StarTalk Radio - Cosmic Queries – LIGO, Light, & Lycanthropy

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

Are all galaxies redshifting away? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Negin Farsad tackle a grab bag of fan questions covering cosmic infrastructure, redshift, werewolves, gravitational waves, and the nature of time itself. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Thanks to our Patrons Alex Nuche, Christian Payne, Gage Ewing, Ryan Whynot, Temirlan, 2 Lives Left, Chad Keeler, Harli Shae Smith, Brad Smith, Norm Bailey, James Peterson, Ryan Coppens, David Whittenberg, Scott Jarboe, Varun Krishnan, Eric Salinas, Mary Seman, Melissa Davis, Stephen Rockwell, Catrina, Max Wilburn, keith Koenigsberg, LEIII, Vincent Loniello, Simon Toth, DoctorWaterGod, Ruthanne Nava, Martineau Alex, Matthew, Phil, Jaden, Arik Drori, Papersneaker, Steven Peeters, Trey Durango, Julianne, Robbie James, Jason Foreman, Liam, Steven Van Vleet, Marilyn, Zakk Why, Ben Wheeldon, Erik Leazure, KONAL SHARMA, Dušan Živanović, Erik Strandberg, berklie novak-stolz, Kazi Mahin Mahfuz, Tim Van Devender, Andrew Martin, Jason F, Charles Joubert, Youcef Kazwiny, Joy Joslyn, Freeman, Jessica, Pat, Phillip Brooks, Michael Hues, Jacqueline Sinclair, Robert Marsh, Botas, Raza Naqvi (Sid), Jake Colón, Christine Bartholomew & Family, Mr Xoot, Dyonté Houston, Daryl, Rob Weiss, Caleb Holmes, Jeffrey Luce, Kellie Owczarczak, and Brandt Reppond 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.

Nagin, this round had a lot of deep philosophy in it. Ooh, people got juicy. Juicy about time and space and dimensions. And just things that don't exist and maybe never will, or will they? All that and more coming up on StarTalk's Cosmic Queries. The Grab Bag. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. We're going to do a Cosmic Queries grab bag edition. And today I've got with me as my co-host, Nagin Fassad, Nagim. Hello. Welcome back. Oh, my God. So excited to be here.

So excited to launch myself into space. Yes, yes. And you've got all the questions from our Patreon supporters. Oh, by the way. Just reading through these questions, I have to say I feel so much better about humanity. There are some extraordinarily smart people out there. You don't get this, that. You don't know that in your regular life.

So you're saying I'm biased into thinking the world is smarter than it actually is because of our sandbase. Because these are not the kinds of things I get from my fans. Just so we're clear. Maybe there'll be some spillage over. So what's your podcast is? My podcast is called Fake the Nation. You can also hear me on Wait, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Yes, we all love wait, wait, wait, don't tell me.

NPR. Yes. I feel like there's probably a big crossover. I've only ever heard that on the radio, but it sounds like it's live. That's right. We tape in Chicago usually in other cities around the country. In an actual auditorium. In like a huge auditorium with like 800 people and it's a really good time.

Yeah, I highly recommend a live taping if you haven't been to one. Yeah, so I think I've been on them once or twice. Yeah. It was very hard. They asked me hard questions. I couldn't feel. Because the questions were so. So dumb you couldn't believe that they were happening.

That's why I did. Thank you for stroking my ego there. That's right. Right. So I haven't seen the questions. Well, let's get into it. It's grab bag, so I don't know what it is. Well, I'm going to start with a question from Nathan Sprow.

Nathan writes Dr. Tyson, could we launch microsatellites as relay points between larger spacecraft on long-distance missions, effectively creating a network like a cosmic hyperlink with the main spacecraft release these microsatellites directly or would we need a separate deployment system to keep them spaced out over the journey? And what would be the biggest challenges, like keeping them aligned or dealing with the signal delay? So, see, I, I, I, that's a great thought. Yeah. This is a person imagining a future where the solar system is our backyard or, or, or it's an extension of civilization into the solar system or beyond. And, and, And what I would ask is, what is the point of having a relay station?

If, instead, I could just beam my signal straight to earth. Why don't I have to go off of your relay station? Well, I guess it... Unless your relay station boosts the signal. That could happen. Like, it gives us better pathways of communication strength to something super far away. Yeah, but I'm saying that there's the straight way, which is just my own beam of radio waves.

Yeah. But if it goes to you and you want to boost it, you need a source of energy to do that. What if there's like a planet in between you, your signal, your being? If I'm blocked, space is so empty. This is not your concern. It's not happening, okay.

And even if a planet is there, it's in motion. Right. Okay. Right. Like, so imagine you say, oh, I wanna go sunbathing. Oh, darn. There's a total solar eclipse. What am I going to do?

Wait four minutes. Okay. Because the moon orbits Earth. And it's not going to be blocking the sun the whole time. So blockage does not tend to be a problem in the vastness of space. But here is what we do need such places for. Okay. If you're going on a very long distance and you need fuel.

Like long distance like Mars or something No no even farther Okay okay or let's take a simple case I don't want to get to Mars in nine months I want to get to Mars in a week There's a way to do that Okay we always say how far away is nine months away Yeah do you know what they mean by that

That means you load up your your rocket with fuel You burn it all until you have just the right speed And you coast to where Mars is gravity then grabs you and then you go land on Mars. And since you're coasting the whole way, that takes time. It takes extra time. So you'd want to accelerate at 1G because on Earth we live in a 1G environment. If you put it to 2G, that's just you'll feel that beyond what you're comfortable.

Like what your body can't handle. Yeah, your body did not evolve in 2G. So I don't want to travel to the planets in 2G. That's just like if you eat a bunch of Taco Bell and then go. speed racing. You don't want to do that. That's like going 2G. Multiply that by 10 and you get it.

Got it. Your digestive track and all your circulation does not. Now 2G is what you'll feel on roller coasters and things, sometimes even 3G, but you don't want to live on a roller coaster and dine and socialize on a roller coaster. So 1G is an interesting, nice force to put on your rocket. And at 1G you will accelerate through space and get faster and faster and faster and faster and faster. And then you turn the ship around,

fire the rockets in the opposite direction to slow you down. Because there's no other way to break in space. If you were to drive across the country or around the world and you needed to carry all the fuel you were going to use with you, you'd have a tanker behind you, right? Something huge. But we don't. We just have, you know, 15, 20-gallon,

gas tanks. You were not a gas. What do you do? You charge it. You go to a charging station or refill your gas. I'm sorry. It's 2026, Neil. I'm driving an electric car in this imaginary scenario because I don't have a car at all. Okay, so you either have a power station behind you or you'll run out of batteries and you have to recharge. So in space, we either carry all our fuel with us. Right. Or you recharge at one of these nodes that the person is referencing. But they're not communication nodes. They would be filling stations. And look at, for example,

Artemis just went around the moon and back. You know where the astronauts were? They went up a little bit. They were. And the whole rest, and the boosters. All the rest of that is fuel. Fuel.

And by the time they come back, that's all this left, because they spent all the fuel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So space travel, ideally, in the future, would be, you would refill that nodes. And is that just like regular unleaded or like what's in the? Yeah, I mean, it depends on what kind of rocket technology you use. And yeah, give me high octane.

You mean, yeah, I don't know. So the real challenge will be, as we have on Earth, if that's a filling station, you would have to continually supply the filling station. But you can do that on your own time. Yeah. Right? You can send slow ships to refill. They're not trying to get somewhere on a, you know, on a timed trip.

And so there would be this continuous source of fuel brought to them by tankers, space tankers, if I call them that. So there's an occasion for such things. All right. Okay. So not really to microsatellites, but yes, really, to fueling stations. I love that. That's right. Okay, well, our next question comes from Leo B.

Hello. Lowe or Leo? There's an accent on the E. Leo. So I felt like it's Leo. That's a great Leo thing to do. Hello, Dr. Tyson. All Leo's I know put an accent on the E.

You know, right. I feel like the E is meant to really be observed. So this is a question for all of you. Once upon a time I was a child in junior high school back in the mid-80s. When talking about the periodic table, teachers in school used to say that no element slash medals would ever be discovered that it was without any doubt at all impossible. Yet here we are today with a bunch of new elements on the table. In another category of science and tech, humans used to say that we would never fly slash travel in the air. Now we have all kinds of flying transportation available

planes, jets, even hot air balloons. If you could choose a thing that science says can't be done yet without a doubt, which would you most want to see become possible in your lifetime? Thanks. And this is Leo from the Canadian Atlantic provinces. He didn't want to get specific about which province. A man. Yeah, he's a witness protection program. Just the vague region. His name really is Leo, but he's hiding under Leo. So it's a great question.

I love this question. But I have to put it in proper context. Yeah. Okay. In science, if something violates well-tested known laws of physics, it's not going to be possible later. It's just not. Okay.

Because that's what testing the idea means. So the people who said, we will never go, we'll never break the sound barrier. Let's look at those folks. Excuse me, we had rifle bullets that move faster than sound. Did you ever do a towel? Yeah. Whipping. Yeah.

Okay. Have you ever did that? Yeah. Was that just a guy thing that we did? I mean, it's mostly a guy thing. Yeah. I mean, I can't say that me and my gathers. palpals I've ever done that, whipping each other with towels.

But yes, I'm familiar with the action. Especially a mostly damp towel. Yeah, no, it just sounds rather unpleasant. So the tip of the towel makes a snapping sound at the end. Even if it doesn't hit something, the tip of the towel in that instant went faster than sound. It was a mini sonic boom. Really? Yes.

And that is equivalent to what happens at the end of a whip. That's why it makes a cracking sound. It's not just because it hits something. The tip, that's why whatever the material is, typically leather, it's moving this way and rapidly snaps back. And in that rapid change of direction, it's briefly moving faster than sound

and it's a mini sonic boom. We've had things that move faster than sound. So don't tell me, we'll never go faster than sound. You just haven't figured it out yet. Don't tell me we will never fly. Birds fly. So just say, I'm too stupid to figure out how to fly, but don't tell me that the laws of physics are preventing us from flying.

There's a difference between stuff we haven't figured out how to do yet and things that are forbidden by the laws of physics. Two completely different things. That's all. So, is there something that is forbidden by laws of physics that one day? Right. Like, what if the laws of physics are wrong? Oh my God, are you going to like explode right now? Are you sweating?

Oh no, I broke Neil deGrasse Tyson. Here's the worst that can happen to a law of physics. Yeah. We learn that it doesn't apply in as many cases as we thought. That there's situations where those laws of physics fail. And we need a deeper understanding of how the universe works. in order to account for those failures. Well, if these laws of physics failed,

why don't we just discard them? We don't discard them because they still work in all the places where they were tested. And the best example of this is Newton's laws of motion and gravity. We went to the moon. The Apollo missions went to the moon on Newton's laws of gravity. Einstein has his own laws of motion and gravity.

It's called the theories of relativity. When do you use that? If speeds are really high or gravity is really strong, Newton's laws begin to teeter, and then they fail miserably, whereas Einstein's laws precisely predict what's going on. But you know what happens? If you put low speeds or low gravity into Einstein's equations,

they become Newton's equations. Right, so it's still fundamentally works. It's still fundamental ways. So Einstein's equations, enclosed Newton's equations. And Newton, we didn't know at the time, was a special case of Einstein's equations. But it's not discarded in the way that you, I think, implied

when you said, maybe with the attitude, maybe your laws of physics are wrong. And so it's a matter of technology. And today, when I say, we're not going to Mars for 100 years, it's not because we don't know how to get to Mars. No one is denying our ability. We have an SUV-sized rover on Mars.

We plunk down and it's row. And we took a helicopter with it. It's not about whether we know how to get to Mars. It's whether we have sufficient geopolitical or national motivation to send people to Mars. That's a whole other thing than in the 19... But we do have the scientific capacity to do it, the technological capacity to do it. Yes. And okay.

Oh my gosh. And that's different from in the 1940s and 50s, I collected... comments from people, people from writers, say, oh, we will never get to the moon for another 200 years, that they couldn't imagine the pace of technology going exponentially right past their capacity to imagine. And there are people who are alien adjacent, let's say. They're the ones who would have thought in the 1950s we weren't going anywhere,

and then 15 years later we're on the moon. Where did you get that technology from? Right. Okay. You must have been chilling with the aliens. And these are people who are in denial of a true exponential growth of science and technology, which is the period in which we live right now. In the era of having gone to the moon, no one is imagining that anything is impossible.

That became a thing. We can land a man on the moon, but we can't feed the hungry or whatever. Yeah, it was a constant refrain. It was, this is the reference point for what we're capable of. Right. And after that, people say, oh, we can go to the moon by 1969. We'll be on Mars by 1985. And there were these, the people were overpredicting where we'd end up landing.

Right now, it's not a matter of what can or cannot happen. When it's a subject of debate or conversation, it's, we're pretty sure it's going to happen, but how soon. So it's a time reference thing, not whether it's the laws of physics allow it. Well, you and Leo both mentioned forms of transportation, and I have one that I don't think is possible right now, but I would like to see it happen. It is a hovering subway, like a subway that doesn't have, like hit tracks. It hovers above tracks so that it doesn't make like a screeching noise. and that it's like a little faster and just a little more agile. That already exists in the world.

Like a hovering subway? Already, yes. Okay, well then... They're called Maglev trains. You never heard of these? Oh, in China? Well, China has them. Yeah.

We're not up to China's practicality yet. So they hover literally, like how much do they hover? They magnetically levitate over a track. Okay, so... So I just want the thing that already... What would you do if an alien actually showed up? Would you shake its hand or run? Does it even have a hand to shake?

In my latest book, Take Me to Your Leader, I explore not only how they might have gotten here, but what they might want and how you should respond. Because the real question is not, are we alone? It's, are we ready? By the way, I also narrated, take me to your leader. And I'm duly informed that you can get a copy of that book or the audiobook now, wherever books are sold. You should probably get the book sooner rather than later.

You don't want to have a first alien encounter and not be ready for it. I'm just saying. All right. Well, listen, I have another question. This one's like very scientifically advanced, I think. From Martin. Martin in Denmark says, I have a question about... In Denmark.

I love it. red shifting. What makes the light red shift when traveling great distances? And do we know that we're directing all the red shifted light or is our current equipment not good enough to detect light from, for example, 50 to 100 billion light years away? Okay. So that's a, that's a very common question that confabulates to, is that the right word confabulates? Yeah, conflates. Conflates. That's the word. That conflates two different things going on. The redshift is only a speed thing. Okay?

Forget distance for the moment. Just for the moment. Okay. If you are approaching someone and you are emitting light and a light you can think of as waves, let's think of it as a wave. So I begin to emit a wave of light of a certain wavelength. But as I'm emitting the light,

I'm getting closer to you. while I'm emitting that light. So the wavelength that finally comes out of me is shorter than the wavelength would be if I just were stationary. So if something comes towards you, all the light shifts to smaller wavelengths. And if something's moving away from you,

you're stretching out the wave. Yeah. I started emitting the wave and I finish emitting the wave. It got stretched because now I've increased my distance. So it's a speed that. And the faster I'm moving, the longer is that shift in its wavelength, either towards you or away from you. Okay.

We call it a red shift because we're kind of stuck with just a visible part of the spectrum in the history of this exercise. And whatever features in the spectrum you saw, if the object was moving away from you, those features shifted to the red side of the spectrum. So we called it a red shift. like the fingerprints of elements that are in the light, you know, hydrogen and carbon and nitrogen. They're called spectral lines. They're the fingerprints of these elements. They're all shifted, every single one of them by the same amount. We call that a red shift.

If it's moving towards you, they all shift the other way. Call it a blue shift. Now, another little confusing fact, all the colors of the rainbow, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. So really it's a violet shift. Oh, right, because we're going to the other end. Okay. There's indigo and violet beyond the blue, right? So technically, if you're going to say one side is a red shift, we should call the other side of violet shift.

But we don't. We just say blue shift. You famously demoted Pluto. Maybe you can change. Maybe you can change blue shift to violet shift. Oh, you're respecting the power that I will. Yeah, no, respecting the power that you wield. I thought you're trying to pick a fight.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. So as an educator, I want to minimize confusion. So ideally, it would be a violet shift. But so now, what's interesting, these features can shift so much. They go beyond the red and come out at the other side. And then they're like infrared or microwaves or even radio waves. And if they keep shifting, they're shifting away from the red.

It's a matter of semantics to say it's a. red shift. It's not like a line like that. Yeah, it's just we, the red was where it, when we first discovered it, it happened to be headed. Right. But we know of other branches of the spectrum beyond that and we can say that it's infrared shifted or, or microwave shifted or radio shifted, but we don't. We still say red shifted. Okay. Turns out in the expanding universe, the farther away you are, the faster galaxies are receding from us. The farther away you are, the faster. Okay.

It's the signature of an explosion. Yep. That's why we didn't pull Big Bang out of our ass. We, we, that is what an explosion looks like. Although it is something I can picture a scientist saying after like a particularly good poop. You know what I mean? Like he called it a Big Bang and then someone heard that and it's like, that's a good name for this theory we're working on.

We know exactly where the word Big Bang came from, though. There was a physicist, astrophysicist named Fred Hoyle. He hated the idea of a Big Bang. It was on a radio show, I think it was. And he pejoratively says, these people believe in a big bang. He's like, hey, that's a good idea. Let's the little stick. He imagined the universe was eternally static.

Right. Well, that's static, but was always the same and didn't have a beginning. So he was in the other camp. But the point is, the universe is expanding. so when we look at the spectra of galaxies, they're all redshifted because they're moving away from us. Right, right, right.

And because the amount of the redshift correlates with how far away the galaxy is because you've been farther away, you redshifted even faster. It's why we get to say the higher your redshift is, the farther away you are. And then also then...

But that's just a fact. You sort of like then never see a blue shift? as a result? So if a galaxy is close enough, we might be falling into each other as we currently are with Andromeda. That has a blue shift. But on a large enough scale

where the expansion of the universe dominates, every galaxy is redshifted. All right. Every galaxy is redshifted. Yes. So what else you got? So from William Warren in Abington, Maryland, we have...

I have... This sounds very British. Yeah. I've never heard of it. Okay. But now we know. So if they write, I have epilepsy and a neuropace device implanted in my brain to help control seizures. Nice.

I've heard claims, even from medical professionals, that seizures can be more common during full moons. You might see where this is going. Scientifically, is there any plausible mechanism by which cosmic events like the moon could influence neurological activity in the human brain? More broadly, what do you think about the idea that the universe can influence human experiences in ways that feel meaningful but may not have a measurable physical cause. How do you personally separate scientific reality from perceived cosmic connection? Wow. Okay.

So in some municipalities, I'll get to the epilepsy in a minute, but let's start simple. In some municipalities, there's slightly more babies born during full moon than other phases. Really? And so people say, oh, is it the extra gravity or is it the, Is it to this? And people want to just put meaning into it. Keep it all onto the cosmos. And right, they want the cosmos to deliver meaning into their lives.

It turns out the gestation period of the human female is almost exactly equal to 10 cycles of the moon. If you gave birth during a full moon, you got pregnant during a full moon. Right, right. Okay? Yeah. I just want to put the math. The math. Let's do the math here.

Yeah. No one debates the beauty of a full moon on a romantic night. So that easily explains the slightly higher birth rate during a full moon. That's it. I mean, that's how. That's kind of all I can give you. Okay. That's kind of all I can give you because, because, now you're going to take, keep a list.

Keep a mental list. You ready? The phase of the moon has nothing to do with its gravity. The moon's gravity on Earth is the same no matter what the phase of the moon is. A, B, the tidal forces exacted by the moon on Earth itself is unrelated to the phase of the moon. you might say, well, how about the famously high tides during... Oh, the full moon. Full moon.

Yeah. Okay. Those high tides are not because of the moon. They're... I thought it really... The sun also raises tides on Earth. They're about a third the strength. Or its effect on the waters is about one third that of the moon.

And so, but on full moon, the sun lines up with Earth and the moon. Okay? So they're both acting. They both act together. They can do it. And what you're seeing is the sun's tides added to what was otherwise be a constant moon tide throughout the month. So it's the sun's fault that the full moon has higher tides than other phases of the moon.

Now see, that needs a rebranding because I really, no one knows that. Nobody knows that. Nobody knows that. So you're not getting extra tidal force from the moon. You're not getting extra gravity. Gravity is just a matter of how close you are, so is the strength of the tidal force as well. But it's a distance thing.

It's not what phase you're in. So now, the moon's orbit around the Earth is not a perfect circle. Sometimes it's a little closer. Sometimes it's a little farther. When it's a little closer, the gravity will be a little higher. The tidal forces will be a little higher. But that has nothing to do with the phase. That's all I'm saying.

It could be that with a half moon or a crescent moon, but nobody talks about that. So let me keep going. Okay, so now people say, I feel a little crazy under the full moon. Where do you think we get the term lunatic? Oh, yeah, yeah. That's the Luna moon, okay. And werewolves, if you're going to turn it into a werewolf. You're going to do it on a full moon.

On a full moon. You never see a human turning into a werewolf on a night where there's a full moon, but it's cloudy. No. If it's overcast. Antichlomactic. for the story. No, yeah. It's like,

show me the cloudy sky. It's not cinematic. It's not cinematic. It's not cinematic. So then, so if they really need to see the moon to turn into a werewolf, because that's always how it is, right?

They see it, and then they turn into the werewolf. That means just the light from the moon that might be affecting them. Yeah. However, the light from the moon, and I did this experiment in an eighth-grade science fair project, I got a spectrum of the science fair project.

Okay. I got a spectrum of the and a spectrum of the moon and showed that they're identical. Why? Because the moon is reflected light from the sun. If you turn into werewolf under moonlight, you should turn into werewolf every waking moment of the daytime. Daylight.

Right. So the light is just sunlight. And also, if you live in any city, the light of the street lamp you walked under is typically brighter than the light of the light of the light of the sunlight. the full moon that's in the sky, even if they're in the sky at the same time. Of course, as you walk away from the street lamp, it gets much dimmer. But right around where the street lamp is, street lamp is brighter than the full moon.

No one is talking about the effects of street lamps on your emotional state. On werewolves. Or on werewolves or anything. Right. It comes down to how big is the human ego to suggest that the universe gives a rat's ass about you, your social life, your mental health, or your love life. Because rats are not blaming the cosmos

for whatever they do specifically. So if there are studies to show that there are more neurology events, let's call it that, neurological events in the world

during a full moon and other phases, I don't know of them, I'd like to see them. I can tell you that people are so primed to think of the full moon as a force on us that if someone has a seizure and it's not the full moon, are they going to report that? You had a seizure and it was a crescent moon.

Oh, my God. Who gets told that? Right. Nobody. But if you happen to have a seizure and there's a full moon, everybody's going to hear about that. Again, it's cinematic. You know, yeah.

Everybody's going to hear about that. So I remain unconvinced by such claims, especially since to the untrained eye, the moon will look full for about four days, two days on each side of the... Right. To a trained astrophysicist's eye and amateur astronomer's eye, we know if you're 12 hours out of full moon, we'll know. But the untrained eye, they'll give you two days. So that's four days out of 30. That psychologically you think you're in a full moon. Correct.

Right. Correct. So that's one out of, call it three days, one out of ten days. That means 10% of your seizures, if they're random, will occur under a full moon, and that's when everybody talks about it. This talk about tidal forces and things? Do you realize tides are equally as high during new moon as they are during full moon? During new moon, the Earth, moon and sun also line up, but you can't see the new moon. It's like a sliver, like a nothing, yeah.

Or you can't even see it. In Islamic cultures, the term new moon refers to the first, especially during Ramadan, the first sighting of the new crescent moon. They call that new moon. But astronomically, new moon is not far enough to the side yet to even see a crescent. And it's there. No one sees that phase in the moon. So yet, the tidal forces are just as high. Plus, if you didn't want to explain higher birth rates that way, you'd have to say, okay,

did you give birth in stirrups facing an open window where the full moon happened to be in the sky at the time? So the gravity will yank the baby out. And suppose you weren't, suppose the moon was behind you. It's going to keep the baby in?

Just think this through. Think it through. Right. The baby also can't see the moon. Hi, I'm Ernie Carducci from Columbus, Ohio. I'm here with my son Ernie because we listen to StarTalk every night and support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Another question from Gregory K. In Ottawa, Canada. Okay, a lot of Canadian questions today. It's a question about LIGO. My dad used to talk and argue with other people about gravitational waves. And then... They just have arguments about gravitation.

I love it. I mean, this is a man after your own heart. I love arguments over dinner about science. Yeah. And then he celebrated when LIGO, L-I-G-O, am I saying that right? L-I-G-O, am I saying that right? Ligo? L-O-L-G-O, detected the merging black holes. Now, what I don't understand, what makes me doubt is that they haven't confirmed the merger with a telescope detecting the same event. How do they even know it's not some gravity waves cult conspiracy? Oh. So there's a lot in there. Very good. So, indeed, we did the calculation and we said, how often might two black holes call? in the universe. There's a lot of galaxies in the universe. You can ask how often would that

happen in our own galaxy? I don't know the number, but let me make up a number that could might happen only once in a million years. Well, you wouldn't build an experiment on the hope that something will happen now that happens only once in a million years. But suppose you have a billion galaxies. Yeah, that makes my head hurt. Okay. So something can happen once in a years. Right. But if you have a billion galaxies... Then it's...

Yeah, the probability is higher. Somebody's doing it all the time. Right. Okay? Not everyone at the same... You're doing it and then you're doing it and then you're doing it. Somewhere it's happening. Somewhere it's happening.

It's a rare event that then would come to you frequently. Mm-hmm. Which is fun to say that, right? This event is rare, except it's common. Mm-hmm. Okay. Armed with that calculation, they turned on the telescope. Within days of that, they made their first discovery.

And we can characterize the masses of black holes and what it would look like. And so we knew these two black holes were around 30 times the mass of the sun. They collide, sent out a ripple through the fabric of space time, traveling at the speed of light. And it is a signal coming from a galaxy far far away. For billions of years, it washed over spacetime.

until it arrived at Earth, until it arrived at that detector, and they measured it. Now, black holes don't emit light. Two black holes don't emit light. They collide. They don't emit light. So you're not going to see this with any telescope that uses light. But you will see it with a telescope that uses gravitational waves. So that person, what's the person's name?

This was Gregory in Canada. So Gregory and Canada wanted verification from a regular telescope. But it can't happen. But we built a new telescope that verified itself. The laser interferometer gravitational wave observatory. Oh. Acronymned as... Ligo.

Ligo. Okay, so now, using the same telescope, we've discovered two colliding. pulsars. They emit light. They collide. They're not as massive as the black holes. So their LIGO signature is not as strong. But once we discovered what their masses were, we told other telescopes, look for this in this part of the sky. We found, and then they turn on the telescopes, and there it is. Okay. So colliding pulsars showed up in everybody's telescope. And that's where we learned that pulsars might be the source of all the world's gold. It's very high-level, high-mass nuclear fusion going on.

Gold, platinum, meridian, silver. All comes from these collisions. We think most of that in the universe comes from colliding pulsars. And nothing's coming out of a colliding black hole. They're just boring. My face is. I love me the wiggle that they send us. But, yeah, no, otherwise.

look elsewhere if you want some action. Right. Yeah, yeah. So I've been giving long answers. Should I try some short answers? Do you want to try that? Yeah, let's do it. I mean, I, I mean, I, they're, I find them good.

You like them? Okay, all right. I find them fascinating. If I can follow them, I think that's a good sign. Let's try, I'll try one that's short. Okay. Just so you can, and then you can pass judgment. Yeah, let me see.

So James Hudson from Alabama asks, we often talk about mysteries that may take centuries to unravel, but which cosmic questions feel close enough to touch the ones you believe we might actually answer within the next 30 years. Okay. So I'm going to give a cop-out answer, then I'll give a real answer.

My cop-out answer is, I don't think about questions yet to be answered. Oh. I think about questions yet to be asked. Ooh, okay. As our knowledge grows. Yeah. I say as the area of our knowledge grows.

so too does the perimeter of our ignorance. So I want to know the question I have yet to think to ask because there's a new vista we have yet to arrive at that'll show us the universe in ways we don't yet know how to question. So that's the real answer I want to give that question. Questions like, why are two colliding black holes so boring? Why don't they make gold like colliding? If you know to ask that question, it doesn't count in my list.

It has to be a question you don't know to ask yet. Right. Gosh. See, for example, before black holes were developed, you wouldn't even know to ask that question. No. You're asking questions about other stuff black holes do, not even about the black hole. And you feel like there's things always on the precipice of being discovered. To put me in a new place to ask a new question I don't even know to ask right now.

That's the answer I want to give them. But let's get back to like normal philosophy here. Yeah. I want to know if there was ever life on Mars. Okay. Or if there was ever life anywhere else in our backyard. The moons of Jupiter, other planets, the solar systems, especially Mars. I want to learn that before I die.

And if I lead a healthy life and wear a seatbelt and don't smoke, I should live another 30 years. And I'm looking forward to that. You have a recent book on aliens. Well, thanks for giving it a shout-out. Yeah, no, it's a good read. And I wonder, like a personal question for you is, what if you find out that there's life on Mars and that life is like really uninteresting?

No, no, it would be interesting to a biologist no matter what. Okay. It's microbial life, you're not having a conversation. Like single cell. Yeah, yeah, you're not having a conversation with it. No. That's not coming up to you and saying, take me to your leader. Okay. But it's another way of being alive. Right. And that, is immense, can I speak for biologists in this way? I'm pretty sure I got them covered here. That would be immensely fascinating. Does it have DNA? Is DNA as complex as that molecule is? Is it inevitable in any imprint of life the universe sees? If it has DNA, is there any DNA in common

with DNA on Earth? You wouldn't expect it to have any DNA in common at all because it's from another planet. But if it does have DNA in common, could that mean life began on Mars and moved to Earth? Mm-hmm. That's called panspermia. Where an asteroid hits, it kicks life, stowaway life on a rock, on an asteroid, on a meteor that moves from planet to planet.

It arrives on Earth already homemade life on Mars, which would mean everyone on Earth would be a descendant of Mars. That would be wild. Also, some people perhaps more so than others, perhaps. Also, that's called panspermia. Yeah, a guy came up with that word. I'm gonna, I'm gonna not say anything further. Let that one go.

We're gonna let that one go. We have other battles to fight here. But or suppose it was life and had no DNA at all. Yeah. That's more interesting. Right, like you look into the microscope and it's just squigglys and you don't, it's like doesn't look like anything that we know. That would be transformative to biology.

Meeting aliens asking me to take them to their leader would be transformative to our culture. Oh, yeah, totally. It would be so fun. It would be so fun. And I'm so not taking them to our leaders. I'm taking them to brunch. To brunch.

I like that. You know what I mean? Let's have some mimoses to talk about how you guys live. Oh, yeah. Okay, if you invite me to join you with that, totally brunch first. and then we go to the National Academy of Sciences. Okay.

Yes, natural second place. All right, okay. So one more, I think we have time for. All right, here we go. Okay, so we have one from Donatus from Lithuania. Oh, Donatus. I love them. All right.

Well, I love time travel movies. I suspect time travel is impossible. I lean toward loop quantum gravity where time is emergent, not a fundamental highway. Common travel theories often ignore how gravity affects subatomic particles. versus macro objects. In Bell's rocket paradox, it's argued the string breaks because the rocket rotates in the time dimension. But if a rocket is just a vast cloud of subatomic particles, can a macro object truly rotate into,

sorry, can a macro object truly rotate into time as a single unit? Or is our perception of time just the sum of quantum interactions making the fourth dimension an illusion? Well, I mean, that's... You had that question, too. You were thinking that this morning. I think this question comes up for me every day. Every day. I'm intrigued by emergent ideas on the landscape, the cosmological landscape,

that time or our perception of time could be emergent. What does that mean emergent? It's like, you know, people think of maybe consciousness is emergent. in the sense that the fundamental structure of the universe does not allow for it. But once you start doing things in the universe, there's a time reference that is very helpful to you. And so it comes out of what was otherwise fundamental within the universe itself. And so I don't have a problem with that, but it feels so science fiction-y. I don't, I'm more comfortable seeing it in a science fiction setting

rather than the thing is actually going on in our own universe. I don't know how helpful I can be in reacting to that. You know who we really need for that is Brian Green. He could totally get in there. He's our physicist at large up at Columbia University. I like time. Einstein once said that time is defined to make motion, look simple.

Because motion becomes very easy to see and interpret. It was here earlier and that's here later. Right. And there's a timeline. And I'm just angered that as a dimension of our existence, we are prisoners of the present. Yeah. And you don't think there's like a scenario.

Like, do you agree that it's impossible? It's intriguing ideas right now. I can't weigh in on whether what is more likely than, There's no evidence for any of this, but it's intriguing. And you always need intriguing ideas on the edges just to keep you to destabilize your comfort level with what is known. Because only when you're uncomfortable with what is known do true discoveries occur. Because as we established earlier, that's possible that you're little laws of physics. Don't talk about little laws of physics.

Wrong. Kidding, they're not. They can be expanded upon. They can be expanded upon. There it is. I think we ran out of time. No, one last question, I'll answer it in three sentences. Okay, and or Klomp from Scheiden the Netherlands.

Netherlands, yes. If the universe tends to generate more complex ways of processing information, would creating official intelligence beyond ourselves be unnatural or exactly what nature has been doing all along? At what point, at what point does protecting humanity become holding back the next layer of consciousness? Ooh. Oh, I'm loving that. People feeling all philosophical about the universe. I would say that whatever we do, since we are of this universe, is natural.

If we create an artificial intelligence, it's natural. Nature creates a beaver, a beaver creates a dam. We shouldn't not allow the dam just because it was created. and nature would not have done it all by itself. Nature needed the dam. Nature needs us to create artificial intelligence. I'm cool with that. People see cities as, oh, this is unnatural.

We're humans and we built the city. Deal with it. If you're a bee, you build a beehive. If you're a termite, you build a termite mound. I'm a person I build a city. Chill out. And so I don't think we're getting ahead of ourselves, which is just, let me call it a natural evolution

of what it is to have a brand. a curious brain that wants to keep that engine moving into what are the powers and expressions that our brain can offer. So I'm all in. I love that. It's a little bit like athletes that we thought like in the 1920s you could only run a mile at this. It's impossible to break that record.

The form of a mile was like this barrier. Right. It was a psychological barrier, it turned out. And then we break it and then we break it. Because you know who broke the mile. Who broke the mile? Roger Bannister. That was, okay.

Now, once he did that, people broke the four-minute mile all the time. Oh, my gosh. So it was a psychological barrier, not a barrier created by the laws of physics. So we perhaps are our own worst enemy in this regard. So fortunately, there are people who live among us who are not constrained by these limits of imagination

foisted upon them by others. And Neil, I think you're one of them. Oh, well, thank you. Nagin, always good to have you. So good to be here. All right, all right. This has been another installment of Cosmic Query's Grabbag edition.

This one was big on the philosophy. Yeah, a lot of big ideas. Yeah, but I love big ideas. Small ideas matter too, but big ideas, you need those. And remind me of your handle? You can find me at Nagin Farsad on all the things. Nagin F-A-R-S-A-D. That's right.

You got it. You got it. We'll look for you there. And your podcast is Fake the Nation. Subscribe. Fake the Nation. It's a fun time. And your book is still one of my favorites.

It's How to Make White People Laugh. I just laugh. Just thinking of that title. Really good. All right, Nagin, we'll keep up with you there. This has been another installment of StarTalk Cosmic Queries. Until next time, keep looking up.