Neil deGrasse Tyson - Welcome To The Universe

Neil deGrasse Tyson 0:00 But if you're gonna say we need to put our eggs in two baskets instead of one, so that when a disaster hits one planet, everyone else can just watch it, and watch half their species die, and somehow be okay with that, rather than prevent it from happening in the first place, if you're okay with that, then fine. But I'm saying, fix the problem so that you don't even have the problem you're trying to escape. (air whooshing)

Chris Williamson 0:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson, welcome to the show.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 0:26 Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Chris Williamson 0:28 Elon's bought Twitter, Neil. Should he be spending his time and money taking people to Mars? What's going on?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 0:35 Yeah, I've stopped passing judgment on what billionaires do with their money. I mean, think about it, he could just be ha- having a yacht contest for who has the biggest yacht. You know, billionaires have whatever are their habits. And I don't know that any of us would behave any differently if we had billions of dollars. So, I've just stopped commenting on what a billionaire, billionaires do, do or should do with their money. What I can say is, if a billionaire is gonna do something, it's kinda interesting that he single-handedly brought electric cars back into, uh, uh, uh, uh, he created a new expectation for the automotive industry, basically single-handedly. And he reinvented commercial rocket launch. So, he was doing that with his billions and he has 44 billion left over, and he wants to own Twitter, which he likes. All right. Uh, I don't see anything wrong with that. By the way, most things out there have CEOs who you don't know, and you don't even ask. We just happen to know who the new CEO of Twitter is about to be. And so now, this becomes a point of conversation. Why isn't anybody talking about the head of any other organization or company or, or strategic p- uh, uh, platforms of communication? So, I think the level of scrutiny is, is unjustified given how much scrutiny we could be giving to so many other things. But that being said, if he does what everyone fears, especially on the left, that he reopens the floodgates, gives Trump an account again, um, I think we need to perhaps look at it a different way. Uh, free speech is a... What you want is to not suppress the speech that you don't like but amplify the speech that you do and let that be the, the arena of contest of ideas. Because if you suppress ideas, those ideas will still always be there and they'll run around saying, "I have this idea, but these folks don't want to hear it." That's very different from you losing the idea game in an open contest, and then you say, "Well, how come nobody's listening to you?" "Yeah, because they turned me off, uh, uh, because they, they, they shut off the, the channels where I was communicating 'cause they don't wanna hear anything that I have to say, or because everything I said is wrong." All right. These are two different ways emergent truths can win. But you want it to be the second way because then no one has a platform left. If it's a platform that is either regressive, um, uh, uh, uh, puts, uh, us all at an existential risk or whatever, let it lose on its own terms.

Chris Williamson 3:35 Speaking of existential risks, how good do you think Mars is as a backup to humanity? One of the problems-

Neil deGrasse Tyson 3:41 What, what is it you wanna back up?

Chris Williamson 3:43 Well, the fact that we only have one cradle at the moment, right? If something goes wrong here, if we're all being slowly turned into paper clips or gray goo or there's a, a bio weapon that gets released or whatever, uh, we don't have some air gapped backup.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 3:56 Uh, I assume your listeners know what you mean when you say we're all getting turned into paper clips.

Chris Williamson 4:01 Yes, they do.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 4:02 They do?

Chris Williamson 4:03 Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 4:03 W- so they're AI fluent, is that correct?

Chris Williamson 4:05 AI fluent. Yeah, that's all one word as well, AI fluent.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 4:08 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 4:09 Yes. Yeah, they, they are. So, they know Nick Bostrom, they know about existential risk.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 4:13 Yeah, they know about paper clip hypothesis.

Chris Williamson 4:13 Yes.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 4:14 So, so, um, yeah or an asteroid or a virus, whatever.

Chris Williamson 4:19 Or anything.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 4:20 So, yeah. So, so here's my rebuttal to that. And by the way, this rebuttal is, uh, I don't know many people who have this rebuttal, so this may just be an outlier in the examples you're collecting. But right now, Antarctica is wetter and balmier than any place on Mars, yet I don't see people lining up to build condominiums there. All right. It's a wholly inhospitable place. And right now, it's used for some tourism, but mostly for scientific research. If you wanna move to Mars and do it in a way that's not having you confined to a habitat module, you'll want to terraform Mars. And that's turning M- Mars into Earth. And then ship a billion people there. So, here's my thought. If you have the power of geo-engineering to turn Mars into Earth, then no matter what is about to happen on Earth, no matter what did happen on Earth, you have the power to turn Earth back into Earth. And so, I don't see Mars as a realistic backup plan because whatever you'd have to do to Mars, you could do to Earth, and then that's your backup plan on Earth.

Chris Williamson 5:37 Would it be more difficult to terraform Mars than to perhaps survive a huge asteroid impact or to combat some rogue AI?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 5:44 No, no, no, no, you deflect the asteroid. What? Dude, we're talking... (laughs) If we can fly to Mars and terraform it, we can fly to Mars, ship a billion people there, I think we'll know how to deflect an asteroid. Okay?

Chris Williamson 5:56 Okay.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 5:56 D- did... Am I... S- am I on a limb there when I say this?

Chris Williamson 5:59 No, I don't think that you are. But, um, um, my point is that there may be some existential risks which are so existential or so difficult to overcome that the Mars terraforming could be easier...... than it would be-

Neil deGrasse Tyson 6:09 There's none that I can think of at this moment, but, yes, I will allow that possibility. But there is none I can think of. Okay? So, how about a killer virus that will take us all? Let's invent an antiviral serum that'll take out any virus. All right? That's, is that a stretch to imagine? It's less of a stretch than flying to Mars, terraforming it, and shipping a billion people there.

Chris Williamson 6:32 Fair enough.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 6:32 No matter what you come up with, it's less of a stretch of my imagination as a problem to solve than terraforming Mars and shipping a billion people there.

Chris Williamson 6:41 That's how big the problem is to do it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 6:45 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 6:45 The Ma- the Mars problem is.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 6:46 Because we don't know how to terraform yet. W- we don't know how to terraform. W- I think we could build a habitat ma- module. Sure, we can figure that out. Um, yeah, but how many people are gonna live there? And you have to bring supplies. You have to have supply ships. So, but still, to do that is a lot of science and technology and time and money. Just solve the problems here on Earth. Just solve them. Go ahead.

Chris Williamson 7:12 So, you're saying that E- Elon buying Twitter actually is the best use of his money rather than, and his attention, rather than going to Mars?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 7:18 Oh, no. No. I'm not s-

Chris Williamson 7:19 (laughs)

Neil deGrasse Tyson 7:19 I- I- I- I will not judge what people should or should not do with their money. Okay?

Chris Williamson 7:24 Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 7:24 So, I will not say, "I'm glad he did this or that." What I will say is... And by the way, 44 billion is a, is it, uh, 15% of his wealth, 20% of his wealth?

Chris Williamson 7:35 I think he's raised it from investors as well. Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 7:38 Yeah. Yeah. So, so, um... And by the way that, well, it's not like he doesn't have that money anymore. It's invested in a thing that has value. So, it's not like you went to buy candy and you ate the candy and you don't have the money anymore. So, so, uh, I'm not gonna sit here and pass judgment on how billionaires spend their money. Just not gonna do that.

Chris Williamson 8:01 Got you.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 8:01 I- I can tell you, he wants to terraform Mars. I don't have a problem with that. But if you're doing it because you think Earth needs a backup plan, that's the wrong reason. That's- that's kind of objectively false. I- i- no, let me say that differently. It's hard to defend it for that reason. You can defend it for other reasons. It's a cool thing to do. It's a technology demonstration, sure. But if you're gonna say we need to put our eggs in two baskets instead of one so that when a disaster hits one planet, everyone else can just watch it and watch half their species die and somehow be okay with that rather than prevent it from happening in the first place, if you're okay with that, then fine. But I'm saying fix the problems that you don't even have that solution you're trying to es- that pro- that problem you're trying to escape.

Chris Williamson 8:49 Have you looked into astro politics much? Uh, who's going to own Mars, who owns sections-

Neil deGrasse Tyson 8:54 Yeah, sure. I have some sense of that. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 8:55 ... of space? That's- that's so fascinating to me. You know, is it first come, first serve? Is it another, is it the- the new sort of colonialist, uh, era that we're going into now? You just get to stamp a little area out on Mars and it's yours?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 9:08 Yeah. So, so, the only successful, if we can call it that, model that we have for this sort of thing is homesteading. So, if you... So, let's say the international community owns Mars. Let's just make this up because, you know, I'm Pope of the UN and I declare that like Antarctica, the international community has equal access. If you go there and pitch tent and figure out a way to make a buck, let's say you have a mining operations, whatever, then you get to keep that land provided the industry you create accrues back to the rest of us in some way or in some form. So, that has worked in the past. Holding aside people taking land that belonged to others or, you know, and all the other issues that colonization brought with it, the simple fact of being the first on a plot of land and doing something with it, getting to keep that land if you manage to, as they say, develop it, that's a successful model in the past. I don't see why that wouldn't still be invoked. With regard to asteroids, which have basically unlimited natural resources, if you're the first on an asteroid and you plant your flag, you keep the asteroid. There's hundreds of thousands of asteroids. No shortage of them to do this with, by the way. One of them e- actually has my name on it. So, if I were ever to travel to one, I'd probably put that one top on the list.

Chris Williamson 10:36 Which one?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 10:38 It's 13123 Tyson.

Chris Williamson 10:40 Why? Did you find it?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 10:42 No, no. Uh, that is one way to have an asteroid (laughs) named after you, if you find it. I'm not an asteroid hunter. But, uh, there's so- an asteroid hunter who is a big fan of my work and respected what I do and my efforts in the public, so in my honor, they named it, uh, one- 13123 is the numerical sequencing and then the name is just Tyson that follows it.

Chris Williamson 11:04 That's pretty cool.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 11:04 So, I was very honored by that. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 11:05 Yeah. That's very

Chris Williamson 11:06 cool. What's your favorite answer to the Fermi paradox? I spent an hour and a half last night having a discussion with a bunch of friends.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 11:15 Yeah. I think, um, well, heh, this is my favorite answer but I don't think it's the most realistic one. My favorite answer is they've already visited and have judged that there's no sign of intelligent life on Earth. They moved.

Chris Williamson 11:29 (laughs) Well, did they come, did they come last week?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 11:31 That's the simplest explanation. Another interesting explanation is that whatever is the urge to colonize as many planets as you can, which is what the Fermi paradox, it's the foundation of the Fermi paradox. Right? You have a civilization and it travels to nearby planets around other stars and- and then they then travel to two other planets and they travel to two, so there's a- a quick doubling time where in, where you can populate the entire galaxy in just a few hundred thousand years. And that's small compared with the history of life on Earth.... that's even small compared with the anticipated life expectancy of mammal species, which last I checked is up around three million years. So, but there's an interesting self-limiting fact which I'm going with in my explanation here. It's whatever urge it takes for you to colonize a planet, if that is a genetic driver in an entire wave of people who are colonizing the galaxy, then at some point, you're gonna wanna colonize the same planet that I do. And you're not gonna take no for an answer. Neither will I. That's what got me here where I am right now. So, we will then fight until one person wins and one person loses. And that will happen at every turn when the number of planets that can be, uh, uh, colonized begins to drop relative to the ones that have been. And you'll get infighting and the entire system implodes. By the way, that kinda already happened in Europe. Portugal rises up, Spain rises up, France rises up, J- uh, England rises up. They have these powerful navies, and they wanna colonize the world. And in the end what do they end up doing? Fighting each other over who owns what colony in the world. So, it could be that the very urge to do that is self-limiting. The very urge to populate every planet is the very same force that would prevent that from happening in the end.

Chris Williamson 14:04 That's an interesting way to look at it. One thing I've always considered is that I think it would be difficult for any civilization to be more emotional than we are. If you were to tune the intensity of our emotions up, our reactivity, our anger, our sadness, our despondency, whatever, if you were to tune that up by another 15%, I think coordination becomes so difficult that you really s- maybe not 15%, maybe 25% to sort of 30%. I think it's so difficult that you can't achieve anything, which is wild to think that we're near to perhaps the limit on how emotional a civilization could be and still not be completely ineffective.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 14:43 Except we have a very big range of expressed emotion among us within the species. So, I don't know that I could characteri- yes, I agree we're an emotional species. I, I'm not denying that. But the people who make decisions, who allocate moneys, who fund research and discovery, uh, I don't necessarily think that emotions are as forceful as you are implying.

Chris Williamson 15:07 'cause they have constraints. They have rules, guidelines, procedures, checks and balances.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 15:12 Right. Right. Right. And it's, things get debated and decisions get made. All right? We didn't discover the Higgs boson based on emotion. Right? Um, the, uh, what else? We, I guess we can say we went to the moon based on emotion 'cause we were a little spooked by the Soviet Union, but it took, in the end of the day, science and technology to accomplish that. You can't wish stuff or pray stuff into space. So, so, uh, I like where you're going with that, but I don't think it applies entirely with us.

Chris Williamson 15:43 Well, that's what we try to do, right? That's the reasons we have rules and procedures in place, in an effort to try and constrain some of those worse aspects, or else everybody would be making decisions purely based on emotion.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 15:54 Yeah. That's correct. Yeah. I, I agree with that. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 15:57 Do you think that we should be trying to message aliens? There's METI as well as SETI, right, messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. And I know that it's quite contested about whether that's a safe thing to do or not.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 16:08 Well, so once again, it's like the terraforming Mars. Uh, it makes a good headline. You know, don't tell the aliens we're here, because especially since we know in advance without asking you, you are not gonna give your email to a stranger on the street or your home address. You're just not gonna do that. And this is another person who's our own species. They're, they're your species and you're not giving them your return address. Now we're talking about giving our return address to aliens out in the galaxy? And that's, so whatever distrust you have of your fellow species, you'd think that should be magnified, uh, uh, as a distrust of, um, aliens. So, I, I get that. And I don't have a problem with that, except the aliens already know where we are. We have an 80-year radio bubble of radio signals that came from TV sets, that came from broadcast antennas, and this is 80-light year radius expanding at one light year per year is a radius of radio information about our species and about our culture. So, aliens can learn practically everything they'd want to know, even if it's not everything they'd need to know, in our television broadcast (laughs) shows. So, The Honeymooners, they'd learn how men interact with women. Um, they might, you know, see The Flintstones and wonder what's going on there. Uh, so, so, yeah, this, to, to be worried about a signal being sent today when signals are being sent inadvertently for the past 80 years, uh, I think is, is mis- misguided concern.

Chris Williamson 17:58 Because we've already let that horse bolt out of the gate.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 18:01 Correct. Correct.

Chris Williamson 18:03 Interesting. Yeah. I, um, I wonder, I, I, I'm really not, not sort of too convinced by the, the concern about messaging...You're right. Anyone or any civilization that we should be sufficiently scared of because they're going to come and try and destroy us has probably already been able to detect that we're here. And, uh, it does seem a little bit like looking at a teacup in a, out of an ocean and going, "Look, well, there's nothing in here. We know that there can't be anything out there." That's the equivalent temporally with how long we've been around. We've been around, what, 50,000 years when we could have actually written stuff down and it might be in a cave somewhere or whatever. Like, there's been a significantly longer period of time that aliens could have been and gone and decided that they're not bothered with this planet.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 18:44 Yeah. And plus, if you're listening in for radio signals, uh, if they're listening in 2,000 years ago, we would have had the Roman Empire. By anyone's measure, that's civilization. Or the Egyptian Empire, a thousand years, whatever, before that. And, but, if they don't have a radio signal to send back, you would think that there was no intelligent life here on Earth when there clearly was.

Chris Williamson 19:05 That's a good point. Technology and civilization-

Neil deGrasse Tyson 19:07 Right.

Chris Williamson 19:07 ... have a lagging, a lagging measure, right?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 19:10 Right.

Chris Williamson 19:10 Talking about, talking about the, that bubble, I've been thinking about how, whether anybody has estimations about how big the universe is outside of the observable universe. Is there any way that this can be guessed?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 19:22 Yeah. There, there's some estimates, but they're, it's, like, very loose estimates.

Chris Williamson 19:28 What do you even base it on?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 19:30 Well, you can look at, um, so you can look at how big our universe is and how long it's been expanding and ask, if you were randomly to come upon a universe, what is the likelihood of coming upon it within the first 14 billion years rather than the whole rest of its life? And so you make some, uh, some estimates along those lines, and then you can conclude how much bigger the full universe is relative to how much time we've been expanding within it. And I fe- I don't remember the estimates. It's, I, actually, we, we, the number is in one of my recent books. It's in Cosmic Queries. We give the size that the universe could likely be beyond the visible horizon. I just don't remember exactly what the number was.

Chris Williamson 20:22 I learned about the Boötes Supervoid this week. Have you heard of that?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 20:27 Te- tell me the name again.

Chris Williamson 20:29 Boe- it's B-O-

Neil deGrasse Tyson 20:30 Oh, Bootes.

Chris Williamson 20:31 Yeah, it's got a, whatever it's called, not an ampersand.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 20:34 The W over the second O.

Chris Williamson 20:35 That's it. Bo- Bo-

Neil deGrasse Tyson 20:36 Bootes Supervoid.

Chris Williamson 20:37 Yes.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 20:37 Yeah, yeah, it's a constellation, um, and, yeah, it's just a region of the universe where there's hardly any galaxies.

Chris Williamson 20:43 Like 300 million-

Neil deGrasse Tyson 20:44 There's stuff there, but nothing, nothing interesting.

Chris Williamson 20:45 ... light years across or something? Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 20:46 What's that?

Chris Williamson 20:46 It's 300 million light years across, I think.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 20:49 Yeah. And it's got, it doesn't have bright stuff in it. It probably has lighter, smaller things that are less visible. Uh, and, yeah, that's kind of fun. The universe is not... Universe is like a sponge, where if you take a cut through it, you'll see voids where there's no sponge, and then on the edges of the sponge, edges of the voids, you'll see the sponge material. And that's what the galaxies look like when you take slices through them in spacetime.

Chris Williamson 21:21 It's interesting though, because the universe is supposed to be relatively homogeneous, right? Isn't that one of the things that was predicted?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 21:27 Well, it was, it's statistically homogeneous b- above a certain scale. It's obviously not homogeneous in your, the room that you're standing in because you're in one place and there's air in another place. So, if it was homogeneous, your molecules would be equally spread in the room that you're located. So, you have to say, on what scale is it homogeneous? And if you back up enough and you see enough contents, you could say, now I have a certain mixture of galaxies in this volume and I look over here and I see approximately the same mixture over here and up there. So then you know what counts as the, um... Uh, you, you know what counts as the, um, that is representative-

Chris Williamson 22:12 Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 22:12 ... of what the universe looks like. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 22:14 The scale at which we can start to draw some conclusions-

Neil deGrasse Tyson 22:17 Correct.

Chris Williamson 22:17 ... about where it's going to be.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 22:18 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 22:18 Yeah. It's, I mean, if it's not 300 million light years though, you think, that, that was what inferred to me, oh, well, maybe the observable universe is only a really small part of a much bigger universe because within this, you don't have a massive amount of homogeneity.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 22:32 Right. Right. So, but a big enough volume, you do. So, we're, that, that's how you get out of that.

Chris Williamson 22:38 Just scale out a little bit more.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 22:39 Right. Correct. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 22:41 If the Big Bang was when time began, when's time going to stop?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 22:47 Um, so there's no evidence that it would stop. Well, it would stop at the Big Rip, um, for sure. But if we don't have the Big Rip, where the universe is expanding so fast that it rips the very fabric of the universe, um, that, if that does not happen, then we'll just expand forever. And so time just continues forever.

Chris Williamson 23:12 Would the Big Freeze not eventually-

Neil deGrasse Tyson 23:15 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 23:15 ... end up with everything decaying on a long enough timescale to the point where time kind of becomes irrelevant?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 23:21 Yeah. Oh, no, that's a different question. Right. So if I keep winding a watch, the watch will keep time, but there's a point where, what energy am I using to wind the watch while I'm eating some food? Well, that gets energy from the sun. The sun is gone, then there's no energy and I can't wind the watch. And so, there is a limit to this. And the... But otherwise, the time just slows. The, the, the, there's nothing left for you to care about timing (laughs) . That's really how to think about it. There's nothing there. You know, how long did you run that race? There's nobody running a race. How long did it, did, did you boil the egg? There are no eggs, right? So, uh, there's, I guess we can call that a practical end of time when there's nothing left to measure time with. But otherwise, uh, it would just continue forever.

Chris Williamson 24:12 Yeah, interesting. I learned as well, the same day that I learned about the Boötes

Chris Williamson 24:17 supervoid, uh, about the reason... or a, a question about why the Planck length exists. Why is it that there's a smallest measurement at all? Is there a reason for that?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 24:31 Um, well, so it depends what you mean by reason.

Chris Williamson 24:35 Well, why can't anything be smaller than it?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 24:38 Because that is the very structure that comprises everything that's bigger than it. So, now, there's a, um, there's a movement, uh, uh, a cottage industry I should say, that is wondering whether the Planck length, this smallest unit, consider it like a voxel, a volume pixel, right? This Planck length is fundamental or is there something more fundamental than that? There's emergent research to suggest that space and time emerge from other forces operating. And, uh, that's, that's an interesting fact. So, if that's the case, maybe you can get something smaller than a Planck length, but not by any known means that gives us our understanding in the first place.

Chris Williamson 25:34 There's an equivalent in time as well, isn't there?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 25:37 Yes. Yeah. So, the, the Planck length in time is how long it takes light to cross a Pa- a Planck length.

Chris Williamson 25:44 Oh, no way.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 25:45 Yeah. Yeah. So that's a s- so that's a unit of time and that makes a cube in spacetime.

Chris Williamson 25:53 That is interesting. The most... the, the coolest explanation that I heard for it was that the Planck length is the pixel size of the simulation that we're living in.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 26:02 Yeah. That's another way to put it. That's right. But when you get to the Big Rip, who knows what that will look like, and we have no idea. And by the way, yeah, if we are a simulation and, and you wanna think about it that way, there's nos- there's nothing stopping you from saying these are the pixels of our simulation.

Chris Williamson 26:20 Is it right that the speed that light goes at is the maximum speed that anything can go at? Is that determined by the fact that it's light or is that a maximum speed limit and it happens to be that light travels at it?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 26:35 We don't know, but both are true. Both are true. And by the way, when light slows down, as light slows down when it enters tr- transparent media that are more dense than air, the... um... so when it slows down, it actually hasn't slowed down. It's moving at the speed of light between the molecules, but then it has to pass through a molecule and that, that slows down the total, the total duration.

Chris Williamson 27:04 Oh, because it's gotta go a further distance as it weaves through.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 27:07 So, I, I don't know if it's quite just further distance or if it's the interaction that it has with the molecules of the substance. I wouldn't think it's a further distance, because that would imply something different for-

Chris Williamson 27:25 Bending somehow. Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 27:26 Yeah. Yeah. And I don't think it's distance dependent. But, uh, in, in any case, this, this... uh... so the speed of light is still going at the speed of light even when it's moving slower. That's my point.

Chris Williamson 27:37 (laughs)

Neil deGrasse Tyson 27:39 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 27:39 Which makes complete sense, obviously.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 27:40 Right. Right. Right. Right.

Chris Williamson 27:42 Uh, yeah. I, I just found that really interesting. You wonder whether the maximum speed that things can go at is the speed of light or if there is a maximum th- speed that things can go at and light happens to travel at that speed. I thought that was an interesting distinction.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 27:55 Well, except, no, you... material items can't travel at the speed of light. So, so, uh, I'm recording, um... so you, you, you have my image here and if... sorry, if I wanted to s- join you, I can't... I can travel 99.999999% the speed of light, but I can't travel the speed of light. It's, it's pre- it's forbidden. All the equations forbid it and we've never seen it happen.

Chris Williamson 28:26 Yeah. Well, I don't know. I... the, the insights around, uh, how future civilizations can perhaps travel, whether or not we can wormhole tunnel our way across the galaxy and stuff like that, that kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier on with the intelligent life. It's not a surprise when you see just how spread out things are. You know, it's only a presumption based on how likely it is that some life has occurred within our galaxy, but if the universe is as big as we thought it is and we don't have another, uh, example of life, uh, evolving, it's pretty difficult to work out whether or not we should actually be seeing aliens at all. I can't remember what the, uh, letter is in the Fermi paradox, um, but there's one... or what is it? What, what's the typical equation that goes along with the Fermi paradox?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 29:16 No, don't confuse it with the, the Drake equation.

Chris Williamson 29:19 That's it. Thank you.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 29:20 Right. Right.

Chris Williamson 29:21 Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 29:21 Oh, you did. Okay. Uh-huh.

Chris Williamson 29:22 That's- (laughs) That's-

Neil deGrasse Tyson 29:23 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 29:23 ... one of those-

Neil deGrasse Tyson 29:23 The, the Drake equation. You know, you start out with the total number of stars in the galaxy and you start hacking away at it with fractions. What fraction of those stars have a planet? What fraction of the stars with planet have life? What fraction of stars... No. What fraction of stars with planets are in the Goldilocks zone? And what fraction of those in the Goldilocks zone have life? And what fraction of those in the Goldilocks zone with life have intelligent life? What fraction of those in the Goldilocks zone that have life and have intelligent life have intelligent life with technology that can actually communicate? And that enables you to remove the Roman Empire from this, uh, because, like I said, they wouldn't have known how to answer back if someone tried to talk to them.

Chris Williamson 30:04 Where is the biggest hole in the Drake equation for you? Or what's the biggest question mark over?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 30:09 Right now, it's the... for me, it's what is the anticipated length that a civilization is capable of communicating?And, uh, that, 'cause that one doesn't rely on pure astrophysics. There's a social cultural dimension to that. And I, uh, (laughs) I can't bring my methods and tools of science to address that. Is, are we wise enough to be good shepherds of the power that we wield such that seven generations from now, they'll be proud of us as their ancestors for having preserved the earth? I don't know that I... (laughs) That's, that's how, that's how it should be. Okay? But it's not that, of course.

Chris Williamson 31:01 Outside of your scope a little bit.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 31:03 Right. (laughs)

Neil deGrasse Tyson 31:04 Right.

Chris Williamson 31:05 Do you think that our descendants will leave the Milky Way eventually?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 31:09 No.

Chris Williamson 31:10 You don't think so?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 31:11 No. Not that we can't, there's just no reason to. I think as the sun gets hot and bulbous, we might want to move out to Mars, and that will matter. And, uh, and, because Mars is farther away, so we get to delay the inevitable demise of our civilization by knowing this well in advance and, uh, taking precautions to accommodate it. But, uh, otherwise, you know, I, (laughs) you know, I'm good with Earth just as we have it.

Chris Williamson 31:54 That's got a limited time span on, on it, though, right?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 31:57 What, what, what, what, what are you timing out on us?

Chris Williamson 32:00 Well, whether it be the sun boiling off the oceans and-

Neil deGrasse Tyson 32:03 Oh, oh, at long term? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, we ha- we have to assume that we as a mammal species outlive a typical mammal species that goes 3 million years. We have to somehow, uh, make it clear that, uh, we wanna give, we, we wanna live beyond Earth itself, and even beyond the sun, right? So first you're gonna planet hop your way away from the sun, but then you have to find another star. By the way, something not talked about, when the sun exhaust its hydrogen in its core as a big ball of helium, uh, the sun dies, the sun will die 'cause it can't convert helium into carbon. Okay, that's fine. So how about all the rest of the star? It turns out if you find a way to cycle material from the outer star to the inner star, if you can do that, then you will prolong the life of the star ma- ten to 100 times. Because it only burns out when it's no longer hydrogen in its core. But if there are fresh hydrogen in the rest of the star and you constantly funnel it down, uh, you've got, you've got exactly what you need.

Chris Williamson 33:20 Was that, was it Sunshine? Was that the film where they send a mission to drop, I think they drop a, a nuke actually into the, the heart of the star in an effort to try and get it back, but-

Neil deGrasse Tyson 33:32 But that was the, that was the science fiction movie, which... (laughs)

Chris Williamson 33:34 I'm aware. I'm aware. Yes. Yeah. I'm getting... I'm, I'm, I'm trying to bring this back to the real world.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 33:38 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 33:39 So, my point is just that that was talking about somehow impacting the natural flow of the sun. And what you're saying here is that if there was a way to funnel that back in, it wouldn't be a nuke, but if there was a way to do it...

Neil deGrasse Tyson 33:51 Correct. You just, you just, you just give it a new lease on life. In fact, there are these stars called blue stragglers, that's what we call them, that should have evolved into a different state at the time we noticed them, but they haven't. And all evidence points that it's two stars that have collided and have become one star, and the act of colliding re-churned up the fuel supply and it has given it a new lease on life. So these are stars that are lingering behind the evolution of a, of a star cluster and we have no other explanation for them, but that their innards got churned up.

Chris Williamson 34:26 That's pretty cool.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 34:27 Blue stragglers. You look that up, yeah.

Chris Williamson 34:28 So we need to find, we need to find another star, fire it at our one.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 34:31 That would, that would, that would be, uh, short of reaching in with a ladle and doing it ourselves-

Chris Williamson 34:37 (laughs) Like you're cooking soup.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 34:37 ... collision would surely make that happen. Yes.

Chris Williamson 34:40 Yeah. Like you're cooking soup. That would be one solution.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 34:43 Yeah. (laughs) Exactly.

Chris Williamson 34:44 It's, um, one of the things I was thinking about, I think that, uh, a couple of the guys at the Future of Humanities Institute are looking at, uh, solar forming. So how you would, if you wanted to create a solar system and move stuff out of the way that you didn't need there, um, they're, they're talking about some of that at the moment, and I think that kind of probably ties in at least a little bit with how you would potentially be able to move a star around, or at least the material inside of it.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 35:11 Well, so I'm not sure what their objective is. We're in a solar system now that has eight planets and they're not bothering us. I don't know why you'd want to move it around. Uh, I can tell you that modern models of s- the formation of planets show that you can start a solar system with upwards of 30 planets, and not all orbits will be stable. They, if they're not stable, they'll fall into the sun, fall into Jupiter or get ejected from the solar system altogether. And so, uh, this is a... So, maybe they're saying, if you, if you want to hurry up the, the evolution of a solar system, you say, "Okay, let's get rid of these and add those and subtract those, move this into the right spot."

Chris Williamson 35:58 Mm-hmm.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 35:59 So that you have the Goldilocks effect. Uh, that, and that's an, that's not just geoengineering, that's star system engineering that, you know, I don't see, I don't foresee that anytime soon.

Chris Williamson 36:12 Is that the best way if you wanted to design a solar system to overshoot on the number of planets that you would need and then sort of allow the orbits to sort themselves out?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 36:22 Well, you don't need the extra planet, so just stick a nice-sized planet in the Goldilocks zone, it's a one-planet solar system. It'll be stable. The instability comes when you have a lot of objects tugging on each other for every orbital period.

Chris Williamson 36:34 Hmm.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 36:35 But you throw one out, maybe throw in a Saturn just to be beautiful at night. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 36:39 (laughs) Oh, just cool. Like you- like when you're landscaping your garden.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 36:43 Give the backyard telescope something to do, you know?

Chris Williamson 36:45 Yes. Yeah. I- I- I understand. Yeah, I mean, (clears throat) to see a single planet solar system would be pretty cool.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 36:55 Yeah. And then you could say, "The sun is all ours." It's... (laughs) You can say that.

Chris Williamson 36:59 (laughs) Even leave Mars with no one on it. But isn't it that most solar systems or the vast majority of suns are twin suns rather than one?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 37:07 Yeah. So, I think the, the proper way to say that is more than half the stars in the night sky when investigated more closely reveal that they're in pairs, triples or just multiple stars in a system. Right. So, the single star, star system is, is not as common as you might think.

Chris Williamson 37:27 Why do you think that is? Just the way that gravity works?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 37:30 No, no, just planets go unstable. It's just... Oh, sorry, sorry. Um, sorry. So, I, I mixed two answers. If you have multiple star systems, you don't expect them to have many planets 'cause planets will not fully track their gravitational allegiance, and they can get ejected very easily. Okay?

Chris Williamson 37:50 Oh, it's a less stable gravitation environment.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 37:52 It's less stable.

Chris Williamson 37:53 Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 37:53 And in fact, in the famous Star Wars scene where Luke is, is on the sand planet and he comes out and he looks, there's a double sunset, all right? Very important and poignant moment in the film containing the only accurate astrophysics in the film, by the way.

Chris Williamson 38:08 (laughs)

Neil deGrasse Tyson 38:08 So, that's a planet orbiting a double star system. We've always known that could happen. They showed it, but they did it right because it is possible to orbit two and multiple planets if your orbit is far away compared to the distance among the stars to each other, then the orbit thinks it's just one source of gravity. But if the stars themselves are orbiting at great distances from each other and you are now weaving in and out and among them, that's a recipe for disaster.

Chris Williamson 38:39 Welcome to the Universe in 3D, which is the new book that you've got out. What's going on with that? What's, what was the, the inspiration behind that?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 38:46 Oh, yeah. So, that's actually the fourth in a series of Welcome to the Universe books. Uh, the first was a textbook basically that I co-wrote with two colleagues of mine when we co-taught a class for- introductory astrophysics class at Princeton University. The class went from like 40 people to 300. And so, it was very popular, very quickly. We had to change rooms twice, and we're delighted by that, but we think we know why it was popular. It was taught in a very breezy way, very anecdotally. And all the three of us were pretty well-connected to all manner of things. And so, it was, it was just... So in that sense, it doesn't smell like a textbook even though it looks like one. And, but some people said, "We want to use it as a textbook for our class." So, we said, "Okay, cool." So then we wrote a problem book to go with it 'cause that enables you to assign problems. Then people said, "This book is too big. I want to learn what's in it but in a short format." So then we created Welcome to the Universe, the Pocket-Sized Tour that literally fits in your pocket. And then we said, "Well, the universe is something to look at and to embrace." So if we take selected handpicked images, double them up in a stereo book and have a viewer, then these images become worlds. They become real. They become something you would, uh, uh, interact with emotionally, not just intellectually. So, that's what, that's what Welcome to the Universe in 3D is, is 66 images, and it's a uniquely designed jacket binding so that the, it unfolds and you have the built-in, uh, viewer. Uh, but the, um, uh, it, it doesn't end there. There's a website, welcometothuniverse.net, where all four books are featured. But you go to the 3D book, and as a bonus feature, I've narrated the captions to each image pair. And I... I use my planetarium voice.

Chris Williamson 40:48 (laughs)

Neil deGrasse Tyson 40:49 Yes. Listen. Welcome to the Universe, right? So, yeah, I'm a director, planetarium director, so I got to have that voice, right? So, so that way you can participate in the book while you're being read the captions rather than move back and forth and read them. So, this is a little, little, uh, after-hours bonus that just... In, in, in the... It was like 10 days before the book release I said, "Why don't we do this?" Okay, yeah, but I'm the one that has to do it. (laughs) So everybody, everybody voted-

Chris Williamson 41:17 Why don't you do this? Why don't you do this?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 41:19 And I was like, I was totally outvoted.

Chris Williamson 41:20 Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 41:21 And so I ended up doing it, so...

Chris Williamson 41:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson, ladies and gentlemen. What have you got coming up next? Is there anything that people should keep their eyes out for?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 41:29 Oh, thanks for asking. Uh, I just finished another book. It was a COVID book. I said, you know, I could binge more, you know, Rick and Morty, or I can write a book. (laughs) Okay? So, I chose to write a book on... a book that was gurgling within me. It's a book I could not have written even five years ago, and it's called Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization. And it is me taking a look at all that divide us, all that divides us, and saying, "Here's what that looks like from space." Or, "Here's how an alien would think about it." Or, "Here's what that, that argument you've just made, here's what that looks like when you add a little bit of science to it." All right? Science literacy. And what you'll find is that in most cases, the depth of your argument...... just dissolves away. And you end up, and I'm not talking about a compromised position in the middle, I'm talking about a whole new place that neither of you saw, because you're not thinking about it scientifically or cosmically. And so there are chapters, there's a chapter in there on gender and identity, on color and race, on truth and beauty, uh, on life and death, on, on meatarians and vegetarians. There's an, there's an old eternal conflict for you. Uh, and, uh, there's risk and reward. These things that have chal, that prevent us from all holding hands and singing Kumbaya, that might still be possible if you take another look at your argument, and that's what this book does.

Chris Williamson 43:19 Why couldn't you have written it five years ago?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 43:20 I wasn't wise enough. I didn't have enough... Because it's, it's not just, let me throw down some science, I could do that at any time. It's, here's a nuanced way the science influences this subtle argument you think you're making that you think is the end-all argument. I've had... I needed enough exposure to that, enough encounters with people to hear how they think about problems, so that when I come back at them, I can maximize the bandwidth of how I communicate with them. So, yes, it's a book of maturity, dare I say.

Chris Williamson 43:58 When are you planning to get that out?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 44:00 Oh, d- I'd say it's already, it's in press right now, so September. Which is not even that far from now. Like May, June, July, August, you know, it's four, four and a half months. Um, and so it'll b- it'll have its own... By the way, it's, you can pre-order it, I think, on Amazon right now, actually. But it's a, it's a crazy, it's, uh, I would, I would have been irresponsible given what I know about this world and about science and about the universe if I did not offer this book to the public. I'd be irresponsible. And, uh, you know, the little things, observations. For example, uh, you didn't ask, but I'll just tell you. Um, in the risk and reward chapter, it's all about how ill-equipped we are to evaluate probability and statistics. We are so bad at probability and statistics, entire industries exist to exploit how bad we are. They're called casinos. They're called lotteries. Okay? If we taught probability and statistics in school, early in school, with same ranking as reading, writing, and arithmetic. Okay, reading, writing, arithmetic, and probability. Okay? It's statistics. Add it to that list. If we did that, no one would play the lottery. Oh, here's something interesting. In order to make you always allow the lottery, they use lottery revenue to pay for education. So, if that money that went to education went to teaching people probability and statistics, you couldn't hold the lottery because all, all that extra education money would go away, right? Because no one would play the lottery that's feeding you. So it is in the lottery's interest to not teach you pr- probability and statistics. There's interesting little facts about this that run throughout society and all those topics that I mentioned. There's a whole discussion in there on the removal of statues, you know? Uh, have you thought about that scientifically, what that means? What are the arguments? What is the weight of the argument? Or are you reacting sort of emotionally to it? I don't mind emotions, but emotion without some kind of foundation in, in rational thought, um, then society becomes a free-for-all and there's no objective foundation on which to base anything, not the least of which are laws, which should be based on objective truths. Oh, by the way, there's an entire section in there on law and order. Okay? And what does it mean that a jury has arrived at a verdict? Based on what? On a testimony? Is that testimony from a human being that used their own senses to evaluate what is and is not true about this world? Really? You're gonna put someone in prison based on a human being's testimony? Holy shit. Okay? You know, in science, if you came to the, to a conference and, "This is true because I saw it." It's, "Get the hell out of here." Okay? Our brain only barely works as an organ. Okay? Barely works. You can look at, at, at, at, at one of the books with the, with the images that fool you. Um, optical illusions. Go pick up any optical illusion book. There's a line and, and is, is the line longer or shorter than the other line? I don't know. Is the... Is it a vase or is it a face in the ba- These are simple line drawings that completely confound us. And we're gonna send people to hang or to what, however they kill them in, in 15 states because you have a testimony that implicates them? Oh my gosh. So I'm bringing scientific rationality to these issues. That's all it is. That's what that book is about. And it's a whole other thing unlike anything I've ever written. I birthed the book during COVID because I'm alone and it was gurgling up in me and the baby had to get born and it got born and that's what happened.

Chris Williamson 48:19 And now you're stepping into the culture wars.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 48:21 Well, except I'm not telling you how to, how to think or feel. I'm arming you to become a better thinker when it's time for you to feel about what it is you want to pass judgment on.

Chris Williamson 48:33 And what's that book called again?

Neil deGrasse Tyson 48:36 Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization.

Chris Williamson 48:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson, ladies and gentlemen. Neil, I appreciate you. Thanks.

Neil deGrasse Tyson 48:45 Tha- thanks for having me. Thank you.

Chris Williamson 48:47 What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.