StarTalk Radio - Season 2 Time Capsule

Episode Date: March 28, 2013

Revisit some highlights of our Season 2 shows. This show includes interview excerpts with Whoopi Goldberg, John Hodgman, Nichelle Nichols, Phil Plait, and Morgan Freeman. 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, astrophysicist and director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium. physicist and director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium. Today we bring you our third annual Time Capsule show, which is a look back at some of the greatest hits of the past year on StarTalk Radio. For example, I'll share with you some highlights from my interview with John Hodgman, and some key moments with a friend of the show, Phil Plait, otherwise known as the Bad Astronomer, and some celebrity moments with Moby, Whoopi Goldberg, and even Morgan Freeman. Let's start with a man. Most of you know,

from the Apple versus PC commercials, John Hodgman. Of course he's PC. Let's check it out. John, I have to confess being a Mac user since 1985. When I see you, it's like, eek, eek, eek, PC, PC. What the radio audience cannot see at the moment is that Neil is actually stabbing me at this moment. He's not just making the psycho noise. He's stabbing me with a knife. Please send help. I have you beat.

I've been a Mac user since 1984. Is that right? You can't be a Mac user earlier than that. I had a 128K Mac that I convinced my father to buy for me. Well, you made an awesome PC dude on the TV commercial. Thank you very much. Well, the reality is I was an avid Mac enthusiast. Indeed, I would literally get into bar fights, not fist fights, but fights with words while drunk in bars. 1994, 1995, when I first moved to New York, my friends and I would go see a good friend of mine, Jonathan Colton, perform songs at McGovern's on Spring Street.

Jonathan Colton, he wrote a song about Pluto's moon, Sharon. Yes, yes, indeed. A beautiful song. It's a love song. Pluto's moon, Sharon, was upset that Pluto was demoted, but said, but I'm still your moon. Yes, but Sharon has left Pluto now. Well, that's the follow-on song. Yeah. You know moons. Okay, so you know Jonathan Colton's music.

Yeah, he and I went to Yale University together, you see, and we were very good friends. Friends of mine, including him, would get into long, drunken arguments about Mac versus PC. And they're the same arguments that you make today. And I always took the Mac side. My feeling was that technology should conform to us rather than us conform to technology. That is so correct. And so I went on like that. And then I worked in an office environment.

And I had to learn to use another platform. Okay. And then I ended up buying one of these things. I had had a Mac 128K. Then I had a Mac SE. Then I had a PowerBook 145E. You never had the Mac Plus then. I made the quantum leap from the 128K to the SE, which had a hard drive, which was very exciting.

Internal hard drive. I remember it because I was like, what is a hard drive? What's going on? You mean I don't have to put in a floppy disk? That's half the fun. So that leads me to the next question. Then I had to buy a PC. I'm sorry about your next question, but I need to finish this.

We need to get through this together. I had to buy a PC, I thought, in order to do my work from home for my office job as a literary agent. So I struggled mightily with that platform for a long time. I was all for it, but then I learned all of the problems. I sort of thought I had matured and come around and said, you know what, you can use this other thing. No. By 2003 or early 2004, I realized, no, thank you. It was Colton who made me go back, actually.

He bought one and said, you should try this again. You had it deep within you on how to behave like PC in the commercial. You had it deep within you on how to behave like PC. Yeah. No, I had every gag that they came up with or that I helped to improvise on came from a deep personal pain. Deep inside. Right. I've also flown on airplanes and seen businessmen working on gigantic non-Macintosh laptops, and I know those guys. And you pity them.

You pity them. No, I'm with them. They're my people now. Do you think robots will take over one day? Are they? Oh, you're talking about the singularity well do you tell me how dare you do you think that back on me well as you know i i am mainly aware of popular culture interpretation of advanced technology

and all i know is that futurist slash transhumanist slash keyboard inventor Ray Kurzweil is taking a thousand vitamins an hour in order to stay alive until the singularity can happen. And the singularity is, I believe, when artificial intelligence becomes self-aware enough to be self-replicating. And at that point, I think robots take over. And we become their slaves. We become their slaves or we're able to transfer our consciousness into a robot body. Leaving us unnecessary, as was the plot of The Terminator.

Yes, exactly so. Skynet goes online as soon as Ray Kurzweil goes full cyborg. I don't know what's going to happen. So what was your question? Are robots going to take over? Do you believe that that is the future? I think that it's probably more likely that robots will take over than aliens invade. But that's only because aliens aren't going to bother to get here, and the robots have an investment.

So when the robots take over, then the aliens might come and meet the robots and think that's sort of the organism of the Earth. Look, we're all going to be in a lobster pot by then. Sure, maybe. There's that episode of The Twilight Zone where it's a cookbook. Oh, yeah, to serve man. To serve man. Exactly so. Yeah, the aliens came and fattened us up and gave us new growing methods,

and the wheat harvest was as big as ever, and everybody's happy and fat, and they didn't have to work anymore, and they shipped them off to get eaten. You know what psychologists know? That what scares a child the most is not dying. Robots. No, no. It's not simply the act of dying or getting shot. It's getting eaten.

That's why they fear big monsters because a monster will eat them. They don't fear guns. They don't fear traps. They fear things that will eat them. Usually when you're eaten, you die also. Yeah,'t fear traps. They fear things that will eat them. Usually when you're eaten, you die also. Yeah, that's true. That's true.

But it is that particular method. The method of death. Do you think that it is a child perceiving that its existence is limited that is so scary or the feeling that it is going to be chewed up and swallowed? I'd have to go with the chewed up and swallowed. That is the hallmark of being eaten. And so what I wonder is if, if as adults we capture some of that fear with aliens five minutes you're telling me how much they're going to put us in their lobster pot

because we'll then get eaten you didn't say they'll vaporize us with their ray gun so maybe you're still a kid and you think that the biggest fear is that we're going to be eaten by aliens of course we're a childlike race we're largely irrational there are very few of us who even stop to contemplate our mortality.

And then those of us who do think we're going to go to a special place afterwards. So therefore, we don't need to worry about what we do on this planet. That sums up the world. You have to agree with me on this, right? If they ever do find us, they are so technologically advanced. We are worms beneath their feet. Unless they are extremely politically correct, they are going to. But why would they come here?

We've used up all of our resources. We're not very smart. Maybe for comedy. Maybe they don't have comedy. That's the answer. No resources, what good are we to anybody else? Let me tell you. Not even ourselves.

Let me tell you how we're going to handle first step to handling alien invasion. Recall all the probes. Or you know what? At least stop putting plaques on them with naked men and women, because that's going to make us look like we're walking around naked all the time, waving hi to everybody. Do you know what I'm talking about?

The plaques are a problem. That's an invitation to disaster. For some listeners, the plaque, he's referring to the plaque on the Voyager and on the Pioneer space probes that escaped the solar system. And it's got an illustration of a naked man and woman on it. We need to stop sending pornography out into the universe. What are they going to think of us? In this next clip, we have our very close friend of the show, Phil Plait.

His handle is The Bad Astronomer. He joins us for a conversation on our time travel show. And, you know, the topic today is time travel. I'm loving it. Not only the science of time travel, but we'll also get into all the best movies

that ever portrayed it. And because our man here, Phil Plait, the bad astronomer, spends part of his life assessing how well movies capture science. Oh, I know. I follow him on Twitter.

I'm up on it. The Bad Astronomer. That's where you'll get it. It's a well-spent life watching movies and critiquing the science, let me tell you. It's awesome. Well, let's get the science out of the way. Phil, you're a trained astrophysicist, so I got you on the show not only because you review movies, but because you know some science.

So let's just talk about time travel in the world of science. So what can you bring to the table? Well, it depends on what you mean by time travel. I mean, traveling into the future is... What do you mean it depends on what you mean? Well... Which word did you not understand in that sentence? Well, there's a positive and negative, right?

We all travel in time. We're going forward a minute every 60 seconds. So we're going into the future, like it or not. You're going to see it. But you can travel. But we're trapped in the present as we move to the future. Yeah, but when you said that, it was the present, but now it's the past. Ooh, spooky.

You guys really shouldn't do Hallmark cards. I'm just saying. But we're traveling into the future, and if you wanted to see what it's going to be like a hundred years from now, there are ways to do that. And if you want to see what things were like a hundred years in the past, there are kind

of ways to do that. But if you want to see what the Earth was like a hundred years ago, we can talk about that, too. So let's do it. All right. Well, traveling into the future, if you want to see the distant future, there are ways to do it. Suspended animation, for example, would work if there were some feasible way of doing it biologically. So we don't know how to do that. We'll slow down your bio functions so that you basically age more slowly.

This is a common way in sci-fi movies of decades, where they go on long trips, and they put you in some kind of suspended animation. Right. It takes 100 years to get from here to there, so you freeze the people, and they can wake up when they get to their destination. We don't know how to do that. You freeze somebody, they're frozen.

I'm told Walt Disney knows how to do it. Yeah, I suppose we could send his head to Alpha Centauri and see what happens. Bad freezer burn, fellas. That's true. You've got something on your nose. Oh, sorry, frostbite over your entire brain. All right.

But that is possibly one way. Another way would be to travel very quickly. And according to Einstein's relativity, somebody who's moving very rapidly relative to someone on Earth would age more slowly. somebody who's moving very rapidly relative to someone on Earth would age more slowly. And so if you were to get in a spaceship and move very close to the speed of light, you could literally travel across the galaxy, and somebody on Earth would experience 100,000 years elapsing while you might only experience a few months elapsing. And that is time travel into the future because if you went to the star,

you poked around, planted your flag, turned around, came back, 200,000 years would have elapsed on Earth, and you would have only experienced a short fraction of that. But by then, everyone would have forgotten about you. Well, basically, everybody's dead. So, no child support. Ooh, yeah.

And yeah, no taxes. There may be some advantages to this. I'm just saying. But the problem with that is we have no clue how to go that fast. No, I bet everyone who wants to travel to the future wants to be able to come back to the present just saying. But the problem with that is we have no clue how to go that fast. I bet everyone who wants to travel to the future wants to be able to come back to the present. Yeah. That's my sense of it.

So really, yeah, the honest definition of time travel is being able to travel backwards in time. Or just treat the timeline as an accessible dimension. Like a road. Like a road. You can get off and get back on some other place or go back to where you were as many times as you want. Right. Cloverleaf. Okay. A chronological cloverleaf.

Write that down. I'm going to patent that and make that into a URL. I don't know how I feel about that. Traveling backwards in time. The thing is, if you go back in time, the usual paradox is, I make a time machine, I go back in time, I kill my grandfather before he meets my grandmother, and I'm never born. And I always wonder about that.

And if you're never born, you couldn't have gone back in time to prevent them from meeting each other. Exactly. It's a paradox. So it's impossible to happen. I always wonder about that. Why do they always say grandfather? Why don't I just go back in time and kill my father? I liked my father. I wouldn't have any desire to do this.

That's why they don't portray that in film. Maybe. Because it's a little more diabolical to kill your parents than... Oedipus time wrecks. Plus, why even kill them? All you have to do is prevent them from meeting. That's right. That's all.

If they don't meet at the enchantment under the sea prom dance, then they'll never meet. Put them on different trains, then they don't meet. Exactly. Give one of them bad breath before they encounter. And there are other paradoxes involved. That's sort of the canonical one, the one that everybody always brings up. There are other ones. I mean, what happens to the atoms that you're made of in the future and you bring them back into the past?

They're the same atoms existing in two different places at the same time. Oh, because presumably your present still exists in the present. Yes. So if everybody in the future went back in time, suddenly there's more people. There's more mass in the universe than there was. At that time. Yeah, at that time. And so that can't, maybe averaged over the age of the universe.

You know, it's been said that in the future they have actually invented a time machine. And the most curious historical event that has piqued people's interest is the sinking of the Titanic. Yes. So they all went sinking of the Titanic. Yes. So they all went back to the Titanic to see it sink, and that's why it sank. Because everybody overloaded the Titanic. This was my idea for a short story, in fact. The reason the Titanic sank is because nobody knew how to steer the ship because they were all time travelers from the future. We'll be right back with more of the Time Capsule Show. Remember, if you'd like to hear any of these shows in its entirety, you can visit our archive page on startalkradio.net. We'll be right back. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio.

You're listening to our special time capsule show, highlighting the greatest hits from our past season on StarTalk Radio. Let's keep the focus on movies as we visit our time travel show. Once again, our friend Phil Plait, the bad astronomer, helps us explore that subject. So what did you think of Planet of the Apes? I love that movie. The original with Charlton Heston.

Yeah, and they had people in suspended animation, as we discussed in the first segment, because they didn't know how long. You don't want to use up your resources. And then some of them died, I think, when they landed. Is that right? There was a woman on board who dies in suspended animation. One of his fellow astronauts gets shot, and then another one gets shot and stuffed and put into a museum.

I remember that. And you see the cotton in his eyes. Oh, yeah. That was so grim. Well, that's what they did. Because they're the damn dirty apes. So tell me about the cotton in his eyes. Yeah, that was so grim. Well, that's what they did. Because they're the damn dirty apes. So tell me about the time travel in that. Comment on its accuracy.

What do you think? It was fine. They're traveling to a different star, so they're moving very rapidly. So they must have gone in some loop because they landed back on Earth but didn't know it. That's not another planet. Let's make this clear. This is not some parallel planet that had a different evolutionary track. This is Earth that he comes back to in the future.

Right. And what humans evolved back into apes? Is that? Well, yeah. Leanne, does your data support this, that humans are evolving back to apes? Back to hairy apes. I'm actually not convinced of what you just said. How do we know it's not an alternate developmental track?

How do we know that? Oh, yeah, yeah. Phil, yeah. There are some lines in the movie. So we know it's the Earth in the end because he's at the Statue of Liberty. And so there are some other things that indicate it's Earth. There's some gotcha lines in it when they're on a raft and they're going down the river and they're trying to figure out where they are.

One of them looks up at the sun in the sky and says, It's a little too yellow. Do you think it's Bellatrix, which is a real star in Orion? And they're sort of misleading you, making you think they're on a different planet. And in the sequels in Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes and Apes of the Planet, there was like five sequels. They actually establish how one of the apes comes back in time. And that's where you have to assume there's time travel.

The ape goes back in time and becomes the first ape that can talk. And then leads the revolution, which becomes the planet of the apes. Oh, so what you're saying is that the entire premise of that movie required backwards time travel. I don't think in the first movie it does. They thought that through? I don't think so. And in the original book, it's actually... Well, you read the books too. Yeah, it's actually a decent book. He's a Renaissance man. Really, yes, I still read.

But then this was like 20 years ago when I still read. Now I prefer to just sleep. But I believe they go to another planet and it's a parallel evolution. And they come back to Earth. And the big twist is apes have taken over during the time they were gone another planet, and it's a parallel evolution, and they come back to Earth, and the big twist is apes have taken over during the time they were gone. Right, right.

Maybe not as much impactful as pounding the sand and screaming at the Statue of Liberty, but still, it's a decent book. Okay. And so, now how about Groundhog Day? That's a fun one. That's the time travel I think we all wish we could be part of, because you get to slightly change what happens. Speak for yourself. You get to change the past. He wakes up every morning, relives the day, but he has a memory of what happened the last time.

What do you think of that? It's an interesting premise. It's never really explained. It's clearly not the groundhog itself because he kills the groundhog when he steals a truck and dives over the edge of a quarry and he still wakes up listening to Sonny and Cher. And if you want to wake up...

You remember this much about the movie. Oh yeah. This is scary, Phil. Well, you know, his name is Phil in the movie. The groundhog or him? Both. It was kind of a cool idea and you don't really ever find out how long he was in there but he was in there long enough to be able to become a you know an incredible piano player at the end of the end of the movie and i think there was an interview was it was it

robert zemeckis or john landis who directed this movie well whoever there was an interview with him saying he was actually trapped in there for years maybe even hundreds of years long enough to be able to acquire that expertise. Yeah. Okay. And to me, that would be the ultimate torture, to be trapped in one place like that and have to live that over and over again. It would make me crazy.

How about Superman? Ugh. The original Superman, the movie. Okay. The one where you will believe man can fly. Yeah, Christopher Reeve. Okay, I love this movie. In 1970, whatever, it's still one of John Williams' best soundtracks.

I just think it's one of the best superhero movies. It just takes itself exactly the right amount of seriously. Wait, Superman II was a little better, but referring specifically to the time... The time travel. The time reversal. I just want to get that out there, that I like this movie. He flies around the Earth, and somehow... Backwards.

The Earth spins the other way. He flies around the Earth backwards somehow backward the earth spins the other way he flies around the earth backwards from the rotation and i think there was a little bit of confusion there i think that he was supposed to be traveling so close to the speed of light that he was reversing time but it looks like he's flying around the earth so quickly that the earth somehow gets dragged backwards and spins backwards as if you're just spinning the earth backwards would spin backwards time leaving everyone to think yeah if that if you just turn the Earth backwards, that time would reverse. Yeah, and why doesn't he reverse time a couple of days

so he has more time to fix things? And let me tell you something. The whole reason this thing happens is because Lex Luthor is shooting two missiles in opposite directions, and he promises Miss Tessmacher, and yes, believe me, I know this movie, that he's going to stop the missile heading towards New Jersey. Hackensack, where her mother lives. Where her mother lives, that's exactly right.

And so he has to stop that one. He can't stop the one that hits the San Andreas Fault. That's why Lois Lane gets killed, and he has to make the Earth go backwards. He can't catch up to a missile, but he can fly around the Earth fast enough to make it spin backwards. Hello? Yeah, that's crazy. That's crazy.

Plus, at the time, I had a girlfriend, and we saw the movie together, and he starts flying backwards and reverses time, and she turns to me and says, can he really do that? And I said, why didn't you ask me earlier whether a man in blue pantyhose can fly? Why is this the first issue that you have with the physics of the film? People have different thresholds. And if you ever watch a Big Bang Theory on TV in the first episode, they go through this. I did not see the first episode. I have to go back to the archives.

They're talking to somebody about this and saying, you know, can Superman fly or does he just jump? And there's this whole thing about, she says, oh, well, people can't really fly. And one of the nerds actually says, oh, no, let's assume that. It's like the first thing that a science nerd would actually say, no.

So they actually, they just sweep right past that. I love that scene. It's very funny. Do you want to join us for Thai food and a Superman movie marathon? A marathon? Wow, how many Superman movies are there? You're kidding, right? You know, I do like the one where Lois Lane falls from the helicopter and Superman swooshes down and catches her. Which one was that?

One. You realize that scene was rife with scientific inaccuracy. Yes, I know. Men can't fly. No, no. Let's assume that they can. Lois Lane is falling, accelerating at an initial rate of 32 feet per second per second. Superman swoops down to save her by reaching out two arms of steel. Miss Lane, who is now traveling at approximately 120 miles an hour, hits them and is immediately sliced into three equal pieces. Unless Superman matches her speed and decelerates? In what space, sir? In what space?

She's two feet above the ground. Frankly, if he really loved her, he'd let her hit the pavement. It'd be a more merciful death. Excuse me, your entire argument is predicated on the assumption that Superman's flight is a feat of strength. Are you listening to yourself? It is well established that Superman's flight is a feat of strength. Are you listening to yourself? It is well established that Superman's flight is a feat of strength. It is an extension of his ability to leap tall buildings,

an ability he derives from exposure to Earth's yellow sun. And you don't have a problem with that? How does he fly at night? A combination of the moon's solar reflection and the energy storage capacity of Kryptonian skin cells. I'm just going to go wash up. I have 2,600 comic books in there. I challenge you to find a single reference to Kryptonian skin cells. Challenge accepted.

We're locked out. Also, the pretty girl left. On StarTalk Radio, we've been fortunate enough to have time to sit down with some major celebrities. Here's a clip with musician Moby as he joins us to talk about music and the science behind it. Music is so ubiquitous. You know, it's such a normal part of our lives, but it can do so much.

They play it at funerals. They play it at weddings. People play music to have sex. They play music to cry. People play music when you're trying to get armies to march into war. And what's amazing about music to me, it doesn't exist.

All it is is air moving a little bit differently. But somehow moving air a little bit differently can make someone weep, can make someone jump up and down, can make someone move across the country and cut their hair. So what you mean there, of course, is that there's not a thing that you look at and say, that's music. It's a construct of our brain responding to moving air yeah that's all it is i mean most art forms you can put your hand on them you can touch a sculpture music by definition

doesn't exist and it never can exist like the moment that air hits your eardrum it's done it's gone for that microsecond it affects you emotionally and the music is gone because we think music exists because like oh what about cds and vinyls? Those are just delivery vehicles, convenient ways of recording and storing electronic impulses that will move air a little differently. So you say that music doesn't exist physically, yet has the greatest power over our emotions than anything anyone has ever devised. That's scary. That's why. A scary beautiful. That's why I'm a musician. When I hear your music, I'm thinking,

he might be able to compose the epic musical track for my nine-month journey to Mars. Now, if NASA said, we're looking for that person, are you going to run to the front of that line? Oh, yeah. I'm a space nerd. So basically, if NASA came to me and asked me to do anything, if they asked me to like... To mop the latrines?

Yeah, mop the latrine, make coffee somewhere, I'd be happy to do that. But if they wanted me to write music for spaceflight, of course, I would like nothing more than to do that. But it does raise a bigger, nerdier question that very few people apart from me might be interested in, which is, as we go into space, do we have to carry our physical bodies around? And that's, I think, a debate within NASA as well. Like a Mars mission, do humans have to go to Mars or can we send representatives to Mars? I just think there's the bigger question of what it means to be human, which I know sounds vague, but basically we're defined by our cognition. All of our things,

our skin, our eyes, our nose, our senses, are what informs our cognition. And through technology, we have the capacity to build other things that will also inform our cognition. So that's the question. It's like, do we need to send our biological bodies into space to inform our cognition, or can our cognition be informed technologically?

And our sensory experiences are really limited. They're amazing, but our visual spectrum is pretty limited compared to what's out there. We're practically blind. Yeah. And even our sense of hearing is also quite limited. That's why we bring dogs to hear things, right? And smell, right. So that's the other question is like, can we go into space in a modified or augmented form that will actually improve the experience that you're talking about. Thanks for listening to our Time Capsule Show. We'll be back with more of our favorite clips. If you want to stay up to date with all of the latest StarTalk Radio news, visit our website at startalkradio.net, or follow us on Twitter, or like us on Facebook.

We'll be back with more StarTalk Radio. You're listening to our special time capsule show, highlighting some of our most recent shows. Actress Nichelle Nichols, better known to Trekkies as Lieutenant Uhura, also sat down with us on StarTalk Radio. And we talked about everything from Star Trek to the Civil Rights Movement. In this next part of the interview, Nichelle Nichols reveals exactly what Martin Luther King Jr. told her about the importance of Star Trek to society. Let's see what she had to say. He said, you have one of the most important roles this is a first it's non-stereotypical it's brilliant it's beauty and it's intelligence and you do it with warmth and grace and i'm just

standing there watching him at listening to him i'm thinking the only visions i've seen of this man really are nightly in the news with marching and black people in the south marching and demanding their rights to sit at a lunch counter, lunch counter and coming out, being hurt, hurted out and having hoses, fire hoses turned on them. Dogs, attack dogs turned on men, women, and children. And this man leading them and marching and the face of all of this being arrested. Every night I ever saw him, I said, they're going to kill him. It won't happen past this time. But it did. And so he became this power of hope. And here I am playing this character that I'm going to give up. And I said to him,

Dr. King, thank you so much. I'm going to miss my co-stars. And before I could say because, he said, what are you talking about? What are you talking about? And I said that I just told Gene that I'm leaving the show after the first season because I've received, and he said, you cannot. I felt like that little boy who later said, what are you talking about, Will? Because I felt like saying, what are you talking about, Dr. Martin Luther King? But my mouth just dropped. And he said, you cannot leave. Do you understand? It has been heavenly ordained.

This is God's gift and onus for you. You have changed the face of television forever. Because this is not a black role because this is not a black role. It is not a female role. Anyone can fill that role. It's a role with power and dignity. He said it can be filled by a woman of any color, a man of any color. It can be filled by another Klingon or an alien.

He said, this is a unique role and a unique point in time that breathes the life of what we are marching for. Equality. He says, beside your chief communications officer, your fourth in command. I'm thinking nobody told me that. I mean, he's paying attention to these episodes. He knows Star Trek is built on the Air Force. On the rankings, yes. Rankings.

So he knew the rank. And he said, you have no idea the esteem that we hold for you. And I'd start shivering. And I'm just looking at him, and my mouth was quivering. And he said, beside the shelf, you have no idea the power of television. This man has shown us in the 23rd century what started now. This man who's created this. This man has created a reality.

And because it's in the 23rd century and you are chief communications officer, forth in command of a starship going on a five-year mission where no man or woman has gone before. It means that what we are doing today is just the beginning of where we're going, just how far we're going. We have to make sure that that's enabled. You cannot leave. Besides, and then he smiles again, Star Trek is the only show that my wife Corettta, and I allow our little children to stay up late and watch. And Michelle, I can't go back and tell them this because you are their hero.

So overnight, your life became bigger than yourself. Exactly. Your role became bigger than you. I couldn't think of anything for the rest of the weekend. I was just shivering. Sometimes I was furious. Sometimes I was crying. Sometimes I just sat numb and thought about it.

And I went to Gene Roddenberry on wobbly legs, and I walked into his office, and he was behind that same desk. And I walked into his office, and he was behind that same desk. And Gene was a 6'3", muscular, hatchet-faced man with a wicked sense of humor and a brilliant mind. And he sat there, and he looked at me, and I said, Gene, if you still want me to stay, I'll stay. And I told him the story, what had happened to Dr. Martin Luther King and he just looked up at me and didn't say anything for a long time and he opened his desk drawer and took out my letter of resignation

and handed it to me and I looked at this man and tears rolling down his face and he said God bless Dr. Martin Luther King someone knows what I'm trying. Someone realizes what I'm trying to achieve. I'm getting misty-eyed just listening to your story.

I can hardly ever tell it. And he handed me my letter of resignation, which had been torn up into a million pieces from the moment I had handed it to him. He wasn't going to accept it anyway. And I said, Gene, do you know Dr. King? And he says, I've never met him, but I bless him. In this part of our time capsule show,

we'll replay highlights from our conversation with Whoopi Goldberg. She shares some of her thoughts on science, celebrity, and her role in science fiction. My friend, LeVar Burton, came to see me one day. So he was already a cast member? Yeah. I said, what are you doing, LeVar? Was he Geordie, right? Geordie. He said, oh, I'm doing the new Star Trek. I said, the what?

Because, you know, I was like... Star Trek's been dead for 20 years. Yeah. And he said, the new Star Trek. I said, dude, you have to tell them I want to be on it. Why? Because of Lieutenant Uhura. Uhura. Now, when you watch Star Trek, the original, what most people don't know, because they're

not kind of geeky like I am, is that before Uhura, there are no black people in the future in any sci-fi. At all. At all. I heard a comedian if not you i'm forgiving me for not remembering who said this they were worried about the future because nobody included us in that before lieutenant or her that's absolutely true and it's hard to put your brain back in that mind state at the time because you just look at it oh it's just a good actress doing her thing and now you look at it and you say well of course there'll be black people in the future, but when, what is it, 62 that this?

No, it's 66. 66. Yeah. Think of all of the science fiction movies that predate Star Trek. Oh, there are tons. There are tons, especially the era of the 50s. There are not one black person anywhere.

So you saw that and you... Well, as a kid, I saw Lieutenant Uhura. I just assumed I was going to be in the future. It wasn't until I got older that I recognized that before Star Trek, there was none. So I wanted to be part of that legacy. It had been in you for that long. Oh, yeah. And when there's no show, there's no reason to keep thinking about it.

Somebody says the show's reborn. Yeah. There it is. Yeah. They had the same doubts. So for a year, I didn't hear from anybody because he told them. They can't have taken you seriously. No, they didn't.

They thought you were just messing with them. They thought I was fooling around. And so I saw him like a year later and said, you know, they never called. He said, they didn't believe me. I said, call the office right now. Plus, who walks off the Academy Awards stage and said, put me in a TV show? Well, you know, everybody started on TV. You know, you look at Robert Redford, you look at a lot of those actors. They started on Twilight Zone.

Yeah. Yeah. With good roles, good, well-written roles. Fantastic roles. So television has always been a great place to be. But I was always a character actor. I wasn't thinking of myself as a star because as a character actor, I could do anything. You know, as a star, you're limited. Yeah. Because there's only one star, but there's 100 different characters doing their thing. That's right. There's lots to be done. So I made an appointment with Gene Roddenberry. He said, why do you want to be on the show?

And I explained to him just as I explained to you. About a week and a half, two weeks later, I get a call and says, well, Gene has written you a part. And the character's name is Guinan, after Texas Guinan, who always greeted her patrons with the words, hello, suckers. You know, she was a great bar owner. I think the early part of the 1900s. Bartenders are generally, they hear everyone's story, so they have a certain wisdom. And I think if I remember your part, this is what you were.

Well, she was very old, very old. We're not really sure what her origins are, except that she and Q have a very rough relationship. Q is one of those, you know, omnipresent god figures. And so one thinks that I could have smote him if I wanted to. I love that word. No one uses it. I know.

You never hear of being somebody smote him. Good one-syllable words are hard to come by. You know. I will smoke you. Yeah, I think, you know, I think smiting is a lost art. But, you know, folks are living this lifestyle. And it's the fact that they were living it is what created the buoyancy to have the resurrected shows to begin with. Yes, well, because people love the idea of a society of people from different races and different styles and different...

I'm glad, but I can say it's not everybody loves that idea. Not in today's world. You know, well, but I can say it's not everybody loves that idea. Not in today's world. Well, you know, well, people will get over it. Well, they have to because it's not like any of the races are disappearing.

Right, right, right. We're all here and everybody's getting more mixed. Yeah, and pretty much you can hardly tell who's who. In the original Star Trek,

the stories were about us. It wasn't about aliens. No, but see, people often don't recognize themselves. And the only way to get people to recognize themselves is to make them alien. So you have people who are blue. You have people who are silver.

As it turns out, people are much more comfortable with blue and silver people than they ever are with black people, which I find extraordinary. But that's just me. More of our Time Capsule show is coming up after the break. You can hear all of our latest shows by subscribing to our podcast on iTunes. While there, leave a comment and tell us what you think about the show. Our final segment of StarTalk Radio, after the road. Welcome back to StarTalk Radio. For the last hour, you've been listening to our time capsule. It's highlights of our favorite shows from StarTalk Radio over the past season.

Now let's revisit more of our conversation with Whoopi Goldberg. I love science fiction because, to me, it's the predictions of the future. I always worry because I love the movie Soylent Green. Oh. That's the one where it's people? Yes. Okay. Yes, yes.

Spoiler alert. Yes, yes. And Edward G. Robinson. Yeah. I just love it. But so many of those futures were apocalyptic. They were not utopian. Soylent Green, they were like melting down people

and making green patties out of it to feed other people. Yeah, that's creepy. It is creepy, but stranger things have happened. And science fiction movies have sort of told us what's that's what it's about. It's about going to Yeah, maybe if they make it creepy enough, you're alerted to avoid it. If that's why you would think so. But it doesn't always happen. I mean, look at computers. You look at the computers in 1930s sci-fi or 20s sci-fi, you know, and you think, oh, really? That's never going to happen. You'd watch the movie, and the next thing you know, you're walking around with an iPad. Right, right. They would have resurrected the witch-burning laws if that came out even 10 years ago.

Yeah, yeah. Think about it. Well, they tried to mess them up, you know, because now everybody's trying to catch up. Right. The curse that everybody says, may you live in interesting times, you know, that's an old, supposedly an old Chinese curse. But the truth of the matter is we do live in interesting times, and interesting times have happened all the time. Right. We live in an era of interesting times.

Yes. That's what it is. Yes. And an accelerated era, because I think we're seeing in children and also in adults an acceleration of evolution. Because little kids are born now, it seems, with an ability to connect to the computer. Yeah, yeah. They know things. To me, it is a prelude to our lives.

A window to what can be. What can be. And no longer do people go, oh, come on, that's never going to happen. Right, they don't say that anymore. No, because we know it is all possible. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. Because in the pre-moon launch era, people said, oh, the moon will never.

Once we started going to the moon, everything became possible in our minds. Yes. I'm still waiting for my jet pack. In the flying car. Yeah. Well, no, the flying car I didn't like. You didn't like that. Why not?

Because I wanted the control aware of all that. I wanted to just be me moving through space and landing somewhere. I want the jet pack. You want the jet pack. Yes, but I don't want it to be fueled by hydrogen. Now you're getting picky. Come on. I feel that, you know, there should be some new discovery.

Some new source of energy. Some source of energy. You don't have to slap a nuclear device on your back. Because what happens if you, you know, have a rough landing? Kaboom, there you're gone. There are few people in this world who need no introduction. Morgan Freeman is one of them. In this clip, we discuss his role in helping bring attention to science through his celebrity.

So let's get back to this bit about aliens and what kind of intelligence they would have. One of my great concerns is we always think that they're approximately the same intelligence as we are, intelligence as we are, so that we can have a conversation. Is there any species less intelligent than we that we can have a conversation with? I don't think so. I believe you two have been doing that all show. But Morgan, I mean, the philosophical. Yeah, yeah.

Or yeah, exactly. Not just here's food. Eat it. Are you worried when the aliens come that they might enslave us? No, I'm not worried about it at all. Why? Because Hawking's worried about it at all. Why? Because... Hawking's worried about it.

Well, Hawking's in a chair. Okay, I don't know what the fuck you're making at. Oh, he can't run? He can't turn around and run? Is that what you're... He can't shoot a gun. Okay. You know what I'm saying?

All right, now, you know what? I did like you, Morgan Freeman, until that comment right there, because I didn't think of it. And that was the funniest thing said all show. I don't think, personally, that we need fear the universe. Right. You know, even though I walk through the valley, I feel no evil. I'm the baddest thing in the world. That's a good point. That's to be fair in me.

So, okay, so when the aliens come, we will put you forward. Well, you know, listen, we don't go out there with, you know, the... He's doing the record show. He's doing the Vulcan sign, live long and prosper. How do you know that's not go, you know, F off? Well, because. To an alien. As long as you've got an open hand, I think it's universal that, you know, I don't mean you're any harm.

I just want to clear out the alien part of our discussion before the break. Just to, just to, the aliens, if they come and you're going to like say hi to them and you think they're going to be nice? No, I don't know what they're going to be, but I'm not going to imagine that they're going to be hostile. It's just as easy to imagine that they're going to be beneficent, that they're going to be just people out exploring like we would do. Okay, but our first explorers were not beneficent, were they? Huh? They were like totally tearing up the places they... Oh, you mean the explorers were not beneficent, were they? Huh? They were, like, totally tearing up the places they...

Oh, you mean the explorers here on Earth. On Earth, yeah, yeah. Well, the Polynesians did a lot of explorations. I don't know if they killed everybody they met. That's true. That's true. Well, they have to be just northern Europeans. Well, you know, people with hot blood.

Hot blood. Hot blood. So this segment, I want to talk about the end. Yeah. The end of the universe, the end of life. You know, the universe is just going to expand forever. Says who? The data say that.

That's what I'm saying. The data said that we knew all of the matter. We had already mapped the universe and we knew what all the matter was until the advent of the Hubble telescope. And all of a sudden, oh, wait a minute, we were wrong. had already mapped the universe, and we knew what all the matter was until the advent of the Hubble telescope. And all of a sudden, oh, wait a minute, we were wrong. I think you want to be wishful that the universe goes through cycles. Is that right? I feel that. I don't want to be wishful, but I think that's a usable theory.

It could have worked. It's just not. All the data don't show that. Because if we expand forever, we continue to get cold. And the temperature of the universe, which is now 3 degrees Kelvin, will approach 0 degrees. And closer and closer, all physical processes in the universe will wind down. And as it winds down, there'll be no life, no stars. Hold on.

You're holding forth here with some stuff that doesn't sound right to me. For instance, all of these stars, they're burning hot. Yes. I don't care where they go, they're still going to burn hot. No, they run out of fuel, and one day they stop burning. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They're being born every day. They're being born every day.

They're being born out of gas that is not in the star. And one day you run out of gas. So the last set of stars that made out of the last set of gas, when they burn out, that's all she wrote. And the stars will burn out one by one in the night sky. And what started out as a starry night will become an abyss of darkness.

Have a nice day. Thanks for listening to our Best of Time Capsule show. Hope you've enjoyed this past hour. And if you'd like to hear it again or listen to any other shows that were featured in the Time Capsule, or any other shows during all of our previous seasons, just visit our website, StarTalkRadio.net. StarTalk Radio is brought to you in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. For me and the entire StarTalk Radio team, we wish you a happy new year and hope you can join us for an exciting 2012. And remember, as always, to keep looking up.