StarTalk Radio - George Takei and the Legacy of Star Trek
Episode Date: April 26, 2015Neil deGrasse Tyson delves into the legacy of Star Trek with George Takei, who played Lt. Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise. In studio, co-host Leighann Lord and astrophysicist Charles Liu discuss ...how the series inspired the future. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.
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Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
StarTalk begins right now.
I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist right here at this museum where I also serve as director of the Hayden
Planetarium.
And we're here in the Hall of the Universe of the Rose Center for Earth and Space.
And I want to first introduce my co-host, Leanne Lord, professional comedienne.
Hey!
Welcome!
Thank you. No stranger to StarTalk? No, not comedienne. Hey! Welcome! Thank you.
No stranger to StarTalk? No, not at all.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, today I want to talk a little bit about Star Trek and its legacy.
Yes.
There she goes.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Because I knew in advance you had some Trekkie flowing through you.
Just a little bit.
Just a little bit.
You love you some Star Trek.
I do.
There's a couple of restraining orders out there.
You know, so.
Well, you know who we're featuring in my interview?
George Takei.
I know! Oh my gosh, I'm so excited.
I know some Star Trek stuff, and not like what you do.
But also, sometimes I've got to reach for my homie on this.
I've got a friend and a colleague who knows everything about everything
that's not otherwise astrophysics,
but he's also an astrophysicist.
Nice.
He's my go-to man for all these kinds of occasions.
Give me some love for Professor Charles Liu.
Charles Liu.
There he goes.
Hi.
He's a professor of astronomy and physics
at College of Staten Island, the CUNY system.
Yes, Neil, you have only the
slightest inkling of how happy
I am to be here today.
George Takei
is the man.
He's the man. He is the man.
The man. Right. So,
he came to my office. He comes in.
You can't not talk. You try not to
talk about Star Trek. You do?
But you have to talk about Star Trek.
Yeah.
Of course.
He comes through town, you got it.
He understands that.
He understands that.
But I didn't want to feel like I was just somebody else that just getting on his,
I wanted to be different to him.
But I couldn't.
I don't even understand those words.
You are Star Trek, dude.
You can be different after you do Star Trek.
You are Star Trek, dude.
You can be different after you do Star Trek.
So we get a little bit of Star Trek prehistory in this clip.
It was a very strange interview.
Because when you're going up for what could be a running part in a series,
you have a whole group, a team of people interviewing you.
Network people, advertising people, the studio. Because you're not a one-off character.
Right.
They're marrying you for this.
Exactly.
It's the marriage arrangement.
Tribunal.
And I was prepared for that.
When I walked into Gene Roddenberry's office, first of all, he mispronounced my surname.
He called me Takai, but I corrected that.
I said, my name is pronounced Takei,
but I don't object to Takai
because that's a Japanese word that means expensive.
And he said, oh my goodness.
You're definitely Takei.
And I told him, Takei doesn't mean chief either.
Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek.
Creator of Star Trek.
Producer, writer, visionary.
All-around creative guy.
Creative guy and with a vision of what we could be.
I think they sent his ashes to the moon or something?
No, not to the moon.
To orbit.
So he's made it into space.
He's still out there.
He's still out there.
And Jimmy Doohan had his ashes sent out there too.
Okay.
But I guess he wasn't quite in orbit because he fell back down to New Mexico.
Is that right?
Okay.
Gene Roddenberry really deserves and should be up there.
Because Star Trek was more than just... He felt that television certainly needs to be entertained.
But it also needs to inform and inspire.
Did you know this at the time?
At the time, are you just doing television or are you saying to yourself,
this is some good shit going down here. This is whoa. Because the show did get canceled.
Right, right. But I knew that it was a- The Kardashians have been going, went longer
than, than the original Star Trek. Yeah, but we on Star Trek we had the Cardassians. That's right.
Forgot about that.
We talked about books we had read,
movies that we liked, current events, issues, you know.
We had a wonderful, engaging conversation.
He described the show, and it was thrilling.
That vision that he had, Starship Enterprise,
a metaphor for Starship Earth,
and the strength of the Starship lay in its diversity, coming together and working in concert.
Nobody was thinking that back then.
Nobody was thinking. I mean, you know, minorities weren't...
In anything.
No, no. I mean, to have Nichelle as a chief communications officer, a woman and a black woman at that,
an Asian man, well, you know, there are Asian chauffeurs.
But nevertheless, a crack technician and a member of the leadership team, half alien,
pointy-eared,
bi-species, not bi-racial.
That kind of vision of the future.
There he is.
He gets his gig after the interview.
You know, he actually was the helmsman of the Enterprise,
so in a sense, he was the chauffeur.
Oh!
I'm just saying.
That's his actual title. That's his actual title.
That was his former title.
Well, the bottom line is that even though there was an expansion of wisdom and understanding
and diversity in that show, there were still some things that could not yet be broken at
that point.
Right around the same time the Star Trek was running, you know one of its great competitors
on TV?
The Green Hornet.
I remember the Green Hornet.
Yes, and guess who was the chauffeur?
That was...
Bruce...
Bruce Lee.
Bruce Lee.
Yes.
Asian chauffeur.
But he could still kick your ass.
Oh, hey, that's one of the few things
that Asians were allowed to do on TV back then.
Okay.
Right?
Still?
No, now we can solve astrophysics problems.
What intrigues me is that the opening,
the now famous opening lines,
let me read them to you.
Sorry, I don't have them committed to memory.
Space.
With pantomime by Charles Liu.
Space.
The final frontier.
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.
Its five-year mission to explore strange new worlds.
To seek out new life and new civilizations,
to boldly go where no man has gone before.
So here's the thing. This is a five-year mission. The show only lasted three years.
Yes.
So what's up with that?
Listen, if you don't ask, you don't get. They had to put it out there.
Roddenberry was trying for five years, I'm sure.
Hundred episodes? Who doesn't want that?
But you know what happened? He was beaten out by Batman, The Green Hornet, other shows that were
more popular at the time, but didn't have the kind of lasting legacy that some far-looking,
far-reaching show like a science fiction show would have. So one of the features of it,
which you alluded to, but let's like get in there,
was in spite of George Takei being the chauffeur.
Yeah.
If you have to be a chauffeur,
let it be of the Starship Enterprise.
Darn tootin'. I'm just saying.
There is this diversity of crew,
a little bit from everywhere, essentially everywhere,
or as everywhere as could possibly be represented
in 1960s television.
So this is an extraordinary construct, an extraordinary step to take.
You know what's funny? You say it's extraordinary,
but for me, this was normal.
Ooh.
Which I guess means it did its job.
Like, that's what TV's supposed to look like to me.
Yeah, that was very not what it was looking like...
Oh, I know.
...in the day.
Yeah, and I got that in retrospect.
Yeah. And one thing we should all remember also was that Gene Roddenberry
used a large number of excellent science fiction writers to write his scripts. Many of his plots
were based on classic short stories in science fiction as well. So in a sense, he was looking
forward, as science fiction often does, to a future which could either be much worse or much better
than the present time and part of this com combination of of ethnicities and skin colors
that's part of a philosophy that he put forth that permeates through the scripts through the casting
through everything even to the point where spock himself is a half alien, half human.
Half Vulcan.
Is Vulcan not alien?
Yeah, but she said it like it was a bad thing.
Okay.
So Spock has a pin that he wears that is this combination of geometric forms
and different material substances.
Different textures, yes.
Different textures, which is the iconic, emblematic representation of this philosophy.
Right.
The idea is that when you bring in all these different elements, it creates something beautiful.
And lasting.
And lasting.
So there's truth and beauty in that symbol.
By understanding that, we can slowly but surely bring ourselves to our better nature.
And there are Star Trek episodes almost to a topic.
Absolutely.
Oh, the famous one, Let That Be Your Last Battleground,
where there was one half of the face was black and the other was white.
And they hated each other because one was black on the left side
and one was black on the right side.
Now, critics like me think that that was one of the—
And that was during the Civil Rights Movement.
Oh, absolutely.
And the Vietnam War.
Yes, extremely important. I have to tell you that was— What a Rights Movement. Oh, absolutely. And the Vietnam War. Yes, extremely important.
I have to tell you that was...
What a backdrop this was.
Yeah.
So if we're hardwired for stereotypes, that makes it very hard...
Very hard.
...to overcome.
That's right.
And you look at the struggles during the Civil Rights Movement,
the Women's Lib Movement, the Gay Rights Movement,
each of these in some way represents...
An additional...
...trying to overcome.
Precisely.
Overcome what we somehow...
We're constantly fighting ourselves.
That's right.
It was a message that lasted,
and that was Star Trek.
So, Charles,
Star Trek predates you as well.
I'm an old-timer here in the threesome.
Well, my first interaction with Star Trek
was on reruns on Channel 11
at 5 p.m.
before my father came home from work.
And I never saw an entire episode
because he would always come home before the end of the episode.
But there were certain lines that I remember
that always stuck with me that I remember the most.
And one of the lines I remember from George Takei
was in the episode called Mirror, Mirror,
where he says,
Regrettable, but it leaves me in command.
I remember that.
From there,
my Star Trek grew,
expanded,
and reached the point where it is today,
only a little bit.
I couldn't claim to be a true Trekkie or a Trekker,
but I do love it,
and I have enjoyed it for many, many years.
So it wasn't the episode where Sulu,
the naked episode? Oh, the naked episode?
Oh, the naked time, yes, where he comes around.
This is interesting.
They're around a star which somehow, through some way, makes people feel drunk, lose their inhibitions.
What was interesting in that episode was he became a swashbuckler.
And they originally wanted him to go around with a samurai sword and whacking at people.
And he said no.
He would want it to be... That would be too stereotypical. Exactly.
He's Japanese, give him a samurai sword.
Precisely. And so he
wound up going around with a rapier.
Dancing and quoting...
Excuse me, rapier...
Wit? No. Rapier?
Rapier. A rapier. It's a sword.
Excuse me, I'm from the Bronx.
We have switchblade knives, not rapiers, okay?
Go in with a rapier, and he was going,
ha, hoo, like this.
And he had the proper form.
He did.
And he was kind of shiny.
They oiled him up.
He looked good.
This is like a little too hot and heavy here for me.
I'm sorry.
That's a different channel, right?
It is.
Sorry.
So, no, we've all been touched by Star Trek.
What I wonder, I mean, Star Trek is folded into some of your routines and comedy.
You're a scientist.
I'm a scientist.
Yeah.
And I sometimes wonder if it affects other people as well, whether or not they became scientists.
And clearly it has because, all right, did you know next year is the 50th anniversary?
Oh, did we know? Yes. I'm on the email list. What, are you know next year is the 50th anniversary? Oh, did we know?
I'm on the email list.
What, are you kidding me?
Rumor is Paramount's going to make a 50th anniversary
movie.
They've got lined up for the future.
Their alternate future Star Trek,
of which now there are two movies,
that Sulu does
use a samurai sword.
What does that say about the evolution of our society
from that past to the present,
where it's now okay to glorify that stereotype in a positive way,
whereas at that time he chose to defy the stereotype in a different way?
Right.
And so this whole thing about diversity is an interesting juxtaposition
because, as you may know,
he, at one time in his youth was in a camp
in the retention camps in the basically concentration camps they were yes for the
Japanese citizens and and immigrants during the second world war and when we come back we're going
to learn of an episode in George Takei's past, in his childhood, where what he experienced was the opposite of all the messages that Star Trek wanted to convey to this world. We're back.
StarTalk.
Leanne Lord.
Sir?
Charles Liu.
We're featuring my interview with George Takei.
He came through town.
I snared him, put him in my office, and we just talked.
We were like old buds.
We went on and on and on about everything.
We can't fit it all in the show.
You lucky man.
Yeah, we were totally chilling and talking about everything.
So during the Second World War, he was living in California with his family.
During the Second World War, he was living in California with his family.
And one morning, soldiers with rifles showed up on his doorstep and took him away with his family.
Let's find out.
I was a child when we were incarcerated.
This was age four to eight?
Actually, five to nine.
Five to nine.
Yeah, my brother was four to eight.
Very formative years, my gosh. Very, very formative.
There were 10 camps altogether in some of the most god-awful places in the country.
Can you imagine the blistering hot desert of Arizona?
No air conditioning.
We were in the sweltering swamps of Arkansas.
Windswept, cold, high plains of Wyoming,
Idaho, Utah, Colorado,
and two of them were in the most desolate places
in California.
But the actual incarceration for us as children,
we didn't understand what it was all about.
It's just life.
It was just life.
And everybody around us lived just
like we did we lined up three times a day day to eat lousy food in a noisy noisy mess hall we went
to mass showers with our father when i made the night runs from our barrack to the latrine search
lights followed us but you know as a five-year-old kid i thought it was kind of nice that they
lit the way for me to pee you That was about the extent of it.
It was coming out that was terrifying for us because we were literally penniless.
They took everything from us, my father's business, our home, our freedom, and froze our bank account.
We had nothing.
And then the war's over, they let us go.
Our first home was on Skid Row. And that, to nine-year-old me, or eight-year-old my brother,
or six-year-old my sister, was terrifying, living with derelicts and lunatics and drunkards.
On one occasion, a derelict came staggering in front of us,
fell down, and barfed.
And my baby sister said,
she screamed and said,
Mama, let's go back home.
Because that's all she knew.
That was our home.
We didn't have alcohol.
We didn't have derelicts.
We didn't have, you know, lunatics. Well, we did have lunatics. People We didn't have, you know, lunatics.
Well, we did have lunatics. People turned, went crazy, you know, under those circumstances.
There it is. Now, originally when I learned of this, just in American history, because they don't really teach it.
I was about to say.
You got to go get it.
Yes.
And once you get it, I said, well, okay, they're being interned, not because they're Japanese, but because they're the enemy.
But then I thought it through, the enemy during the war.
Then I thought it through that we didn't intern German,
people of German descent, even though we were at war with Germany
or people with Italian descent.
So it was really just, if you look like who bombed us in Pearl Harbor
and you're on the West Coast, you're going into the camp.
That's exactly right.
Because basically a racist conduct.
Basically, yes.
Correct.
There's no question about it.
And only now, in the past several years or decades, have scientists tried to understand this concept of race.
What is it actually?
Even though it's so dominant in all human transactions, it remains a mystery scientifically.
The reality is that we human beings,
and you know this as well as I do,
we are wired to discriminate.
Wired for tribalism.
Yes, we are wired to discriminate
between whether or not that rustle in the trees
is a predator or whether it's a food source.
Or someone who's not well-dressed.
Someone who...
When we find chairs,
we don't have to test every chair
to see whether or not it'll bear our weight.
We naturally sit down because our brains have organized
these things called chairs into things we can sit down on.
And only very rarely will they break when we sit down on them.
And so when we translate that to the 21st century,
our ideas of difference,
our ideas of what, our ideas of
what are the same, what is safe, what we fear, they're all wired in thousands and maybe even
millions of years of evolution. And it's a lot of effort to overcome that even today.
But there's victims of our own evolutionary past.
Very much so. And we have to be aware of that, right? Because a hundred years ago,
people who looked like me were stupid. We could
only work on the railroad. Maybe we could wash your clothes. And now the stereotype is different,
that Asians are great at math and science. Right. How did we change so rapidly in a hundred years,
right? Are you good at math and science? Yes. Okay. Case made. But the point is precisely that,
right? Now the discrimination, ironically, is in the other direction,
as it has now been shown that Asian people are discounted
almost 150 points in their SAT scores
in terms of getting into prestigious colleges
compared to non-Asians.
Because they're so good at the test taker.
Precisely.
Do you see how that switches?
And it's easy to make that error.
You're saying we're all messed up.
That's what you're saying.
We are, but the more we realize it,
the more we can overcome it. See, but that's
where it gets a little confusing for me, because
the way America is set up,
if you read the brochure and believe it, we had
all these things in here that were supposed to prevent
that. You know, when the
Japanese were taken to the internment camps, there were two
lawsuits, and both times
the Supreme Court stepped in and went,
no, your case is turned away this is
the exact opposite of what star trek tried to show in terms of diversity taken to a japanese internment
camp when we come back we want to look at technologies ideas that pervaded the Star Trek storytelling, that at the time were, wait, that's way in the future,
that actually became true on StarTalk.
We're back.
Star Trek.
In the Hall of the Universe of the Rose Center for Earth and Space.
And of course, I'm your host,
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Lu.
Leanne Lord, thanks for being here.
My co-host, my special guest.
Thank you.
We're featuring my interview with George Takei.
And we're talking about Star Trek.
I was in traffic coming here today,
and I say, I'd be great if I had a transporter
to transport me to where I'm going,
but then I thought,
that wouldn't be the biggest use of the transporter.
It would be transporting goods.
Right?
Yeah, I can see that.
I don't have to go to the store,
just transport some milk into my refrigerator.
No, think about it.
Look at all these trucks I'm behind in traffic
as they offload goods.
How about transporting a stent into your artery
so you don't have to do any surgery?
Okay, you guys are, like, so missing the point.
I'm just looking at this from a dating perspective.
Like, I don't want somebody just popping up on my doorstep
because their transporter's working.
You know what I'm saying?
Thank you.
Let somebody understand, Vinny.
Our colleague Lawrence Krauss wrote a book,
The Physics of Star Trek, some years ago.
We've had him on StarTalk.
That's right.
And he once made a calculation that in order to get a single transport correct,
you'd have to have 10 billion times the total computing power in the world today
just to get one loaf of bread or a glass of milk.
Okay, we're almost there.
Yeah, what is that, an iPhone 16, 17?
That's right.
Exactly.
That'd be nice.
Just aim the iPhone at somebody.
Exactly.
Put them somewhere else.
You got it.
There's an app for that.
There's an app for that.
Exactly.
So let's get back to the enterprise.
I remember looking at all of these things that they had,
the replicator and this thing that heated food fast
and cards that they put in machines that had data on it.
And I was thinking how impossibly far in the future that was.
And I wanted to just get, I just wanted to sort of chill with George Takei
and just get his reaction to the stuff that
came true let's find it we're putting a benchmark out in the future of what we could be doing and
that's a goal that we can reach today with our technicians our researchers our scientists our
innovators this is the 1960s We are going to the moon.
And we know we're going to the moon.
That's right.
So no one is thinking that anything is impossible.
And three years later, we did in 1969.
You know, and beyond that, we had this amazing device that was attached to our hip.
And we would walk around with it all the time and whenever we
wanted to talk to someone we'd rip it off flip it open and start talking at that time it was an
astounding piece of technology today we've gone way past it so you know what's science fiction
science fiction serves a good purpose because it sets those goals, those benchmarks out
in nowhere.
And we work toward that.
And then now we surpass that because that communicator that we had now, we watch movies
on it, we listen to music, we send messages.
None of us would want the Star Trek communicator
because we had some better stuff.
Absolutely.
I only pray for the early invention of the transporter
where we can just sparkle and pop out.
That's a little scary to me.
Well, it was scary to McCoy as well.
So they were a little afraid of the transporter.
That's interesting.
Well, McCoy was, absolutely. I would not want to be the first afraid of the transporter. That's interesting. Well, McCoy was, absolutely.
Yeah, I would not want to be the first one in the transporter.
Oh, I didn't say first.
And Gizmodo published an article in 2013
estimating how expensive it would be to build the Enterprise today.
And obviously, we don't have all the technology,
so you get our counterpart to that technology.
So the engines, you'd put in some kind of engine fuel.
For the weapons, you'd put in nuclear weapons.
Instead of phasers and photon torpedoes.
Yeah, you put lasers maybe.
So they did this.
The size, the scale came up to $476 billion.
Oh, that's cheap.
Let's do this.
Right.
So you think, wait, wait, that sounds like a lot, but
actually, what do we spend on defense
every year? About a lot. A four billion.
No, no, not four. Excuse me. Four hundred billion.
Oh, four trillion. Excuse me.
Well, if you add it all up. But just
the Pentagon, Department of Defense,
it's hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
So you're just talking about a year and a half of
defense money, and we could get a
Starship Enterprise.
Well, you also have to figure in that that's going to go over budget.
It's going to double.
I'm just saying.
And you didn't even talk about 10 forward.
You got to put it in a little nightclub.
Oh, all the rest.
And nowadays, you got to put it in the holodeck.
That was assumed.
Yes, of course.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Did I just go next gen and I shouldn't have?
Sorry.
Well, Star Trek involved many aspects of real science.
And wormholes, warp drives, the warping of space and time.
When we come back, let's talk the science of Star Trek on StarTalk!
Yes!
This is StarTalk.
It is our job to collide pop culture with science.
If we don't do that, we're not doing our job.
We've been featuring my interview with George Takei,
Sulu, on Star Trek.
Star Trek had some science in it, I thought.
Or some science that had yet to come
that we have now and some other science
we know we ain't never getting, right?
Like, I like the warp drive.
Who doesn't like the warp drive? Who doesn't like like who doesn't like that let me confess publicly right now i have
described the warp drive incorrectly in my past
that's it i'm sorry i can't work under these conditions okay Okay. When I first knew of the warp drive from the original series,
I'm thinking, well, they're warping space,
just like I would fold this piece of paper.
No.
If you're trying to get across the galaxy,
which is 100,000 light years across,
if it's our Milky Way,
and so you warp the space like that.
That is so wrong.
You wrap the Enterprise in a subspace field
and then you send it
faster than life.
Let me finish how wrong I was.
So you'd warp the space
and then you'd travel
through a little wormhole
and then you unfold it
and then you get
across the galaxy
during the TV commercial
and it wouldn't take
100,000 years.
Can I?
So then,
so people must have been timid
because I was saying that
for years
until some like, I was at Comic-Con,
and some Star Trek people met me in an alley,
and they...
I can see it.
I can see it.
And they had the, what's the...
Batleth?
What's that weapon that the...
The Batleth.
Batleth.
Batleth's the big one.
The Mechleth is the little one.
Yeah.
Wow.
Tell me how the warp drive works.
What happens is that the warp nacelles create a subspace field around the ship,
which allows it then to slide through ordinary space faster than light.
Okay, so the warp factor is how fast you're able to slide through this subspace stuff.
So how, what are they warping?
It's a complete fabrication.
Well, at least mine had...
Yours had a tie.
You didn't use your tie.
This is real.
The warp thing is a bubble.
At least I'm describing something that's real.
So, here's...
Of course.
So, I was wrong about the show.
Yes.
And I beg forgiveness.
But you look good doing it.
But if we ever get a warp space, it's going to be something like this. Maybe. Maybe. What if we ever gonna warp space, it's gonna be something like this.
Maybe.
Maybe.
What if we use...
Oh yeah, I mean yeah, yeah.
What if we use quantum wave technology?
Quantum wave or quantum teleportation, whatever.
I'm down with that.
Okay.
We'll do a whole show with that.
The point is that the idea that we can bend space easier than we can bend ourselves seems to me backwards. But that's just
the physicist in me. What do I know? Well, George Takei, in my interview, asked me about the
plausibility of wormholes. So I like seeing this curiosity in folks, so let's check it out.
What is your thought on wormholes? Wormholes? You know, we're not going anywhere without them.
Well, we haven't been there yet.
Forget that we don't know how to make one yet.
We know on paper we can do it, but not physically.
And on movies, too.
And in movies.
We're really good in movies.
Matthew McConaughey.
Exactly.
And it was a stunning...
So forget that we don't know how to make one.
We don't have the command over space, time, matter, and energy yet to make one.
And do you think we will eventually?
I don't see why not.
As the communicator became so many other things.
Yeah, I don't see why not.
Because what you want to do is be able to control the fabric of space and time.
Matter and energy curve the fabric of space and time, Einstein tells us, and we can experimentally
verify that that happens. So right now, how much energy do we command? Not that much. How much mass
can we manipulate? Not that much. We're not there yet. But the day we can, the day we can summon the energy of a galaxy, the mass of all the
stars in the supercluster, we can then tune it to bend space this way, that way, pry open,
and use it almost as space-time sculptors.
How many lifetimes, though, before we get to that point?
You know, I don't know if it's farther away
than someone in 1900 saying,
oh, we'll never get to the moon,
and then 69 years later, we're leaving boot prints.
I don't...
It's hard for me to assess how far away it is.
For me, the most important moment
recreated in the later generation movies
in the Star Trek series
was when they went back to the guy who invented the warp drive.
The warp drive is essentially manipulating the fabric of space and time.
Without that, we're really not going anywhere.
Even if you could go the speed of light, even if you could go the speed of light,
it's still 100,000 light years across the galaxy. And you got to
really start folding space. And so I can imagine manipulating matter, energy, putting curved pockets
within the fabric of space between you and your destination. And then the universe becomes a
wormhole Swiss cheese set of highways.
And then you go wherever you want and arrive instantaneous.
You know, I do believe, because of our genius, that fiction can become fact.
Can I tell you a quick wormhole story?
I was in the airport.
I think it was Charlotte.
I had to change planes and I was like,
on one side of the airport, I go to the other.
I must've walked three miles.
And I thought I'd be clever.
And I tweeted and I said,
I can't wait until there are wormholes.
And that way all gates can be right adjacent to one another
through a chosen wormhole.
And I thought I'm being clever and you know,
and then someone tweeted back, if you had wormholes,
then you don't even need airports.
That's true.
And yet somehow
you'd still have to pay
for your carry-on bag.
But the idea of traveling
through the galaxy,
even if we do only travel
at the speed of light
or a little bit less,
as a species,
it's only a matter of time
before we spread out
through the entire galaxy.
Only a very short period of time.
But the individual wouldn't do it, the species would.
That's right. And there might be something...
Because you have to star hop at that point. That's right.
And you percolate out like a disease
spreading in a petri dish.
And in that sense, we might ask ourselves
if wormholes did exist and some
engineering society already created them,
why haven't we seen them already?
Right?
This is what Enrico Fermi
asked the same question.
Yeah, it's the Fermi paradox.
Yeah.
When we come back,
let's talk about
what kind of a hope
Star Trek gave us all
on StarTalk.
I'm your host, Neil Tyson.
Degrass, Tyson.
Charles Liu, longtime friend and colleague.
Pleasure to be here.
Astrophysicist par excellence.
That's not why we have you here.
No?
One day I'll bring you back because you're an astrophysicist.
We have you here now because you're just an all-around smart guy
who knows everything about everything.
Am I wrong on that, Leanne?
No, he is guest extraordinaire.
Guest extraordinaire.
I got Leanne Lord, comédienne extraordinaire. Guest extraordinaire. I got Leanne Lord,
comedian extraordinaire.
Great to have you on the show.
We're featuring my interview with George Takei.
Now, I've told this story before,
but now I just want to tell it again.
I saw Star Trek in its first run.
That's how old I am.
All right.
And in the first run,
I was actually accepting
all of these things in the future.
It is the 23rd, 24th century anyway.
So many, many years in the future.
Sure, you'll have starships.
Sure, you'll have photon torpedoes.
Sure, you'll have transporters.
But the one thing I said we will never have
were doors that knew you were coming.
I didn't know you were going to say that.
I didn't know you were going to say that.
How does the door know?
It can't possibly know you're, how does it know?
There's no, and so, so never come to me to get me to predict the future.
That's all I'm saying.
You're saying you don't have shares in Amazon.
That was like the first thing that we made were automatic opening doors.
When we walked to the supermarkets, right?
But they found out we were there because you stepped on a pressure pad.
You stepped on a pressure pad.
Right. And then the pressure pads disappeared
and there was that little infrared thing from the top.
Yeah, yeah.
But I'm just saying,
don't come to me to get me to predict the future
because I failed that badly in Star Trek, okay?
Wow, so now we've got two things.
We've got the warp thing.
Yeah, I know.
This is my confessional here.
Wow, okay.
Wow.
Yeah, so George was interested in other kinds of ideas and phenomena, technological phenomena,
but he wasn't always happy about all of them.
So let's find out what the next things that he was thinking about.
In the Star Trek universe, we had warp drives.
Those are great.
And transporters.
Was there anything else that you really wanted that you thought might have been in the future?
Anything else? How about that food? Anything else that technology would...
How about that food, the thing that makes food real fast?
Or heats food.
Any of these things you were thinking,
hey, that'd be cool if we had that?
Or information on little disks that you pop into the box?
I'm old-fashioned when it comes to eating.
You know, in Seattle, they have a lab
that's working on haute cuisine,
all done with technology.
Oh yes, I've read about that.
Yes, at Microsoft, I think.
It's very high physics,
the physics food technology.
Right.
Okay.
I didn't like it.
Not so much.
I love my good old enchilada from East LA.
Off the street corner, right?
I'm too much of a down-to-earth guy.
Okay.
Me too.
Food should come from the heart, not from the lap.
And you know who made the best enchiladas in all East L.A.?
Who?
My mother.
Is that right?
Mrs. Takei.
She had a friend, Mrs. Gonzalez, next door,
and they lived in each other's kitchens.
And I grew up on my mother,
Mrs. Takei's enchiladas and tacos.
Only in America can that even be a story to be told.
Exactly.
And that's the strength of America.
Yeah, yeah.
That we are, we do have this diversity.
We're at our strongest when we can.
Coming together without warring with each other, without discriminating, well we do have this diversity coming together without warring with each other,
without discriminating.
Well, we do, but we're making progress.
Wow.
Well, I hate to break it to Mr. Takei,
but all the food we eat is lab food.
Yeah, of course,
but he's referring to something different.
Not the generation of the raw food stuffs,
but the preparation of the dish that you're about to eat.
Oh.
Yeah, what goes into that? So on our radio show, we interviewed Nathan Myhrvold, who,
I don't know if we've aired that episode yet, but he's a physicist turned chef. And so-
And he's single?
So, when he looks at food, he's thinking of the physics of the molecules and the atoms and the flavors, and he takes it to
a whole other dimension.
I happen to like wine.
I've accidentally asked him about wine.
Oh my, OMG. So,
here's what happened. You know how people will decant
wine so that it can breathe? He said, well,
if you're trying to let it breathe, why don't, let's do
that in the extreme. And he takes wine
and puts it in a blender and blends
the wine. No! And so he did wine and puts it in a blender and blends the wine no and so he did that
and then gave it to expert tasters that hey this is um oh you must have you know it improved every
bottle that he did it to really yes and then he told him that he put it in a blender then all of
a sudden they didn't like the wine i need a blender well yeah and anybody who has never
and so then because he's a physicist and he's an experimental physicist,
it's, well, is it that it got blended
or is it that it introduced oxygen in?
Is it the oxygen that's doing it?
Exposure to oxygen?
Or is there something dissolved in the wine
that would then be released upon blending it?
So one time he blended it with just air,
atmospheric air, 21% oxygen.
The next one, he removed all the oxygen and blended it in a neutral gas.
The wine tasted the same in both cases, so that in fact it is not the oxygenation of the wine.
It is dissolved gases in the wine, which when you swirl it is primarily what's coming out of the wine, thereby improving what remains.
That's why people go drinking and dancing.
Aeration.
Aeration.
Right.
And anybody who has ever had ice cream made by pouring liquid nitrogen on the stuff?
There's a place in L.A.
You never go back.
Yeah, you never go back.
You never go back.
There's a place in L.A. they did it.
I forgot what it's called, but I like ice cream no matter where I find it.
And I go in there, and they just sit there with this big bowl.
You dump in your ice cream batter, and they put in liquid nitrogen.
When you pour liquid nitrogen, it's very cold.
And it's so cold that it condenses moisture out of the air.
And you see this cloud rise up out of it.
It looks something very much out of Frankenstein.
But once you have this very cold liquid, you dump in your ice cream batter,
and you just stir it.
It was the best ice cream
I've ever had.
Oh, my God.
Physics!
Yes!
And cooking!
Yes!
No, I...
Yeah, okay.
Physical cooking!
Yeah, yeah, physics.
No, physics, physics.
Physics does some
badass things in the kitchen.
When we return,
we're going to go to
Bill Nye the Science Guy.
He's going to share with us
a vision of the future
as seen through the lens of a Trekkie on Star Talk.
I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Here from the Hall of the Universe,
under the Hayden Sphere of the Rose Center for Earth and Space.
You feeling love?
I am feeling love.
This is a nice place you got here.
Well, come by and visit sometime.
So Bill Nye took a minute to tell us
what the future can be
if it was truly inspired
by all the great ideas of Star Trek.
Science fiction is based on science and imagination.
But right now, as an observer of the human condition,
it looks to me that almost all of our science fiction is apocalyptic.
It's about a future for humankind that kind of sucks.
But on Star Trek, it's not like that. It's never like that.
In all the versions of Star Trek,
the future for humankind is optimistic.
They've solved all the problems of food, clothing, and shelter.
You know how they solved them?
Through science.
Not only that, in the Star Trek future,
everybody gets along.
People from the continent of Australia,
from North Africa, South Africa,
North Asia, South Asia, from Europe.
Everybody gets along because they point out over and over again
that we're more alike than we are different.
That we are all in this together.
Let's embrace that happy Star Trek future.
Let's embrace the process of science for a better tomorrow for all of us.
We can all, through science, dare I say it,
live long and prosper, people.
Bill Nye!
That's a very hopeful future.
It is.
I drink that Kool-Aid all day.
It's something we can all aspire to, for sure.
Absolutely.
The Star Trek future.
And, you know,
of course we were featuring my interview with George Takei.
Generally when I have sort of people who are
best known for acting and other,
maybe they don't spend much time with scientists
so I try to give them a chance
to sort of ask any questions that might
be lingering within them. Especially
of the universe because there aren't that many
astrophysicists in the world.
That you can just call.
No, just not that many.
There are about 7,000 of us.
Yeah, I was about to say, and I know two.
So I'm doing pretty good here.
Yeah, you're doing real good, honey.
So there's about 7,000 professional astrophysicists and about 7 billion people in the world.
So Charles, you do the math, what do you get?
We are one in a million, everybody.
Yeah, yeah.
Aww.
And you got two right here.
We are one in a million, everybody.
I'm feeling so special.
Yeah, so I try to give him that opportunity.
So we closed out the interview.
I just asked, you got any questions you got for me?
Let's see.
What are some of the
achievable things in my life?
I want to think that by the time you're 90,
so next decade, decade and a half,
we will know whether or not there's life elsewhere in our solar system.
Whether there's life somewhere in the soils of Mars, deep down.
NASA's mantra is follow the water.
Because anywhere on Earth...
And that's the exciting thing that's been found.
And that's a completely reasonable thing.
One of the most famous Star Trek episodes was the one with Ahura,
which is life not based on carbon, based on silicon.
And that silicon wasn't pulled out of the ether.
Silicon appears directly below carbon on the periodic table.
And all the elements that line up above and below one another
on the periodic table of elements, they all form the same families of molecules.
So if carbon can make life in all of its varied molecules,
the suspicion was maybe silicon can just be swapped in for it.
You have silicon-based life instead of carbon-based life.
So that episode with the Horta
was deeper than I think people noticed at the time.
Only later would we be searching for life
and having to ask, what should we look for?
Should we look for ourselves?
Carbon-based life? Carbon-based life?
Silicon-based life? Or some
kind of life that we have yet to dream of?
Energy-based life?
So,
it's one of the
challenges. We know life does
exist based on water, so that's a
we can start there, but we should
not be too
blinded by that. because nature might be cleverer than we are.
Fascinating, isn't it?
Yeah.
I mean, here you took a fictional story, the Horda, fictional creation, and there's a real possibility.
You know, when I was a kid...
It got people thinking.
If it gets you thinking, there it is.
Absolutely.
When I was a kid... It got people thinking.
If it gets you thinking, there it is.
Absolutely.
Again, you have that benchmark that's unimagined, or imagined, but way up.
Just out of reach, but you can create the path there.
And then we start putting the bricks together, this chunk of information, that chunk of information.
When I was a kid, I was thrilled
when I went to see a movie titled Destination Moon.
And now we have our surrogate on Mars roaming around,
sending back information like the ones with which
we now speculate on what might be up there.
That's great that you remember Destination Moon.
That came out in 1950.
About half of the movie was about why we should go to the moon,
and the other half was about an adventure
where people actually went to the moon.
Why do you know all this, Charles?
Because he's Charles.
Because he's Charles.
But that's great that he was inspired as a child
to do that to the present day.
So I got a list of all kinds of life
that appeared in Star Trek.
So you had the humans, of course.
You had the Horda.
You had the Borg going through across next generations.
Vulcans, Klingons, Romulans, the Cardassians.
Not the Kardashians.
The Cardassians.
Interesting, even the Gorn.
Think about it.
They were all bipedal.
Had arms, legs, and a head.
So maybe as much as we celebrate the diversity of their aliens,
maybe they're not actually all that diverse.
Well, the obvious reason they were like that
was because they couldn't find actors that had six heads and three arms.
Okay, that's the blunt reason.
Well, and it's also, we tend to project ourselves into what aliens will be.
You know, we just think it's a bad hair day and bad makeup and that's an alien.
But Star Trek did. There were other aliens that
weren't bipedal. What about species
8-5 something, the fluidians?
8-4-7-2. 8-4-7-2
that made their appearance in Star Trek Voyager.
You know?
Plus the order was not bipedal.
It was a rock. Right.
A waddling rock.
But that's, I guess, the contribution from
the original, but, you know, that species,
the fluidians, because they were from
fluid space, the only, by the way, only ones to actually
beat the Borg,
because they were so powerful.
And how can we forget the best, absolute
best alien? Oh, the triples!
Oh my gosh, the triples!
Oh, that's creepy.
It's the only impression I can do.
Fuzzy things that brought out the kindness in us all.
Except for the Romulans.
And there's an episode of Star Trek, The Chase.
That was the attempt to spread human DNA all across the galaxy.
It was almost Star Trek's way of trying to justify retroactively
why all the aliens we've ever seen on Star Trek had two arms and two legs and one
head. It was kind of a backwards way of saying it, but in the sense, you're right. It's sort of
the ultimate in diversity and saying that we are much more alike than we are different, even though
we come from different planets. So, people, this has been a wonderful hour that we have spent together. Thank you so much. Dr. Charles Liu, friend and colleague.
Leanne Lord.
Sir.
My co-host.
Yes, loving it.
Thanks for being on StarTalk.
And I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson,
your personal astrophysicist.
And as always, I bid farewell,
asking you to keep looking up.