StarTalk Radio - Cosmic Queries: Potpourri Vol. 2
Episode Date: May 26, 2017Neil Tyson and first-time co-host Eddie Brill answer a potpourri of fan-submitted Cosmic Queries. Topics include alien communication, gravity assist, electromagnetism; "Blade Runner," "...Interstellar" & "Arrival;" independent thinking, junk science, and more!NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Find out more at https://www.startalkradio.net/startalk-all-access/ Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
StarTalk begins right now.
This is StarTalk.
I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist,
and this is going to be a Cosmic Queries potpourri edition.
And I have a guest co-host today, the one, the only, Eddie Brill.
Eddie.
Yes.
Dude.
Hey, it's good to see you after all these years.
You're from, like, the comedy firmament.
I mean, you go back, you've been to see you after all these years. You're from the comedy firmament. I mean, you go back.
You've been everywhere.
You know everybody.
And it's a delight and a pleasure and an honor to have you as my co-host for this episode.
Well, that's very, very nice of you.
Yeah, I've been at this game since I was in college at Emerson in the 1970s.
And it's just been starting.
Were you one of the kids in the class that were cut up in class?
And they say, what are you, a comedian?
Yeah, as a matter of fact, I am.
All right, but no funny stuff.
Exactly.
Yeah, you know, I was very shy as a kid, and I was a good student.
I was actually a science and math guy.
Nice.
In school.
But, you know, my stepfather died very young.
Good night.
No, my stepfather died very young, and that's our show.
What?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And all of a sudden I realized life's too short, and I went sort of to do like broadcasting,
and I got some laughs at it, and I kind of liked that.
And little by little, I went to school to study journalism, and the first friends I
met were Stephen Wright and Dennis Leary and Mario Cantone.
We formed a comedy group, and then I stopped math and science.
I stopped journalism.
I mean, we could have we could
have understood the the unified field theory by today by today except that you left you left yes
so it's my fault you know comedy is very mathematical the writing of comedy the writing
of music is very mathematical and I just liked getting laughs and I liked being creative much
more than a not much more in a different sense.
So to summarize, it's comedy is a serious business.
Very true.
So you've got questions for me, which I haven't seen yet, but they've been called from our
internet base.
It's wonderful.
And I always like knowing who they come from, but when Chuck does this, he can never pronounce
their names correctly and people write in and correct him and complain and laugh.
Well, I understand.
Like the first one I saw here, the guy, I love that he used this name.
It's J.J. Hingleheimer Schmidt.
Oh, okay.
Which is a play on words.
And maybe his name is Billy Hingle or not really.
But here, it really came out at me because his name is so long
and I worked hard to memorize it.
But he said, suppose we meet aliens.
How do we go about asking them which creatures from their planet taste good?
So this guy not only has a good name, has a good question, and he's a little odd.
A little odd.
A little odd.
I think if aliens come to Earth, that means their technology is vastly superior to ours and it means they're smarter
than we are they will be asking who among us are tasty we will not have that power over them
to even dare to ask such a question they it'll be by the grace of their will that they do not eat us and only enslave us or only put us in their zoo
of creatures that they found in their journeys across the galaxy well there might be some of
us in their snack bar you know that might be the few of us that really taste good and then we'll
find out it's like but i think in the history of human uh hunting and gathering it for us it's
really just trial and error.
And the stuff that will kill you, if you eat something and it killed you,
gone are your genes to propagate to a next generation who would think the same way.
So evolution by natural selection has a way of tuning what it is that tastes good and what it is that does not.
That's interesting.
What do you think of those five planets that we found?
Is it exciting in a way about, I'm asking mostly,
is it a place that we want to go to?
Yeah, well, it's the seven planets, three of which were in.
Two I don't really care about.
It's the five.
Well, there are three in the Goldilocks zone.
So, yeah, if you are hegemonistic,
if you feel a bit of conqueror in you,
yeah, you'd go there and say,
I declare these lands in the name of the empire, right?
Because, of course, humans did that for millennia.
Sure, but it's not an interesting thing to do if no one's there and it's a hostile environment
and you would die if you tried to pitch tent.
Who the hell wants it anyway?
You'll never find out that they're tasty or not.
Exactly.
By the time you get there.
Well, you might be hungry by then.
You never know.
There's a friend of mine who's a fan of fish,
but has a strong objection to ugly fish
because you've been at aquariums before.
Oh, yeah.
There's some ugly, you know, just butt ugly fish.
And so what she said was
is that
her name is Denise Gamble, and she said
if you're going to be, if you
got to be ugly, at least be tasty.
Have some redeeming
features about you. Otherwise
there's no point of you ever having been born.
Well that goes back to J.J. Hingelheimer
Schmidt going, well you know
maybe they'll take the ugliest of us and eat us because at least we're tasty.
That's right.
All right, let's see what some other people have to say.
All right, what do you have?
Here's Kyle Toth.
What would a truly invincible and immortal superhero experience as the universe reaches its final moments?
Oh.
I like that.
Interesting.
I love that.
So let me remind people, if you didn't otherwise know what the final moments of i like that interesting i love that so uh let me remind people if you
didn't otherwise know what the final moments of the universe will be we are on a one-way
expansion trip one way i look at me look at the lunch i had no we call that uh you're developing
an accretion disc we have other vocabulary for when your belt size is growing. So what we have is an
expanding universe that's getting cooler and cooler. You can measure the temperature of the
universe. Right now, it's three degrees on the absolute temperature scale. It's already very
cold. That's why we say space is cold. That's why. All right. But it's still getting colder.
So in a few more billion years, we're going to drop another degree. A trillion years, you start getting into the fractions of a degree and you start approaching absolute zero. And so the death of the universe will be an absolutely cold universe that has reached zero degrees. Now, here's the problem. I don't mind if it's just zero degrees,
but how about the stuff that's in the universe?
Might you still have stars?
No, they will use up all of their fuel
and then they'll burn out.
And what happens to them?
Then they will cool and come into equilibrium
with the cold temperature of the universe.
What happens to orbits?
There's energy contained in orbits.
Orbits will decay and will collapse into one mass into the universe. What happens to orbits? There's energy contained in orbits. Orbits will decay
and will collapse into one mass into the center. And so all motion, all processes will cease.
If you're an invincible superhero, but you require food, you need some place to get your energy. I don't care where. All energy phenomenon in the universe winds down.
So even the invincible superhero, who presumably needs energy for their sustenance, will wind down and you'll find them seated and dead in the corner.
Because they've got no energy to do anything anymore.
in the corner because they've got no energy to do anything anymore.
Yeah, I guess there would be a hierarchy of how people would die.
Yeah, exactly. You know, there would be, a superhero doesn't mean you're going to live long.
You'd just be a mediocre superhero, like, you know, Ice Cream Man.
You know, that might actually work in your favor.
Yeah, so depending on how sensitive you are
to the flow of energy into your body,
you'll be the first to die off if you didn't have that.
By the way, this scenario is what they play out in zombie stories.
So zombies are dangerous not only because they'll eat you
or eat your brains,
but they'll eat the brains of the people
who are running the power stations. They'll eat the brains of the people who are running the power stations.
They'll eat the brains of the people who are running the farms.
So slowly, there's the dismantling of civilization.
And what we so take for granted that provides us sustenance is one by one gets taken out.
If the farms go away, then the cows go away because now there's no vegetation for them to eat.
So your steak goes away first, then all the vegetables go away, and then you go away.
Right.
And then an earth winds down.
But if you had a superhero that had infinite energy, then they're around forever, but there will be no one to save.
Right, or nothing to eat.
When you were growing up, did you have a superhero that you wanted to be?
I did.
I did.
It's a little embarrassing, but I can take it.
I wanted to be Mighty Mouse.
Ah.
Here I come to save the day.
I just thought you can sing opera and save a damsel in distress.
That was just, I just thought that was awesome.
Yeah, it's sexy.
And I didn't think too hard about how little a mouse is.
You know, mouse are really tiny.
And how do you actually lift up big buildings?
But back then, I wasn't analyzing the physics of it.
Today, yeah, I would say, no, the mouse is not lifting the building,
no matter how big his pecs are.
You have to work out pretty hard in this world to lift a building.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, for me, it was not superhero, but it was more like, I always loved the idea of the three wishes and to be the genie.
Oh.
And to always ask the third question to be, I need two more questions.
Can I have two more?
Oh, two more wishes.
Yeah, right, right.
Three more wishes, and then I can infinitesimally, that's why I went to comedy, infinitesimally would be able to constantly be able to have the favors.
Oh, infinitely. Infinitesimal would be tiny. Yeah, right. So infinitely would be able to constantly be able to have the favors infinitely
infinitesimal would be tiny yeah infinitely would be as many more as you need that's why i need you
here with me okay i got your back you did and front on that one you saved my front and back
now here's a question and i'm picking this one out of a few because a lot of them are asking the same
general general idea this is potpourri so they
can come from anywhere all right and it doesn't smell like potpourri this smells like paper
which is odd but it because of our society right now and what we're going through how can ordinary
people distinguish true facts from alternative facts especially if true ones and i like this
part of it are not appealing oh yeah yeah there's like four questions that have to do with the truth.
Yeah, and of course they're quite topical.
So the way to answer that is I can say what we do as scientists.
Right.
Okay.
By the way, there are things that I can tell you that completely defy common sense,
and I'm telling you they're true, and I might expect you to believe me,
but if you don't i'd have to though
go then find the evidence for it so for example for me to say that particles pop in and out of
existence you saw that doesn't make any sense well i've said many times the universe is under
no obligation to make sense to you especially when you're probing places regions conditions
of the universe that fall outside of your physical
five senses, then what's natural in those environments is not natural in your life.
So you have to be open to things that don't fit into what you expect to happen.
All right, so now what about truths?
This is why one of the great powers of science is there are certain things that are repeatable
in this world. The laws of physics, the laws of optics, the laws of the quantum physics, certain laws
of chemistry, biology.
This is why knowing science is so important because it gives you a foundational landscape
on which other people are trying to plant facts or false facts.
Right.
But I know how things are and how they operate
because I studied that.
You're now going to tell me something
that is inconsistent with something I know
to be true in the universe.
Maybe it's a new discovery and I want to know about it.
Maybe it's not.
Maybe it's fake news.
Maybe it's just a mistake.
But I am now empowered
to ask questions about it. You come to me with crystals you want to rub together and it can
heal ailments. So here I have these crystals. Do I completely discount it? Knowing the physics I
know, I could, but that's equally as intellectually lazy as embracing everything you
say. What's harder is to pose the question and to know how to pose the questions. And we're not
taught this in school, how to be curious about the natural world. So I would say, what are these
crystals made of? Where did you find them? Are they manufactured? Are they natural? What ailments
do they heal? What is the evidence that they heal these ailments? How quickly does it heal it? What
is the mechanism? And by the time you've done it, the person's ran away. If they're charlatans,
they won't have believable answers to those questions. And in that way, you can ferret out
what is true and what is not simply by an intelligent sequence of questions that you
pose upon it. Yeah, because a lot of people will, you know, say, well, this is fake news or
if they don't agree with it and not just the president or his people, but a lot of people
do that in our society. And this is why the last part of the question was really kind of cool for
me. Even if the true ones are not appealing. Oh, yeah. So you got to get over that one. Yeah, right. Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah. There are many facts that are just the reality of the world. You can ask yourself
the question, I think, if you had the choice to know a truth that was unpleasant or instead,
or know a series of truths that were unpleasant, or lead a delusional life,
thinking something that's true that isn't,
what would you choose?
This is kind of like the Matrix,
the red pill or the blue pill.
I'm thinking I value reality.
I don't know.
In comedy, we were talking about this a little bit earlier
before we started.
In comedy, the truth is the foundation.
And reality is the foundation.
It's where you go from there.
And in addition to that, I did a podcast in Finland, of all places, called We Are Not Here to Please You.
And I loved it.
And it really changed my thinking in comedy.
Wait a minute.
A comedian had a podcast saying, I'm not here to please you?
Yes.
How many gigs did that get you? Well, the truth is it's the best way to be, a comedian had a podcast saying, I'm not here to please you? Yes. How many gigs did that get you?
Well, the truth is, it's the best way to be as a comedian.
Because if you have your perspective, you don't have to.
George Carlin taught me that.
He said, they can't argue with your perspective.
Because it's authentic.
Right.
That's the word.
It's authentic.
Where, I mean, you don't have to agree.
But if I don't take you for granted or
treat you poorly um then if i do treat you poorly then i'm being irresponsible but as a comedian
this is how i feel whether you know like i talk about like i don't believe there's a devil because
i don't i believe where it's a fear-based society and doing it having a devil would be you know it's
just foolish i mean you know i and I'm not saying there's no devil.
There could be.
I'm saying I don't believe there's one, and I believe, say...
So you're one of these people who say, I know there ain't no heaven, but I pray there ain't
no hell.
Right.
Pray there ain't no heaven, and I pray there ain't no hell.
I love Blood, Sweat, and Tears.
I just saw them, and they didn't have David Clayton Thomas, unfortunately.
Okay.
But the fact is, for me, so I don't believe it's the devil.
And so if God created everything, why would he make a devil?
He's like, well, I made this beautiful planet with trees and mountains and ducks and James Brown,
but there's not enough drama in my life.
Let me create some SOB who's going to go against everything I've ever created.
And just to piss him off, I'm going to force him to wear a red jumpsuit, you know,
with a tail and horns and all this stuff.
But, you know, as a kid, I was taught that sex was the devil's work.
And I said, look, I don't know if you've had sex before, but it's fantastic.
But I believe if there's a God, that God created sex, because what do we yell when we're having
sex?
You don't yell to the devil, you yell to God.
You go, oh, God, because we're thanking the manufacturer for the beautiful gift that he's given us.
So back to the point that the truth should be the foundation.
And reality being the foundation, it's really picking apart comedy.
But it's the same thing in science, the same thing in math.
Right.
And so once, in fact, you're not funny if you're not basing it on something that's real.
Otherwise, you don't have me at all.
Right.
We have no common ground on which you can then take me.
Unless you're so outrageous, because there are no rules in comedy, if you're just outrageous,
that could be funny and consistent. But the best comics, the Carlins, the Lily Tomlins,
the Pryors, they were based in reality.
Yeah, yeah. So, we only got a few seconds left in this segment. Okay. So let me just round that out by saying at the end of the day, it's not only how much do you know about the physical world.
You should also know is something consistent with something else.
There's a photo of me where I'm on stage and it shows me holding up my middle finger.
I got you.
Okay.
Can you picture me doing that?
Yeah.
Just ask.
Well, I can.
No, no.
No, let me assert that my vocabulary is sufficiently large that that will never be something I
need to do.
Okay?
And so this is a doctored photo.
I held up just my index finger, and someone flipped it with the middle finger, and that's
the thing.
But it became a meme, and I'm just saying you should ask yourself is there a is is what they're
saying is it consistent with all of my expectations of what it is or are you so duped by others
telling you what to think and how to think that they're just feeding you anything you want and
this is a shout out for being an independent thinker of whatever
a pundit wants to have you
say or think.
It's beautiful. That's what we all want.
That's what we all want. We've got to take a break.
You were listening to, possibly watching
StarTalk
Cosmic Queries, Pokiri Edition.
And I'm with my guest co-host
April. We'll be back.
We're back.
Star Talk.
Cosmic Queries.
Potpourri edition.
I got my guest co-host, Eddie Brill.
Eddie's been around the block, over the river, and through the woods.
And here I am at Grandma's house.
So, you got any projects now?
What are you doing now?
Yeah, tons of things.
I have a podcast called The Break with Eddie Brill,
and I'm talking to all A-list comics like Suzy Essman and Mario Cantone and Stephen Wright and on and on and on.
Because you know all these people, so they'll come out for you.
They'll come out for you.
Yeah, and I have a ton of great comics coming in for that.
So you can go to SoundCloud or iTunes and go to The Break with Eddie Brill.
To The Break with Eddie Brill.
Very nice.
And talk about their childhood and their house.
Who was the funniest and how were they influenced?
You know, you're missing an opportunity to be a psychoanalyst and find out what is troubling these people who are professional comedians.
Right.
And the truth is that we kind of come up with that.
Yeah.
So you got questions for me.
Yeah, I do.
I do.
And there's some great questions.
And like I said, a lot of them have to do with fact-checking and all this kind of stuff.
But here's something different from Amanda Good.
Are there resources, or resources, matters where you're from, within the scientific community
that we can use to help refute junk science in public forums?
Ooh.
Ooh.
Resources.
It has that same kind of theme.
Same kind of thing.
But I like this one because there's a lot of people typing on Facebook and typing here and there.
Yeah, so let me just clarify what junk science is.
It has a broad definition, but when it most commonly rears its head,
it is something that looks, smells like, tastes like science, but it's not science.
smells like, tastes like science, but it's not science. And we know when something is not science when, for example,
your controls on the experiment were not properly conducted.
When you have certain funders that could influence what the outcome is
and thereby have you abrogate your responsibilities as the dispassionate researcher.
There are cases where there's only one result and no secondary confirmation of that one result,
yet people gravitate to that one result because that's the result they wanted,
only to find out that later subsequent studies show that it was false,
but they got suppressed in the media
because they didn't want to hear that result all of this is science that is not in the service of
advancing our understanding of the world and so i is there a toolkit to bring to bear what you do
is you listen to that one result and then do some homework. There's something called Google
Scholar. Do you know about Google Scholar? Yeah, I do. Yeah, yeah. It's fantastic. It's a separate
branch of Google. You just type Google Scholar. It'll take you right there. Type in a topic or a
researcher's name, and it will find every published scientific paper associated with that person.
And let's say there's more than one, that one name shows up in
more than one field. You just add another keyword to tighten down the list and you'll find out,
are these peer-reviewed journals or not? Or are the articles something they wrote for the local
thing and it's being passed off as official science that you want to then hold opposite
something that was a collaboration in an academic setting
with peer-reviewed journals.
So, no, there's no easy toolkit.
It's always hard to show when someone is wrong.
But, oh, how much that can pay dividends on the progress of society
if we all just had a little piece of that tenacity.
And combined with a thirst of knowledge.
Yeah, oh, yeah.
Really wanting to know. Then you get it for free. Then you get it for free. Yeah. It's like, oh, my gosh, I wonder if that tenacity. And combined with the thirst of knowledge. Yeah, oh yeah. Of really wanting to know.
Then you get it for free.
Then you get it for free.
Yeah.
It's like, oh my gosh, I wonder if that's true.
That's an amazing result.
Let me check.
Yeah.
All right?
You don't say, oh, that is true.
Now let me base my, and pivot my life
on what the person just said.
Which a lot of people do.
And then when they find out that it's not true,
sometimes they'll even hold onto it
because they don't want to upset the
foundation they've created, that false foundation. Well, I mean, this is our susceptibility in
modern times. As I've said many times before, the good thing about science, it's true whether or
not you believe in it. So that's one of the distinguishing features of science relative
to practically anything else we engage in, politics, religion, cultural hegemony, whatever.
And in all these other branches of human existence,
you can develop a sort of a philosophy
of where you are better than others.
Practically every religion says this, right?
That we're correct and everyone else is false.
Essentially every religion says that,
almost all, there are a few exceptions.
And so that means you are living in a belief system
that rejects what doesn't agree with it
and accepts what does.
That is not the way to find the actual truths of the world.
So if you're not interested in the truths,
that's a different kind of country.
But if you care about the truths,
these are the foundations of the advance of civilization
as we come to know it.
Yeah, because if you have a garden
and all the flowers are white color
because it basically is that same feeling
and that same thing,
and it has nothing to do with the color,
but it's all the same color,
it's not as beautiful as a garden
that has different flowers and different colors in it.
That's beautiful.
No, while I was saying it, I go, that's BS.
It's stuck with the garden thing.
You know, it's funny.
I was talking about the truth is that that's basically in comedy.
And when I was a kid, I loved playing cards.
Our family, we didn't have a lot of money, so we played games all the time.
We had a lot of fun.
And we were talking about...
Card games would be cheap.
Yeah, they really are. Unless you played poker or po. And we were talking about- Card games would be cheap. A cheap version of card games.
Yeah, they really are.
Unless you played poker or poquino or any of those guys.
Then you lost money.
Yeah, then you were-
You know, penny poker was okay.
But we were wondering about the royalty in the deck of cards.
We know who the king is.
We know who the queen is, but-
That has existence based in historical truth.
Yes.
Right.
But who the hell is the jack?
I don't ever remember reading about jacks. There's no jack in history. Other than the jack of all Yes. Right. But who the hell is the Jack? I don't ever remember reading about Jacks.
There's no Jack in history.
Other than the Jack of all trades.
Right.
That's the one Jack, but he's a different Jack.
And Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
But, you know, I am the Jack of England.
There's no Jack.
There's never been a Jack.
There's never been.
And I was talking about this.
I did it on stage.
I wanted to do it on one of my first Letterman appearances.
And the day before, Princess Diana fell to that horrible car accident.
And I had to take that joke out of my set.
Oh, because it had royalty.
Because it was the king, the queen, the royalty.
And I had to save it for another set.
And I so loved that joke.
And there's more to it you know like uh you know if you're the 10 you must you're probably pissed off because you don't
get the nice clothing you know you get clubs on you like get these clubs off me i want a robe and
a knife like that one-eyed bastard and it was kind of silly and funny but i couldn't do it on tv until
later and again but it was based in the truth and then you take it to another odd place,
and that's how that goes.
Plus, with the Jack, we accept it in the deck of cards
because that's the only place we've ever seen it.
But if a Jack started showing up elsewhere,
we would question it, I think.
Because, yeah, there's no Jack.
Honey, there's a Jack at the door.
Jack who?
All right, let's go on to some more questions.
See if anyone named Jack here.
This is funny.
Is it like Superman, Batman?
There was also Jack Shit.
You don't know Jack Shit.
I don't know him.
Yeah, yeah.
And there's Ruthless.
That would be without Ruth.
Ruthless.
Yeah, okay.
Who's Ruth now all of a sudden?
I always wanted to meet Claire Voyant.
Yeah, she's incredible.
You would think you'd see her coming.
That's right. But it's just not happening. Okay, she's incredible. You know, you would think you'd see her coming. That's right.
But it's just not happening.
Okay, here we go.
What else you got?
Truths, truths, truth, truth, truth.
I can't believe you have three pages of things here.
There's so many of them, but here's a different one.
What would be the first question the scientific community ask an intelligent, intelligent extraterrestrial visitor?
And the second part, what major problem could they help us solve today?
Yeah, I don't think we would give the same answer.
We all have our little pet ways we would interact with the alien.
But I've given this a stupid amount of thought.
And embarrassingly, okay.
I think we already said that there's no embarrassing amount of thought.
So, for example, I've tweeted as such that in the film Arrival, where they got a linguist and a theoretical physicist.
I'm saying, no, no, no, that's not how you play this.
No.
Right.
No, you don't bring a linguist to aliens.
All right?
A cultural linguist to aliens.
I'm sorry.
Nor do you bring the theoretical physicist.
I'm sure he's a smart guy.
But we got aliens here, please.
So I would bring a cryptographer who specializes in decoding messages.
And I'd bring an astrobiologist, of course.
Naturally.
That's what I would bring.
And so you would first set up a common vocabulary.
But you would do so by referencing things that you know we would have in common, and that would be science.
Right.
That would be science.
You might show a lightning spark.
You know, what do you call this?
You know they would have seen it because it's moving electrons.
And they took a ship to get here.
They must know something about electricity.
Right.
Okay?
You don't show them an apple and say, we call this an apple.
What do you call it?
We don't have apples.
I don't know what the hell you're holding up.
So we would show maybe the periodic table of elements.
The organization of that chart is surely universal, literally universal.
Right.
We abuse the word universal here on Earth.
Miss Universe, excuse me.
Right.
No.
Universal ball joint in your car.
It works on Earth, right?
No, Miss Universe is Miss Earth.
Let's get over Earth, right? No, Miss Universe is Miss Earth. Let's get over
that, okay? So I would take scientific iconography, display it in front of them, and then we would
share a common vocabulary. Then I'd ask them how far they've gotten scientifically. I'd want to
know. I'd want to know. I would tell them that we were on the brink of destroying ourselves because perhaps our conduct and our intellect was not at the same level as our scientific discoveries that we had to harness.
What did they do to survive themselves?
Can we, is there a playbook that we can borrow from them?
That's kind of the things I would ask them. Yeah, and the second part to that question, if I can find that again on this beautiful
page here, is what major problem could they help us solve today?
Oh, so I, yeah, great.
So I would say the energy, the energy problem.
Well, how do they get the unlimited energy that they need?
Do they, have they figured out a way to suck energy from a star at random,
like the modern Death Star device that can suck energy out of a star
and then destroy multiple planets all at once?
I tweeted about that, by the way, and people said,
oh, why are you putting all this science on Star Wars?
It's just a fantasy.
And I'm thinking, no, had they known a little more science,
they could have improved their Death Star. You can calculate how much energy there is in a star. If you contain
that and then destroy, you can destroy a thousand planets easily. A thousand planets.
Right. That's a lot of planets.
That's a lot of planets.
More than one. We have one and we worry about it.
A thousand planets. You could totally destroy the force. All right. The force will have nothing
over on you if you're taking out a thousand planets at a time.
So if you can harness the energy of a host star,
I'd like to know what methods, tools, and tactics
they invoked for it.
So, yeah, I would be asking survival questions.
Now, when you go to a film,
do you constantly take it apart like you did Arrival?
Yeah, but not in a mean way.
I have these thoughts, but I don't share it.
I'm not annoying in the aisle.
Well, to yourself.
To myself, oh, yeah, yeah.
I'm thinking, oh, no, that wouldn't happen.
Well, that was good.
They did that.
They represent.
That was good.
So here's my favorite compliment for a film would be when they do something that was based in good science,
would be when they do something that was based in good science,
which is a topic we've already discussed,
but then has an extremely innovative step beyond the science.
So I said, wow, they really thought this one through.
Kudos to them for this new thing that they came up with.
I took a screenwriter's class,
and one of the films they call the perfect film, and it's one of my favorites, is Blade Runner.
How do you look at Blade Runner as a film and the future and the science?
Let me see if I had any issues with Blade Runner.
That's a good one.
I'm sure I had a couple of issues.
Perfect just in terms of setup and storytelling and beginning, middle, end and all the rest.
And the science of the replicants and how long they last. And Batty, you know, the character who knew his own death
and found out the death and how people live to a certain place
and how they finish their life and still held on
and wanted to live forever as humans do.
I've seen things you've never dreamed.
Attack ships off the belt of Orion.
Something else, something else.
All these, all this will be lost in time like tears in the rain.
Time to die.
I think, did I get that almost right?
Oh my God, I got chills.
It's one of my, I would say my third favorite movie of all time. And that's a pretty good one. did I get that almost right? Oh my God, I got chills. It's one of my, I would say my third favorite movie of all time.
And that's a pretty good one.
Did I get it almost right?
You got, it was incredible.
It was great.
And then the dove leaves his hand.
He can no longer grip it.
And there it is.
And that was great.
That was chilling, actually.
And I was watching you do it and going, oh my God, he's good.
Well, so the point is in that you sympathize for him.
Because he's kind of, he's not your warmest or snuggliest of the replicants and in the end
all of a sudden he brings you into his fate yeah and you can only shed a tear for him in that and
relate to it because that's how we are as humans right and who's a replicant who's not and nowadays
and in those days now the line was very small between what was and what wasn't.
And that will only get very blurry going forward.
What do you see as the next sort of human form?
Well, I don't think human form is the goal.
I think in the old days we would say the ideal robot will be indistinguishable from humans.
That implies that the human form is useful or interesting.
But we're not.
That's ego.
That's ego.
It's completely ego.
Yeah.
If you want something that can drive a car the best, you don't make a humanoid to drive
a car.
You just make a self-driving car.
Right.
Right?
If you want something that can run fast, we don't even replicate human bones and feet.
We just have them run on
blades right yeah you see the blade runners the literal blades that the olympic runners who who
by whatever misfortune have no legs they're running on blades and that is a a better return on the
energy of every step than anything going on in the human physiology. So the human form, as far as I can see,
is not going to be anything anyone wants to emulate
unless you want like a sex bot or something.
Right, well, that you definitely want.
That'll be...
Oh, excuse me.
What are you talking about?
You mean it. Sorry, sorry.
Yeah, I'm on the road all the time.
We've got to take a break.
When we come back, more with the one and only
Eddie Brill
as my guest co-host.
You're watching,
listening to, likely,
StarTalk.
We're back for the third
and final segment
of StarTalk Cosmic Queries
Poo-Poo Re-Edition.
Eddie Brill, my comedic co-host,
guest starring as co-host today.
It's fun.
You know, I've enjoyed your work.
I know it's very Arsenio of me to say that.
You know, you're the greatest.
You're the greatest.
But I really have.
I've enjoyed your work for so many years.
And, you know, as a kid science person,
you know, it just thrills me to do that.
And, again.
So you got a little bit of science in you is what you're saying.
A little science sympathizer.
I am.
And I had incredible science teachers.
I had one guy with a southern accent.
He thought he was funny.
And he was talking about the elements.
He says, when you see a mouse, you seize him.
And then you went, when he dies, you bury him.
And I'll never forget it. That's good. That was 11th grade. Seize, you bury him. And I'll never forget it.
That was 11th grade.
Cesium and burry him.
Cesium and burry him.
All right, so you got questions?
I do.
The last round of questions there.
What do you have?
Okay.
Popey Reese.
So these are just random from wherever people come up with them.
Okay.
Manfredo Aguilar.
Very nice.
Oh, gracias.
Chuck would have totally mangled that name. Manfredo Aguilar. Very nice. Oh, gracias. Chuck would have totally mangled that name.
Manfredo Aguilar.
Aguilar, yes.
Muy importante.
Verdad.
What is the maximum speed a gravity assist can get you?
Second part of it, could we gravity assist towards the speed of light?
Oh, it's a great question.
So gravity assist is widely misunderstood.
So let me tell you what people think it is, and I'll tell you what it is.
So gravity assist, generally, if you don't have enough energy, fuel, to pack into your rocket,
to get to its destination either at all or quickly enough before you die,
one of the great rules of being a scientist is your experiment should be finished before you die. One of the great rules of being a scientist
is your experiment should be finished before you die.
Helpful.
That's not written anywhere,
but it's built into the design of the experiment.
Right.
So if you don't have enough,
you will sneak up behind a planet.
You will fall towards the planet,
gain speed,
and then you're slingshot out on the other side,
and you'll have more energy coming out the other side than when you fell in.
Makes sense.
And you can do this, the famous Voyager spacecraft back in the 70s and 80s, they did this multiple times.
And so they had, that was required to give it the energy we wanted for it for it to escape the solar system forever
so we gave it enough energy it's never coming back it achieved escape velocity not speed of
light but just escape velocity all right so the way this works is if the object is just sitting
there and you drop something towards it and it skims the the outer edge and continues out the
other side that is a symmetric diagram.
You will speed up falling in, and you'll slow down climbing back out.
And you won't gain any additional speed for having done so.
So that's why a pure gravity assist, as I've just described,
in that moment will not work.
The reason why actual gravity assists work
is because the planet is in orbit around the star.
And you sneak up behind the planet.
You will accelerate towards the planet because the planet's gravity.
But because the planet is in motion, you pick up the orbital speed of the planet in addition to your speed.
Ah, yeah.
So you will speed up and slow down going in and out, but you're left off with a net extra speed, the speed of the planet in orbit around the host star.
So, in fact, you have stolen a little bit of orbital energy of that planet.
Stolen it.
That's great.
Now, I don't know if you are.
Are you a baseball fan at all?
A little bit, Yeah. Okay. Well, there's a thing that constantly comes up where if a guy
is running to first, if he slides into first, they say it takes him longer to do that as we just ran
through to try to get to the base quicker. Right. Because every time you are not in contact with the ground, you are not moving as fast as you would for having done so.
So, in other words, if I – yeah, so there's the front slide and the back slide.
Let's do the front slide because all your momentum is forward, okay? The moment you stop touching the ground
and just lean forward, okay?
Right.
Your body still has to go that distance, okay?
Mm-hmm.
And so you're, so, so,
now, the value of a slide is, of course,
now they have to, they have to, like,
well, first base, they don't have to tag you, right?
Right.
But if they have to tag you, it's harder to slide you if you're close to the ground than if you're standing up, like, chest level.
So generally, that's why you're sliding.
It's harder to be out.
But if you're ever not in touch with the ground, no, you are not moving as fast as you possibly can.
Right, because this is a first base question where you don't have to be...
So it's not a tag question.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, so your steps are the most important thing that you could be taking.
Yeah, that seems to make the most sense.
Okay.
All right, let's move on here.
This is a very interesting question.
Adam Raymer, do you think the early experimenters and discoverers of the properties of electromagnetism
missed the opportunity to announce they had discovered magic?
And, of course, the second part, it can levitate, illuminate, disintegrate, ignite, remotely cause motion, et cetera.
So I love that because you know what I think about all the time?
Suppose we physicists didn't tell anyone how and why the laws of physics work.
We just performed them.
And we said it's because we have powers.
If we did that, we would be running the world.
And people would be genuflecting as they walked by us people would be bringing us
chickens from their farms people would be begging that we don't incinerate them with our antimatter
device uh the fact is the people who are doing the research into magnetism electromagnetism more broadly they tended to be educators academicians not charlatans
and so only if you're a charlatan will you not tell someone how something works
pretend you have the power and then you have the power over that person that is diabolical so
it is incumbent upon the educator educators class if you can call it that to say exactly what it is incumbent upon the educator's class, if you can call it that, to say exactly what it is we're doing and why.
And then it's not mysterious.
You could do it too.
You could be a physicist.
You could probe the operations of nature as we do.
So I –
In what way?
In what way?
Oh, well, no.
You want an example?
So I can take two clear liquids, put, no, you want an example?
So I can take two clear liquids, put them together, and they make a blue liquid.
That's kind of mysterious, right?
Or two other liquids, and it makes a red liquid.
I could put two liquids together, and they make a solid just by pouring them together.
I could take something, squeeze it, and then it freezes right in front of your eyes.
You could put your hand on a Van de Graaff generator.
Remember those?
Those big silver balls where you put your hand on a Van de Graaff generator. Remember those? Those big silver balls? Yes, yes.
Where you put your hand on it and your hair stands on end?
I can have a secret one below the desk,
and you hand me a fluorescent light bulb,
and I grab my hand around it,
and it will light up under my hand.
I gotcha.
Okay, because the charges are within me.
They go into the phosphors, and they excite the phosphors.
Gotcha.
I have powers, and you don't.
So, but I explain them and therefore you don't come running to me thinking that I'm your,
your, your demigod for having these powers.
You say, what book did you learn this out of?
I want to be able to do that too.
So yeah, we could have been magicians or charlatans.
This is a comedian comedian i'm sorry to
interrupt the comedian you see some of them and you go well how much did that trick cost
at the store because you know it's a trick and how did they pull that off and you start
doing that and then there were people like penn and teller who would break it down for you and
show you how they did it um but there are many people in the world who believe in magic, believe that charlatans can create.
Yeah, so that's an education issue right there.
And rather than beat adults over the head,
because it's not their fault they weren't educated
or weren't exposed or whatever,
I think we just have to rethink K-12 and what it's taught,
what science is, how and why it works.
For me, science is vaccine against charlatans.
It enables you to know when someone is full of shit and when they're not.
And that's power.
It's power of protection for yourself.
So you will not be exploited by those who do not have your best interests in mind. Well, speaking of best interests in mind, you know, things are changing now with the EPA and with the public school situation and the knockdown of science for a
reason. There's a reason. There has to be a reason. And that's really about making more money. How
does that affect you? And how hard is that for you to move ahead in this new world? Because these
people, they have a plan. Well, you'll make money temporarily,
but the long-term plan will just fail.
It'll fail miserably,
and we'll have to pick ourselves up
from the bottom of the world's rankings
in science, math, technology, economic strength
because the engines of tomorrow's economy
will be driven by innovations
in today's science and technology.
So, yeah, it's, again, people don't know how to think about what role science has played, is playing, and will continue to play in their lives.
And that's unfortunate.
It's like at the end of Godzilla when you see people running in the streets going, oh, I should have listened at the beginning to the scientist.
I forgot.
That should be the playbook for when Congress doesn't listen, right?
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm scared for the planet because it seems like we have been making all of these forward movements,
and we haven't.
So we go on a lightning round?
Okay.
So now you read the question fast and we haven't. So we go on a lightning round. So now you read the
question fast and I answer fast.
We'll see how many we can get in in the last three minutes.
Let's see what you got.
Kurt Mintz, why not reach out to Alien Life?
Because they may annihilate us.
Lately we've just been listening to see if they're out there
with our radio telescopes.
We could send active signals. In fact, we already have.
It's called the radio bubble,
which is the history of all of our television
and radio communication leaking from Earth,
moving at the speed of light,
washing over already known exoplanets
that have been discovered.
So our earliest emissaries are going to be
early episodes of I Love Lucy and Honeymooners
and Howdy Doody, this sort of thing.
And why were they successful?
Because there was nonverbal as well as verbal.
And that's what science plays to me in a part in the world.
There's that part where we talk about things, but it's the actuality of the nonverbal.
Well, I'm just saying if the aliens' first understanding of humans is Howdy Doody, I don't know what that means.
I just don't know.
duty i don't know what that means i just don't know or early images of warfare that were broadcast they'll wonder what kind of evil violent violent people these are so so um yeah we could maybe we
should purposefully send a signal that's kinder they're just getting 70 80 years of previous
signals before we even knew what the hell we were doing.
We should send it to our children now.
Next, what do you got?
Tony Williams, do you ever get annoyed that the superheroes don't do much to help science,
such as Green Lantern could retrieve an asteroid and place it in the desert?
Neil helps Superman, so there's at least one favor.
So, yes, I get a little frustrated because there are problems they could solve
that would preclude the daily problems that they encounter.
So that you can get to the bottom of society's problems rather than finding the criminal after it's too late.
Now you've got to put him in jail.
There are ways you can fix the educational system.
You can fix, there's a lot of things superheroes could do that they're not doing.
So yeah, give me some time with superheroes.
I'll bring them as guests and we'll see what we can do. Give me another one.
Alma Cassandra. I still don't understand
why speed of time was different on the water
planet than on the spacecraft
in Interstellar. Oh, okay, good.
it simply has to do with
how strong...
Oh, I see. Okay, so
the spacecraft was orbiting
far enough away from the planet and the black hole to have a very different rate of time progress.
So as you descend towards the black hole, which they did to get to the water planet, time slowed down for them.
The strength of gravity slows down the passage of time.
And as you get closer to the surface of the black hole,
your time goes slower and slower and slower.
And they were much farther away in their spacecraft.
Had the spacecraft just been orbiting the planet, right,
they would have been about the same distance.
They would have had about the same passage of time.
So with the gravity assist, you could do this for as many planets as you can.
And you would just keep boosting your speed.
And you're adding it to your speed.
In principle, you could just keep boosting your speed. And you're adding it to your speed. In principle, you could just keep doing this.
And I suppose you could possibly one day come near the speed of light. It would just take a very long time adding up one planet's orbital speed plus another.
It would just take a really long time.
And by the way, if you're moving really, really fast, it'll be harder for you to navigate,
to come near another planet, to get its orbital speed.
And at that point, just go on, sail away.
You've got the speed.
Come sail away, come sail.
I think that's all the time we have.
Okay.
Eddie.
What fun.
Beautiful to see you.
You reminded me we met some 10, 15 years ago.
Right.
At a private function.
You did a private gig that I was in the audience and i loved your
work and well i i just have a soft spot for comedians wherever i see them because you guys
carry the soul of our culture in the palm you know people say we're the truth tellers we're
the last people who can tell the truth because there's so much political correctness in the
world and it's really a shame people have to be careful about what they say instead of really
being passionate and the word you used earlier, authentic.
Authentic. You got it.
Eddie, good to have you.
My pleasure.
You've been listening to StarTalk Radio.
I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
In this edition, Cosmic Queries, we've had Eddie Brill as my guest co-host.
Cosmic Queries edition.
As always, I bid you keep looking up.