say that there's a scientific, and maybe there's not, maybe I'm misquoting you here, but there's some kind of scientific reason why it's fine.
I'm like, hang on, Neil, you'll miss a reality check.
You'll miss a cold, hard fact.
Surely you can see that this is wrong without it actually having to be transphobic to say that.
Well, so you have me here live on your show.
We don't have to comment on other shows.
So let's just have this conversation.
So I did my own study of the relative speed of men relative to women in Olympic sports, the world records, from the 100 meters to the 200 meters, the 400, right on up to the marathon.
And what I noticed is in every event, on average, men were 10% faster than women, 10% faster.
And in events that require strength, that percent was even higher.
I forgot what my exact number.
It might have been 50% stronger.
Okay.
So across the board, that is the case.
So there's no dispute there.
That's just objective truth.
So now we have to ask, why do we watch sports at all?
Okay?
And at Friday Night Lights, that's in the United States, that's high school football.
Saturday, it's college football.
Sunday, it's the NFL.
Do you realize, of course, that the worst team ever in the NFL could wipe its ass with the best team ever in college?
Why?
Because every single player in the NFL was the best person in their college.
And so there's no contest between these zones of athletic engagement.
But we still like watching college.
We don't watch college say, you know, the Philadelphia Eagles could whip their ass, so let's not watch it.
No, we like the equality of the contest and not knowing who would win.
That's what makes sports fun.
Okay.
So if there's a wave of trans women who dominate the sport against other women, all those sports will become less interesting based on how we all watch sports.
Even the Super Bowl here in the United States.
If it's a blowout by halftime, nobody watches the second half.
We watched it for the equality of the contest.
Okay.
So what I'm saying is, like you said, wait, wait, I'm almost done.
So what I see is sports is on the frontier of how to handle this frontier of people who are trans.
It's on the frontier of how to resolve that.
And I'm making this up now.
Imagine the future of sports does not distinguish sex.
It distinguishes and sorts people by hormone ratios.
I'm making this up, but imagine that if that were the case, that would be interesting.
You get a hormone test.
You're in this range, and then you compete against other people with the same range of wars.
That's ridiculous.
Neil, that is ridiculous.
No, it's not.
I'll tell you why it's ridiculous.
You're going to give every single person in wrestle a hormone test.
Hold on, hold on.
I used to wrestle.
And wrestling, there are people who weigh, sorry am I using pounds here, 125 pounds, right on up to 240 pounds.
You don't wrestle each other.
The entire sport separates people so that the contest is interesting.
And so the people of the same weight wrestle each other, and that is the contest.
And if Floyd Mayweather is not a woman, I don't know if that's how it will land.
Hang on, Neil.
If Floyd Mayweather fought a woman boxer, a female woman boxer, who was the same weight division, he would annihilate her.
That's why we don't let it happen.
And in fact, in the Paris Olympics, the winner of one of the women's boxing competitions, one of the females.
Well, yeah, but my point is that I just think that if you don't mind me saying, I'll say this respectfully because I love you.
But it just seems to me like you've dug yourself into, you've dug yourself into a slight hole on this issue and you're trying to get out of it.
I know you're suggesting slightly malicious theories.
Whereas the science to me is obvious.
You've already given the best argument that I've heard for why.
That's what's the point.
For why we separate the voices.
Hold on.
You misquoted me in this very interview.
What I said was the idea of creating categories within a sport, splitting them in the example I gave, which I've just made it up, like hormone ratios is not fundamentally weird compared to dividing wrestlers by weight.
No, it is.
The only reason why you do it is to make an interesting context.
Neil, you're wrong.
And so you said Floyd Merryweather, fight.
Hold on, no, no, hold on.
You're wrong.
Floyd Merryweather.
You're not allowing for the superior male biology when it comes to lung capacity, stamina, to body mass, to muscle mass, all those things.
If you just take one criteria of hormones, you're not allowing all that.
I'll give an example.
Caitlin Jenner, who obviously...
Hang on, let me finish my point.
Let me finish my point.
Caitlin Jenner was an Olympic male decathlon gold medal winner.
Caitlin is a big golf fan.
And when she started playing golf after she transitioned, she was allowed to play off the women's T's, which are 50 yards further than the men's tees.
And she quickly realized that she was still smashing it 300 yards down and obviously was then beating all the women that she played.
So she now plays back off the male tees because her biology is that of a man.
The Trans Athlete Frontier 00:03:27
And I feel that that was the most honest way to deal with it.
I also feel that if you want to have a separate category, have a trans category or have trans women compete against men, which is their biology.
Isn't that the scientific way to resolve this?
I don't have a solution.
What I started this section of the conversation by saying that how you handle trans athletes is a frontier in sports that does not yet have a full solution.
And so, and I made up an example, like maybe you could divide people by hormones.
I don't know if that would work physiologically, but at the end of the day, we watch sporting events because they are competitively interesting.
And so something's going to have to get resolved there.
And I don't have that solution.
I do.
So you have a trans category, or you have the trans women competing against biological men, which is what they are.
And I completely respect trans rights.
That may be.
Oh, sorry.
That may be how it settles, but I don't know.
But I'm telling you, it's a frontier without a current solution that everybody agrees to.
That's all I'm telling you.
And I started this by affirming, yes, men are faster and stronger than the average man is stronger and faster.
Dude, world-class men are faster and stronger than world-class women.
Obviously, there's huge overlap when you come down the rest of the world.
The truth is, if you had a gender-neutral Olympics, how many women, biological female women, would win gold medals if it was open to men and women.
You keep going.
The answer is tricky.
They might win one or two.
I'm trying to stay above.
You're creating this world that makes great clickbait.
No, I'm not honestly.
No, no.
I honestly the thing you'd throw back at other people, which is science.
I'm telling you that it's the scientific reality, unless you say otherwise.
And I don't think you do, because you've already explained that men have a superior solution.
Otherwise, I started this.
The science is clear.
You started this by saying it.
But the science is clear, isn't it?
And I'm saying the solution isn't clear, even if the science is.
And so that's all.
We can debate what could work.
I think the world has to figure it out, and maybe they'll figure it out one day.
And maybe it is hormone ratios.
I don't know.
But if it is hormone ratios and we don't compete sexes, we compete by hormones.
That's a whole other interesting future of athletics.
By the way, every Olympics, I pause and think to myself, which of these events can and should be, should not be separated by sex.
There are some already.
That's not the case.
And the equestrian.
The equestrian does not separate.
The equestrian and shooting, I think, also is another one where if they're sitting and shooting.
That I didn't know.
Yeah.
So I just figured there's some that would, that would be the case.
We can start there and just work our way up.
So yeah, it's a frontier.
People are thinking about it.
Top people are thinking about it.
And I'm not going to be the one to have that solution.
Very nice.
But at the end, I know when you're watching sports, you want to watch people who have equivalent talent compete.
Fairness in Sports Categories 00:02:56
Otherwise, it's not interesting.
Well, you want it to be fair and equal.
That's why when they're...
Advertisers know this.
Yeah, but it's like when you have the doping scandal in, say, cycling, because people are using drugs to cheat, it gives them an advantage.
It's just wrong because it removes the basic premise of sport that you and I would love, which is it has to be fair and equal.
And the moment you lose that.
Unless you just allowed everyone to dope, then it would be fair and equal again.
Well, yeah.
There are a lot of ways that can slice.
You know what?
In cycling, that's pretty much what happened.
I think I interviewed a guy once when I was at CNN who had been like number 42 in the world in cycling.
And it turned out he may have been the best cyclist in the world because the other 41 were all cheats.
So it may well have been the case.
Let's turn to something less contentious.
Actually, it may not be because it's your new book.
Can I slip something in?
I just want to slip something in, if I may.
There's something I wanted to say about Elon that I didn't, and I forgot to.
So forgive me if I can slip this in.
Of course.
Not only has he made electric cars a daily conversation for people, whether or not you own one, you're certainly thinking about it.
He is transforming access to space to become something affordable.
And to do that requires something that he's been doing quite spectacularly, which is reusing booster parts.
And, you know, the boosters of his Falcon come back and they stick the landing, makes great video.
He did the chopstick recovery of the booster for his larger...
We're looking at it now.
That's all.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
He posted this.
He posted this overnight.
It's utterly staggering footage.
I mean, the way this thing reconnects is unbelievable.
What do you think when you see this?
No, no, I think it's that's if consider that if you flew from New York to London on a 747 and they shoved it off the cliff and rolled out another one, your trip to from New York to London will cost you a million dollars.
So the fact that we reuse airplanes is a very important fact for aviation.
And the fact that now Elon is pioneering the reuse of rocket boosters will, in fact, be extremely important going forward for the affordable access to space.
I wanted to get that in there.
Very important.
I get it.
I get it.
I think you and Elon probably agree about a lot more things than you disagree.
In the same way, I think you and I agree about a lot more.
Yes, that is a fact.
You and I agree a lot more about that transition.
I think that's a good idea, I want to admit as well.
Let's move on.
Let's move on.
I want to move to your book, sure.
The book is Merlin's Tour of the Universe.
It's an updated revised version of a book that you wrote many years ago now.
And the format, if for people who don't know, is an omniscient spaceman called Merlin, who gives answers to questions from adults and children across the cosmos.
And I'm just thinking when I knew you were coming on to talk about this.
God of the Gaps Explained 00:05:02
And I think I've asked you this before, but it presumably evolves anyway, the question.
But if you were asking yourself, what are the three things you, Neil deGrasse Tyson, would most want to have answered that really eat away at you?
What would they be in terms of your area of expertise?
Yeah, so yeah, I have a kind of a cop-out answer because I've spent a lot of my life thinking that very question.
And then I realized when I arrived at the answers to those questions, either I because I would do the research or my field because we didn't know the answer at the time and then the field arrives there, I realized that the question that I asked wasn't as interesting as the next question I would ask now that I was standing on a new frontier and can see farther than I ever did before.
So no longer do I say, these are the questions I want answered and that'll do it.
I say, what are the questions I don't even yet know to ask?
Those are the ones I dream about.
I mean, that is fascinating.
And also, it makes complete sense because, I mean, the universe is a gigantic place, right?
There must be so many unanswered things anyway.
I mean, the question I always ask people, because you're an atheist, right?
Is that right?
I don't use the title because if I said it, people then assume things about me to be true that are not.
And so I realize I have to put some distance between me.
But I find myself unconvinced by any God that has been described to me being in charge of anything.
So how do you think we all got here?
How did it all start?
Well, I follow the lines of scientific evidence, and we know about evolution.
We know about genetic commonality among all life forms on Earth, plant and animal, and fungal.
And so this comes to us from very hard work invested in the biological sciences.
You add some of that to the geology and astrophysics of the early solar system.
And we go from raw ingredients drawn from the periodic table of elements forged in the hearts of stars that are everywhere in the universe, by the way.
The ingredients of life, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, they're the most common ingredients in the universe.
And for life to be based on them is it tells you that life is highly opportunistic.
And in the early Earth, we went from organic molecules to self-replicating life.
We still don't know how that happened.
That's a biological frontier with top people.
So what was this?
Here's my question.
We don't know what was around.
Here's my question for you.
If I was Merlin, this is what I'd be asking, right?
Let's assume you're Merlin for a moment.
Merlin, what was there before nothing?
We don't know.
Right.
So here's the thing.
It's okay to not know.
That's the whole point of science.
No, but that's the whole point of Sermon Deal.
Go where you don't know the answer.
That's why I believe in God, because there has to be a superior thing out there which can answer that question.
The human brain cannot answer it because they can't, because nobody knows the answer.
Therefore, there has to be, does there not, logically, a superior thing which can answer that question.
Yeah, so that's not an invocation of logic.
That's an invocation of what philosophers have historically called the God of the gaps.
The God of the gaps is, you look at where science has yet to tread, where science has yet to figure out, and you say, wow, that's mysterious.
I don't know how that works.
God must have done it.
And by the way, for you to feel this way, there's a long storied history of people thinking this way.
Let's go back to AD 150, Claudius Ptolemy, brilliant Alexandrian mathematician, polymath.
He wrote in the margin of one of his greatest works, he said, after looking at the planets going back and forth, not fully understanding why they did this.
And he writes, when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch earth with my feet.
I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.
He was feeling it, okay?
He's invoking religion.
It's a beautiful quote.
It's one of my favorite quotes ever, by the way, because it's so honest and so mysterious and so curious.
And what I'm saying here is he did not understand the planets and he invokes deity to help him out.
That's what you just did, but on a different frontier, because we know why the planets go back and forth.
Newton got that figured out.
And Kepler.
So if, to you, God is where science has yet to tread, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.
I want to end with just a funny thing.
Newton, Kepler, and Mystery 00:01:37
That's a great answer, by the way.
It's terrible, but it's a great answer.
I want to wait.
You are one of the most memed scientists in the history of the planet.
And we found one question that wasn't asked in the book.
Take a look.
What is the most astounding fact about the universe or yourself that we don't know?
The most astounding fact is that I'm actually an accountant.
I don't know shit about physics, space.
I'm just totally making it up.
I just watched Star Wars and started making shit up.
Okay.
And I'm literally just putting random words together about stars and space and all that.
And I'm just a CPA, so it's kind of hilarious to me that they think I'm serious here.
Your reaction.
I love it.
I've never seen that before, but I love it.
I mean, I enjoy humor.
I enjoy when people use me or my image to just have fun.
It's flattering and a little creepy sometimes, but it's...
I don't, I don't, it's, let it flow.
Let it flow.
Neil, it's brilliant to have you back.
Again, the book, Merlin's Tour of Universe, revised and updated to the 21st century, is out now.
Fascinating book.
You're a fascinating guy.
I love having you on and I appreciated the interview.
Thank you very much.
You've got it.
Thanks, Bill.
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