StarTalk Radio - Cosmic Queries Science in Movies and TV

Episode Date: March 16, 2014

Stay Tuned for… Science! Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Eugene Mirman answer more of your questions about science in Star Trek, Star Wars, Sliders, Superman, Contact, Mary Poppins and more. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. In studio with me, Eugene Merman. Eugene, love having you, man. I love being here. Oh my gosh, comedian Eugene Merman.

He's here to make fun of all my answers as to what's going to happen. Yeah, and to learn, like you, the listener. This is Cosmic Qu queries edition of star talk this is where we collect all the questions that we accumulate from our web our website startalkradio.net on facebook twitter twitter startalkradio is our handle there and uh we get enough on one theme or another we put them together so today is science in movies and other forms of entertainment yes Yes. And some people have genuine questions about it. Others want to know anything I can pick apart. But I haven't seen the questions yet.

No. And I'm going to start in. Let's just start right in. Go for it. It's about the movie Contact from Danny Davis. Movie Contact, the story written by Carl Sagan. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. My question comes from the movie Contact, one of my favorites. The problem I'm trying to figure out is the ending when Jodie Foster's character travels in the spaceship and has her experience. But for Earth viewers, the ship instantly falls through like nothing happened. And then it is later revealed that her camera recorded 18 hours of static. Now, from what I understand about relativity, it should have been opposite. On Earth, 18 hours would have passed, but her camera would have recorded seconds of static. Please help me put my mind at rest on this query once and for all.

Did the movie get that part wrong or am I missing something? Thank you, Danny. This person knows just enough relativity to just get angry about it. Yeah. So just to remind people in the film, Jodie Foster's character visits aliens in another part of the galaxy and does so in an odd sort of rotating spaceship that never leaves Earth. And they see her take just seconds. And in that time, in those few seconds, she goes on this journey and i think the point here is that the fabric of space and time yeah is such that you can warp either space or time or both and so you can basically travel through a wormhole get

to some destination instantly all right and if you travel fast that you're the the questioner oh who is it who is it? Danny. Danny. He's from where? I don't know, but his name is definitely Danny. He didn't include it. So normally, if you're the one that goes away, you live for a shorter amount of time than Earth that you've left behind. So Danny is perfectly correct about that. But these are aliens who gave us instructions how to build a spaceship

to do exactly what just happened. So I'm not worried about that relative time dilation. So Danny's right that it would logically work that way unless aliens gave him a plan that he stuck to that worked differently. Exactly, which is what happened in the film. Right. You could also imagine that she was not the one who left, that it was Earth that left that location and then returned.

I mean, and then Earth is the one that lives for only the few moments, and he's the one that lives longer. You can imagine aliens controlling space and time in such a way that that's what happens. So in the movie, they could have moved the whole planet with or without – That would be hard. It would be hard. No one's saying it's easy. Neil, I am not saying that this is easy. i'm saying that it's within possibility of science what i mean is that it would be hard not only to physically move the planet but earth has to be the one that accelerates

away and then it slows down stops and comes back we would all feel that you would feel that yes if we went through a wormhole we would feel it no if we slow down we sped up and slow down and stopped yeah we would just fall over and roll roll off the planet because we're not attached to the earth so not even a little no not at all not even with not even gravity so we would all fly away if so if you could stop the earth if you just stop the earth from its movement in space or it's adjusted it in some way, Earth would stop. But we were moving with the Earth in orbit around the sun. So we would just fly very quickly.

As you would fly through a dashboard in a car that hits a brick wall and you're not wearing a seatbelt. I really can't believe that people who do jump from outer space or bungee jump or any of that haven't tried to stop Earth to just go flying. That would be a fun experiment. Let's try it. So I'm not worried about that, but strictly speaking, if she was the one that went away, Danny's correct. All right. All right, Danny, good job.

Congrats. You just got your PhD. Okay, this is from Brendan. It's about time dilation effects of wormholes. In the episode Rimmer World of the comedy Red Dwarf. Yeah, sorry I missed that episode. Well, it's season six, episode five, he writes. Thanks, Brendan.

You just wasted our lives. One of the characters goes through a wormhole in an escape pod that is accelerating away from the other character's ship into a wormhole to a planet that he would land on. They mention time dilation effects of wormholes, and the first one through the wormhole had to wait 557 years before the rest of them caught up to rescue him. How true would phenomena be if the wormhole travel was real?

Is that real? Yeah, so a wormhole allows you to go to another part of the galaxy quickly, much faster than a beam of light would take you there. By the way, if you can travel through wormholes, it allows backwards through time travel. That's how you would do it. So just an FYI on that. If you can travel, you're effectively traveling faster than light. And that allows certain trajectories through the fabric of space and time. Are you saying sliders is pretty real?

If they can manage the wormhole part. So the point there is the wormholes, if you're accelerating through the wormhole and you're moving fast, you would not age very much at all. And you come out the other side, everyone else is aging a long time. Right. But if someone else comes through a wormhole right after you, no, you don't wait 500 years for them. No.

No, they'd just be right there, too. You're both using the same thing, so it'd be about a minute. Whatever. And the wormhole could be arbitrarily short time for you, depending on how warped the space is or how tight the hole is between one section of the galaxy and the next. Wait, in fact, this thing that he's describing, he should have just said in the first reboot of Star trek there was a wormhole you don't need to go into season six episode five of red dwarf this is literally the plot of the first star trek to have a conversation about wormholes you don't need to be that specific in your science fiction and you can pick a much broader i mean yeah anyway so so that's the same thing about the star trek you wouldn't yeah so so uh the point is if you're

all going in together or immediately after one another, yeah, you're good to go. 15 minutes apart. Yeah. Don't even. Don't worry about it. Nice. All right. On Facebook, Robert Millard, this is his thing.

I promise I had this thought before I saw Men in Black. We believe you, Robert. You liar. No one. Yeah. Okay. It seems that matter is basically mass and energy swirling around each other. The same could be said for solar systems.

Is it possible our solar system is an atom or the Milky Way is a molecule? That was a deep thought 110 years ago. People, as we started probing the structure of the atom, we looked at it and said, oh, there's a nucleus. There's electrons and they're orbiting around. Maybe that's just a mini. But there are no cats, and there's no cows and farms and buildings. When we come back, I will give the answer to why atoms are not solar systems. You're listening to StarTalk Radio.

I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist, and my day job is as director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Check us out. Eugene, do you have a day job? I mean, I think as much as you, I guess you have a thing that you would call your day job, but it probably blends into some of your nighttime work, too. And the thing you call a day job, your voice on Bob's?

Yeah, Bob's Burgers, I guess. Love to know that. Excellent. So we're in the Cosmic on Bob's. Yeah, Bob's Burgers, I guess. Love to know that. Excellent. So we're in the Cosmic Queries edition. Yeah, so someone had asked. Science and movies, right. And so what do we leave off? Basically, they were like, is our solar system an atom or is the Milky Way a molecule?

Yeah, and these are great questions, deep questions that were asked about 120 years ago. He's about 120 years late in asking this. Right around when Hashish first reached Boston. Interesting you have the date for that. So here's the problem. The problem, when we discovered atoms and that there's a nucleus and electrons, you say, hey, that looks like a solar system. Yeah.

I wonder if inside an atom there's yet another atom and another atom. This is an episode of Mork and Mindy, but yeah. It turns out that the laws of physics that describe what goes on in a solar system are different from the laws of physics that describe what goes on in an atom. And so the conduct of matter and energy is completely different in these two regimes. Really? And because of it, as you mentioned before the break, no, within atoms, you don't have cats, you know? Right.

You don't have- Yeah, bulletin boards. This stuff that does not happen inside of atoms- Right. That happens macroscopically. Right. So the microscopic world and macroscopic- So different physically.

The macroscopic world responds to what we call classical physics, right? And the microscopic world responds to quantum physics. Quantum physics actually applies to the whole universe, but on large enough scale, it looks like classical physics, and equations are easier. So we just use those modes to describe it. So, no, it's not just the Russian egg, the Russian dolls. The nesting dolls.

The nesting dolls. Matryoshki. That's how you say that? Matryoshki, yeah. Matryoshki. Very good. You and I should go to Moscow now. Matryoshka dolls.

So, no, it's just not that, but it would have been a really cool philosophical revelation. So, there's no life inside of an atom or molecule? None that we know of or that we would have ever defined as such. Right. That's correct. Okay. Okay, next question. All right, what else you got?

Oh, I have a lot. Yeah. Okay, Brian has a question. And he you got? Oh, I have a lot. Yeah. Okay. Brian has a question. And he's from where? Brian Hodgson. No one here is telling us where they're from. Okay. I think they're afraid we're going to find them and help them learn.

If you were an astronaut tumbling through space like in the movie Gravity, could you change your rotation or trajectory, say, through twisting your body? Thank you. Love the show uh no no unless you unless you're in contact with some other thing or unless you lose mass if you do not lose mass or come in contact with anything else you will tumble in that same way at that same speed you forever but you actually will lose mass in the sense that you'll grow hungry and die. It depends. Well, okay.

Thirsty? Would that be better? That's a really slow, as people who have tried to lose weight will attest, that is a slow way to lose. There are much faster ways to lose mass. Yeah, but if you're tumbling through space and you don't have access to any restaurants or anything. No, what you can do is if you open up certain hatches of your spacesuit you could like pee in one direction or another this will send

your mass out another direction opposite presumably the way you're tumbling and you don't want to go that will slow you down so i do like the idea of someone spinning and peeing and then just it would just they'd spin and spin in the other direction they still spin so you'd have to know some angular angular momentum physics before you went when about to say started peeing or spitting or yeah pooping or or or or anything that's the end of gravity is just someone peeing themselves i'm just saying oh by the way you can't be inside the suit it has to actually leave your body into space, right? If you do this, you can then control to some level your wayward trajectory. This is no different.

Would you die? Like, say you open the suit. Your skin wouldn't be able to contact. Oh, it's just a vacuum. I mean, yeah, it won't be comfortable, but you can do it temporarily. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. For how long?

A couple, few minutes. Oh, really? That sounds great. Now I have a new goal, tumble through how long? A couple, few minutes. Oh, really? That sounds great. Yeah. Now I have a new goal, tumble through space for a few minutes, no suit. So the point is that when you lose, if you look at spacecraft when they make adjustments, if they're in free open space, they're little sort of what they call these nozzles, these rocket nozzles that are strategically positioned around the body of the ship to make it rotate one direction or another, to change the attitude, the angle, or to slow down or to speed up.

It is losing mass by the act of burning fuel that sends gases out in one direction or another. Oh, wow. Yeah. So anything that comes up, burp, any other flatulent activity. I understand. Okay. Yes. That all the things that are funny to children become the way you survive tumbling through space.

Exactly. Is what you're saying. Every bodily function that you're not supposed to discuss during the day in school, you need to survive to fly back to the earth. Yes. Sounds like a plan. All right, here we go. This is a question from Robbie. Oh, and he's at the University of Michigan.

He didn't mind telling us where he was. Excellent. Here's his question. So he could be a student or Michigan. He didn't mind telling us where he was. Here's his question. So he could be a student or a professor. We'll find out. It's true. Well, depending on how good his question is, we'll know. Or an administrator.

He used a lot of exclamation points. He's probably a student. Oh, the OMGs and exclamation points? Right, okay. Yeah. While at home, I was watching Futurama, and during the episode, the characters land on an alien world that had three suns. It left me wondering what would happen if there was a second or third star in our solar system, either in orbit around our sun or fighting with it to become the center of the solar system. Thank you, and thanks for the show.

Ooh, so here's the problem. If you start throwing extra suns in the middle of your star system, depends on how far away your planetary orbit is. If you're not far enough away from all of them, let's say it's a triple star system. Sure. Do one up on what they showed in Star Wars. So let's have a triple star system. If you're not really far away from all three.

What's considered really far, like Jupiter? Much farther than any one of them are from each other. Okay. So it's a relative statement. So you want to be far enough away so that all three stars feel like one source of gravity to you. I see. If you're too close and one is over to the left and one is over to the right, your gravitational allegiance becomes constantly compromised. Who am I orbiting today? Oh, it's this star, not that one.

And you'll become really close to one star and far from another. Your climate would be all to hell because you wouldn't sustain a stable temperature environment. And you can do models on a computer to show what happens to these orbits, and most of them are unstable. A planet will either fall into a star or be ejected from the star system altogether. But it would be fine if you simply were so far away that they felt like one. They felt like one. And they did it right in Star Wars where they had the double sunset, if you remember that scene.

Those were far enough away from the planet. Yeah. But the planet is really only seeing one sort of collective gravitational. Yeah. And so that's the problem that you have here. But otherwise, it'd be really cool. It'd also be cool if the stars were different colors. And then you'd have a.

Yeah, as one star set, the color of your sky would change. What are some of the options? You can have red stars, white stars, blue stars. You don't have green stars, though. Why not? You want me to get into, I can't get into that now. Wow. Okay.

Finally stumped with green stars. Ah, it's exhausting. There's no green in space. No, there's green in space. There's just no green stars. There's plenty of green. No, now you have to tell me why there's no green stars. Finally, I went to a real piece of science, and you're like, no.

Okay, fine. There's actually green emissions from gas clouds in space. And we looked at it, and we looked at its spectra. We didn't know what it was. And we, as my historical brethren in the field that I study, and in fact, it was named of nebulae, and it was called nebulium, this green light in space. Nebulium, that was a placeholder until we actually figured out what it was.

We figured out it's actually oxygen behaving in ways that we've never been able to reproduce in the laboratory. Under the rarefied vacuum of space, oxygen behaves badly, or goodly, depending on how you want to look at it. It's a green cloud that's coming for us. So it emits a beautiful green light. And if you're angstrom fluent, it's 5,007 angstroms on the scale. angstrom fluent it's 5007 angstroms yeah on the on the scale so you can have green light coming from gas clouds but stars because they're giving off a whole spectrum of light green is this narrow

part in the middle of the spectrum right and when you puddle together all the light but you can you can lean towards the red side of the because it's not a primary color well because red orange yellow green blue violet that whole spectrum it either leans to the blue side it leans to the red or it gives about the same of each and that'll give you a blue star red star or white star you're not going to get a green star all right that's why all right uh here i'll ask uh here one more one question oh you'll get about a minute left yeah go for it uh-huh okay a minute left in this segment but yeah yeah this is from harrison fizzle fizzle it is uh dear neil degrasse tyson and funny person how can one fly a kite i watched mary poppins recently and it got me thinking if one had a long enough string how high could a

kite possibly go if the kite and string were made of a sturdy enough material could it go up through the atmosphere up where the air is clear? Anyway, it goes on. Oh, let's go fly a kite. I love that question, especially since I also love that song. I love corny Broadway songs. So what you need is enough updraft

to keep the kite afloat against the weight of the string that's pulling down the kite. All right? We got to think, don't forget that. And let me pick up on this answer when we come back to StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition, Science in the Movies. We're back. StarTalk Radio.

Neil Tyson here. So kites. And Eugene Mermin. Again, thanks for doing this. Great question we left before the break about how high up can a kite go. A thought brought on by watching Mary Poppins. And by the way, at the end of mary poppins where they're all flying kites yeah uh all kite string angles are the same because they're

all standing there i just want to make note of that uh that would be true if all the kites are high flying at about the same height and then the wind is the same for everybody and so they did that accurately so i want to commend the m Mary Poppins creators of the movie. For accurately presenting the kites. Oh, good. So how high up can it go? So you have to watch out because the higher the kite goes, holding wind currents aside for the moment, the higher the kite goes, the more string is dangling beneath it. You reach a point where the weight of the string rivals the weight of the kite. Not only the weight of the kite, but even the updraft buoyancy of the kite and when that

happens the string becomes a burden to the kite and the kite will not continue to ascend that's a problem so but what so your but your kite could be one mile long yeah if you had a really huge kite yeah oh yeah a super kite oh my gosh you take it up to the stratosphere oh my god yeah okay so say you have a one mile the problem take it up to the stratosphere. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Okay. So, say you have a one-mile-long. Yeah. The problem is in the stratosphere, wind speeds are about several hundred miles an hour. Sounds good.

Sounds like a super fun kite ride. So, basically, if you had a mile-long kite tied into your foot, got it up there, you would just fly. So, it'd be fun, but temporary. Yeah. The stratosphere is a little higher than a mile up but yeah yeah no i mean the the sorry the kite itself though the width one square mile would be the size of the physical kite yeah yeah yeah so and you uh yeah you can put that up really high okay good

i now have a new uh summer project and by the way it's good way to think about physics problems is compare one thing going on to the other and you don't even have to get a number you don't have to be numerical about it right how high can the guy go as high as the weight of the kite versus the weight of the string you know you just think about it traditional kites wouldn't be enough but uh super kite that you and i made in fact if you tried with your kite you will see there's a point where the string starts getting saggy compared with the ability of the kite to keep it buoyant and the kite just gets farther away from you rather than higher up. I feel like you would like win a kite contest.

Like if there was one and someone had to build one, I would definitely put you on my team. All right. Here's a question. I was going to skip it because it's long, but because it's Buck Rogers and that's something I love. I'm just going to ask it. Watching an episode of Buck Rogers from,

oh, this is a Ray, by the way, Ray Bamer. All right. Watching an episode of Buck Rogers from, oh, this is Ray, by the way, Ray Bamer. All right, watching an episode of Buck Rogers from 1979, Tweaky is missing. The subplot was transferring 10 million tons of frozen oxygen from space to the North Pole where it would melt and replenish

the oxygen-depleted atmosphere of the planet. The, quote, spaceberg has to hit a window in our atmosphere exactly or be ignited by friction and scorch a third to a half of the planet. My question is, one, would an injection of frozen oxygen or anything from space help Earth? And, B, could a spaceberg of oxygen scorch the Earth? Okay, so a couple of things. First, berg, actually German for mountain, so it would just be oxygenberg. Yeah.

Spaceberg would be a mountain of space, if you want to totally analyze this. I will let whoever wrote Buck Rogers know that they have made some terrible word mistakes. No, iceberg is a properly named object. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a mountain. It's an ice mountain. Yeah. So here's the thing. earth it has no shortage of

oxygen at the moment we just have too much carbon dioxide we don't have a shortage of oxygen uh if you wanted to just simply add oxygen to the atmosphere what will happen is fires that are ignited will not burn out as easily as they might today oh Oh. Because oxygen feeds fires. Right. Right? So let's say we have twice as much oxygen as we do today and lightning strikes a leaf. And ordinarily the leaf would just sort of ignite

but then fizzle away, not with more oxygen in the atmosphere. It would totally come to flames. It would catch to another leaf and you would burn forests like it was nobody's business. So a spaceberg made of oxygen is what you would describe as a very bad idea. That would be a bad idea unless we're actually, for some reason, losing our oxygen and you have to replenish it. Right, and what we're gaining is carbon dioxide.

We're not losing oxygen. It's two different things. Correct. Now, we have plenty of water. We don't need to bring oxygen from space. Water is what, chemically? Hydrogen and oxygen. H2O. Yeah, yeah. oxygen from space water is what chemically hydrogen and oxygen h2o yeah so you just what's you break

the hydrogen away from the oxygen you got free oxygen right you don't have to go to space that's easy yeah so maybe the buck rogers writers didn't know this yeah plus oxygen itself is not flammable it only allows other things to burn right so when they say don't smoke near oxygen tanks you're not going to burn the oxygen tank. The oxygen tank is going to burn you. Right. Okay? You light a cigarette, the cigarette burns instantly. And then the flame, the spark hits your finger, then it burns your skin.

And then it burns your clothes. It would explode. Yeah, and this is how we lost three astronauts in Apollo 1. Oh, really? It was a pure oxygen atmosphere inside their capsule on the launch pad, on a practice launch pad as they were testing communications and other things. And a spark inside the spacecraft triggered, and everything burned inside the spacecraft. Oh, okay.

But they didn't, like, light a cigarette. They weren't foolish. They were not smoking astronauts. Yeah, yeah. Well, you said that's what happened, but now I realize it's a spark. No, it's good. All right. What else you got?

Here's a question from Alex Robinson about the Death Star. In the movie Star Wars, thanks for clarifying, we see the Death Star blow up the planet Alderaan. Setting aside the question of how a thing would be possible, what would happen to our solar system if the empire blew up, say, Mars? Yeah, that's a great question. So it's really simple. First, how would you want to go about blowing up a planet? What you can do is look at what's holding the planet together. There's all the gravity, and there's all the tensile strength of all the solid matter that is the planet. And

when we come back, I'll tell you how to blow up that planet. StarTalk Radio Cosmic Queries Edition. We'll be right back. StarTalk Radio. Eugene Merman with me in studio live in New York. Eugene. Hello. Yeah, you're reading me questions. I'd never seen any of these questions before, and we left off.

Somebody wants to, like, blow up Mars. Yeah, yeah. Someone's basically like, if the Death Star blew up Mars, what's a good way to blow up Mars? Yeah, yeah. How do you do that? What would it do to our solar system? Okay, so here's how to blow something up. You ask yourself how much energy is keeping it together. Then you put more than that amount of energy into the object.

It will explode. Period. So more than whatever, so more than the gravitational. Yeah, so you find out, you can calculate that. That's physics 102. Right. Not physics 101. 102.

Is how to blow up Mars. That's a pretty, that's a quite an accelerated science system class. So you calculate what's called the binding energy of the planet. All right. And it's a gravitational binding. It's gravity keeps it together.

You want to overcome the gravity that's holding it together. Calculate that. How much energy is it? Now you have a device that can pump that energy into your planet and have that planet absorb the energy rather than have the energy come out the other side. It will completely destroy the planet to smithereens entirely. So that's how one would go about it.

If you did it to Mars, we'd lose our Curiosity rover that's discovering science there now. But it wouldn't affect us that much. I would affect our rover. No, no. Tax money. Excuse me. I would affect our rover. No, no, of course we would. Excuse me. I mean our physical well-being, not our mental, emotional, and knowledge well-being. We will continue to orbit the sun,

and Mars will have essentially no effect on us. Will parts of it land here, and then people will then gain powers? There will be Mars debris scattered all over the solar system. Mars debris will land everywhere. Yes. Eventually, it'll land everywhere. And would it radiate kids and make them powerful?

No, because Mars is not radioactive. Wow. Right. Well, at least we get some of it. Okay, here's another question from Sar. Planetary death in the movies. Wait, can I back up for a minute? Yeah.

When you make a snowball, how much effort did it take to make a snowball? Well, not much, right? Not much. Not much at all. And then you throw it at the wall. Oh, wait, can I back up for a minute? Yeah. When you make a snowball. Yes. How much effort did it take to make a snowball? Well, not much, right? Not much. Not much at all. And then you throw it at the wall. Yeah. It explodes on the wall. Yeah.

You don't think of it as an explosion. I do. But it doesn't bounce off the wall. Right. It completely shatters on the wall. Yes. That's an example of the energy of motion of the ball, of the snowball being greater than the energy that's holding it together in the first place.

Yes. And so you explode a snowball by throwing it into a wall. I would love to throw Mars into a wall and watch it just go everywhere and not irradiate anyone. There you go. All right, what else you got? Planetary death in movies. Which is the most scientifically accurate death destruction

of a planet you've seen on the big screen? How many? Okay, so two things. The Death Star planet. If it can pump the right amount of energy into a planet, it will blow up a planet just the way it's shown. Yeah. Okay? With all debris scattered.

That was pretty accurate. That was accurate. That's probably the most scientifically accurate part of Star Wars. That was accurate. That and Yoda. Now in the Red Matter droplet in Star Trek, the J.J. Abrams Star Trek, that one, holding aside... The unlikeliness of Red Matter? Red Matter, holding that aside. Holding, yeah.

If you turn a planet into a black hole, it would become a black hole just the way they, essentially the way they showed it. So that's sort of accurate. It's imploded into itself. Assuming that Red Matter creates tiny black holes, that is a great plan. Exactly. But would you need to drill it into the center? No, that's not what you want to go to.

Don't get me started. Oh, sorry. Oh, boy. Okay. Once the red matter is into the surface at all, it won't know that it's at the center. How is it going to know it's at the center of the planet? It has no idea.

Well, yeah. No, they don't make it seem like it's the red matter's plan. They definitely make it seem like a Romulan idea but romulans what do they know right exactly um and then the other deaths of planets superman i guess the new superman it implodes and then the old one it exploded no no uh yeah well it just it's destroyed from within because they that's more realistic or no they overmind the planet so here's here are people who have super powers and super everything and they don't know that they're over mining their the planet. So here are people who have superpowers and super everything, and they don't know that they're overmining their own planet.

I don't know. Can you think of any analogies? And they can send the baby Superman, Moses style, on a basket, a spaceship. So anyhow, yeah, that could happen. Are you telling me that Superman is unrealistic? You can destabilize a planet if you make Swiss cheese out of its innards. Okay. That's clear. But I like the Star Wars destruction.

Just a good old-fashioned planetary explosion. Put some energy into it, blow it up. All right. Here's a question. Crowdsourcing science from Ryan Labee. With the popularity of crowdsourcing, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, why haven't scientists taken to the internet in the same way? Why can't we get a mission, say, to Mars by crowdsourcing true science geeks who would love to support in a big way?

If Veronica Mars can do it, so can the real Mars. Yeah, I think the problem is, well, there are two things. There's using the internet and having people participate in data reduction. That's just sort of another efficient way. And then getting people to sort of contribute to make a mission happen. Space is expensive. Far more expensive than your laboratory science experiment. That's all.

It's a matter of scale. It's billions of dollars. Billions and billions of dollars. Not three million. Right. So if you want to create the budget to do real space things, it's not millions, it's billions. And it's a whole other scale. That's why.

Got to take a break. When we come back, more of StarTalk, Cosmic Queries Edition. This, the last segment, we traditionally have our lightning round because I take so much damn time answering all the other questions. Yeah, the other questions are so involved and tell you the episode and what made them think of it. So, lightning round. I'm going to pretend I'm in soundbite mode and we'll test our bell there we go okay eugene you're here for me yes i am let's do it eric he's got a question could

an alien species consist of only thought or energy nothing we would recognize as body or mass i don't see why not except oh by the way, mass is energy. Energy is mass. So I can imagine an alien species that is energy. I can imagine it. Like a pound of energy. I can allow my brain to accept the possibility of it. I don't know how to portray it. I don't know.

But since matter and energy are equivalent, I think we're good here. Okay. A problem is energy. It's hard to create form out of energy. When energy becomes matter, you can make molecules and things and objects and brains and this sort of thing. Without it, it's amorphous. And it might be harder to make amorphous life than material life.

Next. Okay. Go. Could you eat it, though? Could you eat a being made of energy? Okay. Acceleration. Actually, since the only point of humans eating is to give ourselves energy and nourishment,

if there is an alien that is made of energy, you wouldn't have to eat it. You just have to absorb it. Okay, great. I'm on it. Acceleration of expansion of space to sea. Okay, Justin, this is his question. Is the expansion of space accelerating? If so, will that acceleration Is the expansion of space accelerating?

If so, will that acceleration reach the speed of light? If so, what happens when it reaches the speed of light? It's accelerating, and over time, it will one day exceed the speed of light, which it can do because it's expanding space, not objects moving through space. This is allowed by Einstein's general theory of relativity, published in 1916 by Albert Einstein. And in so doing, as the universe expands faster than the speed of light,

the objects that it puts beyond that horizon will forever then be visible from your view. So the very distant future, all galaxies will accelerate beyond your visible horizon, and the nighttime

sky beyond our galaxy will go dark. Uh-oh. And our entire known universe will just be the stars in our nighttime sky. Sounds fine. It's still pretty far. And all that we know of and what we call cosmology will no longer exist, because there'll be no information about the rest of the universe other than the stars that are sitting in front of our nose.

Next. Okay. Next. Okay, Justin wants to know, lunar terraforming. If we terraform the moon, would nights be darker due to the lost surface reflectivity? Oh, almost anything you do to the moon will make it reflect more. Oh, really? The moon is one of the worst reflecting. The moon reflects.

Even adding skyscrapers? The moon reflects like a sidewall tire. The moon is like, I forgot then, it's like 5% low single-digit reflective. What if we covered it in mirrors? Would that be helpful? What would happen to the Earth? So for example, Earth, which has oceans and land and clouds,

Earth is like 10 times more reflective than the moon is. Oh, wow. And so the moon is a bad, it's like dark. Yeah. It's just so much light pouring. It's as reflective as a pancake. Yeah. Well, no, it's as reflective as the surface of an iron skillet.

Oh. Okay. So anything you put there is going to make it more reflective. Wow. I can't even believe we can see it because of how non-reflective iron skillets are. Well, it's because how bright the sun is. The sun is. The sun is very, very bright.

So when you do this, if you want to terraform it, you will make the full moon brighter at night. Oh, really? Next. All right. If the universe is expanding, can we use the direction of expansion to determine the center of the universe, a.k.a. where the Big Bang occurred? It is expanding in every direction. Therefore, there is no center. Oh.

And the best analogy I can think of is if you inflate a balloon, everybody on the surface of that balloon is expanding. Yeah. But you can say, where's the center of the surface of that balloon? Where's the center of Earth's surface? If it's a balloon shaped like a rabbit, well, no, you're assuming it gets harder. Yeah, so there's certain geometries where there is no center, even though it can be expanding, and the universe is one such shape. Great. Next. no center even though it can be expanding and the universe is one such shape great what is the minimum size for something to be labeled a planet and why is it that kepler 37b which is only a

fraction larger than pluto has been labeled as an uh exoplanet while pluto was demoted to a dwarf planet yeah so a couple of things in the in the 2006 definition of a planet has to be large enough for its gravity to make it a sphere. Pluto checks out on that. Kepler checks out on that. Fine. But it also has to be significant enough with its gravitational attraction to have cleaned out its environment in which it orbits. And Pluto has done no such thing.

It orbits in the Kuiper belt of other icy bodies in the outer solar system. Pluto, dwarf planet. Kepler planet, real planet. There you go. So just get over that. So Kepler is not covered in ice? In an icy belt. You could be covered in ice, but we don't...

Of surrounding you. Yes, exactly. Next. Quick. If a quasar of... Lightning round, go. Stars in its distance. If a quasar or a star is billions of light years away,

how do we calculate that distance if light takes billions of years to reach us? Because the universe is older than that, and we've waited around for it to get here, and it finally got here, and the light that reaches us is light that left that quasar back at the beginning of the universe. So, the stuff that sent us light

that hasn't gotten here yet, we don't see those objects. But we will. We will eventually as the universe gets older, those objects, we will see them being objects. But we will. We will eventually as the universe gets older, those objects, we will see them being born. Yes! They will rise up out of the firmament

of the cosmos and their light will show up to us and we'll say, there is an object being born now that the universe and our cosmic horizon has enveloped their existence.

Nice. And the universe is old enough for its light to reach us. We gotta go. Thanks, Eugene, for being part of Cosmic Queries. Great to be here.

You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Thanks always to Eugene Merman, who does such a great job with me. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.