Modern Wisdom - #468 - Neil deGrasse Tyson - Welcome To The Universe

Episode Date: May 2, 2022

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist, planetary scientist, author and science communicator. Elon Musk bought Twitter and I found out about a 300 million light year across supervoid out in space within the same week. Thankfully Neil is here to help me work out what is going on in this version of the simulation. Expect to learn whether focussing on Mars as a backup planet is a smart idea, how big the universe is outside of the observable universe, how we could restart the sun when it begins to die, when time will end, the politics of who gets to claim different asteroids, Neil's favourite solution to the Fermi Paradox and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 30% discount on your at-home testosterone test at https://trylgc.com/modern (use code: MODERN30) Get over 37% discount on all products site-wide from MyProtein at https://bit.ly/proteinwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Welcome To The Universe in 3D - https://amzn.to/3EWjD5b Follow Neil on Twitter - https://twitter.com/neiltyson  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bonjour friends, welcome back to this show. My guest today is Neil de Grasse Tyson. He's an astrophysicist, planetary scientist, author and a science communicator. Elon Musk bought Twitter, and I found out about a 300 million light year across Supervoid out in space within the same week. Thankfully, Neil is here to help me work out what's going on in this version of the simulation. Expect to learn whether focusing on Mars is a backup planet is a smart idea, how big the universe outside of the observable universe might be, how we could restart the sun when it begins to die, when time will end, the politics of who gets to claim different asteroids, kneels favorite solution to the Fermi paradox, and much more.

The guys are legend, right? Neil de Grasse Tyson is a lot of people's gateway drugs into astrophysics, into space, into thinking about the universe and big picture, planetary stuff. Very, very much appreciate his work. And today's fun. Also, he's got a new book coming out later this year. So expect another appearance from Mr. Tyson later in 2022. Also, don't forget that the Modern Wisdom Reading List is now available for free and you can get your copy by going to chriswillx.com slash books. It's a list of 100 books that you should read before you die. If you're looking for some new reading material, just go there, right? There's 100

books that you can get stuck into fiction and nonfiction, chriswillx.com slash books for your free reading list. But now please welcome Neil deGrasse Tyson, look at the show. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me. Elon's bought Twitter. Neil, should he be spending his time and money taking people to Mars? What's going on? Yeah, I've stopped passing judgment on what billionaires do with their money.

I mean, think about it. He could just be having a yacht contest for who has the biggest yacht. You know, billionaires have whatever are their habits. And I don't know that any of us would behave any differently if we had billions of dollars. So I've just stopped commenting on what a billionaire do do or should do with their money. What I can say is if a billionaire is gonna do something, it's kinda interesting that he single-handedly bought electric cars back into, he created a new expectation

for the automotive industry, basically single-handedly. And he reinvented commercial rocket launch. So he was doing that with his billions new expectation for the automotive industry, basically single-handedly. And he reinvented commercial rocket launch. So he's doing that with his billions and he has $44 billion left over and he wants to own Twitter, which he likes. All right. I don't see anything wrong with that. By the way, most things out there have CEOs who you don't know and you don't even ask. We just happen to know who the

new CEO of Twitter is about to be. And so now this becomes a point of conversation. Why isn't anybody talking about the head of any is unjustified given how much scrutiny we could be giving to so many other things. But that being said, if he does what everyone fears, especially on the left that he reopens the floodgates gives Trump an account again, I think we need to perhaps look at it a different way. Free speech is a, what you want is to not suppress the speech that you don't like, but amplify the speech that you do. And let that be the arena of contest of ideas because if you suppress ideas, those ideas will still always be there and they'll run around saying, I have this idea, but these folks don't want to hear it. That's very different from you losing the idea game in an open contest. And then you say, well, how come's nobody's listening to you? Yeah, because they turned me off because they shut off

the channels where I was communicating because they don't want to hear anything that I have to say, or because everything I said is wrong. All right, these are two different ways emerging truths can win. But you want it to be the second way because then no one has a platform left. If it's a platform that is either regressive, puts a solid and existential risk, or whatever, let it lose on its own terms. Speaking of existential risks,

how good do you think Mars is as a backup to humanity? One of the problems is- What do you want to backup? Well, the fact that we only have one cradle at the moment, right? If something goes wrong here, if we're all being slowly turned into paperclips or Gregu or there's a bio-weapon that gets released or whatever, we don't have some air-gapped backup. I assume you're listening to what you mean when you say,

if we're all getting turned into paper clips. Yes, they do. They do. So their AI fluent, is that correct? AI fluent. Yeah, that's all one word as well. AI fluent. Yes. Yeah, they are. So they know Nick Bostrom, they know about existential risk. They put my hypothesis.

Yes. So, um, yeah, or an asteroid or a virus, whatever. Or anything. So, yeah, or an asteroid or a virus, whatever. Or anything. Yeah, so here's my rebuttal to that. And by the way, this rebuttal is, I don't know many people who have this rebuttal. So this may just be an outlier in the examples you're collecting. But right now, Antartica is wetter and balmyer than any place on Mars. I don't see people lining up to build condominiums there.

It's a wholly inhospitable place. Right now is used for some tourism, but mostly for scientific research. If you want to move to Mars and do it in a way that's not having you confined to a habitat module, you'll want to terraform Mars, and that's turning Mars into Earth, and then ship a billion people there. So, here's my thought. If you have the power of geoengineering to turn Mars into Earth, then no matter what is about to happen on Earth, no matter what did happen on Earth, you have the power to turn Mars into Earth, then no matter what is about to happen on Earth, no matter what

did happen on Earth, you have the power to turn Earth back into Earth. And so I don't see Mars as a realistic backup plan, because whatever you'd have to do to Mars, you could do to Earth, and then that's your backup plan on Earth. Would it be more difficult to terraform Mars than to perhaps survive a huge asteroid impact or to combat some real bad? No, no, no, you deflect the asteroid. What, dude?

What, if we can fly to Mars and terraform it, like fly to Mars, ship a billion people there, I think we'll know how to deflect an asteroid, okay? Okay. Am I on a limb there when I say? No, I don't think that you are, but my point is that there may be some existential risks, which are so existential,

are so difficult to overcome, that the Mars terraforming could be easier than it would be. There's none that I can think of at this moment, but yes, I will allow that possibility, but there is none I can think of, okay? So how about a killer virus that'll take us all? Let's invent an antiviral serum that'll take out any virus. All right? Is that a stretch to imagine? Is less of a stretch than flying to Mars, terraforming it and shipping a billion people there?

Fair enough. No matter what you come up with, it's less of a stretch of my imagination as a problem to solve than terraforming Mars and ship it being a people there. That's how big the problem is to do it Yeah, the Mars problem is we don't know how to terraform yet We don't know how to terraform. I think we could build a habitat module sure we can figure that out Yeah, but how many people gonna live there? Any have to bring supplies, have to have supply ships. So, but still to do that, there's a lot of science and technology and time and money. Just solve the problems here on earth.

Just solve them. So you're saying that Elon buying Twitter actually is the best use of his money, rather than his attention, rather than going to Mars? Oh no, no, I'm not, I will not judge what people should or should not do with their money. Okay. So I will not say I'm glad he did this or that. What I will say is, and by the way, 44 billion is a, is it 15% of his

wealth, 20% of his wealth. He's raised it from investors as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, Yeah, yeah. So, and by the way, that wealth, it's not like he doesn't have that money anymore. It's invested in a thing that has value.

So it's not like you went to buy candy and you ate the candy and you don't have the money anymore. So, I'm not going to sit here and pass judgment on how billionaire spend their money. Just not going to do that. Got you. I can tell you, he wants to terraform Mars. I don't have a problem with that, but if you're doing it because you think Earth needs a backup plan, that's the wrong reason.

That's kind of objectively false. Let me say that differently. It's hard to defend it for that reason. You can defend it for other reasons. It's a cool thing to do. It's hard to defend it for that reason. You can defend it for other reason It's a cool thing to do the technology demonstration. Sure But if you're gonna say we need to put our eggs in two baskets instead of one So that when a disaster hits one planet everyone else can just watch it and watch half their species die and somehow be okay with that Rather than prevent it from happening in the first place, if you're okay with that, then fine.

But I'm saying, fix the problems that you don't even have that solution you're trying to escape. Have you looked into astropolitics much? Who's going to own Mars? Who own sections of space? That's so fascinating to me. You know, is it first come first serve? Is it another, is it the new sort of colonialist era that we're going into now? You just get to stamp a little

area out on Mars and it's yours? Yeah, so, so the only successful, if we can call it that model, that we have for this sort of thing, is home-stating.. So if you, so let's say the international community owns Mars, let's just make this up because, you know, I'm Pope of the UN and I declare that like Antarctica, the international community has equal access. If you go there and pitch tent and figure out a way to make a buck, let's say you have

a mining operations, whatever, then you get to keep that land. Provided the industry you create accrues back to the rest of us in some way or in some form. So that has worked in the past. Holding aside people taking land that belong to others or you know, and all the other issues that colonization brought with it, the simple fact of being the first on a plot of land and doing something with it,

getting to keep that land if you manage to, as they say, develop it. That's a successful model in the past. I don't see why that wouldn't still be in vote. With regard to asteroids, which have basically unlimited natural resources, if you're the first on an asteroid and you plant your flag, you keep the asteroid. There's hundreds of thousands of asteroids. No shortage of them to do this with, by the way. One of them actually has my name on it.

So if I were ever to travel to one, I'd probably put that one top on the list. Which one? It's one, three, one, two, three, Tyson. Why did you find it? No, no. That is one way to have an asteroid name. If you find it, I'm not an asteroid hunter, but there's some an asteroid hunter who is a big fan of my work and respected what I do and my efforts in the public. So in my honor, they named it one, one, three, one, two, three,

is the numerical sequencing, and then the name is just Tyson, and it follows it. That's pretty cool. Very honored by that. Yeah, that's very cool. What's your favorite answer to the Fermi paradox? I spent an hour and a half last night having a discussion with a bunch of friends. Yeah, I think, well, this is my favorite answer, but I don't think it's the most realistic one. My favorite answer is they've already visited and have judged that there's no sign of intelligent life on earth. Did they come last week?

That's the simplest explanation. Another interesting explanation is that whatever is the urge to colonize as many planets as you can, which is what the Fermi Paradox, that's the foundation of the Fermi Paradox, right? You have a civilization and it travels to nearby planets around other stars and then they then travel to two other planets and they travel to two. So there's a quick doubling time where you can populate the entire galaxy in just a few hundred thousand years. And that's small compared with the history of life on Earth. That's even small compared with the anticipated life expectancy of mammal species,

which last I checked it is up around three million years. So, but there's an interesting self-limiting fact, which I'm going with in my explanation here. It's whatever urge it takes for you to colonize a planet. If that is a genetic driver in an entire wave of people who are colonizing the galaxy, then at some point you're going to want to colonize the same planet that I do. And you're not going to take no for an answer. Neither will I.

That's what got me here to where I am right now. So we will then fight until one person wins and one person loses. And that will happen every turn when the number of planets that can be colonized begins to drop relative to the ones that have been and you'll get infighting and the entire system implode. By the way, that kind of already happened in Europe. Portugal rises up, Spain rises up, France rises up, England rises up, they have these powerful navies and they want to colonize the world and in the end what are they end up doing fighting each other? Over who owns what colony in the world? So it could be that the very urge to do that is self-limiting.

The very urge to populate every planet is the very same force that would prevent that from happening in the end. That's an interesting way to look at it. One thing I've always considered is that I think it would be difficult for any civilization to be more emotional than we are. If you were to tune the intensity of our emotions up, our reactivity, our anger, our sadness, our despondency, whatever. If you were to tune that up by another 15%, I think coordination becomes so difficult that you really, maybe not 15%, maybe 25% to sort of 30%. I think it's so difficult that you can't achieve anything, which is wild to think that we're near to perhaps the limit on how emotional a civilization could be and still not be completely

ineffective. Except, we have a very big range of expressed emotion among us within the species. So I don't know that I could character, yes, I agree we're an emotional species. I'm not denying that. But the people who make decisions, who allocate monies, who fund research and discovery, I don't necessarily think that emotions are as forceful as you are implying. Because they have constraints, they have rules, guidelines, procedures, checks and balances. Right. Right. And it's

things you have debated and decisions get made. All right, we didn't discover the Higgs boson based on emotion. What else? I guess we can say we went to the moon based on emotion because we were a little spooked by the Soviet Union. But it took in the end of the day science and technology to accomplish that. You can't wish stuff or pray stuff into space. So I like where you're going with that, but I don't think it applies entirely with us. Well, that's what we try to do, right? That's the reasons we have rules and procedures in place, in an effort to try and constrain some of those worse aspects. Are else everybody

would be making decisions purely based on emotion? Yeah, that's correct. I agree with that. Do you think that we should be trying to message aliens? There's meti as well as seti, right? Messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. And I know that it's quite contested about whether that's a safe thing to do or not. Well, so once again, it's like the terraforming Mars.

It makes a good headline. Don't tell the aliens we're here because especially since we know in advance, without asking you, you are not going to give your email to a stranger on the street, or your home address, you're just not going to do that. And this is another person who's our own species. They're your species and you're not giving them your return.

Now we're talking about giving our return address to aliens out in the galaxy. And that's so whatever distrust you have of your fellow species, Now we're talking about giving our return address to aliens out in the galaxy. So whatever distrust you have of your fellow species, you'd think that should be magnified as a distrust of aliens. So I get that. And I don't have a problem with that, except aliens already know where we are. We have an 80 year radio bubble of radio signals that came from TV sets, that came from broadcast antennas. And this is 80 light year radius

expanding at one light year per year, is a radius of radio information about our species and about our culture. So aliens can learn practically everything they want to know, even if it's not everything they need to know, in our television broadcast shows. So the honey mooters, they learn how men interact with women. They might, you know, see the Flintstones and wonder what's going on there.

So, yeah, to be worried about a signal being sent today, when signals are being sent inadvertently for the past 80 years, I think is misguided concern. Because we've already let that horse bolt out of the gate. Correct. Interesting. Yeah, I'm really not sort of too convinced by the concern about messaging. You're right.

Anyone or any civilization that we should be sufficiently scared of because they're going to come and try and destroy us has probably already been able to detect that we're here. And it does seem a little bit like looking at a teacup out of an ocean and going, well, there's nothing in here. We know that there can't be anything out there. That's the equivalent temporally with how long we've been around. We've been around, what, 50,000 years when we could have actually written stuff down

and it might be on a cave somewhere or whatever. Like there's been a significantly longer period of time that aliens could have been and gone and decided that they're not bothered with this planet. Yeah, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, if they don't have a radio signal to send back, you would think that there was no intelligent life here on Earth when there clearly was. That's a good point.

Technology and civilization have a lagging measure, right? Talking about that bubble, I've been thinking about how, whether anybody has estimations about how big the universe is outside of the observable universe. Is there any way that this can be? Yes, there's some estimates, but there's like very loose estimates. What are you even base on? Well, you can look at, so you can look at how big our universe is and how long it's been expanding and ask

if you were randomly to come upon a universe, what is the likelihood of coming upon it within the first 14 billion years rather than the whole rest of its life? And so you make some estimates along those lines and then you can conclude how much bigger The full universe is relative to how much time we've been expanding within it and I free I don't remember the estimates It's I actually we the numbers in one of my recent books. It's in cosmic queries We give the size that the universe Could likely be beyond the visible horizon. I just don't remember exactly what the number was. I learned about the Bueta's Supervoid this week. Have you heard

of that? Tell me the name again? It's B-O. Oh, Boaties. Yeah, it's got a, whatever it's called, it not an ampersand. Over the second O. That's it. Boaties Supervoid. Yes. Yeah, it's a constellation. And yeah, it's just a region of the universe with as hardly any galaxies. Like three million light years across. It's big and interesting. Yeah. It's 300 million light years across, I think. Yeah, yeah, it's got, it doesn't have bright stuff in it. It probably has lighter, smaller things that are less visible. less visible. And yeah, that's kind of fun. The universe is not, the universe is like a sponge where if you take a cut through it, you'll see voids where there's no sponge and then on the edges of the sponge, edges of the voids you'll see the sponge material. And that's what the galaxies

look like when you take slices through them in spacetime. It's interesting because the university is supposed to be relatively homogenous, right? Isn't that one of the things that... Well, it was statistically homogenous above a certain scale. It's obviously not homogenous in the room that you're standing in, because you're in one place and there's air in another place. So if there was homogenous, your molecules would be equally spread in the room that you're in one place and there's air in another place. So if there was homogenous, your molecules would be equally spread in the room that you're located.

So you have to say on what scale is it homogenous? And if you back up enough and you see enough contents, you could say, now I have a certain mixture of galaxies in this volume, and I look over here, and I see approximately the same mixture over here and up there. So then you know what counts as the, you know, counts as the, then it's representative of what the universe looks like. The scale at which we can start to draw some conclusions about what it's going to be.

Yes, I mean, if it's not 300 million light years though, you think that that was what inferred to me. Oh, well, maybe the observable universe is only a really small part of a much bigger universe because within this, you don't have a massive amount of modulity. Right. Right. So, but a big enough volume you do. So that's how you get out of that.

Just scale out a little bit more. Right, correct. If the big bang was one time began, when's time going to stop? So there's no evidence that it would stop. Well, it would stop at the big rip, for sure. But if we don't have the big rip, where the universe is expanding so fast that it rips the very fabric of the universe.

Um that if that does not happen then we'll just expand forever and so time just continues forever. Would the big freeze not eventually end up with everything decaying on a long enough time scale to the point where time kind of becomes irrelevant? Yeah, oh, that's a different question. Right. So if I keep winding a watch, the watch will keep time. But there's a point where what energy am I using to wind the watch? Well, I'm eating some food where that gets integrated from the Sun. The Sun is gone, then there's no energy, and I can't wind the watch. And so there is a limit to this. And the, but otherwise the time just slows it. There's nothing left for you to care about timing. That's really how to think about it. There's nothing there. How long did you run that race? There's nobody running a race. How long did the boy on the egg?

There are no eggs, right? So I guess we can call it a practical end of time. There's nothing left to measure time with. But otherwise, it would just continue forever. Yeah, interesting. I learned as well, the same day that I learned about the brewers super void, about the reason, or a question about why the plank length exists, why is it that there's a smallest measurement

at all? Is there a reason for that? Well, so it depends what you mean by reason. What why can't anything be smaller than it? Because that is the very structure that comprises everything that's bigger than it. So now there's a movement, a cottage industry, I should say, that is wondering whether the plank length, this smallest unit, considered like a voxel, a volume pixel, right, this plank length is fundamental, or is there something more fundamental than that? There's emergent research to suggest that space and time emerge from other forces operating. And that's an interesting fact. So if that's the case, maybe you can get something smaller than a plank length, but not by any known means

that gives us an understanding in the first place. Isn't equivalent in time as well, isn't there? Yes, yes. So the plank length in time is how long it takes light To cross a plank length. Oh, no way. Yeah. Yeah, so that's a unit of time and that makes a cube in space time That is interesting the most the coolest explanation that I heard for it was that the Planck length is the pixel size of the simulation that we're living in. Yeah, that's another way to put it.

That's right. But when you get to the big rip, who knows what that will look like? We have no idea. And by the way, yeah, if we are a simulation, and you want to think a bit of that way, there's nothing stopping you from saying these are the pixels of our simulation. Is it right that the speed that light goes at is the maximum speed that anything can go at? Is that determined by the fact that it's light or is that a maximum speed limit and it happens to be that light travels at it? We don't know, but both are true. Both are true. And by the way, when light slows down, light slows down when it enters transparent media that are more dense than air.

So when it slows down, it actually hasn't slowed down. It's moving at the speed of light between the molecules, but then it has to pass through a molecule and that that slows down the total duration. That's it's got to go a further distance as it weaves through. So I don't know if it's quite just further distance or if it's the interaction that it has

with the molecules of the substance. I wouldn't think it's a further distance because that would imply something different. Bending war. Yeah, yeah. And I don't think it's distance dependent. But in any case, this, this, so the speed light is still going at the speed of light even when it's moving slower. That's my point. Which makes complete sense, obviously.

Right, right, right. I just found that really interesting. You wonder whether the maximum speed that things can go at is the speed of light, or if there is a maximum speed that things can go at and the light happens to travel at that speed. I thought that was an interesting distinction. Well, except material items can't travel at the speed of light. So, I'm recording. So you have my image here, and if I wanted to send join you, I can't travel 99.99999%

speed of light, but I can't travel the speed of light. It's forbidden, all the equations forbid it, and we've never seen it happen. Yeah, well, I don't know. The insights around how future civilizations can perhaps travel, whether or not we can wormhole tunnel our way across the galaxy and stuff like that. That kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier on with the intelligent life. It's not a surprise when you see just how spread out things are. It's only a presumption based on how likely it is that some life has occurred within our galaxy, but if the universe is as big as we thought it is and we don't have another example of life evolving, pretty difficult

to work out whether or not we should actually be seeing aliens at all. I can't remember what the letter is in the Fermi paradox, but there's one, what's the typical equation that goes along with the Fermi paradox? No, don't confuse it with the drink equation. That's it, thank you. Right, right.

Oh, you did, okay. That's the one I was talking about. The drink equation, you start out with a total number of stars in the galaxy. You start hacking away at it with fractions. What fraction of those stars have a planet? What fraction of the stars of planet have life? What fraction of stars, what fraction of stars

with planets are in the Goldilocks zone? And what with planets are in the Goldilocks zone, and what fraction of those in the Goldilocks zone have life, and what fraction of those in the Goldilocks zone with life have intelligent life, what fraction of those in the Goldilocks zone that have life and have intelligent life have intelligent life with technology that can actually communicate. And that enables you to remove the Roman Empire from this, because like I said, they wouldn't have known how to answer back if someone tried to talk to them. Where is the biggest hole in the Drake equation for you or what's the biggest question mark over? Right now, it's the, for me, it's, what is the anticipated length that a civilization is capable of communicating. And that, because that one doesn't rely

on pure astrophysics. There's a social, cultural dimension to that. And I, I can't bring my methods and tools of science to address that. Is it all wise enough to be good shepherds or the power that we wield such that seven generations from now, they'll be proud of us as their ancestors for having preserved the earth? I don't know that I can't. That's how it should be, okay? but it's not that, of course. Outside of your scope a little bit. Right.

Do you think that our descendants will leave the Milky Way eventually? No. You don't think so? No. Nothing we can't, there's just no reason to. I think as the sun gets hot and bulbous, we might want to move out to Mars and that will matter. And because Mars is farther away, so we get to delay the inevitable demise of our civilization

by knowing this well in advance and taking precautions to accommodate it. But otherwise, I'm good with earth just as we have it. That's got a limited time span on it though, right? What are you timing out on us? Well, whether it be the sun boiling off the ocean. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So we have to assume that we, as a mammal species,

outlive a typical mammal species that goes three million years, we have to somehow make it clear that we want to live beyond Earth itself and even beyond the Sun. So first you're going to plan it up, you're way away from the Sun, but then you have to find another star. By the way, something I've not talked about. When the Sun exhausts this hydrogen in its core as a big ball of helium. The sun dies, the sun will die because it can't convert helium

into carbon. Okay, that's fine. So how about all the rest of the star? It turns out if you find a way to cycle material from the outer star to the inner star, if you can do that, then you will prolong the life of the star 10 to 100 times. Because it only burns out when it's no longer hydrogen in its core, but the fresh hydrogen in the rest of the star and you constantly funnel it down. You've got, you've got exactly what you need. Was it sunshine? Was that the film where they send a mission to drop? I think they drop a nuke actually into the heart of the star in an effort to try and get it back. But that was the science fiction movie. I'm

aware, I'm aware. Yes, I'm getting, I'm trying to bring this back to the real world. So my point is just that that was talking about somehow impacting the natural flow of the sun. And what you're saying here is that if there was a way to funnel that back in, it wouldn't be a nuke, but if there was a way to do it. Correct. You just, you just, you just give it a new lease on life. In fact, there are these stars called blue stragglers. That's what we call them.

That should have evolved into a different state at the time we notice them, but they haven't. And all evidence points to that it's two stars that have collided and have become one star, and the act of colliding re-churned up the fuel supply, and it has given it a new lease in life. So these are stars that are lingering behind the evolution of a star cluster. And we have no other explanation for them, but that their inner has got churned up. That's pretty stragglers. So we need to find another star, fired at R1. That would be sort of reaching in with a ladle and doing it ourselves.

Collision for sure. Make that happen. Yes. Yeah, like you're cooking soup. That would be one solution. Yeah, it's one of the things I was thinking about. I think that a couple of the guys at the future of Humanities Institute are looking at solar forming. So how you would, if you wanted to create a solar system and move stuff out of the way that you didn't need there,

they're talking about some of that at the moment and I think that kind of probably ties in at least a little bit with how you would potentially be able to move a star around or at least the material inside of it. Well, so I'm not sure what their objective is. We're in a solar system now that has eight planets, and then I'm bothering us. I don't know why you'd want to move it around. I can tell you that modern models of the formation of planets show that you can start a solar system with upwards of 30 planets and not all orbits will be stable They if they're not stable, they'll fall into the sun, fall into Jupiter, or get ejected from the solar system altogether. And so this is a, so maybe they're saying, if you want to hurry up the evolution of a solar system, you say, okay, let's get rid of

these and add those and subtract those to move this into the right spot so that you have the Goldilocks effect. That's not just geoengineering, that's star system engineering that I don't foresee that anytime soon. Is that the best way if you wanted to design a solar system to overshoot on the number of planets that you would need and then sort of allow the orbits to sort themselves out. Well, you don't need the extra planet, so just stick a nice sized planet in the Goldilocks zone, it's a one planet solar system. It'll be stable.

The instability comes when you have a lot of objects tugging on each other for every orbital period, but you just throw one, maybe throw one a Saturn just to be beautiful at night. Just cool. Like when you're landscaping your garden. Yeah, I just hope something to do. Yes. Yeah, I understand. Yeah, I mean, to see a single planet solar system would be pretty cool. Yeah. And then you can say this sun is all ours. Even you Mars with no one on it. But isn't it that most solar systems,

or the vast majority of suns are twin suns rather than? Yeah, so I think that the proper way to say that is, more than half the stars in the night sky, when investigated more closely, reveal that they're in pairs, triples, or just multiple stars in a system. Right. So the single star system is not as common as you might think.

Why do you think that is just the way that gravity works? No, no, just planets go unstable. It's just... oh, sorry. Sorry. So I mixed two answers. If you have multiple star systems, you don't expect them to have many planets, because planets will not fully track their gravitational allegiance, and they can get ejected very easily. In the famous Star Wars scene, where Luke is using on the sand planet and he comes out and he looks, there's a double sunset, all right, very important and poignant moment in the film, containing the only accurate astrophysics in the film, by the way. So that's a planet orbiting a double star system. We've always known that it could happen, they showed it. But they did it

right because it is possible to orbit two in multiple plants. If your orbit is far away, compared to the distance among the stars to each other, then the orbit thinks it's just one source of gravity. But if the stars themselves are orbiting at great distances from each other and you are now weaving in and out and among them, that's a recipe for disaster. Welcome to the universe in 3D,

which is the new book that you've got out. What's going on with that? What was the inspiration behind that? Oh yeah, so that's actually the fourth in a series of welcome to the Universe books. The first was a textbook basically that I co-wrote with two colleagues of mine when we co-taught a class

for introductory astrophysics class at Princeton University. The class went from like 40 people to 300. And so it was very popular very quickly. We have to change rooms twice. And we're delighted by that, but we think we know why it was popular. It was taught in a very breezy way, very anecdotally. And all the three of us were pretty well connected

to all manner of things. And so it was just, so in that sense, it doesn't smell like a textbook, even though it looks like one. And, but some people said, we want to use it as a textbook for our class. So we said, okay, cool. So then we wrote a problem book to go with it because that enables you to assign problems.

Then people said, this book is too big. I want to learn what's in it, but in a short format. So then we created, welcome to the universe, the pocket sized tour that literally fix in your pocket. And then we said, well, the universe is something to look at and to embrace. So if we take selected hand-picked images, double them up in a stereo book, and have a viewer, then

these images become worlds. They become real. They become something you would interact with emotionally, not just intellectually. So that's what, that's what, welcome to the universe in 3D. It's 66 images, and it's a uniquely designed jacket binding so that the it unfolds and you have the built-in viewer. But the it doesn't end there. There's a website, welcome to the universe.net where all four books are featured but you go to the 3D book, and as a bonus feature, I've nam-rated the captions to each image pair. And I use my planetary invoice. Yes,

that is welcome to the universe. So yeah, I'm a director, planetary director, so I got to have that voice, right? So that way you can participate in the book while you're being read the captions rather than move back and forth and read them. So this is a little, a little after hours bonus that just, and it was like 10 days before the book release, you say, why don't we do this?

Okay, yeah, but I don't know one that has to do it. So everybody, if you do this, I would, I would, I would, we outvoted. Yeah. So I ended up doing it. So Neil deGrasse Tyson, ladies and gentlemen, what have you got coming up next? Is there anything that people should keep their eyes out for? Oh, thanks for asking.

Uh, I just finished another book. It was a COVID book. I said, you know, I could binge more, you know, Rick and Morty, or I could write a book. So I chose to write a book on a book that was gurgling within me. It's a book I could not have written even five years ago. It is called starry messenger, cosmic perspectives on civilization. And it is me taking a look at all that divide us, all that divides us and saying, here's what that looks like from space, or here's how an alien would think about it,

where here's what that argument you've just made. Here's what that looks like when you add a little bit of science to it, right? Science literacy. And what you'll find is that in most cases, the depth of your argument just dissolves away. And you end up, and I'm not talking about a compromised position in the middle, I'm talking about a whole new place that neither of you saw, because you're not thinking about it scientifically or cosmically. And so there are chapters, there's a chapter in there on gender and identity, on color and race, on truth and beauty, on life and death, on metarians and vegetarians. There's an, there's an eternal conflict for you.

And there's risk and reward. These things that have chow, that prevent us from all holding hands and singing cum bai'a, that might still be possible if you take another look at your argument. And that's what this book does. Why couldn't you have written it five years ago?

That wasn't wise enough. I didn't have enough because it's not just, let me throw down some science, I could do that at any time. It's, here's a nuanced way, the science influences this subtle argument, you think you're making that you think has the end all argument. I've had, I needed enough exposure to that, enough encounters with people to hear how they think about problems, so that when I come back at them, I can maximize the bandwidth of how I communicate with them. So yes, it's a book of maturity, dare I say. When are you planning to get that up? Oh, it's already, it's in press right now, so September. Which is not even that far from that.

Like May, June, July, August, you know, it's four and a half months. And so it'll have, it's, by the way, you can pre-order it, I think, on Amazon right now, actually. But it's a, it's a crazy, I would have been irresponsible, given what I know about this world and about science and about the universe, if I did not offer this book to the public. I'd be irresponsible. And, you know, there are little things, observations. For example, you didn't ask, but I'll just tell you,

in the risk and reward chapter, it's all about how ill-equipped we are to evaluate probability and statistics. We are so bad at probability and statistics, entire industries exist to exploit how bad we are. They call casinos. They call lottery. If we taught probability and statistics in school, early in school, with same ranking as reading right in arithmetic and probability, okay, as statistics. Add it to that list. If we did that, no one would play the lottery. Oh, here's something interesting. In order to make you always

allow the lottery, they use lottery revenue to pay for education. So, if that money that went to education went to teaching people probably in statistics, you couldn't hold the lottery because all that extra education money would go away, right? Because no one would play the lottery that's feeding you. So it is in the lottery's interest to not teach you probably in statistics. There's interesting little facts about this that run throughout society and all those topics that I mentioned. There's a whole discussion in there on the removal of statues.

Have you thought about that scientifically? What that means? What are the arguments? What is the weight of the argument? Or are you reacting emotionally to it? I don't mind emotions, but emotion without some kind of foundation in rational thought, then society becomes a free-for-all, and there's no objective foundation on which to base anything, not the least of which are laws, which should be based on objective truths. Oh, by the way, there's an entire section there on law and order, okay? And what does it mean that a jury has arrived at a verdict based on what? On a testimony? Is that testimony from a human being

that used their own senses to evaluate what is and is not true about this world? Really? You're gonna put someone in prison based on a human beings testimony? Holy shit, okay? You know, in science, if you came to a conference and this is true because I saw it,

let's get the hell out of here, okay? Our brain only barely works as an organ. Okay? Barely works. You can look at at one of the books with the with the images that fool you. Optical illusions. Go pick up any optical illusion, but there's a line and is the line longer or shorter than the other line. I don't know. is it a vase or is it a face? In the, these are simple line drawings that completely confound us. And we're gonna send people to hang

or to whatever, they kill them in 15 states because you have a testimony that implicates them? Oh my gosh, so I'm bringing scientific rationality to these issues. That's all it is, that's that book is about. And it's a whole other thing, unlike anything I've ever written. I birthed the book during COVID,

because I'm alone and it was growingly on up in me and the baby had to get born and it got born, and that's what happened. And now you're stepping into the culture was? Well, except I'm not telling you how to how to think or feel. I'm arming you to become a better thinker when it's time for you to feel about what it is you want to pass judgment on. And what's that book called again? Starry Messenger, cosmic perspectives on civilization. Nailed to Garcetice and ladies and gentlemen.

Nail, I appreciate you. Thanks. Thanks for having me. you