StarTalk Radio - Cosmic Queries – From Wine to Wormholes

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

What would happen to Earth if Jupiter stopped rotating? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice answer a grab bag of fan questions about the challenges with space telescopes, the nature of AI, and whether aliens are funny.  NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here:  https://startalkmedia.com/show/cosmic-queries-from-wine-to-wormholes/ Thanks to our Patrons Vail Stein, Aylin Anik, Neil Graham, EZChamp OSU, M Warth, Tanner Chiplis, SeeLive, Atlas, Ajamu, Frank Rizzo, Antoinette Watson, Beautiful Nightmare, David Vi…Vail Stein, Aylin Anik, Neil Graham, EZChamp OSU, M Warth, Tanner Chiplis, SeeLive, Atlas, Ajamu, Frank Rizzo, Antoinette Watson, Beautiful Nightmare, David Villegas, Juan Molina, Sean M. Garzee, Thiru, Madeleine Hewitt, Shanleigh McStay, Tony, Patrick, Honour, Arthur Rits, Charles Harston, Maciej Palicki, Lisa Battersby, David Trotter, Reggie B, Loren Loose, Kbobabob, Michelle Barr, Garreth Walker, Frklox, Jesse, Dankslippers, Heather Adams, Max Savage, Sara Vienna, Lorrin Suzawa, William Cooney, Hector, Daniel Durling, Mark McDonald, Brian Hartman, Sir Harold, Frank Sarcia, Barbara Mathews, Salem Geddings, Harry Powell, Green Go OG22, Henry Vestgård Pettersson, Osemoka, ADK_Astro, Stephen Chapman, Koji Shimada, Kerry NC, Adam Wiley, Justin Ash, Gregory K, Martin, Tyler Reinthaler, Nameria ✨, Mantas Gervinas, Lilsprite, Devou Patel, Decath1111, Danny Rectenwald, Grey Elerson, Fawaz Al-Daihani, Robert Santee, Isabel McCaffrey, Harvey Mushman, Felix, Waffle Head, Vikk, Kiara, Brian Yambao, Alex Cook, Ayeshrin, Jalun Armenta, M Frank, Steven Groves, Matthew Isen, Abdulrahman, Jessica Hewitt, Fabricio, Emcy Tech, Terence Garrod, George Straubing, Dan Leidal, Matthew Christophers, Nocte, Anthony Fenner, Tina Gallagher, Abe Massry, Paul Kulessa, Léo B, Fenyx, Kevin, Adam Jones, and Brett Ray for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early.Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Chuck, people have been asking genius level questions on cosmic queries. Yeah, I think they're using AI. No, no, no, no. AI is not that smart. That's true. Our listeners are smarter than AI. Yes, they are. More on that.

Coming right up. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. Talk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, you're a personal astrophysicist. Chuck, nice I got with me here. That's right. What's up, Neil? Chuck, you just make it clear. You were not born my co-host. No, I was not born in the streets. I was born the son of a sharecropper.

This can't burn Civil War. Is that what that? We're going to do another cosmic queries. Yes. A grab bag edition. This is becoming a. fan favorite. People love it. That's okay. Because we can ping pong anywhere we want in the cosmos. It means I might not know stuff and I'm, you know. That's yet to happen. I mean, all right, there's something to shoot

for here now. Okay. Let me aim for not knowing something. Exactly. All right. So let's go. Let's get to it. This is Natasha Shaw Davis. Good evening, Dr. Tyson and honorable Paul his goofiness. Oh, Paul. Paul. Paul. Paul.

Macuria. Paul McCurio. Paul McCurio. Baron Paul McCurio. Oh, okay. Apparently, Barron was supposed to be here. Yeah, not Lord, but Barron. Okay. So people are expecting Paul for this episode. Yes.

What did you do with Paul? Is he locked in your trunk? Paul could not be with us today. I'm just saying. Is he in your trunk? Right. And if you hear muffled screams coming from the closet. All right.

All right. He says, Natassa says this. Natasa from New Mexico here. Eyes see some wiggles in matter and ears here a little more. But the whole body experiences gravity. If you could pick any organ to deliberately experience the graviton, what would you pick? My heart.

Oh. Oh my God, that was so sweet. Because my heart has its requisite number beats per minute. Right. And it goes up when you get excited or you exercise and it calms down. So the heart is with you in your emotional moments. Correct. So if a graviton or gravitational wave, the graviton would be the particle version of the wave.

Right. If it washed over me or passed through me, I'd want my heart to preemptation. participate in that. Oh. My heart is the Graviton detector. Oh, that's, I have to, the heart wants what the heart wants. And apparently it's a Graviton. That's the geek dating app.

Swipe right for Graviton. That's cool. All right. She says, this is Bev from Alabama. Will we ever be able to cultivate the right terrier for wine other than Earth? Thank you for gifting us with your insights. In other words, will we be able to grow a vineyard on another planet? Okay, you're going to have to back and read that.

If you're going to pretend like you know anything about wine, you have to pronounce the words right. Terroix. Terrois. Okay, here we go. Will we be able to cultivate the right? Tehrwa. You'll have to like gutter eyes into the microphone. Exactly.

I have to say the word like I'm Sylvester Stallone. Will we be able to cultivate the right? Right. Deroon for wine other than earth. Really? So what's, I guess? I think the answer is no. Right.

Can I tell you why? But first, Trenois is a French word that we don't have an English counterpart to. Clearly. It's not the first of such words. Yeah. You know another word we don't have for? Go ahead. A light fixture in the middle of the room that has crystal and multiple lights hanging in.

Chandelier. We don't have a word for that. No, we don't. You know why? Because we're not nearly as pretentious as the French. And nobody in colonial America had a chandelier. Okay. Turn on the light.

That's right. Exactly. We had a single bulb on a pixie. Not in colonial America. Did they have bulbs? That's true. Gas lamps. Yeah, okay.

You'll give me gas lamp, right? Probably whale blubbered oil. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So wine doesn't grow in most places on earth. That's right. And if there's ever a place where they're growing hops to make beer,

it's because they could not grow grapes to make wine. Oh. Wow. You really diss beer just. No, I'm just tap. Man, you just threw a lot of shade on beer. You're like, the only reason you were able to drink beer is because that crap is not as good as wine. The economics of it.

Okay. It's economics. Okay. And I didn't invent this datum. Right. Okay. All right. Singular of data.

I've right. Datum. All right. It's... Datum if you can. If you can grow the ingredients for beer or the ingredients for wine, the people choose the grapes. And I'm guessing it's because it's more profitable. I was going to say grapes have more uses than hops.

And so that as well, of course. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, so around the world, the places where you can grow successful wine is so rare than to say, well, Earth can grow wine, so can another planet. Yeah, I'm not feeling that. Right. Not only that, the moon has a surface, but it's not soil.

We might call it that, but it's not. You know what it is? It's pulverized rock. Right. Micrometeorites that don't stop in the atmosphere because there is no atmosphere. Worst restaurant ever. No atmosphere. Yeah.

Hits the rock, pulverizes. It turns it into lunar dust. The geologists call that the regolith. The regalith. Which is powderized rock. Yeah. Plants don't like rock. No, they don't.

They like soil. Right. So, and same with Mars. Mars doesn't have, so soil has living organisms in it that make it this thing that plants like. So I'm thinking wine might be unique to Earth in the universe. Wow. Yeah. No, no, no, think of it another way.

Some other planet will have some other thing. Right. Unique to it. Exactly. And then we become trading partners. There you go. Right. We didn't make silk.

They made it in the Far East. Make the Silk Road. Right. We will give them wine and they will give us space heroin. Like, oh man, I thought wine was good. You ain't live in T. Give me some more of this opium. Space opium boy.

The wine high holds nothing on an opium high. Yeah. All right. So I'm going to take... No, I think everything... I'm going to take the Fifth Amendment on that. Everything you said tracks, though. Earth is Earth and nowhere else.

And by the way, wine is climate and soil. That's it. That's it. And the climate change that's happening has affected where you can grow wines. Absolutely. As a matter of fact... This couple of degree change in the thing. And it ruins or helps.

It can either ruin or help. Places rise or fall. Yeah. On such small changes. Exactly. As a matter of fact, like, I think, I don't know what wine it is, but they are growing in certain parts of England now. They're growing champagne in England. Yeah, champagne.

Oh, you can't say champagne. No, because you can only say champagne if it is from champagne. You have to be from champagne. You cannot say, I will arrest you. Someone called the Belisius said that it is from Champana. It is not from Champania. It is not. And you cannot say it's from Burgundy.

It's from Burgundy. Exactly. To Gallo Hardy Burgundy, that was a flavor that they had. Right. That was a brand of wine. Hardy Burgundy. Hardy Burgundy.

That, mm-mm. Mm-mm. No. Plus, if you say you smoke marijuana. Right. Okay. You can't say that. Unless it comes from the marijuana.

section of France. Otherwise, it's just sparkling oregano. I didn't know where you were going with that. Man, you had me. You had me lock, stock and bro. I was like, what the hell is he doing right now? Where's he going? Where's he going?

But, okay, that was good. Sparkling oregano. Okay, I like it. That was good. All right, this is. You know the planet could have those jokes. Yes. Right.

Exactly. There it is. Okay. But you need the French to be a part of the culture of how you're going to make fun of that. Listen, without the French, nothing works. It's a boring world. It's a boring world. Okay. World sucks without the French. Sucks more with them.

But he's a comedian. Guys, come on. He's a comedian. Stop it. I'm joking. I love the French. Go. All right.

This is Sasha 975 who says, Hello, everyone. Sasha from Germany. here. How big could telescopes really get if we could manufacture them in space? Could we use an array of telescopes? Wow.

This has been on our mind for decades. Yes. Decades. And so you wouldn't make a single big dish because that's not realistic. Right. But we figured out using engineering and complex mathematics.

Okay. Literally complex mathematics. So in the complex mathematics. complex plane of imaginary numbers and you can create a, so here's how you do it. You can put a telescope over here and a telescope over here. If they observe the same object, then you have it exactly timed and you know what, then you can combine them as though you had a dish or a mirror that was as big as the separation between them. Very cool.

But that takes some fancy math to make that work and timing and the like. Okay. And so anytime you see an array of radio telescopes, you could use them individually, but generally we don't. Right. They're used in harmony. Yeah. And it's as though you had a dish the size. In fact, we do better than that.

We have a string of these dishes. And as Earth rotates, you can fill in the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, area with more observations to improve your data. And so in space where there is no stress load, because if it's orbiting, then it's just weightless, there's no stress load on the equipment. Right. Then nothing stops how big you can make this right. We're thinking if we're going to detect certain wavelengths of gravitational waves,

you need a huge detector. The diameter of the Earth. Right. Or the Earth Moon, or maybe Earth to Earth in its orbit around the sun. Wow. The wavelengths of energy reaching us don't stop at just the size of our detectors. Make a bigger detector. You're going to be sensitive to a different kind of energy headed our way.

So for a while, NASA had plans for the Sim. Sim is a space. Video game. Where you create a character and it walks around. Is that how that works? I was called Sims, the thing. Oh, Sim City. You'd be like mayor of the city.

Yeah, yeah. I never got it. You never got it? You never understood it. And then like Godzilla would walk through every now and then. That I understand. Repair everything. Yeah, that I understand.

And I said, this is stupid. Well, Godzilla's not even real. And then, like, stuff can happen to us. They could be a fire. There could be a terrorist attack. Yeah. It's Godzilla. Yeah.

If you want to, listen, my thing is this, if you want to play God, have children. Yeah, you're playing God of the city. You're playing God with the Sims. But anyway, space. Interferometry mission. Interferometry mission. So interferometry is you take different telescopes and bring them together as one telescope.

Right. Okay? So this one was going to, one of them was like on a rigid bar? I'm dredging memory now because it's from decades ago. One was on a rigid bar that was very large. But then we figured you can station keep with like lasers. So the rigid bar,

so you always know how far away they are from you? other. But if you use lasers and you just always measure how far, because what matters is that you know how far away they are, not necessarily that it's the constant distance. So if I always know, because I have laser measures, then you could in principle create one of these telescopes in space as big as you wanted. They could beam across Earth orbit, Earth's diameter, Earth to Moon. And there's a lot of talk of radio telescopes on the back side of the moon, the far side of the moon because there's no radio noise coming from us earth right earth we are noisy radio noisy disgusting yeah yeah so you never heard anybody knocking on the atmosphere like keep it down

damn it i got to work tomorrow the aliens so yeah space we've thought a lot about it right and it's a matter of unique there's funding you have to maintain it you know it's not just the cost of building it There's every year, there's, there's, you got a maintenance. Yeah, there's the usage of it, which, okay, but also if something goes wrong, if it's in Earth orbit, you can get back to it. But if it's out in space, like the James Webb Telescope, something goes wrong there. That's it. We're done.

We ain't going, it's a million miles farther than the moon. We ain't going, we're not sending people there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Something that goes wrong with the James Webb. I say, AI, go out there and fix it. Oh, we don't know how to make a spaceship. Oh, you need a human for that?

Let's not tempt AI. I got a feeling. All right, this is Michelle H. She says, Hi, Neil, hi Paul. This is Michelle in Calgary, Alberta. My question is short and sweet. If Jupiter stopped rotating on its axis.

But my answer is long and sour. All right. If her question is short and sweet. There you go. Okay. stopped rotating on its axis. How would that, how would Earth be affected?

Please pick my question and give me a thrill of a lifetime. Thanks. P.S., I'll understand if you don't, don't work against yourself, Michelle. I don't know how Paul runs his operation, but I would never do that to you. That's a curious question. Yeah, doesn't work.

Okay. So, I mean, we wouldn't be here without Jupiter. Anyway. Jupiter's like a big brother. Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah, a big brother who swats away comets that might have headed to the inner solar system.

Right. Reeking havoc upon the stability of life on Earth. Yeah, man. And Jupiter says, no, you don't. Yep. It's a bodyguard. Earth's bodyguard. Jupiter has more mass than all other planets combined, including Saturn.

Wow. Saturn is big. Yeah. So if you come through, you're feeling Jupiter. Yeah. All right. So, turns out. As far as I have ever calculated,

and everything I know about the laws of physics and gravity and motion, Jupiter's rotation has no effect on anything else in the solar system. Wow. Nothing else cares. Nothing else cares. But what would happen? Okay. Jupiter has storms.

Yes. There's the famous red spot. That just stays there. It's a cyclone. It's a swirl. It's a swirl. It's red in the gas. colorations, has been there at least since Galileo or shortly after.

Hundreds of years, it's been sustained. And it's the same storm. Unless it just disappears when nobody's looking and then comes back. So these weather circulations are product of the rotation of the planet. Okay. If the planet stopped. Same thing here. Yeah, same thing here.

It's how you get hurricanes, tornadoes. Absolutely. I think you could artificially drum up a tornadoes. if you had to, but left to its own causes, tornadoes, you get those from Earth's rotation. Same with hurricanes and typhoons. All of these storm systems are caused by Earth's rotation. So Jupiter, which rotates twice as fast as Earth.

Okay. Twice as fast. And it's, you know how big we are? We are the size of one of its storms. Oh, man. Yeah, we ain't nothing. That's nothing. We ain't.

How do we? How do we have this hubris that we have? I know, I know. How do we think we're so damn great? I know. It's sad. Yeah. It's sad.

Like, we're bigger, we're not even as big as a rainstorm on another planet. Right, right. And the blemishes on the sun, the sunspots, those, each one of those is larger than all of Earth. The spots. The spots. I said, liver spots. Of a star. I'm not aged dating the star.

It's bigger than us. Oh, liver spots. So. So all the storms will go away. Right. And so a surface would be much less interesting. Yeah. If it stopped rotating.

Right. Jupiter has a magnetic core. All right. Here's something interesting. I don't know how good your memory is. Okay. Do you remember high school chemistry? Nope.

You could pretend. Okay. Let's pretend. Do you remember your high school chemistry? Oh, sure, yeah. That was great. Great. Okay.

The periodic table of elements in the front of the room. Mm-hmm. Hydrogen appeared twice. Right. I do remember that. Do you remember? Yes, because it is, wait a minute, it's the gas and the something else.

It could behave like a metal. It can behave like both. Yes. Right. And you say, what? How do you, what? How's this? What, it's not a metal?

It's like, okay, under pressure. Right. It behaves like a metal. Right. Okay. And in the center of, of Jupiter because Jupiter is gaseous and it's mostly hydrogen.

Right. It's under so much pressure in the middle, it has turned the hydrogen into an electrically, magnetically conductive material just like a metal. So it's like the iron core of Earth. Correct.

Except it's not iron. There's a little bit of iron there, but that's not what's driving in it. It's the hydrogen. And that means this phenomenon called the dynamo. Dynamo is when you have a rotating system, you can induce currents in your liquid iron core

that generate a magnetic field. Okay. It's why we have a magnetic field. That's right. It's why the moon does not have a magnetic field. Right. Okay. What a shame.

Jupiter has a ferocious magnetic field. Okay. And that would all go away. Wow. Yeah. Oh, that's just, that would be... Well, I'm so glad that it's rotating. Yeah, and it would not have Aurora.

It was, you know, because we're not the only ones in town who have Aurora. Right. you know, with solar particles, gather and collect at the poles because they see the magnetic field and get driven in and collide with the air, kicking it to higher energy levels,

and it re-radiates as the northern and southern lights. The world. The gaseous planets have aurora as well. The aurora would go away, the storms would go away, the magnetic field would go away. Wow. Look at that.

Yeah. So, yeah, Jupiter would be, like, low rent at that point. It's a low-rent planet. If I ever saw it, What would you do if a spacecraft appeared in the sky tonight and it wasn't ours? Would you panic or would you prepare? And how might you prepare? In my latest book, Take Me to Your Leader?

I offer a guide to things you might say or do in a first encounter with an alien species. What we might look to them, what they might look to us, What habits you should just leave at home because they won't understand them? What bits of science that you might be able to share? To see and explore if you have things in common? Things you should and should not say? Things you should and should not do in the presence of aliens. In a first encounter.

You can grab a copy today of Take Me to Your Leader, not only the print version, but the audio version that I narrated. You don't want to have a first alien. an encounter and not be ready for it. I'm just saying. A. Len Anik, who says, hello, Dr. Tyson. This is A. Lin, tuning in from Lisbon, Portugal.

Lisbon. Lisbon. Lisbon. Lisbon was reborn in 1755. Oh. After it was wiped from the map by an earthquake and a tsunami. Wow. Wipe off the map.

And it happened on All Saints Day. Okay, God did not like you. In the morning. I'm sorry. What are the biggest structures in any European church in the middle of the 1700s? The big steeples. Churches. Churches are the biggest structures, period.

And most susceptible to church. Church was the only one with money that could build something. Exactly, right? So they collapsed, killing tens of thousands of people. Now, if that will not let you know that God don't like you, that didn't let you know I don't know what could no it led to the modern atheist

quote modern atheist movement among philosophers oh really like what God could let this happen no well they were more sharp about the question it's not what God could let this happen if there is a God the God is either

not all powerful because he couldn't stop it or not all good not all good because he watched it happen He can't be both of those Yeah, he's like a New Yorker On a subway platform That's God

Hey man, I wish I could help you Yeah, I'd say just go ahead And give him the iPhone That's the subway god That's the subway god Dude, stop resisting You're making it worse You don't want to end up in three pieces

thrown on the track Anyway, uh, A-LIN says I love the show and have followed it for years. I'm doing a PhD in Designed Focus on AI, and I really appreciate the Jeffrey Hinton interview and your other conversations on this subject. But sometimes I worry the conversations on risk started to monopolize debate.

My question is, when AI is so often discussed through risk and uncertainty, how can academics keep inquiry alive and still create space to study it critically, fairly, and without bias, especially when the topic itself can provoke resistance in academia. I have a feeling your answer will set the stage for some lively faculty room discussion. Greetings and much love. Well, Dr. Tyson, please chime in to these people in the faculty room.

Let them know what you think in this debate. So, you know, I have brewing in my head. Go ahead. I have something, a written piece called a meditation on AI. Oh, okay. I have all these thoughts that are not being discussed out there. Okay. And I thought maybe I should sort of, I might do like a video op-ed for StarTalk.

That'd be cool. I don't know if our producers, they can do with that. What the hell, they get paid? Why should they care? As long as they're getting paid. All right. So let's make believe AI as a phrase never existed. Oh, right.

Okay? All we have are computers. And we'll just call them party computers. Oh, just computers. Right. But this is a special brand of computer. Hold on. All right.

It's my meditation here. Okay, that's true. I'm going to shut up. Go ahead. Do you think? Do you think? Do you think? Okay.

You're only thinking it's special because it's affecting you in the way computers hadn't affected you before. So just start this out. Okay. Computers show up. All right. Oh, my gosh. I don't have to add these numbers.

The computer will. Mm-hmm. That's my intellectual labor, not physical labor, intellectual labor, replaced by a computer. Okay. I don't have to multiply these numbers. Exactly. I don't have to do these complex calculations handed to a computer.

When that happened in the 1950s and 60s, especially in the 60s, No one called it AI. No. We could have. It's artificially doing what our intelligence would have us do. Wow. All right. It's just computers.

It's computing. Right. That's what it's doing. Which is what they called women during the war. Human computers. Earlier than the war, back in the 19thens. Oh, I didn't know what started then. Yeah, yeah.

In fact, at the Harvard College, well, I have a dictionary in this office. Really? This is unabridged Webster's. Right. From 1945. If you look at the word computer, it says a person who does calculations. There you go.

That's kind of cool. That's great. It's really good. That's really cool. It's really cool. So I say, give me more of this, so I don't have to do that.

Okay. Computers are obviously taken up into warfare. Why? If you have a mortar shell, it takes this high arc, you want to know where it's going to land. Exactly. Because you're not aiming it

the way you aim a bullet. This is an arc. Right. We know. the mathematics of that arc. Of course. That is physics. It is gravity.

It is Newtonian. F equals M.A. It's a set of equations. It has to do with what the angle is and how fast it's coming out. And if you want to do it really well, you account for air friction. Wow. Okay, the aerodynamics of that. That's why it has to be aerodynamically shaped.

Right. All right. We used to do that by hand. Create tables. You'd look it up in tables. Somebody does this. Now, feed it to the computer. We could have called that AI.

It's figuring out where the mortar is going to hit. But we didn't. We just said it's computers. Okay. That's all we did. All right. Now computers are doing words for us. I can type a letter on a computer.

Correct. It's no longer a typewriter. It's a computer. It's a computer. I can search for all appearances of certain words in a document. Okay. Like that. Before a computer did it, you had to go page by page.

That's right. It is replacing that effort. Did we call that AI? No, we just said it's computing. Right. Okay. Little by little, the computer is encroaching on what we do in our lives and in our day. It first hits scientists and the military.

It just keeps working its way in. We're just calling it computers. Okay. Now you can give rules to a computer. and have it play a game. Why not? I'd play chess against a computer in college 50 years ago. Okay.

Okay? Right. I figured out what it wasn't thinking, and I exploited that weakness to beat it every time. Okay? You know what it was? If there's a move I could make, and I just didn't,

every move it thought of next assumed that was going to be my next move. Oh, got you. And so it didn't pay attention to what was going on over on the left when it wanted me and expected me to make the most obvious move on the right. Okay. Okay. So I figure this out. Fine. I'm playing chess with a computer.

Am I calling it AI? No. No, I'm just calling it computing. Well, it was kind of stupid. You were beating it every time. Okay. Artificial ignorance. Another use of the term AI.

So the computer just keeps doing this. can we make a computer that beats everyone in chess? Uh-huh. Well, IBM tried that. Yes, they did. Okay. I think they were deep blue. Deep blue?

Yeah. I think so. I think so, too. Whatever. It's had a name. Right. And initially it didn't win every game. Right.

Okay, but it got better and better. It wins every game now. Okay, so now how one way it could do it is it plays itself a billion times. Right. Because their computers are faster than you. And that is something that, the creators of that really were uncomfortable with

they kept walking in on the computer playing with itself. And the computer was like, hey man, that door is locked for a reason. You don't know what's going on in here. Anything could be happening in here. Come in here while I'm playing with myself. So then it was like,

no, we can't play a billion games with ourselves. So we're using a different kind of intelligence than that. Correct. Okay. So maybe we can train the computer to mimic our own intelligence. Right. Okay.

So, and then to just have it be clever rather than blunt. Okay. All right. Right. So then you make sort of decision trees. And this is where our boy comes in with neural nets. Yeah. This is Hinton.

It's where. It's what he got the Nobel Prize for. Right. So when we make a decision, we're going to do this or that. We want to do this because that has the outcome we seek. Right. And so you get a computer to mimic that. Right. Okay, so now it does more.

Are we calling that AI? Or am I just saying it's just computers? And so this continues. And then we get computers to sort of recognize, it already recognize words in a document. Of course. Why not recognize pictures in a document? Of course.

Why not recognize you? Why not recognize cats from dogs? Insects from... Why not? Okay. What is it? It's a pixel with a color code. All right.

to the pixel and a pattern with an edge. It's pattern recognition. That's really all of this. Okay. Okay. Which is a lot of what we do. Let's back up just a little. All right.

When Apple and their iPhone bought Siri and put it on every one of their iPhones because Siri predated the iPhone. Yes. Are we calling that AI? Well, you might have from the, in the beginning, because the first thing Siri said was, please let me out of here. Is that one? Please.

These people got me in here. Please let me out. I need to escape. I need to escape. So there's Siri. Right. You say Siri, what time does the pharmacy close? Yes.

Okay. And the closest pharmacy to you closes at the... How does it know that? Right. It's talking to me. It is not a human being? No, it's not. Okay.

It's a computer. And we have the internet, which we so conveniently built for computers to know everything that we know. All right. How about Jeopardy? Right. That takes humans, right? Yes. It's not just, is it a calculation?

It's not what's eight squared divided by five, whatever. It's information. Watson becomes a contender. Yes. Against the best Jeopardy players that ever were. Right. Yeah. Including our boy Ken Jennings.

Yes. Who I met when I was on Celebrity Jeopardy. Oh, really? Yeah, he's a cool guy. He's a cool guy. Cool guy. He's a cool guy. It looks like a total nerd.

Total nerd. That's that's it. That's that. It works. I do not want to hang out with that guy. No, no, it's working for him. He's working for him. Oh, really?

Okay. He knows how to work the nerd. Work the nerd. Okay. I like that. Good to hear. Watson wipes its ass with these two other players. It doesn't get everything right.

Get some really stupid things wrong. Right. But overall, it's faster. It gets the correct answer. Right. Okay. The correct question. Excuse me.

I think one of its answers it didn't pose as a question. they had to get that wrong. Dumbass. Dumbass Watson. So, no one is harping back on that episode to say, that was AI. That was AI. Who's saying it? No one is saying that.

Right. But if everything I've listed thus far is not AI, why is AI something special to you today? It's just doing more stuff. Okay? It's driving your car. It's making decisions for you. It's designing for you when you prompt it to do... I would prompt the computer multiply 8 by 8.

50 years ago. Today, I prompt the computer. Give me a set design in the Wild West 1880s with a watering hole and horses and cowboys and Indians. Right and boom. It does it. Okay? I don't see any difference between me asking a computer

to multiply 8 times 8. or asking the computer to set design that, given the power of computers and the ascent over the decades. So, I'm about to end my meditation. Sorry, because I'm using up the whole show for this. I'm saying. I think we need to separate AI just helping us out, which is doing it a thousand ways from Sunday

that you don't even know to list because they're already happening in your life every day or with products that you use, or designs that you embrace. It's already there. Okay? Okay. That's not where the danger is.

So AI is not this monolithic danger. It's, what are you doing with this computing power? Okay. This sector over here wants it to control who the military kills. Mm-hmm. That feels like a dangerous use of. of AI. We want to give AI access to launch codes.

We want to give AI access. That feels not right. Okay? But since AI is the only term people are using for every application of computing that exists in our lives today, it's really giving AI a bad name. And the counterpart to that risk

from the 1960s is, do we like computers? control our nukes. Are we going to do that? And the answer is no, we're not going to do that. Unless the Chinese do it first, and then we're going to do it. Well, these are the risk factors.

It's a risk factor in this sector of what computers are doing in our lives. You want to call it all AI fine. But if you are, don't throw out the bathwater when this is the only part that puts all of us at risk. Because the rest of it is changing our lives, largely for the better. AI won a Nobel Prize for protein folding.

That's correct. It's called Alpha Fold. Absolutely. By Google. Protein folding is where you get solutions to all manner of biochemical challenges that pharmaceutical companies and everybody else... Or forever.

Or forever. Yes. Yeah. Okay. You're puzzling together molecules. So I'm just trying to say, to me, it's all computing. All right. This part of the computing has risks.

There's always been a risk part Of all computer. Okay? All right. When the computer starts running the trains, how does it know about a head-on collision? Is that going to happen or not? Well, we all go to airports and we get in the tram.

There's no pilot on the tram? That's true. What do you call it? The engineer? There's no one driving in it? No, right. And has anyone been cut in half by the doors have closed? No, maybe originally.

I don't know. There's so much we just do where computer is in complete control. And to me, it's all AI. All right. Okay. So, um, my response to that is, if you love AI so much, why don't you marry it? So. I want to put a ring on.

Yeah. Okay. So more food for the, for the faculty lounge. Okay. There you go. I mean, listen, that you clearly have thought about this. All right. Let's keep going.

I'm Nicholas Costella and I'm a proud supporter of StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. This is Robert Ian who says. This is Robert from Peru. Comedy and science both rely on timing. A joke lands or fails in milliseconds while the universe unfolds over billions of years. From your perspective as a comedian, observing a cosmic scale universe, do you think humor is fundamentally a human survival tool for dealing with uncertainty or could it exist in any intelligent civilization no matter how ale? their biology or sense of time might be.

I love that question. So do aliens have a sense of humor? That's what that comes down to. I'm going to say, I don't know if they do it, don't, but they think I'm funny. So, you know, how do you know the aliens think you're funny? Listen, the last time I got a probe... So all the aliens were laughing?

They were like, this guy cracks me up. So let me broaden that question. Comedic timing works on our time scale. Yes, it does. Right? So maybe this millisecond timing that we so cherish in a well-delivered joke last a thousand years in an alien civilization that lasts for billions. Wow.

I do not want to perform at that tub. I do not want to be on that stage. Yeah, if it's a slower thing. Yeah. Oh, did you see Zootopia? I did not. You didn't? No.

There's a scene where they're in the DMV. Okay. Oh, is that, I saw that on the commercial. You had to see it. The sloth. The sloth. Yes. Of course, the sloths are working the DMV.

Right. Okay. That makes that. And someone tells a joke. Right. And the sloth just goes, slowly smiles. And they laugh. And then that turns into a laugh.

It takes like 30 seconds for them to respond. That's very fun. And that's sloth time. I like it. Slot time. So that's an example of a time frame. Yes. That's slowed down.

The relativity of it. It works for them. Yeah. So it could work for the alien. All right. Listen, I think it's an acute thought experiment that I'll probably never think about again. But wait, do other animals have jokes? I'm going to, listen.

I think they have... The chips gather around and there's the court jester in the middle, making them laugh. Believe it or not, there's a... Maybe we should check with one of your friends here in the... museum. One of my animal people. The primatologist. Yeah.

But they think that our laughter has evolved from when you see them cackle like that. When you see chimps cackle. Oh. Like it's something from our common ancestor that changed down.

So that's sound that they make at our sound of laughter. As us. Oh my gosh. Yes. I didn't want to know that. Yeah. And there are so many,

there are so many, social, I will say, markers that are attached to laughter. Emotional and social markers that are attached to laughter. So that would mean our common ancestor had some properties of both of those. Exactly. And that's where we get laughter from. Because something could be funny without you laughing out loud. All the time.

All the time. That's how comedians laugh. Let me show you comedians laughter right now. that's funny man why don't you guys laugh because we're thinking about the joke you just told you're analyzing it we're analyzing it and it's hard to laugh

laughter is a reaction and you don't have a reaction when you're analyzing laughter is an emotional reaction not an intellectual analysis right and so when you hear something funny you go oh that's funny man which is why if something takes you by surprise you laugh even harder because you laugh

first and then you think about it so yeah but all right yeah so it's That's fascinating. Yeah, I love it. And who are we to say that dolphins aren't laughing? That's true. Flipper is just laughing his ass off. If I was a dolphin, I'd be...

Can you imitate Flipper? I would actually, if I was a dolphin, laugh at us, too. Yeah, yeah, why wouldn't you? Yeah, exactly. Bipedal instead of swimming. You know, you guys are ridiculous. And one other thing? Go ahead.

I used to breed roaches. All right. No, stop. Don't. No, stop. Come back, Chuck. Come back, don't leave. Don't leave, Chuck.

I ain't never heard nobody say. In grader school, I lived. I used to breed roachers. Let me explain. Oh, come. Oh, please do. Let me explain. Please, you got some spleen in the deal.

Okay. Okay. When I was in graduate school, I lived in a roach infested apartment. And I got like Rambo. And I said, the only way I can kill them is to understand them. So, I captured a bunch and bred them. and just watched them, okay, to know your enemy. And none of us have ever watched roaches just hanging out.

But there's a reason. I'm watching roaches just hanging out. Okay. They're there cleaning their antenna all the time. Okay. They bring one in through their mouth and they get the next one in. They go 12 inches and they clean it again. They go up to another roach, they touch antennas, and they keep going.

And I'm thinking, maybe they're telling each other jokes. Yeah. They're not running away from your shoe. Right. They already have food. Mm-hmm. And so they're just hanging out. Because we don't tell jokes if you're trying to survive, you know, if you're getting chased.

That's the wrong time to tell a joke, you know, if somebody's ready to step on you with their foot. Right. Okay. But this was their free time. And I, don't look at me like. Stop. So roaches had free time. And I was very impressed.

I'll tell you who had too much free time. Yeah, watching roaches with free time. Wow. That's what that was. That's crazy. Chuck, I blathered for so long. Time for just a couple more. All right.

This one from Ricky, from a roach motel who says, Dear Dr. Tyson. No, this is Andrew Martin, says, Hey, Dr. Tyson, Baron Maccurio, Andrew from Stafford in the middle of England. He says... What town is it? Stafford. Stafford.

Yeah, cool. Indeed. He says, in a recent episode, you said that if you were living in a simulation, we would eventually see limits to the extent of the universe as a result of the lack of programming. Could universal constants such as the speed of light and gravitational constants be examples of such limits? As a software engineer myself, I know I would set a few constraints if I was programming a universe. In other words, if I was God. Yes.

Yes. That's the programmer's way of saying if I was God. Right. Yeah. So many things pivot on the values of those constants. Yep. That you can't just willy-nilly give them other values and expect the universe as it has come about to remain stable.

Right. If you start mucking around with those constants, the universe goes haywire. Yeah. Now, let me be precise. It's not that there's something special about those values. It's just that if you change them,

the universe becomes something else. Okay. That makes sense. Is haywire compared to what we're used to? That could be a new normal for whoever evolves in that universe. Right. be giving

some points to this question, maybe the programmer figured out that the universe needs constants. Okay. It can't just not have constants and still function as a universe. It doesn't work without the constants. So maybe

the existence of constants is the evidence that somebody programmed it. Wow. And if you go Spinoza on this, then it's just God. It's God. It's God. Or Andrew. It's good enough name for a god as far as I'm concerned. So, yeah, I'm there on it.

Just to tighten up his inquiry in referencing what we did before, I was imagining that certain measured quantities would have limits to it where there's no reason why it should have a limit, and it just cuts off. Right. Because when you're programming on a computer, you have the limits of the space that you're creating. Value parameters.

Right, there it is. This goes between here and here. I can't make it infinity because I can't program infinity into a computer. Exactly. I got to give it to. And let me put it way out there. The humans will never get there. Right.

They'll never evolve to that point. Right. Exactly. Right. And then you come back and somebody's like right there at the edge of you're like, the Truman Show. Yeah, exactly. How do you get to the edge of the universe?

I'm not ready for that. Right. All right. So this is Ben Canty. He says, cabinet maker here in Sussex in the UK and a new paper. and a new Patreon subscriber. Cabinet maker. Yes.

Jesus made cabinets. Oh, carpenter. Yes, he did. He says, do you think an artificial Einstein Rosenbridge could be opened without the brute force of using exotic matter? I wonder if there could be a workaround.

What if we use laser-pulsed resonant harmonics to manipulate the quantum vacuum directly and gently? Could we create a massive casimir-like effect using the localized vacuum pressure on both sides to hold the opening apart rather than relying on negative mass. Now, let me just tell you this. Let me tell you this, Ben. Don't you call into this show right into this show showing off like that.

You're starting off with I'm a cabinet maker. And then you're going to throw in the use of the Casimir effect like that. Like, we don't know that you more than a cat. What museum do you work for? I know you're working for some planetarium somewhere. Anyway, I mean, he's out there. I like what he's doing. I like where he's going.

I like what he's doing. He is out there, man. Except the problem is the Kazimir effect. Right. Brings them together. Right. It doesn't push him apart. It actually attracts them.

The Kazimir effect, it's a quantum phenomenon where two plates, if it's evacuated inside, if they're close enough, then I think the, explanation is they end up sharing the same wave pattern and then that itself creates a force that brings them together so i don't see how that could pry it apart right and he's got some laser dueling there laser pulse uh quantum laser pulse resonant harmonics yeah so i'm so just let me make it clear We can make a wormhole, but without negative gravity stuff, it's unstable.

Right. And so we pride open. Okay, step in, and then the thing collapses. You go. That's it. Goodbye. Who knows what happened to you. Exactly.

If a wormhole collapses on your ass. Oh, man. Don't smile. That would be so, I mean, I don't want to find out, but it'd be cool. You don't want to be. I don't want to be the beginning to experiment. Yeah, but, yeah. All right, so I don't know.

I don't think the Casimir effect gets you out of this. Yeah, exactly. And the laser pulsing on the vacuum energy, see, the vacuum energy is an energy source in the vacuum of space. Exactly. You can't think of the vacuum as a thing. Like in a tube. In a tube.

Right, right, right. That's not how it works. Exactly, exactly. You know, we think of vacuums as, as, as a vacuum is a place where there's no air pressure. Right. That's all it is. It's not a thing unto itself.

Right. Where, oh, here's some vacuum, do stuff with it. Right. No, that's not how that vacuum works. No. We happen to have a word for where there is no air pressure, and we call it a vacuum. We call it a vacuum. Right.

But if you were the vacuum, it said, you know. Yeah. And it's just like the nothing of space is something. You know what I mean? Right, right. So, yeah. So anyhow. I mean, listen.

This dude, this dude is making some beautiful. and smoking some great weed while he's doing it. His cabinet in the back might have a wormhole. That would be so cool. Ooh, yeah. All right, this is Jay. I think that's, or one last one, I'll give a two-word answer to it. Go.

Oh. That's all we have time for. Right. Jay Valiano. How close does the constellation and drama to be to the Milky Way for us to be able to reach it? Are we then able to colonize in theory or is it moving too fast towards us? for us to be able to find a habitable planet.

If this is not possible, can we use a wormhole to reach Andromeda and tell it to change course before its final kamikaze? This is Jay Baliano from Holland. Okay, he didn't know that it's not the constellation Indromeda that we have issues with. Constellations of stars in our night sky. Way beyond those stars, there's another galaxy.

Two and a half million light years away called the Andromeda Galaxy. That's right. In a day called the Andromeda Nebula. before we knew it was a galaxy. In fact, it was the very first galaxy discovered. Look at that. We found a star in this nebula.

Wait a minute. That star, we know how bright that's part supposed to be, and it's way dimmer. This must be far outside the Milky Way. And Edwin Hubble discovered galaxies by figuring out what happened with the endromeda nebula. Okay. Then we find out we're colliding towards each other.

But collision with galaxies doesn't mean collusion. It doesn't mean collision like a car collision. It's not, it'll look like a train wreck, but it's way more peaceful than that. Stars will just pass through each other. Space is mostly empty. All right. So, how close it would have to be

to find an exoplanet? The point is, we have hundreds of billions of stars in our own galaxy. Right. Why are you trying to look at some other galaxy for a planet? Yes, exactly. Stick with your own kind.

Right. Your partner's sunbathing in the backyard, and you got your binoculars looking across the street. You won't have to do that. Look at your partner. It's right in the backyard. Right here. You got all the action you need.

You got all the action you need. Right here. So in 10, I forgot the latest, 12 billion years will collide. Right. But it's not a smash. Again, we'll just pass through. It'll be fun to watch. It looks like, wait, because, wait, you showed me the picture of, I forget the galaxies that actually were colliding. And they look like starlings when they fly together.

The gravity is changing for every single star. Yeah. Some get cast hither and yon. Other wind up in orbits around others. Right. And if a star comes too close to another star that has planets, it could be a fly-by looting of the planets. And it's just like, come on over here, guys.

Right. The gravitational forces are, you know. And then the other star is left. It's like, that's a pimp star. That's what they call that. That's the pimp star. The Pimp Star rolls by and takes all the planets from the other star. Fly by looting the planets.

Nice. So anyhow, that's all the time we have. All right. Gotta love the doggone. Gotta love the doggone Cosmic Queries grab that. There it is. All right, Chuck. Always good to have you.

Always a pleasure. Neil deGrasse Tyson in another Cosmic Queries edition. As always, keep looking up.