Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Neil deGrasse Tyson Delivers a Harsh Reality Check on Elon Musk’s Mars Plan [Ep. 472]

Episode Date: December 22, 2024

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Is Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars realistic? How does cosmic insignificance shape our understanding of humanity? And why do science and astrology clash so fundamentally? Here to dive deep into some of humanity's most profound questions is none other than Neil deGrasse Tyson! Tyson, of course, needs no introduction. He’s a renowned astrophysicist, author, and science communicator who frequently appears in the media to discuss topics ranging from the universe to the intersection of science and culture. His charismatic style and passion for education have made him one of the most recognizable figures in the scientific community. In this in-depth interview, we explore cosmic insignificance, Elon Musk’s Mars ambitions, astrology, our obsession with politics, social media, AI, journalistic integrity, and much more. Tune in to discover what Neil really thinks about some of the most pressing questions of our time! — Key Takeaways:  00:00:00 Intro 00:16:38 Cosmic insignificance therapy  00:27:39 Judging a book by its cover 00:49:04 Debunking astrology  00:55:15 Life on Mars and panspermia  01:02:55 The giant-impact hypothesis  01:09:04 Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars 01:23:45 Journalism, social media, and our obsession with politics 01:40:10 Audience questions  01:45:02 The impact of AI on education  01:51:02 Fusion ignition and its implications  01:56:25 The great filter 02:02:03 Outro  Additional resources:  ➡️ VVisit Consensus.app and Enter code KEATING at checkout for 40% off Consensus Premium for 2 Years or visit this link https://bit.ly/ConsensusApp ➡️ Learn more about Neil deGrasse Tyson: 📱 Website: https://neildegrassetyson.com/  🔔 StarTalk on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@StarTalk  📚 Merlin’s Tour of the Universe Revised: https://a.co/d/3cBz3m8  ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, this is Brian Keating and welcome back to the Into the Impossible podcast. And today's conversation is a fascinating exploration, not only of the honest topics in science, technology, and the exploration of space, but honestly into some levels of controversy, which I'm not usually accustomed to discussing on this channel. But with today's guest, Neil deGrasse Tyson, it's essentially inevitable. As I mentioned to him in the conversation, he's essentially the most famous scientist in history in terms of his social reach and the number of billions of people that have encountered him, and just in part due to the rapid explosion of social media and population. But if you ask a ordinary person to identify a scientist, it's going to be him in most cases. And that's why I had him on. Now, I got a lot of pushback in the responses to my request for guests, an upcoming guest on The Into the Impossible podcast. They run surveys on YouTube and also on Twitter. It's hard to run surveys here in audio-only formats. So I do encourage you to check out the podcast on YouTube if you're listening to this only on Apple podcast or an audio-only player. Spotify, we do post videos. But back to the

controversy that erupted on the responses, many, many of the 100, 200 responses I got. And these are, don't forget, the most brilliant audience members in the universe, I would say the vast majority of them. Or why are you having on Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or I want to ask him why he's so woke. Or I want to ask him, you know, what does the woke left have on him that causes him to have the opinions that he does? Of course, there's some truth to some of the claims that he's politically left, as he admits. But to dismiss him completely out of hand with these quips, such as, what is a woman, which I got, find them personally, find them entertaining, but very simplistic, as if that summarizes his perspective entirely. And he and I don't agree on this.

I think I align with the majority of science-minded and even lay people who suggest that biological sex should determine, for example, who gets to compete in women's sports. That is something that's very controversial in America. And I don't know why, because it seems very common sense to not allow physically male bodies to compete with physically female bodies. And yet this happened. This happened at the Olympics. Not only. only in America. It is a very hot topic in modern conversation. And a lot of this takes place online. And I had noticed that Neil had withdrawn a lot from social media, especially on X. And I noticed that. And I suggested, you know, to him that we might get into that if he was

willing to do it. And he said, sure, nothing's off limits to his credit. And I wanted him to get a chance to clarify his recent claims made on Bill Maher and Pierce Morgan and even seeming attacks that he's made on Elon Musk, he does clarify this in this interview. So I think it's sort of an exclusive. And that's another reason why I like to have these conversations. I'm not going to take the route of offending my guests. I don't think that makes sense. And I don't think anyone suggesting that I do that really thinks I'm going to really believes that I'm going to harass my guest. That is completely foolish suggestion. So really what I think they're saying is I'm not going to listen to this episode. So I assume that they're not listening to this.

audio essay. And that's fine. That's your right. Nobody's mandating you listen or even watch or engage with any of this. But he is an important figure in the intellectual landscape. So I want to start, you know, the discussion here with my thoughts on Elon Musk's plans for Mars and what Neil thinks about that. And what's so compelling to me is that he does have a systematic approach, which he can lay out exclusively on the end of the impossible podcast. He doesn't get to do that in venues like Bill Marr, where they're looking for clips and sound bites or Pierce Morgan. I've been on Pierce Morgan, I hope to someday meet with Bill Marr, we'll see. The point is TV and exclusively for video productions are notoriously difficult to express nuance and articulate sophisticated

approaches. Now, you may not think he's sophisticated and that's fine. Believe that he has thought about these issues more than most people have. Doesn't mean he's right. And I've had on this podcast people with a much more critical commentary on Elon Musk's plans as well. Zach Weiner-Smith, for example, in his book, A City on Mars, is basically claiming it's not only not feasible, it's essentially impossible. So you can look in the back catalog for that episode. But what Neil kind of highlights is his approach long before these recent dust-ups with Elon Musk, Pierce Morgan, Bill Maher, is that he had written an article about this many, many

years ago in 2018, I think, where he talks about the historical motivations of humans to explore the world in that case and now to explore the solar system. And he claims that these have to have an economic justification in order to be undertaken. And those may come in forms that aren't corporeal, for example, praising a deity or royalty or the actual promise of economic return, or perhaps the prevention of existential threats, what Tyson calls in this discussion, you'll hear the I don't want to die driver. Now, this is a crucial insight that cuts through much of the idealistic rhetoric around space exploration. I pointed out maybe this doesn't apply to Elon Musk, as he seems to be economically insensitive. I believe that his net worth,

Elon Musk's net worth, is now over $400 billion, which puts him one Warren Buffett's worth of wealth, above Bill Gates' level of wealth. So it's just astounding how much personal wealth he's amassed. And something like 20% since the election of Donald Trump. So I don't think the economic ideas may apply to him. I think he could actually afford it all in his own. And I don't think he will have to. I think SpaceX and other companies will find some economic justifications for going to Mars.

But whatever you say about going to Mars, as I point out to him, you could also say about going to the moon. What is the reason we go back to the moon? It's not necessarily for any of these things. In the 60s, we have a space race against the Soviet Union, former Soviet Union. Now we don't really have any rivals economically. In terms of, I'm speaking, a merocentric here. So I know I have a lot of listeners in other countries from Liechtenstein to Austria to Australia, all around the globe. But there is no doubt that the U.S. sort of dominates economically and geopolitically, which means that we don't really have the rivals.

He mentions that if there was ascendancy of China to do this, which may occur. China is spending a lot of money on new huge telescopes and particle accelerators in their own space program, but they don't have plans, at least legitimate plans, realistic plans, to go back to the moon, let alone go to Mars. So what confluence of factors could actually make an enormously expensive endeavor actually happen? And Elon's point is that it doesn't revolve around the notion of something economically sensible. He even says that. I'm acquiring resources in a response to Tyson. Now, he also throws in some ad hominem attacks on Neal, which I don't think are really up to the level that Elon should aspire to, saying that he's only capitulating to the woke because of Me Too accusations.

Now, I don't talk with Neal about that in this episode. And yet, he also is not afraid to wade into controversial waters outside of that of the richest man in Earth's history. and that has to do with his controversial stance on transgender sports. I know what you think this is all we talked about. We actually spent a great deal of time talking about AI, black holes, planets, and many other scientific topics. So don't worry. If you don't care about these culture issues, we have a lot in store for you in this episode that you're going to love. But the broader point that he makes and he gets a chance to articulate uniquely on this podcast.

I do take pride on them. I don't have the biggest podcast, never will. I think I have one of the deepest podcasts that there is. I don't believe that people really get to have these kinds of conversations. And in case you're sort of wondering, I don't believe that's unique to my brilliance, but I think it's the level of preparation that I go to, the level of rapport that I build with the guests, and also to establish a level of comfort that they will be willing to be vulnerable. You didn't have to talk about transgender rights and possibly weighed into another cancellation moment.

And I gave him a chance to articulate in a purely scientific manner how he would orchestrate the differences, between genders in sports. For example, he goes through some data and research that he's uncovered about records set by women versus men in running events versus triathlon events, which have multiple components, obviously, triathlon, as opposed to things like boxing or, and I don't think he's opposed to having as a wrestler. He talks about this as a high school wrestler. He talks about having a deep interest in whether or not males can actually wrestle with females. and he would propose, but it wouldn't be necessarily done by Fiat. You could test based on levels of testosterone, for example. Now, I don't know why you couldn't just test for biological reasons.

Maybe that's embarrassing, et cetera. But that's fine. He's not asserting it as a foregone conclusion by Fiat, as I say. So I think that this is interesting to hear his reasoning. And that's why I bring these conversations to you. It reminds me very much in some ways of Sam Harris, who I've had on, and who many people enjoy that episode is actually the most popular episode of, of all of this year, 24 on the channel.

It had something like 10 or 100 times the audio listenership. It didn't get as many views on video. I'm not sure why that was. I did release several clips of Sam Harris that maybe took the wind out of the sales of the eventual video episode. It did well, but not as well as other videos that I did on the channel. But the audio episodes for which I did not release teasers or clips or whatever, bite-sized nuggets of topics, did 10x the average downloader's ship.

and actually catapulted the podcast into the top 100 of all podcasts for a week or two. So that was very satisfying. Obviously, I want to increase the reach of the podcast. It does keep growing on both video and audio. And I do hope that you leave a review. Wherever you're listening to this, you can leave a rating on Spotify, on Audible, and on Apple Podcast. Make sure you're following it, too. I'm trying to get to 1,000 reviews.

I'm up to 940 on Spotify and 939 on Apple. I'm really hoping to break through the 1,000 review barrier, which is done by less than 0.1% of all podcasts. And I think that that would be a real kind of satisfying way to end the year. So please, I know you're kind of not top of your mind, but there's hundreds of thousands of people listening to this right now. If just 1% of you leave reviews will blast through the 1,000. And it's not even a review you need to leave, but just to click on the star rating. Give me an asterism, not a constellation, but an asterism of five stars or so. Now, what I do think is that having conversations with people I don't agree with necessarily. I think that's important to have people on that you don't agree with. I've had many people from both sides of the political aisle and scientists I agree with and disagree with. But I think the approach that he's trying to take and that I try to take in this podcast is what you might call pragmatic idealism, maintaining our capacity to think critically, also propose ideas and not have them immediately torpedoed, mocked, and shamed in public. You should be able to think in public without getting attacked mercilessly every sentence that you say. And even before you say it, as many of the questions were asked, you know, why are you so stupid and woke? Obviously, I'm not going to do that.

So it's not fair to a guest to do that. And the only thing I can say is you're not listening to this. I hope you're not listening to this. Actually, I take that back. I hope you are listening to this because I do think it can change your mind. We had a two hour long conversation. I always wondered, you know, how do I know I'm doing a good job as I'm recording a podcast? You know, you don't have like some indicator of how well the audience is going to react.

You don't have an indicator of how well it's going to be taken by the guest. And one of the ways I've discovered to do that is the guest will usually tell you in the case of someone like Neil will tell you, oh, I've got 90 minutes. Or Neil's people will tell me he's got 90 minutes or an hour. And then when we go longer, as I did with Sam Harris, we went three and a half hours on a one hour originally scheduled podcast. I'm just glad my bladder didn't fully explode. And Neil similarly, we had about an hour and we went two hours. So this is really, you know, one of the real-time feedback mechanisms that I get as a podcaster. Now this is kind of inside podcasting. But I think if I want to maintain these conversations for the benefit of science, which I do believe is for the benefit of society, we have to maintain a delicate balance between the ambition of the types of questions and ideas we want to explore and the realism between the fact that we can't always agree on things. And that should be okay. And there should be comity, as I always say. little bit of comedy as well. So whether we're talking about colonizing Mars or restructuring sports competitions, it's important in my mind as a scientific society or one that aspires to be to maintain

a healthy dose of scientific rigor, but also pragmatic debate and problem solving. I just don't think you can get that on any pure video platform. And that's why I'm recording this on an audio-only essay. So sorry, I really do believe you're going to enjoy this episode. If you give it a chance, Don't come in with too many preconceived notions. You'll see an approach that might be different from yours, but it might help us navigate not just these specific controversies, but the broader challenge of maintaining your integrity as a scientist or even as a scientifically interested layperson in an increasingly polarized world.

And I study polarization of the cosmic microwave background. That's not the kind of polarization that's controversial. These kinds of discussions are. And as I said, we're going to have many, many other topics on this channel, including the very deep scientific ones, including those that involve the very, very mystical world of black holes, and even answering questions from the audience, as you'll see in this episode. Neil was more than happy to answer and it would have kept going, I think, if I didn't need to go pick up a kid at school. So anyway, this is Brian Keating. Hope you enjoyed this audio essay.

I do them on occasion. And don't be afraid to leave a comment with your review or rating. it really would be helpful to me to understand what you're enjoying about the podcast and what you don't enjoy so much. And don't forget to subscribe to my Monday Magic mailing list because in them, I read every email that you send to me. And so the only way you can really send me an email is through that email address. And I read each and every one of them. And that way you can give me feedback. And I will be running a listener survey towards next week the end of the year where I give away a $100 Amazon gift certificate anywhere in the world, not just for U.S. addresses, as I am forced to and constrained to by the limits of shipping meteorize.

throughout the United States. Anyway, Brian Keating, signing off with great gratitude to you for your open-mindedness and listening to this episode. Today's conversation is with the world's most famous scientist, Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. From the mysteries of black holes to the challenge of Mars colonization, we dive deep into the frontiers of human knowledge and ambition, drawing an inspiration from his new book, Merlin's Tour of the Universe. Neil's no stranger to controversy, and he recently got into it,

with none other than Elon Musk's plans to colonize the solar system in order to save human consciousness forever. His candid discussion reveals the complex realities behind our space exploration dreams and the cutting edge of technology and the motivations behind it all. We also probe into the depths of modern physics, including the mysterious and sometimes dangerous world of black holes in quantum mechanics. So join us for the most illuminating journey through cosmic physics, through causing mysteries you've ever encountered. Let's go.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors. Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson back for his second appearance on The Into the Impossible podcast. Hello, Neil. How is my kid's favorite astrophysicist? Not you? I'm not even in the top Brian, Neil.

There's Brian Cox, there's Brian Green, there's Brian May. I don't even make the top. Oh, man, not even the top Brian. Wow, that's tough. That's tough. Yeah, doing well, thank you. Well, the universe is good, so I'm good. It's Earth that's messed up, and that's need some attention, of course.

Have you ever heard of something called Cosmic Insignificance Therapy? Have you ever heard that term? No. Okay. There's an author called Oliver Berkman. He's a productivity expert. He's a British guy. And he talks about this book called 4,000 weeks.

He wrote this book called 4,000 weeks. It's kind of like your life. And it's supposed to make you kind of at peace with the fact that we're basically here for an insignificant blip on the cosmic calendar, as you know so well. Just to be clear, if you had to make peace with that, it meant your understanding of the world was distorted to begin with. But if you started out realizing we are at insignificant blip, then there's no emotional trauma to it. It's just that's the state of our existence. And so one doesn't need therapy or anything else. It just is.

It's only if you're coming off of this ego mountain that so many of us find ourselves to realize that we're not significant in time or space or size or anything that we've come to cherish. Yeah, although I always point out, you know, we're a lot bigger than viruses. And they seem to have played a significant role in our recent history, right? So or, you know, anthrax or something like that. But, but I agree with you. It's the sensation that we're nothing compared to Jupiter's size and Jupiter's nothing compared to the sun and the sun's nothing compared to, you know, some gargantua black hole. But, you know, we're the only matter we know about that really matters in the sense that

we can contemplate our own existence, at least for now. Well, so we tell ourselves, we don't really know what other animals have that ability. Let's just presuming plants don't do that. Let's assume that for this conversation. I think the more we study the intellect, dare I call it that, of other animals, the more impressed we are by what they accomplish. So it's been a journey from declaring that we alone have consciousness and we are, we alone use tools and we alone.

And then you find out birds use tools. And there's, oh, we have big brains. Well, there are four mammal species that have bigger brains. Oh, well, we have a big brain. ratio to our body waste. You know, you've got to start adjusting the data to make you feel good. Okay, that's true, but if you want to ratio brain weight to body weight, but we're only slightly better, if that's a scale of what's good,

only slightly above mice. Mice have a relatively big head to their bodies, and they don't weigh very much. So that ratio, they do very well in that ratio. And we are both pretty sure that they will outlive the human species. They and rats will just take over. So who's the smartest mammal on the block then? That's right. And then eventually, I don't know where you stand on panpsychism, you know, that this meteorite, which I give away to people on my website over here.

You got a slightly bigger version downstairs from you on the Hayden. Just a little bigger, yeah. But I give these. And there are people that credibly speak about this is having consciousness. this via this theory of panpsychism and that perhaps even inanimate objects participate in the consciousness project. You will since consider that if you go to the shelf of the library, does anyone go to the library anymore, if you did and you looked up books on, you know, the physics of gravity,

there'd be like one third of one shelf and there'd be like five books there. And you want to look up the human mind and consciousness. It is shelf after shelf after shelf after shelf. which is the surest indication that nobody knows what consciousness is because people keep writing books on it. If we really knew what it was, you wouldn't keep writing books on it. So it's the opposite of what you might think. The volume of literature is the measure of how much we don't know rather than the measure of how much we do. And so to take consciousness, which we're still trying to figure out, and then declare that inanimate objects have consciousness,

when you don't even know what consciousness is in an animate object, it to me is overstepping in your base of knowledge. And so, you know, maybe rocks are conscious, but I don't really know what that means since we don't agree on what human consciousness is or any other kind of animal consciousness. Speaking of consciousness, have you seen the YouTube video of the magpie bird? And there's a little, you know, half-liter plastic, you know, drinking bottles of water. You know, 500-millimeter.

And it's just sitting there in the middle of this park on cement. It's some park that people play in. And it's sitting there, and it's filled to the top with water. So the magti goes up and drinks from it. Okay, it's a bird feeder. All right.

We still get to declare that the bird has a bird brain because it's a bird and we're human. Until you see that the bird can no longer sip the water from the container because his beak isn't long enough. Because the water level had dropped. So it leaves the scene for a moment and then comes back, just for a moment, for seconds, and comes back with a pebble that fits through the neck of the bottle. It drops the pebble in, the water level rises, and it drinks some more.

And it repeats this Bernoulian fact. Archimede, who was Archimede? Repeated. Repeated. Multiple times. And this is something I wonder if most humans would figure out. Actually, that's very incisive that you say that, Neil, because they did a similar experiment. They didn't do it, but they asked, have you seen the YouTube video of the Stanford professor

taking a glass, you know, Pyrex container and putting some big boulders in it, a big rocks in it? And they says, is it full? And the students at Stanford nod their head and say, yes, it's full. And then he goes, oh, how about now? He pours in some BBs. Is it full now? No, as it full, he pours in some, you know, anyway, it's the same principle. But pour in sand.

Sand will be more volume filling. And then, of course, lastly, you can pour in a liquid. Yeah. And you can hold tons of liquid after you fill it up. I'm not quick to say that we alone are masters of intellect or intelligence or anything. I'm much more open in recent years. You know, I was indoctrinated like everybody else, thinking how special humans are. And you realize how we've stacked the deck in such a way that we came to value the things.

things that we have that other animals do not and declare that to be special. And by the way, astrophysically, being special is when you look at how people think about what it is to be special, generally they want to list things that are true for you, but not for anyone else. That would make you special or make us special as a species. But astrophysically, since we came to learn in 20th century astrophysics, of course, that the ingredients of life, ingredients in our bodies are forged not only in the Big Bang, but in stars that gave their lives and exploded as supernovae to enrich gas clouds so that subsequent generations of star systems would have ingredients that can make planets and at least one planet, life, and on that same planet, human life.

So for me, being special is being the same, not being different. We share common ingredients with each other and with the universe. That's extraordinary. So when I go up and look up, go out and look up at night, I don't think to myself that I'm different from the universe and special for that reason. I think of myself as the same as the universe and special for that reason. So it's just a cosmic, it's a flip of a perspective. from Earth-based to a cosmic perspective,

something that, of course, Carl Sagan tried to hammer into people for his whole life. That's right, yeah. That's your finger puppet. I have one finger puppet on my shelf. I think it's Isaac Newton. Oh, yeah, I've got one of those. I've got Einstein who we're going to talk about next,

and then, of course, Galileo, who we have to talk about for starring. You know, it's interesting. When they show Einstein and Darwin, for example, it shows them as gray and old. when they did all their best work, you know, before they were 30. They were 25. Yeah, yeah, exactly, 26.

So they should show them as dapper young men. And, but no, I guess we, we want to believe that their greatest work came when they were aged and wise. When it really came when they were young and senseless. Yeah, thinking about that, I do think about that. And I always tell my students, you know, Einstein, first of all, for every quote, there's an equal and opposite quote, right? So for Einstein, he would say, we should explain things in a way as to be so simple. You know, your grandmother could understand it, right? And then he would say when he was asked about the 19-19 solar eclipse results, he said, as you know, if it was wrong, I would feel sorry for God because my equations were frightening.

So you've got this mixture of chutzpah and also, you know, and just complete humility. And I think we need that, right? Because otherwise it's pretty terrifying to do what we do. Well, so, you know, I didn't know Einstein, but that comment is so chutzpified. Yes. It had to be a joke. I don't believe that he really had some theological philosophy. Oh, no, definitely not.

You're right there. But Feynman is another one. Feynman would say, you know, this is so simple. Again, you know, you should be able to, if you don't explain it simply to a high schooler, you don't understand it. And then the day he won his Nobel Prize, Pasadena Star News asks him, what did you win it for? And he said, Bob, if I could explain it to you, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize. Again, the hutspa and the humility, but not the same time.

Yeah, he's just being an asshole there. Right, right. That's just. Fine, an asshole? When he wasn't sleeping with his graduates? I just call it what it was. You know, my favorite, one of those sort of flip back and forth comments has to do with the human mind.

And I just heard this quote recently. I think it was from this fellow who just came out, as a neuroscientist, came out with a book on music. on consciousness and music. And I know the title of the book, it's called, I heard there was a secret chord. And you could look him up. But anyhow, he, I think he told me, he said, someone said,

it wasn't him, but someone said that if our brain, the human mind were easy enough to understand, then we wouldn't be smart enough to understand it. Groucho Marx-like. Yeah. That's a good line. That's good. That's solid.

That is solid. It was simple enough to understand. We wouldn't be smart enough to understand it. So, Neil. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. This book has come out.

Merlin. Merlin's two of the world. Your old friend Merlin is back. I assume some people will be ingesting this podcast by audio only. So I get to describe that you just held up my latest book. Thank you. Although they'll never miss the segment that we're about to do. It's one of my greatest catechisms in the history of podcasting, which is the judge books by its cover.

So this book came out. I'm reading the original came out in 1989. Is that possible? Yeah, 35 years ago. That's correct. Wow. Based on material that I had written throughout the 1980s. So while I was in graduate school.

Long before you were Neil DeGrasse Tyson, right? While I was in graduate school. By the way, there's a brief backstory behind the DeGrasse. I don't think I've ever said this on anybody's show because it never came up. As I was finishing graduate school, getting the PhD, and then I did my postdoc at Princeton, I thought to myself, if I do public things, I'm going to sign them Neil DeGrasse Tyson. But anything with colleagues will be Neil D. Tyson. That way, when anyone comes back to me via email, by a phone call, and they ID me as Neil deGrasse Tyson, I'll know that coming from the public sector rather than from among my colleagues.

But what happened over the years is that my visibility became so much more in the public domain than in the scientific, than in the pure research scientific domain. And so people only know me and think of me as Neil deGrasse Tyson. But my published papers are all Neil D. Tyson. Right. Yeah. Or N.D. Tyson. Right. We've looked at those, I think, in our previous conversation.

So this has incredible, you know, the first thing that shocks me is when I see Isaac Asimov, you know, endorsing a book. That's a trick. You got him from beyond the here after, shall we say. And he did say, and he was the man who got me most interested besides Carl Sagan, perhaps, in science. People don't know, but Isaac Asimov wrote most, 300, 400 books, I think, and many of them were not on science fiction. They were science fact. There were, you know, the history of chemistry, that history of physics, the element. I think that the number is 600 plus. And it is rumored, I didn't verify this. And is it even verifiable. But it is rumored that he wrote a book that lands in every category of the Dewey Decimal System for libraries. So no matter where you are, look for the Isaac Asimov book. And it's there. He's got someone in the Bible.

Of course, he's got some novels. There'd be sci-fi novels. So I was 14 when I met him on a ship to the coast of Northwest Africa to view a total solar eclipse. And I was just a kid, right? Why would he know me or care about me? When that book became a manuscript, I just sent him a note. And within five days, a blurb came back for the book.

And it was like, this guy is all class, right? To take time out from writing his other thousand, 600 books to do so. Anyhow, so that project, which led to a book in 1989, I just felt it was long overdue to resurrect this character, Merlin, and bring this entity into the 21st century. And so that's what that is. And I'm very proud of it. And reading through it and updating it,

I was reminded, I didn't know it at the time, but many of my pedagogical, educational tap roots were set in the replies and in the literary machinations, the humor, the setups, the, where you go with information, how you select information, how you compose a sentence, do you ever rhyme? Does that help? Does it give the reader something fresh? All of that's in that book. And I realize I owe almost everything in I am today to the efforts that I put in to communicate with the public at that time. Because it's a question and answer book.

Yeah, it sure is. In fact, it starts off with a question from a gentleman in San Diego where I am right now, Jonathan Swan. And we've got Mr. Swan here. John, come on over. No, I'm just kidding. I don't even know if he's alive. You know, that was 35 years ago. Half the people are dead, just so you know.

So John starts off by asking Merlin, and we'll describe a little bit about who Merlin is. I kind of suspect he's your alter ego in some ways. He asks a very simple question. What would happen if Earth suddenly stopped rotating? And there are these wonderful illustrations here to illustrate that. So this is not one of those things that would have been updated in the 21st century from what we knew back then. But at the same token, there is a lot. I mean, we went through, the funniest chapter for me is when you talk about Pluto and you're describing it as a planet.

I want to like reach through the mic because I listened to the audio and, Neil, do you hear what you're saying? Like, this could be used against you to compromise you, Neil. Neil deGrasishe recants his killing of Pluto. Anyway, I was an accessory to the demotion of Pluto. I know, I'm having Mike Brown on the show in a couple of weeks. Oh, good, good. He's a good guy. So when you look at these books, you know, and the questions in this book,

I guess first we should really describe it. Oh, by the way, just to your earlier point, I tried to, when I write a book, you want to put in science of high shelf life. And I would say half of the questions did not require updating because there was fundamental physics, like what would happen if Earth stopped rotating. But there are other cases where Merlin makes a pop culture reference or this phrasing that just is a little old. and it needs to be, it needs a little sort of freshening up. So there's some literary elements that needed to be refreshed to go into the 21st century. Also, but maybe you're going to get to it, but it's in my head right now. Someone asked, what's the latest count for the number of moons among the planets?

And in the original book, the total might have been 89 or something. and now it's pushing 300 based on space missions that have been to the outer planets. You get good close-up looks. And so the original was a rhyme that rhymed all of the planet numbers, all of the moon numbers with each planet. And I said, I got to keep the rhyme going. And so that was hard rhyming out how many moons each planet has up to, I think, 289. So there's rhymes in there, like I said, turns a phrase. And it was just a fun literary exercise in bringing the universe down to Earth.

It's a unique book. There's really nothing that's come online since this time, which is either depressing or inspiring that no one has taken the mantle of kind of Oprah of the masses in the so let's do what you're never supposed to do. This is forbidden to do. But on this podcast, we do the impossible, right? So I want you to walk through. the title, the subtitle and the beautiful cover art, which is also a holographic or, you know, look at that, look at that beautiful rainbow-like essence. So, Neil, take us through there. I give a wide berth to artists when they try to reach for science. You know, I might toss a couple of comments back at them, but those are really just for fine-tuning, not for the fundamental idea that they want to bring to the table. So in my conversation with the designer, the The cover, they wanted it to have a little bit of a Harry Potter feel to it. And it kind of evokes that.

Plus you have this, the text goes into a circle, a spiral that goes down. You feel like you may be getting pulled into a black hole. One of the questions in there is what happens if you fall into a black hole. And so Merlin rhymed that answer as well. I only remember three of the stanzas. The last one always, I always have to look it up again. In a feet first dive to this cosmic abyss, you will not survive because you will not miss. The tidal forces of gravity will create quite a calamity as you're stretched head to toe.

Are you sure you want to go? So, again, it was just fun with real science, but making it a little more literarily artistic. But the Subtitle, Merlin's Tour of the Universe, the subtitle is just a, I forgot, is Mars and blue moons and stars. And it's just, it's a short list of the kinds of topics you'll encounter. And the subtitle is sort of loosely rhymed just to put some of the mood into what you're thinking as you pick up the book. And it is silver holographic type onto a black background. We want it to be a little mysterious but fun at the same time.

I think it might be your most ornate of all your book covers. And of course, you know, it's requisite to have a book about astronomy be have a black colored title, but a cover on the audit. But yeah, I tried to try to dissuade my publishers from from that in recent. It's just too overdone to have that, you know, really people can't understand it's about astronomy unless it's dark like the night sky. Kind of silly. But in the some of the most, you know, fascinating things is to see how not just, you know, maybe your perspective has, has, you know, enlarged over. over the decades, but how science as a whole, you know, I don't know if you're familiar with this. I don't know if you visit a place called X anymore, but there's a place on the internet called

X.com. And on X, people speculate about all sorts of crazy stuff, including politics and crazy, crazy things we'll talk about. But the thing that's up there lately that most, you know, annoys me is physics has not progressed. Science has not progressed. Science is static. There's been no real progress, you know, because of things like string theory and other things. And, you know, most of the progress in technology, if you were to teleport somebody from 1989 to here to today in 2024 at the end of December, they would say, wow, your TV's sure got flat. And that's about it.

You know, so in the last, you know, 35, 40 years, not much is it. And then you look at this book and every chapter, there's been radical discoveries, nobel worthy discoveries ranging from exoplan. I mean, you talk about is there life on other planets. And at the time, you didn't know. I mean, we hadn't discovered. In 1989, the exoplanet count was zero. Zero.

And now it's rising through 6,000. These people who say this, they've overvalued the interval of time over which they're living because they're thinking to themselves. They look throughout history. And they sample, let's say, 150 years since the second wave industrial revolution. And they want all that to be happening in their lifetime. Well, it sort of is, but it happens smoothly. and at a rate that you're not even paying close attention to.

So if you go back, is it 15 years? Yeah, go back 15 years. Go back to 2006, okay? There is no smartphone. YouTube doesn't exist yet. Okay? There are people who are YouTube influencers that are making more money than their parents ever dreamt of, and their parents surely would have said

when they asked the kids, what do you want to be when you grew up? And they say, I want to be a YouTube influencer. They would have been slapped. Podcaster. Pod? What's a pod?

Oh, it's an iPod. That's where they come from, of course. What, that's going to be a thing? What? They're going to be 8 million of those actively produced. What? What? And by the way, we have an SUV-sized rover on Mars right now

that brought a helicopter with it. Excuse me? We sent a spacecraft to Pluto. We landed. on one of Saturn's moons. First time anybody's landed on a moon outside of our moon. Okay? You could walk down the street with your smartphone and talk to someone in Europe and think

nothing of it and not right home. Guess what I did today? I talked to that. Meanwhile, it's in living memory this shoulder-mounted cell phone that was wielded in 1987 by Gecko in the movie Wall Street as he was walking the beaches of the Hamptons. And I remembered, I remembered in 1987, gee, I wish I was as rich as he was so that I could have a phone like that and I can walk down the beach and talk to people with this brick-sized, cinder block-sized shoulder-mounted phone.

And now you look at that and say, geez, people actually use that. And so I don't know what they're paying attention to. Their head is in the sand. I don't know what. We have a telescope that can see the birth of galaxies. Come on now. Maybe they're worried that they want a new E equals MC squared or some new formula like that that you can write on a small sheet of paper.

And is that what they're after? I don't know. Is that what they would count as a discovery? We're in the heels of quantum computing, for goodness sake. All right. And AI. You know, you're in your car. you push a button and the car sells you,

turn left here to avoid traffic and save 10 minutes on your trip. Who's the person inside the car who's calculating that? Nobody. It's a computer. It's a fucking eye, okay? That is in our lives on a level that we're not even thinking about. Because the goalposts for AI have been moved. They're always getting moved ever since like the 1960s

when the Turing test was defeated with Eliza, the program. the computer therapist, where you have a conversation with it and you don't know if it's a real person or it's like you just didn't know. And that fulfilled the touring test. Well, we keep moving the goalpost and now AI can compose your term paper and then all the liberal artist folks freaked out. Meanwhile, automated robots replaced factory line workers and the liberal arts folks, I didn't see any outpouring of sympathy from them at that time. Oh, you just got to get used to it. technology moving along. And now all of a sudden AI is in everybody's lap and people are freaking out. It's like, come on now. And whoever is not paying attention to any of this, I don't know,

are they on an island? Are they like, what? In fact, in the other book, which you haven't mentioned yet, I spent an entire chapter exploring the rate and pace of technology. And what happens in 30-year increments from 1850 through 2020. And I just revealed. view them and they're mind-blowing, mind-blowing. You bring someone from 1990 into the present. And you say, I got to send this file to someone. Do you have a fax machine? No, I don't have a fax machine.

No. Okay, where's your CD player? CDs, I don't even know what a CD, and just, they would not know how to function in our world. They'll get in the car and they won't know what button to push. Yeah. the backup camera where where's the backup camera can't put it into reverse like it doesn't have a gear if it doesn't have a backup camera maybe it's the converse of what you said earlier it's kind of this chauvinism right that we we focus is a recency bias whatever you want to say

the aliens are going to look like us life has to be like us in order to matter to give us a cosmic significance but yeah maybe technology has to be exactly what we have now no problems uh with our current tech but it has to be that much better or we'll say that stagnant. And as an experimentalist, look, I have sympathy for some of the, you know, complaints about theorists that, that, you know, there has been a sort of, there tends to be a type of group thing that does occur. It's normal. I think it's natural. And some fields have it. And some fields sure as hell do not have it, because some fields of theory are incredibly active. And, and we just have to look at observations and experiment to see how active and how many discoveries. I mean, basically every single, you know, four or five year period is,

seen Nobel-worthy discoveries that weren't even conceivable 50 years ago. Detection of gravitational waves. Imaging of a black hole's event horizon. I mean, incredible discoveries. And I think... By the way, I only just learned this because I hung out with Kip Thorne just recently for my own podcast. I had a long interview with him about his life. I did not know that in order to stabilize the detector system, because they're trying to measure. measure very small length changes between the two beams on the order of a fraction of the diameter of a proton. So you have to characterize the thermal movement of everything so that you know what is a gravitational

wave and what isn't. And apparently, he described this to me and I was in disbelief so that my brain wasn't clicked in to even under. understand what he says, but I'll repeat it. But I don't claim to understand it. What he said was they took steps to bypass the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to more precisely isolate the movement of the proton. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed-sponsor jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more.

Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed, indeed, Sponsored Jobs. Yes, it's all the squeeze states, right? Yeah, is that what it was? Okay, okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. It was like, it was like magic to me, but oh my gosh. And then you look at, of course. And they invented active noise cancellation.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And everyone just accepted that and presumes it was always there. Yeah. Just get out of my face. You go back to 1990 and we'll see how easy life is for you. With your Walkman cassette player. I told me I could have afforded one back that.

I couldn't afford. I had to get one of these knockoffs. And that would they had the CD Walkman, which was bump resistant. Yes. remember that. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of lasers and sound. Yeah, the problem with that one, yeah, exactly. That was bulkier. Usually things when the technology improves, it gets smaller, but the CD player was bigger than the tape deck. I remember the skinniest one I had my eyes on. I could not afford until I was postdoc, probably. But when we think about these things, yeah, it's always surprising to me that people are so pessimism bias. You know, they say that, you know, optimist, you know, builds the airplane. The pessimist builds the parachute. But it's because I think people think they think they sound smart if they're pessimistic. Like if they're jaded, you know, it's the jaded tortured gene. But I think you're a beautiful counter example of that. I think you have. Well, no, I'm not an optimist. I think I'm a realist. I'm a positive realist. So I look at the fun

things that can happen that can happen realistically. And pragmatist, yeah, that's the word I meant to say, pragmatist. That's the only other is I'll admit to being other than a scientist. I'd rather say I'm pragmatic. Pragmatist implies there's some philosophy and a doctrine and a leader and a cult. Well, Neil, if the shoe fits, wear it. I think you have a nice cult follow. You had a tweet recently that, you know, something playing, I've been playing with similar ideas. I actually talked about this with Stephen Bartlett on his podcast diary of his CEO.

We're at the very end, he gives me the highest compliment. And he says, you and Neil deGress Tyson are very good at explaining things to lay people. So I took that as a great compliment. Oh, thanks. At least for one of us. But the tweet that you had that reference would he, he asked me to basically, you know, see if I can debunk astrology. And you put out this tweet, you know, basically, which I've been saying, you know, to some of my friends and my students, you know, if you were born in late November, you're actually an ophiukas, which sounds dirty. You know, it's like panspermia.

It sounds dirty, but it's not. It's actually fine. It's a perfectly legitimate scientific term. And so Ophiukas would have been the, so how does that? Ophiukin. You'd be Ophiukin. You would you? Libra, I'm a Virgo.

Libra, Libran, you know, just if you properly do the word in the way, like, you know, Ophiukas is the constellation. And if you're of Ophiukas, you'd be Ophiukin. That's all. Now, doesn't that just obliterate astrology right then? I mean, they never knew about it, right? They never talked about it. And they never knew about it.

And if you tell them about it, they'll deny it. They'll say it doesn't matter. These are just arbitrary. Aha. Oh, so it's just an arbitrary distinction. What constellations the astronomers draw. So why is it arbitrary what you astrologers draw from the place of the sun on my mother's day of giving birth to me? And I-

Well, but it's worse than that. So let's assume that Ophukis was just ignored from the original assessment of the 12 constellations. of the zodiac. I'm just highlighting it as a reality, but if that reality doesn't matter, there's another reality that should, and that's, of course, that Earth processes on its axis, and the alignment of the sun with the zodiacal constellation is shifted by an entire month. And you can look this up yourself at any star chart, which shows where the sun is at what time of year, and it does not match up. It just doesn't matter to astrologers.

So I've had people say, astrology can give you insight into a person's personality and their traits and all these. And then let's say, well, what's your sign? They ask of me. And I said, well, if astrology is that potent,

you should be able to figure it out? Why should I have to tell you? You should just go walk down the street and pick out everybody's star sign. And I taught a class at the Hayden Plantarium long ago. And one woman afterwards came up to me and said she was a professional astrologer. And she thought she could get some tips on astronomy to help her do her task. And that's when she

had, before there was an internet and before I was, you know, this information would have been publicly known. She said, well, what's your sign? And I said, that's when I engaged this exercise. I said, shouldn't you be able to figure it out? She said, oh, okay, you're a Gemini. And I said, no. Oh, the Taurus. I said, no. And she goes through eight constellations. Okay. The ninth one is correct.

And when she guesses that correctly, she says, I knew it. So it's like, so what's going on here is people, I think, have no clue how and why statistics work. And I don't blame people for that. I make, I make this point in the, in the cosmic perspectives book that, that, the human brain doesn't seem to be wired to think statistically or probabilistically about anything, leaving us susceptible to that weakness being exploited by entities such as casinos who rely on your false intuition about probability and statistics for them to even stay in business. And look at how ornate they are.

I mean, you're literally walking into a place that screams out, I am going to rob you. But yeah, to your point about statistics, when you got on the ninth one, I used to say to my innumerate friends, I'd say when I meet them or whatever, I'd say, I can guess your birth month with 50% accuracy from just one statement about you. So I can guess, you know, within plus or minus of your birthday by one month, but I can only get it at 50% of the time. Of course, it's like, yeah, I'm guessing you're giving me three months leeway, basically. So I should be able to do that half the time or three quarters of it.

Anyway, in the book, you actually, and in Merlin's book, you have a quip that I will forever love, which is there's nothing logical about things astrological. Yeah, that's how I end that question. Yeah, that's Merlin talking there. That's Merlin. I know it's Merlin. Merlin has all the wit. I've just, whatever wit I have is borrowed from Merlin. Merlin has the fully developed wit.

Here's one for Merlin. Is there any question he wouldn't answer because it's too stupid? Okay, so first of all, I was early woke. So Merlin actually has no gender. There's no reference to the gender of Merlin in that or its sequel. And any illustration of Merlin is illustrated by my brother, by the way. You only see Merlin from behind and you just see long hair coming out from under the hat. So there's a couple of other representations.

When Merlin is having a conversation with Isaac Newton learning about the apple and did it fall on his head, there's a conversation between Merlin and Isaac Newton about that, how Newton came up with his law of gravity. But your question was what? you asked. Is there any question? Oh, no, no, Merlin would, would, by the way, that's a, that's a, that's a, a thousand questions that Merlin had fielded over the year. So those are just the more, the good ones that, the ones that are more fun. So that's, that's, that's, that's, that's cherry picked. There's some ones that are just more boring or, or less, less, they have less wide appeal. You don't want a question

to just apply to the person who asks the question. That's no fun for the reader. So I think some questions can sound completely stupid, but then you can almost treat them seriously, and then you get a really fun answer out of it. Someone once asked, Dear Merlin, does space make beer taste better or worse? You know, that's kind of like, really? You're going to use this moment with Merlin to ask that question. And for reasons still mysterious, your taste buds get a little deadened in zero G. And it's not clear why. It could be not just zero G, but lower air pressure because the space station is under pressured. It has less pressure than what you're familiar with. Just so you don't have to over design the spacecraft, the craft. Same with airplanes. If airplanes were

pressurized to sea level, they would be much heavier and require much higher design standards to maintain the higher sea level pressure that you might want to put in. It's just fun because if you have lower air pressure, then the bubbles will come out faster because the partial pressure over the surface of the liquid is not tamping down the bubble. So the beer will go flat faster. So if that were the question that I put in the book, I would talk about, do you like drinking flat beer?

Are you from England? How do you like your Guinness? Exactly. Warm or lukewarm. Now, if you were to write the Triquil, the third version of this in another 35 years, is there any, you know, particular topic that you think would be ripe for revolutionary, you know, undoing of your current answer? That's a great question. By the way, there is a sequel to that coming out in a year. Oh, awesome. It's called Just Visiting This Planet. Because Merlin is an alien. Yeah, he's from Andromeda. Yeah, Merlin, it came from Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest large galaxy, and studied the solar system because Merlin was born around the same time the sun and its planets were born.

So there's a sort of a resonance there of interest. And so Merlin came to Earth and knows all the famous historical characters. So when you ask Merlin about, you know, Dear Merlin, I don't quite understand some phenomenon, Merlin will recall a conversation with the person who discovered the phenomenon and get them to explain it, which is the fun part because then I get to research what words were common at the time, how would they have composed a sentence, what was the personality of the person, you know, that sort of things. That kind of made it fun. But if you fast forward, I'd like to think that in 34 years, if this got resurrected a second time,

maybe we would have discovered microbial life in the solar system. that's a whole thing. I mean, that would transform biology, especially if it has no DNA or if it has DNA that has nothing in common with us. That would be evidence of another genesis in another place. I want to ask you, yeah, thank you for bringing that up. I have a theory on that. It's actually a no-go theory. I've always wanted to run it by you.

What do you mean you have a hypothesis? Einstein had a theory. In this moment, I think you have a hypothesis. I have a theory, too. Okay. It's actually neither, to be honest with you. It's the following claim. I got this meteorite, you know, the old-fashioned way.

It was delivered by the United States Post Office. And again, you can get these if you go to my website, Brian Keating.com. And I give them out to anyone who's got a .evU email address who lives in the U.S. because my university won't ship overseas. But anyway, the point I'm trying to make is this came from the early solar system floating around an asteroid that exploded many, many years before our Earth. formed. And, and material has been coming. In fact, I have a, I have a shard of Mars. I actually have a fragment of a Martian meteoros. There's thousands of tons of Martian meteorites. If you do the math,

Mars and moon meteorites. Earth is, there's no shortage of them. Yeah. These materials have come from Mars. No, what does that tell you? That stuff from Earth has gotten to Mars, guaranteed. Stuff, there's material from the Earth that's been blasted off by Chick-a-Lub or whatever you like, right, carrying your favorite animal. My middle son asked me to ask you about tardigrades. He loves tardigrades. Hashtag tardigrades. And he said, you know, if some of that material blasted off on a meteorite, it's probably floating around in space and eventually it'll get to the surface of Mars. And in fact, when the astronauts do their business in space, there's biological material that goes on and eventually some of that ends up on Mars. And they actually think that that has already occurred.

But I want to ask you the following question. The fact that we don't see life or signs of life on Mars. Yes, it's not proof there's no life on Mars. But does it set some kind of probability, you know, small probability on at least this panspermia, this way of spreading genetic material throughout the universe as it's very difficult. I mean, it's not like you can spray down a bunch of koala bears and eventually Mars will start to be fissoned with life, right? So what do you think about this, this, what I call it a postulate? The fact that we don't see life on Mars is evidence that it's very, very hard for life to grab hold, even when you start off with life. The initial conditions are life on Earth. Why is there no life on Mars? I'm saying maybe this is

a proof that it's for evidence that's very hard to do. Why would you use a sample of one to then generalize about the galaxy and the universe? Oh, that's true. You can't. You can't generalize, but it says something in a Bayesian way. But you just did. Didn't you just generalize? Well, I'm using it in a Bayesian sense. I'm saying there's, you have to be able to say something from that one example, right? You can't say categorically. But would it not, tell you, because this has been going on for four billion years, right? When did life start on Earth roughly? Three and a half? Yeah. Yeah, between three and a half and four. So for four billion years, these planets are very similar. They share the habitable zone for, you know, some of the time.

Mars has, you know, all the ingredients that Earth has. I'm not saying it's conclusive. I'm saying, can you use this to constrain the probability of panspermic life, you know, spreading in origin in our, in our solar solar. Okay, a couple of things. So what we don't know is whether the formation of life at all in a genesis is easier than a pan-spermic spread of life. We don't really have the answer to that. We don't know. And so life on Earth, having been formed so quickly after Earth was formed, is good evidence that it probably didn't come from somewhere else. I would suspect that if life came from somewhere else, maybe it arrived, you know, later, a billion years later. So we'd have like a sterile earth for half its history that all of a sudden life shows up,

popped into a sedimentary layer of the fossil record. But also, we haven't really looked in the aquifers, the subsurface repositories of water on Mars, where we might find microbial life. We haven't really analyzed the water anywhere other than on Earth. And everywhere we see water on Earth, we find life, of course, including the Dead Sea, thus named is evidence that they had no access to microscopes. So it's got no macroscopic fishes. All right.

So just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's there. It isn't there. So I would say if we go to Mars, look at the aquifers, the permafrost, in some places that might be liquefied, we don't know. And there's no life there, no microbial life. And no microbial life in Europa, which is an ocean, liquid ocean's been liquid for billions of years. Then I'd start talking the way you do. Okay.

I'd say, well, maybe life is not carried from one place to another, because we'd had plenty of occasions for that to happen. Oh, by the way, of course, space is supremely hostile to life as we know it. the UV and the absence of air or any kind of gas, for a life form to survive that, it would have to have an extraordinary diversity in itself for the one life form in a litter to be able to survive that transition from the surface of Mars to the surface of the Earth. By the way, most assaults on Earth's environment ended up with mass extinction. That's right. That was my next stop.

So it's not a given that even if panspermia is a starter idea, it's not a given that it would finish the job at the end of the day. Hey there, I know you're enjoying this phenomenal conversation with the inimitable Neil deGrasse Tyson. I just wanted to take a short pause to ask you to do something for me in this holiday season, which is actually a gift to you, and that's to subscribe to the channel or follow it on audio, podcast player apps of your choice. It is really the best way you can show support for me and the channel and keep getting great guests,

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Yeah, you talk in the book early on about the moon's formation. And it's funny, some of the topics in the book, you know, are curious because they were known at the time you wrote the book, say, or there was a scientific consensus, saying. And then they went through a period of maybe some controversy. And then they came back to the consensus, you know, kind of gone through a few pendulum cycles here. One of them was a giant impact hypothesis. You know, you know, talk about it obliquely in Merlin's book. That's the, you know, the belief that perhaps over, you know, four and a half billion years ago, there was some. giant object that crashed into the early Earth, it called Thea, or Theaia.

How do you pronounce it? Thea, Thea. Yeah, Thea. And then that formed this debris disk. And then later on, you know, the moon coalesced out of it, just at the right position, just in the right, you know, dynamical orbit to possibly play a role in life's origin on Earth, right? Or at least the, the development of stromatolites and things that some people have. But no, there's nothing magical about where the moon would have formed. So in this collision with this protoplanet, Thea, by the way, it's all hypothesis, but it's very strongly support, I don't know anyone who denies the likelihood of this scenario, because our moon is one of the biggest moons of the solar system, is the top six, top seven, out of hundreds of moons. and if you are that size coalescing out of the solar nebula, the solar nebula, which we presume was well mixed in its chemical ingredients,

you would expect our moon to have way more iron in it than it currently does. Earth has iron, mercury. Everybody who forms out of the solar nebula has iron in it. The moon does not. In fact, the moon is remarkably similar to Earth's crust. So to have no iron and to be similar to Earth's crust strongly hints that, and to be oddly large compared with the size of the Earth, strongly hints to an impact hypothesis where we get sideswiped by this protoplanet, which has a name. We named this thing that we don't know existed, and we named it Thea.

It sideswipes us, destroys Thea, but there's a debris field that then coalesces to form the moon. The moon would form just outside of the roche lobe of the earth. Anything that formed inside would fall to Earth. So just outside of it. That's 20 times closer than the moon is right now. Which means when you run the math for tidal forces, the moon would have had 8,000 times stronger tides back then than today. That's kind of interesting.

And then there's tidal frictions, where the moon spirals away. And right now, of course, the moon is still spiraling away at the rate that your fingernails grow. You want a good one for that. That's a true fact. My only point is there's nothing magical about where it formed or what it's still doing today.

And it was long hypothesized that maybe strong tides would strand oceanic life forms on land, putting them through the ringer, through the test of who can breathe air and who can't, and then you get the lung fish or some of these earlier forms of fish, that might speed along the transition of life from the ocean to the land, but it's not clear whether that had anything to do with the formation of life in the ocean, which is where all evidence points as the origin. The connection I'm trying to draw is between, you know, there were at least three different major impacts or impact periods that are suggested.

Again, these are hypothesis, as you say, ranging from what we just talked about, the Thea collision with the Proto Earth, which occurred first. And then many perhaps billion, millions or maybe hundreds of billions of years later, the late heavy bombardment were... Hundreds of millions. Hundreds of millions. Yeah, where people think that... Not billions.

The Earth's only... What's billions and millions between friends? Yeah, I mean, come on, your friend, Carl. I, you know, trademark trillions just in case. There you go. Trillions is a big thing. The question of, you know, then the delivery of water, which came, you know, some, many people have, have some proposals that it came from delivery by comets, right?

And then eventually the Chixilab, you know. By the way, it wouldn't have had to have come from comets. No. Plenty of water. Water is not a rare ingredient in the universe. And tons of water comes out of every volcanic eruption. So it's not clear how much, you know, you're right. There's a lot of back and forth about where I'm.

water came from, it may still be an unsolved problem. It could be because there are multiple ways we can get the water and we just haven't settled on which one. It's not a mystery that there's water out there. Yes, and it is believed from zircons as you talk about in cosmos that these form in water and therefore it formed very early on. We can date the zircons. But then there's the meteorite impact 66 million years ago. I'm informed by my six-year-olds that this occurred to take away the dinosaurs who, as you have noted many times, did not have a robust space program and were not able to deflect or destroy the incoming progenitor of the Chixelope crater. But the interesting thing is that if any of those three major collisions took place in a

different order, right, maybe life would be very different or maybe life would be. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Of course. Everything is contingent. Everything. So does that, I mean, when you think about those, you know, probabilities and so forth, I mean, are you in a sort of alien life, not aliens with giant prosthetic foreheads?

Where do you come down in this discussion? Are you in the camp that says life must be there because otherwise it's an awful waste of space, as Carl and Ann said, or as I say, probability is not possible. I've been to Antarctica twice. I've been to the South Pole twice. Yeah, it's an awful lot of space down there, too, ain't a whole lot of life. So where do you come down and own it all? Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly

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Details at yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. in this, is it a matter of belief or are we getting closer to actual hard scientific evidence that, yes, life is not only exist off the earth, but it might be even abundant. It's just a matter of numbers here. It's not a matter of belief. It's life got underway almost as soon as it possibly could have on Earth within 100 million years or so. You don't start the clock at the formation of the Earth. You start the clock after the period of heavy bombardment when Earth's surface is cooled enough to sustain complex. complex molecules that are the foundations for life as we know it. So when you do that, it's between one and 200 million years, small compared with the life,

the years that Earth has existed. All right. So it happened fast. And it's made of the most common ingredients in the universe. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, iron, the most common ingredients in the universe. So life was highly opportunistic. in forming here on Earth. And so then you look at how old the universe is and how vast it is.

To run around and say we're alone in the universe, there's no room for that, just statistically. There's no room. Now, yes, if the clock ran slightly in a different order, life as we know it wouldn't exist, but there's no reason to think life in some other mode. Maybe life forms would have arisen that were vastly smarter than us. We're not some the measure of what is possible biologically. These contingencies, oh, without it then we wouldn't be here. Maybe something better would be here.

Maybe something that took better care of its environment. Pivoting to more recent events, there's, of course, a great interest in not only discovering life on Mars, but putting life on Mars, a man by the name of Elon Musk, who you once called Elon Musk is more important than Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. Wow, that's pretty awesome. And then recently, however, responding to some skepticism that you... More important?

I don't think I would have used the word important. I might have said he's more productive or more... There might have been a different word there. You said, well, yeah, it's a long article. He said, as important as Steve Jobs was, no doubt about it. Oh, so an article? It's an NBC, yeah, article. to call an NBC.

Wow. Okay. You talk about this. Anyway, recently you were on Bill Mars show, I think. You talked about, you know, what your thoughts were on. Maybe you can recapitulate those. But it's hard to get all my thoughts in there because he doesn't really give you room. Who, Bill?

He doesn't agree with you. He'll, he gives you less room to talk. But what are your thoughts? I mean, because your thoughts on your thoughts on Musk's desire to put Mars, Phil Mars with life forms, including humans and himself potentially. He said he wants to die on Mars. I hope it's not on impact. Clarify what you feel is the relevance or the importance of his mission to extend consciousness to Mars. I never want to get in the way of people's dreams, especially if they're fed by advances and innovations in science and technology. I have no need to do that, especially since

a dream when executed, even if the dream is not realistic or even impossible, it can take you a long path that produce fascinating or other interesting developments in science and technology that we benefit from. So I don't have any problems with dreams at all. So I don't run around volunteering commentary on his dreams. What happens is people come to me and ask what I think of them. And so I wrote a whole book on this, originally titled Failure to Launch, the Dreams and Delusions of Space Enthusiasts, chronicling the mismatch of where people thought we'd be in space versus where we were in space. And so it has every thought I've ever had on the past, present, and future of space. Now, you can say, well, you have different thoughts, so you, okay.

But these thoughts are not just opinions that I'm expressing. This is a very careful read of the history of human engagement in major advances in science and technology. That's what I'm basing it on, not on my desires, not on what I wish or hope. They had nothing to do with that. And all I'm saying is to go to Mars is expensive. Likely the most expensive thing we would ever do as a species outside of the waging of world war. The history of very expensive things sits squarely in the realm of geopolitics and the praise of deity and royalty, which is less of a driving force today than it once was. So these are the three big drivers.

So there's praise of royalty and deity. That's what gets you the cathedrals and the pyramids and this sort of thing. Huge investments of human and financial capital. Then there's the promise of economic return. That's a good one. You want to do it because you want to get rich. Talk about a motivator. That's a good one right there.

And a third one is the I don't want to die motivator. Someone has somehow threatened you by saying they're going to achieve the new high ground, or they're going to look better than you in front of people you're trying to attract. So I arrived at these three drivers in an essay I wrote for the Columbia history of the 20th century. That's the title of the book, and it's in there. It's called Paths to Discovery. And what I wanted to do, what I did was the motivation was, I ask myself, what does it take to motivate a civilization or a culture to do something really,

really expensive? And if I want to go to Mars, and that's really, really expensive, let me look at what has motivated people in the past. And maybe we can recreate that in the present, and then we all just march to Mars. Okay? And I was ready. I had a grid. Make a whole grid.

Here's the expense of the project and here are all the possible causes, possible drivers. just because we want to, or it's in our, because we love it, or it's in our DNA, or it's just, we're just curious, or we're humans, or we're Americans. I was ready for this, and at the end of the day, only three drivers emerged for the expensive things. You have other drivers for less expensive things or non-expensive things. The most expensive things have only three drivers. Like I said, it's the praise of royalty or deity, the quest for economic return, and the

fact that you don't want to die. So the I don't want to die driver, I don't want to die poor driver. And all right. So, Musk says he wants to put people on Mars. And I put it through this filter and I ask, is it in praise of a deity or royalty? Well, I said those are no longer drivers, okay? Is there an economic return on it? Well, clearly no. Okay. Not in putting the first people on Do we feel threatened so that we have to do this? Well, not at the moment, but maybe one day we will. Like I said, if China says, because China's all the buzz in Washington lately, what do we do with our frenemy around the world? And if China says they want to put military bases on Mars, we'll be in Mars in 10 months.

Except NASA doesn't have a spacecraft that'll get us there. Guess who does? Elon does! So Elon rolls out his starship and then we go to Mars, on Elon's ship. You know something? If we do that, it's tax money that sent it there, not money out of Elon's pocket or out of his profits, margins, or anything. So all I'm saying is that I don't foresee us going to Mars unless we believe it is in our geopolitical interest. And if it is, it's not private enterprise that's going to do it. It's governments. And he could go to Mars

as a vanity project. I don't mean that in any pejorative sense. It's just that he could choose to go to Mars with no expectation of a return on that investment because he's either will one day be wealthy enough to do that or he can ban together money from Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and put together the $800 billion or a trillion dollars and then send astronauts there.

That would be fun. I don't have a problem with that. But don't tell me that it's part of your business market. Because that would be without precedent in the history of civilization, that you would spend that much money and somehow figure out how to make money off of it? No. The way this typically happened, especially if it's never been done before, the first Europeans to the New World were not the Dutch East India Trading Company.

It was Columbus, sent by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. By the way, there was some private investment in that. the full motivation and the full driver was geopolitical. Find a shorter way to the Far East. Look for India. When he gets to the New World and he calls them all Indians, okay? That's kind of weird. All right.

And then, but he gets to write down where the trade winds are and where the hostels are and the friendlies and where the food is. And he can characterize that voyage such that a private enterprise who didn't have to take those risks, whereas geopolitics will take those risks in a heartbeat. Businesses can't do that because they're usually using other people's money or even if it's your own money. This is what I'm saying. It has nothing to do with whether we're technologically able to do it. We have an SUV-sized rover on Mars.

Of course we can get to Mars. Of course. That's not the issue here. This is my point. But I don't want to stop him, but people keep asking me, what do I think of it? And I'll say, I don't think it's realistic. Not because we don't know how to do it, but because at some point somebody's got to write the check. And it's not because it's next thing to explore.

That has never been the reason. I think I'd add one thing that maybe dovetails to the deity, but not really. And it's eschatological, effectively, you know, worrying about, you know, existential risks. And basically, I don't want a die driver. That's fine. That would not have to invoke deity. The deity is, I fear this entity more powerful than I am, and I better do things to appease them. And so you build pyramids, you build cathedrals,

You do things for God because you want to be treated well in death or even in life. So that as a motivator because religions don't control societies as much today, certainly not technologically able societies as they once did. That's all. But there's still the, yeah, the Ernest Becker denial of death and we do things in part to stave off these horrific fears that otherwise would drive us crazy. Then it's the I don't want to die driver, and that's a really big driver. Yeah.

But why does it have to do with Mars? I always point out, we, you know, how much of the ocean have we really explored? And isn't it a little bit more practical to build underwater cities and backup drive? Yeah, I don't put those are all false comparisons. I don't. Yes, it's more practical, but so, just do both. NASA's budget is 0.4%. Four-tenths of one penny on your tax dollar.

And you're saying, don't spend them out there, put it in the ocean, do both. I'm not going to stop you. Yeah, and I think even what you say in your, you know, And his response to you, it's... I didn't see his response. But he's defensive, of course, because he's got a whole business there. And I don't have a problem with him jumping in and getting angry. I'm not saying this because I'm decreeing it.

I'm saying it because that's how people have behaved. That's all. Don't shoot the messenger. Right. I'm not even going to get in arguments with people. And by the way, I put it all in this book. Not even any of the books you've mentioned thus far. This is this other book, which the publisher,

renamed because they didn't like the word failure in the title because it was failure to launch dreams and delusions. The word failure and delusion was in the title. So we can't have that. We renamed it Space Chronicles facing the ultimate frontier. And in there, all of this is detailed. Well, I want to turn to your other book, which is named after my intellectual hero, Galileo's Starry Messenger, the Cedarius Nuncius, which is written in Latin. And most people don't realize that the reason he got in trouble at the end of his life for the dialogos, the dialogue is written in Italian. Indeed it is.

That's right. And he was bidden to do that. I had the honor of making the first ever audio book of that book or any of a Galileo's books with Carlo Revelli and Frank Wilcheck and Fabiola Giannati and Stefano. Where was my phone call for that? I don't know. Where was my? I was sitting by my phone the whole time.

You know this. I know you would have loved 22 hours of, you know, hearing. your own voice deal. I want to be Simplicio. Make me Simplicio. Which one of you was Simplicio? Somebody had to do. Lucio, Luccio, Picharillo, he's a professor, friend of mine.

And Carlo Revelli was Salviati, the salvation. I was Sagrido. I was the intermediary. But, yeah, that book got him into trouble. And I love that book. And I love the fact that he got in trouble. People say, oh, he was imprisoned and tortured. No, no, no.

I've been to his house. I've had a conference based. For house arrest, yeah. Yeah, it's house arrest. He's got a vineyard there. He's near his daughter. pretty resplendent place. You know, Sam Bankman-Fried would love to be in Galileo's villa in our Chetri, Italy. But the reason I bring this up is, you know, you're no, you know, stranger to controversy, but people really don't understand where you sit politically. I think that's one of the biggest misconceptions about you. And in this book, Starry, Messer, you say, I lean liberal and almost all relevant opinions that I hold. Yet it was President George W. Bush, who twice appointed me to serve on White House commissions. He saw my scientific expertise and my politics didn't seem to matter. lately there seems to be this obsession with your politics and I wonder what is what is the driver of that and how do you handle I don't know what obsession you're talking about I don't always I've distanced myself a little bit from the cesspool that is social media what's been happening is I'm on some show where we have a very opinionated host and like I said if I don't get my full views in then it becomes a fight and that becomes the clickbait and so so I would rather

anyone who has thoughts based it on my calmly presented measured views, not views than in the middle of a mudslinging fight in the gutter, because that's not how you can convey information. I'm not surprised that people are curious about my politics, but I don't care about my politics as an educator. I care about what's objectively true. I've never mentioned the man, Donald Trump, in any social media posting, ever. And people with my visibility typically are trying to get you to participate in their political leanings, trying to tell you who to vote.

I don't care who you vote for. What I care about is when you vote, I want you to be as informed as you can possibly be and not be voting inside of some delusional bubble. Because only when people vote from an informed posture do you have democracy working at its best. But if democracy has people voting in ways that what people think ought to be true, even though if it violates known laws of physics, that's dangerous. It's not just bad, it's dangerous. It's dangerous to the survival of an informed democracy. So no one knows who I voted for.

I said that's the only time, that's the most political statement I've ever made. in the Starry Messenger book, which I lean left. The point of saying that was I was actually three times appointed by George W. Bush, knowing that I leaned left, because in the interview, they say, are you registered with any political party? I said, yes, I'm a registered Democrat. And then they kept asking questions. They valued my expertise. I was on two White House commissions, and I don't remember if I said it in the book, it might not have been relevant.

So I might have left it out. And I was on an NSF committee approved by the White House to select the Presidential Medal of Science winners, which is a ceremony every year. It's less covered by the press because the press thinks it's political because it's a White House run thing, but it's not. In fact, the year I was there, and there was a dozen of us, I forgot exactly around that number 10, I think. And there are these candidates who are proposed, and we evaluate them. We take the packages home, read them, come back. put at the candidates we think would best serve this role. One of them studied ice cores in

tropical glaciers and showed the impacts of climate change even in those places, not only in places such as Greenland or Antarctica. I didn't even know they were tropical glaciers. That's like, oh my gosh, such a thing exists. And there is President George W. Bush, a Republican, Republicans famously known for climate denial, this sort of thing. There is Bush in the White House, in a ceremony, because I'm there watching. He puts the metal around the person who made these discoveries, this early data on climate change. All I'm saying is to say that I'm getting political, no, I'm not at all. I care about objective truths.

And by the way, if you're part of a political party that doesn't care anything about objective truths, don't call me political for saying that you are objectively wrong. I'm just being a scientist and an educator, and that's my job. As a scientist, you're expressing a scientific fact, you know, about genetic differences and men and women and sport, and then you're being argued with. How do you handle that internally as a scientist, knowing, you know, arguing a scientific point when there, obviously there's a mixture of desire for Click Bay, as you say, in controversy. Yeah, I'm a little disappointed in myself for,

because I count myself among the ranks of media savvy, right? But normally that would be a journalist who ostensibly is asking you questions because they're a journalist and they want to hear what you have to say. But if the person, be the journalist or anyone else, has very strong views of their own, then it's no longer a question and answer session. it's the octagon and it's combat and normally I get through that with a little more elegance than I did with Bill Mar so because Bill Marr is very he's a testy especially lately he's gotten very testy and normally I don't fight that I navigate it and I think I could next time I could do a better job

navigating that sort of landscape that we were placed on but what I say is to people is, rather than quote me from some other interview, I'm here with you. Get the full thing what you want for me. And then you have your own version of it, okay? Rather than comment on what other people were commenting about the comments. That's, this is, this is the maelstrom cesspool that social media has become. And advertisers love it. Yes, they do. Yeah, enraignment leads to engagement. And then you have more ads for, you know, Toyotas, right? you had more place with their. Oh, by the way, just that this whole thing with the trans thing,

it was, I was speaking sort of objective truths, right? And, but they wanted me to place an opinion onto it. And I'm, I don't give opinions because I don't care that you agree with my opinion. It's my opinion. Like I said,

I'm an educator. I care that, however you formulate your opinion, it's as informed as it could possibly be. Again, I don't see there are different edits and, clips and I don't know what landed online, but I can tell you because I'm here with you now. Okay?

I made it clear that I looked at the world records of every running event in the Olympics, and in every event, on average, the male world record was 10% faster than the female world record in the events that required speed. I also check the speed of a serve in tennis. And of course, when you're setting something into motion, you can talk about the speeds, but really you want to talk about the kinetic energy because there's an energy that needs to be invoked to do that. And so there's something like a 30 mile an hour difference between the fastest serves of the best male tennis players versus the best female. It also happens to be true that the fastest marathon time, no, sorry, the fastest triathlon time for men,

is only 6% faster than the fastest triathlon time for women. And I said this on Bill Moore. I don't know if it landed in anybody's clip. So it may be that the events are not arduous enough to have the two curves meet. So I said, yes, that's all true. And so then here's the transition that somehow everyone decided to, I don't know, the heads explode. I don't know, but it turned into viral clickbait. It's very simple.

If we have a future where we are no longer contesting, where we no longer segregate sports by gender, if that future comes, one way that could happen, and like I said, I'm just making this up, is you contest by hormone levels. Okay? There might be a better way than that, but just picture this, hormone levels. So what are your hormones? By the way, this allows women who happen to have unnaturally high testosterone levels to compete with people who have similar testosterone levels. Or whatever, sometimes it's the ratio of hormones. You know, I'm not as hormone fluent as I would need to be to solve that problem. But it's an idea.

Okay. And so it means it's not the men's 100. It's the, you have maybe five racists. 100 decilators of testosterone. Exactly. Exactly. And you'd have. Doesn't roll off the tongue as much.

And the point I tried to make with Pierce Morgan is if you have multiple categories and you say, well, that's weird to have 10 different or five different 100-yard dashes when you only previously had two, that's weird. Well, no, it's not weird because I used to wrestle. And we have people that are 125 pounds and 240 pounds. They don't wrestle each other. That's not interesting. They wrestle other people, their own weight class.

So you see weight class as a way that's divided so that you have interesting contest the entire spectrum. That's when Pierce Morgan jumped in and said, well, you can't have a trans woman fighting a man at the same weight. The man will pummel her to death. That's not what I was talking about. And that's frustrating when you have someone who has an active journalistic opinions because I was saying something more subtle than that. I was saying, I gave wrestling as an example of there being categories. And we just accept that, of course, because you want an interesting contest. And if you have categories, that won't be so, it's not such a hard cell.

So now you have categories of hormone. And if that can't work and we can't find any other solution, we'll just keep working at it. I don't have a problem. I offered no opinion in the last five minutes of what I just described to you. It was an if-then statement, if we're going to go to, because you want the contest to be close. Otherwise, it's not interesting. It's possible, right. Exactly.

It's otherwise it's not interesting. And we know this. That's why the NFL doesn't play college teams because that's not interesting. Yet colleges playing colleges is interesting. High schools playing high schools are interesting. Friday night lights is a pastime in the United States where Texas, perhaps only. but Friday night likes high school football, oh my gosh, people eat it up. And you're not saying they're not as good as college or the college, you're not saying

that. That's not even a thought. So you match everybody up in some way that makes it fair. I think they wanted to, or he wanted to say, the woke, you know, anti-woke, the woke this. I think they want to say body parts. And that's what determines everything. And you, to your credit, we're saying possibly, but here's some other ways that we could do it

that perhaps don't involve. you know, the same level of, you know, maybe embarrassment or something like that. But, you know, am I wrong? You were proposing, you know, a metric, basically a rubric rather, that you could do it. But you weren't saying this was what we must do. And we cannot do what you want. Correct. I was not presenting an edict.

I was offering it as a suggestion of how and what the future of sports might look like. That's all. All right. Neil, I've got two more questions. Okay. What do you have? And thank you for allowing me to explain it. So that without mudslinging or trying to, like I said, I'm not here to give opinions.

I don't care that you know any of my opinions at all. If you listen to people, look, I always say, well, do you want your son to be like Donald Trump or, I don't want it to be like anybody. I don't want them to be like me necessarily, right? I want them to be their own person, but it means they have to think for yourself. And I think that's the thing that's in short supply because people want to hack, they want a heuristic. They want to say, oh, you know, he, Neil's woke. It's not good enough to think for yourself unless you have a self-awareness of the foundations of what lead to the thoughts you have.

Without it, you end up in the Dunning-Krooger Valley. There's lots of ways that can fail. I'm one of the world's experts in the Dunning-Kroger effect. By the way, I independently discovered the Dunning-Kroofer effect. I'd never heard of it until I did my master class. And in the trailer for the master class, I say one of the greatest challenges, is knowing enough about something to think you're right, but not enough about that to know that you're wrong.

And I came up with that on my own. And someone said, well, that's the Dunning. I said, Donnie, what? And I'm looking at the paper. I dug it up. Is it? There it is. They did it 20 years ago, whenever.

And so perfectly happy to give credit where it's due. There's another effect called the Botterwitstein effect or something like that, which is when you see something that maybe you had an encounter before, and then you become aware of it, suddenly you see it everywhere. So like someone who becomes bald or someone who's pregnant, they notice pregnant women all the time. Especially if you buy a new kind of car. That's right. Everybody's driving that car on the road.

So I tweeted out recently. I just became aware of this effect and now I'm seeing it everywhere. Good one. Most people. That's clever. Yeah, that's a smart one right there. There's another one's like that is there are two kinds of people in the world. Those who divide everyone into two kinds of people and those who don't.

Getting back to Merlin for the very last or penultimate question. You always say you're famous, one of your many, many quips, you're very quipworthy. The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. But you didn't say it right here. The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. That's how you got to say it. We're getting all your greatest answer. You either don't want to do another podcast with me.

You want to leave it all on the table or we're just getting the gold today. What question may always be unanswerable? I don't think any question. I think there are people, the people who say that, and I'm stepping into their space, maybe uninvited, when I see people say that, science will never understand love or whatever. I think it's because they don't want science to ever understand it rather than feel confident that science never will. Now, there are certain things that don't respond to. reductive investigations. All right, you can't, that we know of, you can't analyze an organism of any kind,

and from that organism deduce the theory of evolution. There's no code in there to tell you that. You need other animals to do that. So it's not reductive right down to the cellular level of animals. It's not obvious that maybe because neuroscience is still in its infancy, that you You can study a bird that's just pecking around on the ground and learn from studying the bird that it can flock with other birds. These are emergent features where it's not obvious how visible they would be in the organism

itself. But those examples aside, the universe has been remarkably reductive and highly successful in the exercise of figuring out how things work. So I, rather than say there's nothing science will ever know, I'm going to say some things are harder than others. Where I'd rather put it is, it may be that the human mind is too stupid to figure things out scientifically, to figure everything out scientifically. And that's not the same thing as saying science will never figure it out. Hey there, I know if you're enjoying this conversation, you're going to love my Monday Magic mailing list where I write about the conversations I have with intellects like Neil, Sam Harris, many, many other intellects. that I've encountered over my exploration of the multiverse of minds.

It's free. If you go to Brian Keating.com slash list, you'll join. And best of all, you'll be entered to win a real piece of the early solar system that Neil and I are talking about in this episode. Yes, a meteorite. I give away one of these genuine samples to one lucky viewer or listener each month. And if you have a dot edu email address, you're guaranteed to win one of these beauties. If you go to Briankeating.com slash edu, and you have a dot edu email address and live in the

United States. So do it now. I know you're going to love it. It's free. Click over there and I'll see you on the other side. Now back to the conversation. Okay. The last question in the spirit of this wonderful new and old book. This is Schrodinger's book. It's both new and old. I want to take a question from a listener. You've got to take more than one question from your people. Come on. Give me a couple. Okay. Yeah. More than one question from you. All right. Here we go. In all fairness to. They support you, right? Let's do it. They do. Yeah. Okay. So Psycho-Not 17 which I was going to call my third child. Anyway, he or she or it asks,

how much of space is warped at the singularity of Sagittarius A star? All of space is shaped by the presence of matter and energy. This is foundational to general relativity. Space is warped in the vicinity of the Earth, of the sun, of the moon. The moon is in orbit around Earth because it's following a trajectory in response to the curvature of space.

appropriate for its own speed. Okay? But if you want to know actually how space is warping, you send out a beam of light and look at what it does. Whatever the light does, that's what space is doing. And so how much of space, all of space around it is warped towards it. Sagittary is A star, the black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy. And we have black hole envy because Indromeda has a way bigger black hole in its center than we do.

And MN7 has even more. Yeah, it may be that the size of the black hole correlates, well, is driven by the mass of the galaxy in which it's embedded for reasons that are still being explored. And I think the jury is still out, but there are a lot of very good ideas for how you build a big black hole from a big galaxy. The question is not worded commensurate with the meaning of relativity. In relativity, all of space time is curved wherever you find matter and energy. And at the singularity, it's a singularity. Oh, by the way, it's been said that a singularity is where God divides by zero. Remember, you're not supposed to do that in math class?

That's almost accurate in the sense that general relative, you know this, of course, the general relativity fails at the singularity. We know its limits. As successful as that theory of the universe is, we already know its mathematical limits, bring in the strength theorists and others to try to resolve that. That's exactly concord and or consonant with your famous quip that you voice for us, right? We know enough to know where the limitation. That's what a scientist does. Oh, yeah, yeah. We know enough about the universe.

All right. Here's a human interest question from John Van Eman. What does Neil think his mentor and hero, Carl Sagan, would say to him if he was alive today? And what would Neil say or tell Carl if he only had one moment to speak to him? You mean, if Carl was resurrected from the dead and showed up? Okay. So a couple of things. First, Carl Sagan is widely described as my mentor, but I was probably in his presence three times in my life. And you turned him down. You didn't go to Cornell. Yeah, I didn't go to Cornell. Right. So in the traditional meaning of the word mentor, he was not a mentor. However, you can be visible in what you do. And when you're visible in what you do, people can emulate. it if they choose. So in that sense, Carl was a mentor because I said, that was effective. That analogy really worked. That way of describing and thinking about the problem, that was potent.

So in my life, as I honed my skills as, or methods, tools, and tactics as educator, I drew upon many of the methods, tools, and tactics invoked by Carl Sagan. But he's not alone in that. There's probably a half dozen educators in my life who I've drawn from to fold into my life. And then there's stuff that I'm experiencing that they never did, like the internet and social media and rapid fire interviews and comedic interviews. So I have a very strong, I have a high valuation. of comedy in communicating anything, but science in particular. On my podcast, my co-host is a professional comedian.

That's different from the molds that others have honed. And so that's where I'm bringing my life experience into that equation. What I would say, if Carl rose from the dead and had five minutes with him, I'd say, Carl, look what you started. That's what I would say. Okay, look what you started, and the struggle continues. Get back in the grave while we try to fix this. Exactly. It might be safer in the other side of where we do.

So this question comes from Brian Keith. Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG. Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer. and host and style with the fridge serving craft ice, mini craft ice, cube dice, and crushed ice. Shop appliance savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid May 14th through June 3rd, U.S. only.

Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more. See, store online for details. How much do you think AI will influence what you and I, I do professionally? I call it the second oldest profession, which is being a professor, but you're an educator and mentor to many more millions. No, astronomy is the second. oldest profession, not being a professor, just so you know. There's another one. We obliquely can hint at it, but I want to keep it PG.

How will education change? I mean, a thousand years ago in Bologna, Italy, was the first Western university, the University of Bologna. There was a guy, usually a guy, and he would have a piece of rock, and he would scrape on another piece of rock, you know, some wisdom, some knowledge, what have you. And, you know, today we now have this amazing invention called PowerPoint. But really, not much has changed, you know. And I'm wondering, do you see a threat from AI innovation, perhaps at the pace at which it's accelerating to my profession?

Well, my profession of being a professor exist. Yeah, because it's, oh, how? I think it'll happen in ways that you're not thinking. So, especially in liberal arts classes, write a term paper on this subject, and then they go home and chat GPT produces it in 2.5 minutes, and then they hand it in. And you have no idea how much they learn. So what's going to have to happen is assessment of student abilities will have to take place verbally, not in any written capacity. This will require more teachers, and maybe we should, while we're at it, pay them more. But if you make your term paper written by chat GPT, fine, then learn what's in the chat GPT.

And by the way, I might ask you things that your chat GPT didn't tell you because you didn't think to ask it. All right. And that would be further evidence that your knowledge is limited to what AI told you and not what you could have learned had you done it on your own. So the learning process is going to have to change because no longer can you trust a submitted term paper. You know there are some teachers you would swap out in a minute for an AI bot to do the teaching. Okay, not all teachers are created equal. This is one of the great tragedies of the modern world. It's a tragedy because we all knew who the bad teachers were. You're in high school, you're in college. There is general agreement who the great teachers are and who the sucky teachers are. And why no one ever really

does anything about that is one of the great tragedies of education, I think, and teach the bad teacher so they can teach better, all right? Why languish that way for decades until retirement? There's got to be some, or fire them. You get fired in any other job, if you're bad. Tenure, right. Tenure. Or you don't give tenure unless they can demonstrate. It's not a matter of how many years you put in is how good are you. Okay. So it'll change how you teach for sure.

But will a teaching bot, you know, here's what an AI will not be able to do. You went to Galileo's birthplace and you communed with Galileo in all spiritual ways that you know how. And then you come back and now you give a class on that. and the class that you teach will be infused with your emotions and your feelings for a period of time, for Galileo the man, for his family, for his daughter, Celeste, I guess, was her name, and the vineyards and the prosecution and the church. And the fact that you voiced one of the characters in his books makes it closer to you than it could possibly be to AI. Because all AI knows is what other people have put on the Internet.

And you and your life experience have just created something new that AI doesn't know about yet unless you write about it and put it on the internet. But you took this trip over spring break and you're coming back to your school and you're in front of your class and you have the power to mesmerize them in a way that no AI can because you're sharing your life experience with them. And as long as AI stays inside a computer, it's not some robot that did the touring alongside you, you will have that advantage over AI now and forever. Yeah.

And actually, I always say that, you know, we don't, we don't take advantage of the storytelling. I don't think AI can tell stories the way humans can. No, no, it's not. It'll tell it. Well, it can, but it's, well, wait, it'll tell it the way other humans have told stories. That's right. So it's degenerate, you know, it's mad, I call it mad bot disease. You remember mad cow disease?

The cows would eat the other cows brains and then they would go crazy. They were fed the other cows. They were fed the other cows. I know. In the hamburger. What kind of diabolical cows are you imagining? I know, that's right. Well, yeah, I always say I don't eat other cows.

No, we fed them other cow's brains, but go on. I always say, I don't eat fish. And people say, why. I say, I love fish, you know, I don't want to hurt them. I did go to Galileo's house, I said a couple times. And I think we do a disservice when we teach freshman physics. And we talk about inclined planes and we talk about pendulous. Frickshelous implying planes.

We should talk about how he derived that without a clock. I mean, they didn't have a clock. And he was doing it under house arrest in the dialogue and the discourse. I mean, this is incredibly gripping human interest stories. We never did he use his pulse to. Yeah, he used the swing of the pendulum. He used the clock. Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so I have a question. And that was in church when he wasn't paying attention. He was bored as a three-year-old. I mean, can you imagine? I have a question now from Merlin to you. Okay, how about that? How do you think I got that? So Merlin wants to know your thoughts on recently discovered achievement and breakthrough from

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is fusion ignition in a laboratory setting. It's widely celebrated. And this is quite astonishing Merlin asked. And what he wants to know is what you think this. What Merlin wants to know of Neil DeGrasse Tyson, not the other way around, is how do you think this will impact our lives on Earth, bringing the Sun's processes down to Earth? First, I'm reminded of a bumper sticker. I saw on a VW.

beetle that said no nukes. Okay. So this is a very liberal posture, no nukes. And the O in the no was an image of the sun. And it was, okay, this is someone's never had physics. So they don't know. The sun is all it is a nuke. Okay.

You go to see Berkeley. It's a nuclear free zone. I don't know if you've ever seen that. Yeah, no, I hadn't seen that. Yeah. So to say nukes in that way, uses a very broad stroke. And the farther you are in any given political leaning or philosophical leaning, the more other things look monolithic to you. And so this is one of

things I tried to correct in Starry Messenger. This ignition, where more energy came out than was put in in that one experiment. By the way, that energy budget used for that calculation doesn't include the energy for the whole machine and everything, you know, when you really do the math, it ate more energy than it generated. But when you localize it to the phenomenon itself, which we think is something that may be scalable and maybe you just redesign the rest of the cavity with some clever engineers, because that's how that always happens, there's a scientific breakthrough and clever engineers come in after and they make it commercially viable.

So if that is the case, I can imagine a future where no one is complaining about dead birds at windmills, no one is complaining about, quote, unsightly solar farms, no one is complaining about dams up top rivers as a source of hydroelectric. There's just one of these little nuclear plants in every town, and it's nuclear fusion, which has no radioactive bi, it's just hydrogen and helium for goodness sake. So there's no, there's no radioactive evil elements like plutonium

or anything else that is associated with atomic fission, which were, of course, the weapons of mass destruction in the Second World War and shortly after. So that would be interesting. It would completely transform. Let me give a weird tangential example. Mnour in the streets was a very big problem in New York City at the turn of the century.

I thought it would cripple Wall Street, right? Yeah, there's so much manure. And how's the city going to grow? If the horses got to poop everywhere and you can't. And so how do you solve this? Do you have better scooping laws? Do you have better barges to take it out? And the solution was the car.

That was the solution. And so no one studying manure is inventing the car. Somebody else is. So if this becomes, and by the way, what you really want is what was shown in Back to the Future, at the end of Back to the Future, where Doc comes back from the future into 1985 with the Dolorian, and rather than hook it up to lightning bolts, he just has Mr. Fusion, a home fusion engine in the back of his car. You put in anything organic, it'll fuse the hydrogen out of it because all organic materials is hydrogen. So that would be kind of

Cool. And by the way, that would be the future that everyone imagined in the 1950s. You know what they got wrong? The tomorrow imagined in the 1950s and 60s is everyone thought energy would cost nothing. So all those futures, there were people in jet packs and flying cars and everything they showed required energy. And no one imagined that the real future would be the drop in cost of information. So we live in a computing. age rather than an energy age. But imagine a future where we live in the age of both. Then nothing stopping us. Never trust a futurist who didn't predict the internet. I mean, that is

tough, Phil de Swala. Okay, last question from a man by the name of Nestor. You get one question of an alien. I didn't know a man. One question to ask an alien upon first contact. What would you say from Nestor here on the internet somewhere? What I would do is I would lay out

some of our science and figure out a way to show this to the alien because the alien presumably doesn't know English, unless it's really smart and it can figure it out quickly. I would say, what are we missing? You know, I wouldn't know. He's got some fancy spaceship. That's fine. What are we missing in our understanding of the universe? That's what I want to.

I show in the periodic table, shown the Pythagorean theorem, show them some devices that we've made and built. and just I want to know what they know because if they got here, they're more advanced than we are because we haven't left low Earth orbit in 52 years. So that's what I'd ask. What do you think we're missing? I mean, just is it technology? Well, we're missing. We don't know what was around before the Big Bang. We don't know how you went from organic molecules to self-replicating life. We don't know what dark energy is. We don't know what dark matter is. We don't know if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. Of course,

if an alien visit that's answered in that moment, but, Plenty of questions we don't know. That's not what I meant. I meant, what are we missing from ourselves as a species? I mean, right now there's nuclear potential nuclear conflicts. There's sectarian violence. There's all sorts of crazy stuff going on inside and outside of America. Is it possible that we can get to that future?

Is there a great filter? But that great filter is us and the way that we treat each other? It might be. However, there's a little bit of a generational delusion that afflicts many people. I'm Baby Boomer. Yeah. And before me, what do they call them? I guess that was the greatest generation maybe.

The greatest generation, I don't know who named that, but they're citing the fact that they defeated fascism. Okay? Yeah. So that takes a lot of resources to do so. I get that. So I don't want to take that away. However, in that generation was the rise of Jim Crow. My father fought in a segregated army.

Oh, because people with light skin didn't want to kill Germans standing next to people with dark skin. That's weird. Okay. So it's hard for me as a black man in America to view that period and the people who were in charge at the time as the greatest generation. It's just hard. Okay. It doesn't mean I don't know how to respect and value the good thing that came of it. Exactly.

All right. So, but that's not even my point. My point is, if there are protesters, let's say, and a van, an angry van plows into them and kills a dozen people, let's say. That's headlines for a month in the country in which it occurs. Headlines for, no, no, it's headlines for a month in the state. It's headlines for a week in the country. Headlines for a day worldwide. It's, my gosh, how are we treating each other?

Will we ever survive ourselves, one might ask. However, if you go back to the greatest generation, from 1939 to 1945, 1,000 people were killed per hour in the service of that war. We are reacting to a dozen people dying from a hate crime. A thousand people died per hour. And no one talks about that because the war wasn't reported that way. It was, well, we've taken this beachfront or this island or this town. We've liberated France.

It's in conquering terms. It's not in the toll of human life. So when I look at the history of the world and the amount of bloodshed that precedes us, we don't hold a candle to how much bloodshed there was in the Second World War, in the First World War, all the European wars that preceded that. All the war just, you know, take a look at how many people were guillotined. Tens of thousands of people beheaded and guillotined over short periods of time. It's like, what?

What do you do? Like, what? And so I am glad I'm living in the present for how peaceful it is. relative to how violent we've been as a species in the past, not to diminish the very real, tragic violence that's going on today. It's senseless violence, right? Just, you know, I'm pro-civillion, okay? People just trying to live and feed and raise a family,

caught up in whatever is the political unrest of people who don't have their safety in mind when you end up putting them at risk in the ways that you do. So, yeah, I think we can survive ourselves, especially compared to what we've already been through. I sure hope so. And in this holiday season, nothing makes a greater companion to the mysteries of the cosmos than this wonderful. I think it's a fun book, but that's just me.

It's super fun. I want to have one more poem, and then we'll call it today. Yeah, let's do it. I won't turn that down. All right. someone wanted to know if red stars are red because they're hotter than blue stars or other color stars because we think of red hot. And I could have just said, no, but it's Merlin answering, so Merlin's got to have fun.

So here it goes. On canvas with paint in the artist's school, it is red that is hot and blue that is cool. But in science we show, as the heat gets higher, A star will glow red, like the coals of a fire. Raise the heat some more and what is in sight. Behold, the star has turned bright white. But the hottest of all, Merlin says unto you, is neither red nor white when a star has turned blue.

Very, very nice. There's nothing like scientifically accurate poetry. Poetry, right. Yes, I would have loved to have Paul Dirac read that poem. He hated poetry, and he famously said, In science, and you have to imagine his British accent, in science, one tries to tell people in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite. Neil deGrasse Tyson, I'll let you ruminate on that one. He was a deeply closeted poet, as I understand it. Thank you so much for sharing your time, your thoughts, and giving my audience another bite at the,

at the Tyson Apple to understand a little bit better about how this universe is put together, how it works. Well, thanks for your interest. This is my second time on your show. And keep it going. Keep it strong. Keep growing that following. For me, those are the metrics that people care about science. When actual scientists get followings such as that, that's a good sign.

I want to put any fears that Neil does things on a venal basis. We invited you to the San Diego Air and Space Museum. We wanted to induct you into the, into the, Hall of Fame. And it's a great honor. There's someone named Sally Ride there. Neil Armstrong is there. The Wright brothers and a man named Brian Keating is there. But we're not going to get into that right now. And we said, Neil, we'll even get a pilot friend of ours to fly you out in a private jet. And this is true. Jim Kedrick, the CEO of the Air and Space Museum here in San Diego, would have charted. And you said in a very lovely email, you said, I appreciate the honor. It's a great, it's a great privilege.

and, you know, thanks for the offer of the private jet. However, you know, the reason you're inviting me out is because of my writing, my thoughts, my, you know, contributions to education. And that very thing will be compromised if I accept the honor for which you're bestowed. So it was one of the greatest declination of a... Next, when I asked Freeman Dyson to endorse my first book, blurt my first book, losing the Nobel Prize. He said, I have a policy of never endorsing.

any books. So I will not endorse your book because it would violate my policy. So, Neil, thank you for your candor. Thank you for your contributions to human understanding and championship of science. I always tell people, you are, I mean, like it or not. You're the most famous scientist, you know, by virtue of this, you know, following that we call social media, which I have noticed, by the way, I did notice that you mainly are posting about Merlin. And I salute that, actually, for your mental health and mine. Just in the last few weeks, yeah. Yeah, I think that's wise. But you do communicate to millions.

You're certainly not shy about your passions, but I think what you do is inspire people and your storytelling ability, your knowledge, your depth, but also your addition and how much you care about science. I appreciate you, Neil. Have a happy New Year. Thanks for recognizing that it takes hard work. Some will say, oh, you're such a natural. They have no idea how much effort went to doing.

Okay, Neil. Have a great holiday. All right. Good. And to you as well. more ways to save at Ralph's, like low prices in every aisle. And when you download the Ralph's app, you can clip and save more with digital coupons every week. Plus, you can earn fuel points to save up to $1 per gallon at the pump. At Ralph's, you can enjoy more ways to save and more rewards

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