StarTalk Radio - A Tribute to Neil Armstrong – StarTalk Radio Cosmic Queries

Episode Date: March 28, 2013

Our first Cosmic Queries episode: Neil deGrasse Tyson answers questions from fans and offers personal reflections in a “Tribute to Neil Armstrong.” Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and this is StarTalk. Hello. Junine, I miss you when we don't have you. And this is StarTalk. Hello. Junine, I miss you when we don't have you. I know, I miss being here. It's a tribute to Apollo, and we're part of the Q&A section.

Yes, this is the Q&A. Did you know him? Yes, I did know Neil Armstrong. In fact, we first met when I was 14 years old. Oh, really? Yeah, I was on board the SS Canberra, a huge ship. Did you stow away? Or was it a formal... I fit into a footlocker, yeah. And they're like, who's this kid?

I was 14 and I traveled alone. I think I was the youngest unaccompanied person on this ship of 2,000 people. They took off all the shuffleboards and all the deck entertainment, and it was converted into a floating science laboratory. And in June of 1973, that's how old I was, this ship sailed from Manhattan to the coast of Northwest Africa to view a total solar eclipse of the sun. Wow. That's what, of course, a solar eclipse has to be of the sun.

I would hope, yes. A total solar eclipse, one of the longest of the century. And Neil Armstrong was one of the invited educational staff. Who else was on the ship? Isaac Asimov was there. Oh, wow. And some other people you might not have heard of but have extreme expertise in things you want to know about. There were climate scientists.

Henry Winkler. There's expertise there I haven't learned of yet. Possibly. Was the Fonz on in 1973? It must have been, yeah. Happy Days? Yeah, isn't that? Happy Days was like harking back to the 50s, probably in the 70s.

There it was. So I met him there, Happy Days was like harking back to the 50s, probably in the 70s. In the 70s, there it was. Yeah. So I met him there, and he was a quiet man then, he was a quiet man his whole life. Mm-hmm. He was with his kids, who were sort of my age, and that's when we first met. Not that he would remember me after that, for decades, of course, I was just someone else who went to shake his hand. But later on, when I got more active in sort of the civics of science and space exploration,

I appeared on committees for NASA, and he was on several of these committees. So we got to know each other much better. And so then you started spending time together. Yeah, well, we were not beer-drinking buddies, but no. Wine, but maybe wine-dr drinking buddies and the occasional salmon. So we were, uh, no, so we, we knew each other. We would correspond. We would talk about the past, present and future of NASA.

And like I said, he remained a very private person over all that time. And, uh, one of my favorite statements made about him was from one of his fellow Apollo astronauts from the film in the Shadow of the Moon, I think it was called, where the whole documentary was just interviews with the moonwalkers, with those who went to the moon. That's it. There was no narrator. There was no fancy reenacted footage. It was just them talking. you know, the fact that Neil was not a big media celebrity meant that each one of us in the world could take a little bit of ownership of the first steps on the moon.

Because let's say he came off the moon and started singing and dancing and saying, I'm Neil Armstrong, and you're not, and I landed on the moon, and you didn't. All of a sudden... Like a jerk would. Like a space jerk. If that's what he started doing, then you're not part of that. Yeah. But instead he let it be the sort of whole community of everybody.

He let it be the whole community. And he receded and it became a gift to us all. And so this was true then and now. Like I said, he's been on in the backdrop he hasn't been inactive in fact he was professor at university of cincinnati professor of engineering and so it's not like he disappeared he still ran his life but he served this country landed on the moon walked on the moon and went back to becoming a private citizen right yeah that's how that how that played so eugene you got questions for me from they do combed from the internet the internet yeah invented by

neil armstrong he has so many secret inventions so these came over google plus and twitter and twitter google plus facebook our facebook page one from Friendster is just a request. Dating, no. Here's a, these are two questions from Google+. Now that you mention it, you know, if we're low on cash, we could start like a Stardate dating service. StarTalk dating, yes. Geeks finding geeks. This is perfect. Stardate.

Stardate, there you go. And then some redone Star Trek thing. All right. Well, now that we have that business in place. What do you have? Okay, this is from Aaron W. Came over by what means? Came by Google Plus, whatever that is.

All right. No, I'm sure it'll survive, just like Google Wave did. Okay, enough about that. Aaron W. writes, I'm curious about the tech side of space. What kind of computers ran the Apollo 11 mission and others like it? Speed, storage capacity, et cetera. And then she also adds what are astronauts using now 50 years later. I'll extend the question to mission control as well.

Yeah, wow. Okay, no, I'm not that fluent in hardware to give a precise answer to that question without looking it up. But what I can tell you is, without hesitation, that the computing power of a singing birthday card rivals that of what was used to launch the Saturn V rocket. Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's no... So it's like way less than a PCjr. Yeah, and actually, I shouldn't say a greeting card. Probably closer to... A solar calculator. Yeah, and actually, I shouldn't say a greeting card. Probably closer to some fraction of your cell phone is far beyond anything that you've gone on.

Well, my cell phone is probably way more advanced. Yeah, it is. But what I'm saying, I'm trying to give a sense of stuff you carry around on your hip is completely, it's vastly greater than anything we went to the moon on. Right. And so back then, that was a time when things were simpler. By the way, simple things are not necessarily worse. All right?

Sometimes they're better because there are fewer parts to fail. Right. When the shuttle was announced, I remembered this distinctly. And they said, this is the most advanced and complex machine ever to be launched into space. Right. NASA spoke boastfully of this. And I said to myself, that does not feel right. Right.

That's not what makes something good. Then it has more things to break. I don't know about this. And when you look at risk assessment, you look at the likelihood of a part failing by how many launches or over how much time. And every part that you add to the structure of that vessel, you have to consider the likelihood of all of these causing a failure. So in other words, if you have 100 light bulbs and they blow out once a month, let's say,

and you have 100 of them, then they're going out six or seven times a month. I mean, you're changing light bulbs all the time. Ideally, spaceships would just be eight-track cassettes which would have very few parts and fly perfectly. When we come back, there'll be much more on StarTalk Radio. We are in the StarTalk Q&A. Neil deGrasse Tyson. See you. The future of space and the secrets of our planet revealed.

This is StarTalk. We're back in our celebration of Apollo. The death of Neil Armstrong. That's something to celebrate his life, I think. You know, I committed myself recently. I said to myself, if anyone dies in their 80s, I'm not going to mourn their death. I'm going to celebrate their life. Because if you live into the 80s, you're doing good.

You did a great job. You did good. I mean, I would extend that to sort of 60s and up. 60s? You could reach them down in there. I'm just saying, I like the idea that if someone was 79 and you're like, I'm not going to celebrate this. I would just, I think it's fine to celebrate any length of time. Just try to look at it positively.

Look at it. As opposed to just being like, 79, too bad. Wasted life. Too bad. Wasted life. But we left off in the previous segment about a discussion of what the computing power was available to Apollo astronauts versus today. And here's a question actually from Robert Scott Herrick, which follows up on that. He writes, I'd like to expand on Aaron W.'s question. Fifty years later, what would we do differently when going back to the moon?

What technological advancements would help in a new endeavor to land on the moon? Let me slip an interesting story in there. When the Hubble was first designed and it was built and it got ready to be launched on the shuttle, it had a very early chip running its onboard computer. And then there was the Challenger disaster. So there was Hubble delayed in its launch, sitting mothballed in a warehouse. And, you know, many years later, the thing finally launches. Meanwhile, we're several generations of chip more advanced than what the Hubble was launched in. So it was kind of uncomfortable to know that you spent all this money on this spacecraft that was up there that did not have nearly the computing power that you were enjoying here on Earth. And when they serviced the Hubble to fix the problem mirror, they ripped out all the old

boards and put in and updated the new ones. And so it's something that when you have a long horizon of launch and design and functioning, you want to be able to factor in the ability to update your electronics. Otherwise, you're... Well, chips increase in speed, what, every one and a half weeks? Yeah. Is it a month and a half?

Yeah. Moore's Law says it doubles in speed and power every 18 months. Right. We've held close to that for over the decades. I can't wait until whatever the singularity happens. Just 30 years away until we're all rock robots. We'll do a show on that. And we'll invite you back.

Good. So, yeah. So now when we go, the computing is just everywhere. We have computers in your refrigerators now. And everything you interact with practically has a computer. So space would be no different from this. It would have to be temperature tested and shock tested and all the rest of this. Would it be risky, though, to make everything like that going into space?

Would there be fallbacks where you wouldn't? For everything important, they always build in redundancies. Right. Always. And do they ever build in any sort of analog? I mean, or... You mean an abacus? Yeah, yeah.

Would you have an abacus along with a solar calculator just in case you really needed to do quick math? Right, because no one can do math in their head anymore at all. What if you got to the moon and then all of a sudden you had to do your taxes? And then you were like, oh, my God, I have none of the tools because all the electricity is dead. Yeah, I think, you know, they don't have to pay taxes while they're in space. I'm sure of it. And if not, we'll start a movement to make that happen. That's literally, I think, the plot of the movie with Bruce Willis, whatever it was called, Asteroid or something.

Anyway. So getting back to Neil Armstrong. So when he died, August 25th. Yes. When he died, August 25th, as you may know, the family asked of the world to consider that evermore to be wink at the moon night around the world. And so that's the day he died. And I looked up and I winked at the moon that night. And by the way, the moon is also up in the daytime.

And there was also a blue moon. Yes, there was. In fact, on the day of the blue moon, there was a private family ceremony honoring him, and I was invited to that. I felt very honored. There was at least ten astronauts from the Apollo era who were there. All in their upper

70s, low 80s. None of them are spring chickens. It's the closing of an era. I was very moved by the thought that here is a time when we garnered all of our resources, our emotional, political, cultural resources to explore and walk on the moon. And now the few among us who had that privilege are dying away. And it's as though a chapter in our life that we were all so proud of is fading. And it wouldn't be fading if we kept going.

Sure, they would die, but more would be born and more would be doing it. Yeah. Right? And so it changed the nature of that event for me. So I was sadder than I thought I wanted to be. Than you thought you'd be. Right. Right to the end of.

That's right. The death of Neil Armstrong should just be, oh, the early guys are dying. But what they started still exists. It still exists. How did the astronauts that were still there sort of feel about it? I mean, were they? You know, they're grownups. You know, I mean, they're old.

And their mortality has descended on them as well. So, I mean, it was very respectful. And then there was some reminiscences from his kids and from an old friend of his from many years back. And so I met the rest of the family that I had not met previously. And for me, what always makes me misty-eyed was at the end, you know, he served in the Navy. And, of course, there was a Navy color guard there that walked in with the flag. And at the end, they walk out and we exit from the tent. It was in a country club setting, big open field golf course, open field.

And sure enough, in comes the missing man formation, the four jets that fly directly overhead. And one of them pulls away right when they fly over your gathering. And it leaves the formation, and the formation continues. And I get teary every time I see it. So it was a beautiful ceremony. It was a beautiful ceremony. A beautiful ceremony.

And sort of, did they talk about it all NASA now and in the future? No, because it's not. It was just more of a memorial. It wasn't about that. It's a celebration. Yeah. I mean, it could have devolved into that, but it was not. It was about the man.

And yes, we know him for walking on the moon, but there's the rest of his life. You know, he loved golf. He was a family man, and he had kids. And so it was the rest of his life fleshed out. And that was the value of that event. So you've got more questions on this. Yeah, I know, lots of questions. Go for it.

Where do these come from? This is from Facebook, which is a social networking. So Facebook page, just find us. We're Star Talk Radio. Facebook, just find us, easy. And like us when you get there. This is from Al. Just Al?

Well, maybe it's Al Basiri. Okay, thank you. But now I don't know if I pronounced it correctly or not. I will take it. All right, go on. What does he say? I had heard that when Apollo 11 was launched, it was done so with less technology than what we have today in our cell phones. Everyone thinks their cell phone is a spaceship, basically.

Had the motivation been from science itself and not the Cold War, how much further do you think we could have been today in comparison to the Mars Curiosity rover? Ooh. Don't get me started. Ooh, that's a whole thing. Oh, my gosh. Okay, if the motivation had been science only and not the Cold War, we would have never gotten to the moon in the first place.

Right. So it's a sort of funny question where it's like, say at the time science was very important. That's not the answer Al is expecting, but it is the truth. We've got to eat it. But it is the truth. We've got to eat it. It's to dislodge $110 billion, today's dollars back then, to go to the moon could have only happened in a military atmosphere. Science has never been the driver of major costly projects in the history of human conduct.

Science, discovery, exploration has never been that. There's always been a driver behind it all. And that driver has been war. It has been economics. It has been hegemony. Love that word? A good SAT word? Yeah, no.

I bet you would pass your SATs even today. This morning. Unfortunately, science has piggybacked these activities, and exploration has piggybacked them, but it's never led it. So we would have never even gone to the moon. If someone could fake an alien signal that seemed like it was a threat, but coming here in, say, 15 years, would that be the best way to really get us motivated? Yeah, it would be. If the alien said, get the hell off of Earth because we're going to nuke it. Here's 15 years. You have 15 years to leave Earth, and we would finally have the defenses.

We would terraform Mars, terraform Venus, we'd set up colonies on the moon, and we'd be scattered into the solar system. We would terraform Florida. We would sell seats to watch Earth get destroyed, and it would totally rock. I will work on sending a false signal threatening the Earth, then. Thank you, Eugene, on that. You're welcome, Earth. I am a savior. We got about 30 seconds before our break.

Eugene, did you have any quick questions about the Apollo era or Neil Armstrong? I have so many, but they're so similar to the ones that are being. Oh, that's lame, Eugene. Oh, yeah, I had them, but they're the same as what we're getting off the Internet. All right, we'll go back to the ones on the Internet. I'll think of a good question. Okay, Eugene. Did they eat ice cream?

Just kidding. Don't answer that. No, but they did have time. This is StarTalk Radio. We'll be right back. So we are in the Cosmic Queries, the after hours part. Yeah. Of StarTalk Radio. StarTalk After Hours. Yeah. Cosmic Queries, the after hours part of StarTalk Radio.

StarTalk After Hours. Yeah. Cosmic Queries. You got another one for me, Eugene? Well, actually, let's take a call. From the lines. Yeah, let's take a call from the line. Michelle Obama.

Go. Hi, my name is Jake, and I'm in Portland, Oregon. I've always wondered, what does it sound like to astronauts up on the moon? I know there's not much atmosphere up there, and sound travels through atmosphere. But what sorts of sounds are coming from their suits? And could you hear anything with limited atmosphere? Thank you. Let me just answer that.

It sounds, if I understand correctly, like Jethro Tull. Specifically, the album thing is a brick. 45 minutes of orchestral pop. I would have picked Dark Side of the Moon. Yes. If you're picking album tracks, Eugene. Well, and I think we now know why I picked Jethro Tull to not pick Dark Side of the Moon. It does not sound like Pink Floyd in people's suits.

It sounds like Sid Barrett. That was a great question. So what happens is the suits themselves are pressurized. So they're breathing air in their suits. And there is no air on the moon. So in other words, they can't talk to each other, obviously, but they do via radio communication. So there's a little voice microphone, and it transmits to the other astronauts on the moon. So that's how they communicate with each other. It is electronically, not acoustically in that sense.

So what they would hear is this. That's all they would hear. Well, they'd hear their own breathing. Unless they started talking to themselves, then they'd hear their own voice. That's correct. But otherwise they would hear breathing. And they did. And whatever. So if they were to sing whatever song they sang, they'd hear their own voice. That's correct. But otherwise, they would hear breathing. And they did. And whatever.

So if they were to sing whatever song they sang, they would hear. Yes. And so there's not as interesting an answer as what the caller might have. He had hoped that there was just tons of rattling. I think it would be terrifying if you were in a suit and there was breathing, and then all of a sudden you started hearing the suit make weird clanking noises. Well, that big backpack that they wore. Yeah. and then all of a sudden you started hearing the suit make weird clanking noises. Well, that big backpack that they wore also is there.

It maintains body temperature because they're exposed to the sun. And without coolant, they would basically overheat. Oh, how hot is it? Well, so temperature is a funny thing. And it depends on what the medium is that's doing the absorbing of the sun and what color that thing is. So if you have a white sheet of paper, it won't absorb much sun and it won't get that hot. A black piece of paper will absorb the sun and it will get hot. It will go to several hundred degrees.

Oh, really? That's correct. So if you had a black piece of paper on the moon, it would set light on fire. No, no, no. That's not hot enough to ignite. Oh, it won't reach 451. 451. Just a guess. I wish there was a book about it't reach 451. 451. Just a guess. I wish there was a book about it.

Fahrenheit 451. So it would just get very hot. But you could cook an egg on it, on a black piece of paper. You could poach an egg, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. You could poach it. Yeah, you're not going to fry it. You'll poach it.

And so you... I can't wait to go to the moon and poach eggs on black pieces of paper. Cook eggs on the... But on white paper, it would get not nearly as good. No, that's right, because it reflects the energy from the sun rather than absorbing it. We don't have these issues as badly on Earth because the air around us is generally what we consider to be the thing that has the temperature. Right. You're not saying, what is the temperature of the couch or of the metal in the car?

You say, what is the air temperature? Right. And that kind of homogenizes. So the moon having no air means just the object itself is what has the temperature. The object itself has the temperature, and that temperature is not shared with other objects unless they're in physical contact. So that's the thermodynamics of the moon. Thank you. Thermodynamics 101.

And in terms of the sounds, yeah, you hear any sound that you're making, they would surely hear the vibrations from their backpack. So the backpack mostly cools the suit because through the window you get hot? The window meaning the helmet. Well, their suits are white, so they're reflecting as much solar energy as possible. But you want to maintain a livable body temperature within the suit. Yes. You don't want to send people all the way to the moon only to cook them, or sorry, poach them

in their suits. So what else you got for me? In this, the Cosmic Queries part of StarTalk. This is from Twitter from Mike Kunha at StarTalk Radio. What have we

learned regarding space engineering since Neil Armstrong was up there? Space engineering. We learned how to build in zero G. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It was not obvious that that was something you could do. And zero G, can you make structures that are useful?

Can you put telescopes there? Can you – what about this sort of orbit around the Earth? Is that a useful place to do any business? Yeah. And literal and figurative business. And historically, if you ever looked at sci-fi, they would always go to a surface and that's where they would pitch tent. That's where they would do their thing.

And I would say beginning with the film 2001, they showed a space station being an actual place. Right, to build stuff. To build stuff, to do things. Star Trek also, when did they, because in the first Star Trek, don't they build things in space? Well, yeah, so in space you can build things so large that they would not otherwise be stable in a gravitational, under 1G. So the Hubble telescope, for example, is unstable, structurally unstable at 1G. It can only exist in 0G. So the Hubble telescope, for example, is unstable, structurally unstable at 1G. It can only exist in 0G.

And the space station itself is the size of a football field. You can't bring that thing down to Earth and make a tourist attraction out of it. It wouldn't hold itself up. So engineering is... 1G, how much... What's the G here? We'll get back to that when we come back.

Star Talk Radio. We'll get back to that when we come back. Okay. Star Talk Radio. We'll see you after the break. This is Star Talk. Star Talk Radio. We are back to StarTalk after hours. StarTalk, the cosmic queries part of the broadcast. And just before break, we left off, Eugene, talking about the fact that we learned how to do extraordinary engineering feats in space.

And I don't think we advanced a space frontier since Apollo because we haven't gone beyond the moon. We haven't even gone beyond low Earth orbit. But in low Earth orbit, we've done heroic things, created the space station, which itself is the size of a football field. Extraordinary structures that we learned we can not only build in space, but maintain, gain access to. And they wouldn't, and you couldn't build it here on Earth. They're structurally unsound on Earth.

Unbuildable on Earth, because every part of it is weightless, so there are no load-bearing elements to it. Whereas on Earth, the bigger you build something, the more load-bearing the lower segments need to be, and the materials have to be, have a strength commensurate with those needs. So you can make a space station out of foil. I mean, you wouldn't want to, but you could. Aluminum foil.

Aluminum foil space station. That's a fun project. Wait, so you said that it couldn't survive in 1G. How many Gs are on Earth? Okay, so by definition, Earth is 1G. Okay. Earth's surface is 1G. And so if you were in an environment that was 1.5G, if you stood on a bathroom scale, you'd weigh 1.5 times your current weight.

Right. So when they talk about pilots pulling 3 Gs or this sort of thing or 2 Gs, you put a bathroom scale under their butt, you would weigh them. They would weigh three times their normal body weight. Because they're going so fast. Well, it's not speed. It's acceleration. They're going so heavy. It, it's not speed. It's acceleration. They're going so heavy. It's going so heavy.

It's acceleration. And the two ways to accelerate, one is to just go faster and faster and faster. And that way you'd feel pressure against the back of your seat. Another one is to change direction that you're moving in. And then you feel, that's that, quote, force that you feel against the wall, the door of your car when you make a sharp turn. So those are forces changing your velocity, one changing your speed, the other changing your direction. And so, yeah, in a pilot pulling a 3G turn, they're changing their direction and they

feel the G-forces there. Okay. Yeah. I have a question here from Facebook from John Hart. And the question is, wasn't Neil Armstrong the second man on the moon after the cameraman? And that's the question. Yes. Next question. That's it? Yes? Because what he's referring to, you know, there are all these documentaries that recreate the ascent of Mount Everest and the descent to the Marianas Trench.

And there's always a camera at the point where the person who is the first to reach that point reaches. And so – You're like, how did the camera get there? It's a hilarious thing. And I always, in fact, joke about that when they have to redo documentaries. But no, so the Lamb had cameras positioned out on its legs, and so they could watch things happen as they came down the ladder.

Right. That's the other very reasonable version. Though I do like the idea that there's some cameraman who isn't allowed to say that he was the first man on the moon. Because he was more of a videographer than an astronaut, though he traveled to space. All right. What else you got? I got Gregory Langhauser from Facebook.

If we wanted to return to the moon on a manned mission, assuming we have the money, how long would we need to build the ships, train the astronauts, ground crew, and go? Also, moon base or Mars base? Which is cooler? Let's ask the first part. Yeah, you know know who knows today because back in the in the day in the golden age of uh when we were trying to do that nasa was lean and mean and it was completely conceived and designed to accomplish that one feat right to

put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth and so now nasa has way more in its portfolio i mean it's got missions to the planets, and it's got the shuttle. Well, not anymore the shuttle, but it's trying to redesign a vehicle that will get us back, and we've got the space station. So it doesn't always follow that if it took 10 years to do it in the 60s, it would take less time to do it 40 years later. So I couldn't tell you how long this would take. My sense of it is at least 10 years, fewer than 20 years. Really? That's correct.

Wait, if we want to – If we said today, we are going to go to the moon as soon as we can. Yeah. Yeah, 10 years. Really? You don't think we could go in like five or six? No. Okay.

Well, then I won't try. Yeah. I'm just not – I just – but meaning if we had the research, if we'd like genuinely dedicated resources and. If we felt threatened, we could do it in. For sure. Quickly. If we felt, if our national security depended on it.

Yeah. That's, yeah. So two questions. One is, do you think 10 years reasonably? And then if our national security depended on it, how fast? Five years. Five years. Okay.

Or less. Easily. Or less. Or less. Well, there you go. So that's the – yeah. I mean, that's my question. My question is how fast is – if we were –

Yeah, if China said they want to put military bases on Mars, we would be in Mars in ten months. One month to fund, design, build, and test the vehicle, and nine months to get there. That's exactly how that would be. Wow. We got to run. Okay, I'll see you around. We got another segment coming? No, no, no.

No, no, I'm not listening. Don't leave. I'm just testing you. We'll be right back with StarTalk After Hours. Unlocking the secrets of your world and everything orbiting around it. This is StarTalk. We're back in this special StarTalk radio program. We were commemorating Apollo.

Apollo and Neil Armstrong. And should we take some calls? Yeah. Let's take some calls? Yeah. Let's take another call. Yeah, let's take another call. All right. Hi, this is Sally calling from New York. Who do you think the successor to Neil Armstrong is,

and where will they be exploring? What great feat will be accomplished that will galvanize us the same way that his walking on the moon did thank you excellent sally thanks for that call well i was asked a similar question to this in the twitterverse uh-huh yeah and you know what i said i said the person, the first person who walks on Mars is a middle schooler today in China. I got in big trouble. Oh, I'm not patriotic. Oh, my gosh, that's un-American.

How could you possibly do just when we're trying to drum up our support for our own. Well, what better way to drum up support than to be like, unless we act fast, it'll be a middle schooler in China. I'm just trying to be factual. And if you look at trend lines, look at what China's investing in their space exploration programs and the track that they find themselves on.

Are they spending much more than us? They have a much greater cultural, financial, and political commitment to that exercise than we do. If we could only also enslave half our citizens. Every year. Imagine the advances we could make. Every year, NASA goes hat in hand to Congress. Right.

And if that were not what was necessary, NASA, we'd be, you know, the whole solar system would be our backyard by now. But that's just not the case. So I was just trying to be truthful about it. In fact, it has been said accurately that in the 1960s, there were two spacefaring countries. And in this, the 21st century, the second decade of the 21st century, there are two spacefaring countries, but one of them is not the United States. Right now, we have no capacity to send a human being into space. Well, I mean, we could probably do it. We just can't bring them back and they wouldn't be in a shuttle.

They would have to be thrown at almost unimaginable speeds just towards the moon. They wouldn't be in one piece either. Yes. Right. They would be ejected out of a flying plane. Now, of course, we've sent robots everywhere. And we've got robots headed even to Pluto and one that's exiting the solar system as we speak, the Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in the 1970s. So it's not as though we have not been to space.

But if you're thinking about the crude space vehicles, that's the gender-neutral way to say it, a crude spacecraft rather than manned, then it's not clear who the next person will be. And from my read of the way things are going, it could just as easily be someone from China taking a first step on Mars. Well, this leads me to a question from Facebook, from Laura Venner. What do you think needs to happen to motivate Americans to get excited about the space program the way they did during the Apollo missions? Yeah, that's a great question.

Because I will say that, you know, you talk about how the Cold War is very motivating, but also people were genuinely excited, and you know, about... Yeah, are they excited enough to write a $100 billion check unless they feel threatened? The answer is no. The history of this exercise is no.

No. Just look at all the expensive things people have done throughout human culture. We've waged war. There was the – Ice swans made of ice. That's costly but not really expensive. It's not a major redirection of the GDP of a nation. Right.

But look at it. The Great Wall of China, the cathedrals of Europe. You can make a list of these that are really expensive. They all involve sort of feudal or slightly enslavey political systems. But they involve the praise of deity, the praise of royalty. They involve the promise of economic return. That's the Columbus voyages, the Magellan voyages, Lewis and Clark. They involve war or what we'd otherwise call defense.

And so these are the motivators. I am not so, I will not be naive and say, we should go to Mars and send people there because it is in our DNA. Right. It is, we are Americans. We should go because there is a money god on Mars. And once we can just get the money god, we'll be perfect. So I think we can go to Mars if we convince people that the act of going to Mars stimulates the STEM field, science, technology, engineering, and math.

Makes people want to become engineers and scientists. Makes people want to do the kinds of things that invent the economies of tomorrow. of tomorrow. And so, in fact, it becomes an economic plan because of how the cultural mission spills into the rest of society and culture. And then we invent the tomorrow that we always thought should have been here by now back in the 1960s. So basically, it's – I want flying cars.

That's what this comes down to. And flying skateboards. Hoverboards. We have a term for it. A phone that's also a camera. We've got to take a break here, but when StarTalk returns, Eugene and I will enter

into a rapid round of Cosmic Queries. These are questions sent in by our fans from across all our social media on topics about anything and everything in the cosmos.

We'll see you then. Welcome back to StarTalk. Here's more of this week's episode. We're going to pack in as many answers as I can. Here's more of this week's episode. describing a relatively recently found quasar cluster, which apparently is too big to exist in the universe, according to our current state of understanding. I am wondering now, of course, how an object could even be too large for the entire universe and also what that exactly means for our understanding of the cosmos. No, so that's a great question. So I think there's a mix-up of information there.

So if there's an object, you have like galaxies out there, right? Sure. And then you have like pairs of galaxies and they know about each other because they orbit one another. Yeah. They can have clusters of galaxies and they orbit like bees in a hive would. And so you can see that galaxies can know about the existence of other galaxies that are nearby, and they create what we call a cluster. Now, if you have a cluster of quasars, and they know about each other, but they're too far away from one another for the age of the universe

to have allowed them to know about one another at the time they were created, that's a problem. Yes, it's's a problem. So, so. It's definitely a problem. So in other words, it's a coherent structure that is larger than the universe at the time would have allowed to have existed. Right, but now it's fine.

No, well now it would have been fine, but back then, we're talking about quasars in the early universe. The early universe back then, the universe was smaller. It was the size of like a pan, the size of a Marshalls. Pick a time and any – pick a time and we can find a time in the universe where – pick a size. There's a time in the universe when it was that size. Marshalls.

Marshalls, yes. A marble, yes. An atom, yes. A football stadium, yes. I see. So it's a challenge when you have this. The universe brims with mysteries. We don't have answers to them.

Is that the name of your band? All right, here's a question from Nick. Christoph Wetterich, theoretical physicist at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. If he's a theoretical physicist, he should have no questions for me whatsoever. Well, it's too late. This guy is quoting him. It's too late for me. Oh, he's quoting theoretical physicist, he should have no questions for me whatsoever. Well, it's too late. Okay. This guy is quoting him. It's too late for me.

Oh, he's quoting the other guy. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I thought there was a question from. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, Nick is like expanding universe and then he – and then this is the message. Christoph, a theoretical physicist at the University of Heldelberg in Germany has recently – That would be Heidelberg.

Yeah, I'm just testing you. Okay. That would be Heidelberg. Yeah, I'm just testing you. Has recently proposed an idea that the universe isn't expanding, but instead gaining mass. If the entire universe is gaining mass at the same proportions, it makes his theory impossible to test, though it remains mathematically possible. Nature News ran the article with a couple of opinions. Cosmologist Hongang Sheng Zhao, who thought it should be entertained, and Naish Ashfordy, an astrophysicist in Canada who preferred the standard Occam-Razor approach. Have you read this paper? Whether you have or have not, what are your thoughts on

or initial reaction to it? Okay. Thank you for having me read all these names that I have tried to do justice to. But you didn't even get the city right, so... Yeah, but that's because I was terrified that I was going to say Hong Kong Zhang Zhao

incorrectly. So what we have going on here is a new idea that someone puts forth that could explain what we already know to be true, but in a new and novel way. There's a time-honored history of this going back in the middle of the known universe, turning our geocentric world into a heliocentric world. His book called De Revolutionibus, that book, which is one of the most coveted books in the history of publishing that goes for millions of dollars at auction, if you want to pick up one from the original first... I would love to.

Maybe I'll start a Kickstarter to buy it. For the original first edition, that idea was so heretical. To put the sun in the middle and not the earth? It is clear and obvious from any read of the Bible that earth is in the middle of all motion and everything goes around the earth. That's how any movement is described. And earth is stationary. So to say something that's not that is heretical and at the time punishable by trial and the inquisition. So at the beginning of it, there's a disclaimer. And the disclaimer not written by Copernicus.

It says, this is probably not true, but it makes the math a little easier. So for that reason alone, it's worth publishing so that the mathematicians can calculate where the planets are in the night sky. That's a good, great way around it. So the point is, if you have a new idea, it could be completely radical from what was prevailing at the time. And it could be right. It could be wrong. First, you want to make sure it doesn't predict something that you already know is not true. And you want it to predict something that you haven't discovered yet.

And that'll give you confidence that it's a real idea. And it's not just exactly mapping onto what you already know is true. If that's all it is, it's not useful. It's just somebody else's other idea. And you don't want it to turn it into a Richard Kipling. Just a big idea party. A Richard Kipling just so story. That's how the leopard got the spots.

It got before this way. And here's how the elephant got its trunk. You could just come up with another explanation. Right. That doesn't make it right. It's just another explanation. Right. And it's got to survive the testing.

So you're not a fan of multiple origin stories. No, you want to make a prediction that we can test it. And if the prediction fails, then we discard the idea. So I don't know the idea well enough to know what kind of predictions it makes. If it makes no predictions, it's not useful to anyone. Right. Not anyone scientifically. Sounds like you're not a huge fan of theoretical physicists. No, no. Or they're fine.

On a scale of 1 to 10, where would you put them? They're 11. That's a very disingenuous 11. My wife is a mathematical physicist. I've got to say nice things about her. Right. I don't want to ruin your marriage. What else you got? ingenuous 11 my wife is a mathematical physicist okay i've got to say nice things okay right i don't want to ruin your marriage um what else you got okay uh gareth asks i've read some theories

that harp can be used to manipulate the weather is this possible yeah harp is uh high altitude radio pension i always forget i always forget the acronym. There are people who are sure that the government is stockpiling aliens and controlling everything about anything we would ever think about, and they clearly have never worked for the government because the level of incompetence in the government and inefficiency knows no bounds, for starters. It's true that you could manipulate the weather like they did during the Olympics in China.

It's not that you can't manipulate the weather. It's that whether you would really have any serious control. Well, weather happens in many places. So it comes about from the heat balance, from the energy coming from the sun, what it reflects off of, what it gets absorbed by, what the up currents do, what the down drafts do, what the rotation of the earth is doing, all of this factors in. And so I have not been convinced by any of the reports

to suggest that experiments in the upper atmosphere, physics experiments, are having any effect on our weather whatsoever. Right. And it would be tragic if we wanted to say, oh, that's why it's getting hotter in the world. Okay? Because there's some experiment happening.

That would be tragic because we would be missing the 900-pound gorilla in the room. Right. And then, but can you... The carbon dioxide gorilla. Yes. Yes, the 900-pound carbon dioxide gorilla. All right. Here's another question. By the way, I don't think gorillas can weigh 900 pounds.

Is that true? Yeah. The biggest one I've seen, so not 900 pounds. 500 pounds, yeah. Not 900. So a 900-pound elephant. Like a pumpkin. I bet there's like a pumpkin that someone has made with a gorilla, like a 500-pound gorilla holding a 400-pound pumpkin.

That would work, yes. That would be in the room, which would also should attract attention. Here's the question, though. I don't know who it's from. Yeah. Is it possible to somehow direct pollution through our atmosphere and dispose of it in space all without harming our atmosphere? Love your show, by the way. Thank you.

It depends on what kind of pollution you're talking about. Dust. So what you're saying is rather than pollute your rivers or your oceans, you want to pollute the space environment. Well, since it wouldn't be – we'll throw it into space throw it at well you'd want to actually get rid of it you drop it into a black hole drop it down into the sun yeah you'd want to actually remove the thing entirely but what would it matter to throw it into space like would that be bad to someone you have to calculate the energy it takes to throw it into space versus the energy it takes to completely break it down

on Earth into some non-pollutant ingredient. You don't want to send a whole thing of like sporks into space because that's the way to dispose of it. And I don't know that sporks are destructible at all. But so you'd want to not just scatter it into space. Space, we might

want to travel that one day. Yeah, but we wouldn't put so much pollution into space that we'd be like oh we can't get to mars i think they said that when they had built smokestacks oh it's just a little bit of dirty air look how big the atmosphere is don't worry about it yeah all right all right i won't i won't throw my trash into space let's have some foresight here okay are there any plasma rockets that are close to being ready to go to Mars? What is the time frame? How do they work?

Yeah. He's like, is it true? Tell me how to build one. So that's my lightning round question. Yes, we do have plasma rockets. They're ion drives. And they are not good for sort of launching things. They're good for slowly changing the direction.

And they're good for very long trips. Yeah. Or if you're going to send cargo to Mars and you can take years to get it there, high shelf life product, go ahead. But if you're going to move people, the ion drive is not a good option for people at this point. Would you ever use an ion? It takes too slow to move you.

Oh, okay. You would use it on Earth? No. No, no. No. Next. Good. Great.

If we could manage to build a spaceship that could accelerate at a constant 1G, could we leverage time dilation to reach the nearest galaxy within the lifetime of a human on the spaceship? The nearest galaxy, no. But you can definitely, if you could accelerate at 1G, and that way you can walk around in the spaceship as though you're on Earth, because you'd have a 1G acceleration, that would be cool. Yeah.

No bone mass loss or anything, all these problems you'd have a 1G acceleration. That would be cool. No bone mass loss or anything. All these problems you hear about being in 0G. We can go ahead and do that. Go to the nearest stars and come back. And yes, time dilation, you'll eventually reach near the speed of light. Time dilation will allow you to not age very much, but people on Earth

will continue to age. And when you come back, everyone will have forgotten about you. There you have it. We gotta go. We gotta go. Eugene eugene bye thanks again for being a star talk yes cosmic queries edition all right grab bag i'm neil degrasse tyson your personal astrophysicist as always i bid you farewell which means i say to you to keep