StarTalk Radio - The Science of Godzilla, Zombies & Other Monsters, with Charles Liu

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

Would Godzilla be structurally sound or too big for its own weight? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Matt Kirshen, and astrophysicist Charles Liu, takes a look at monsters that have terrified us, like zombies in The Last of Us or Godzilla, and the scary speculative science behind them.NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://startalkmedia.com/show/the-science-of-godzilla-zombies-other-monsters-with-charles-liu/Thanks to our Patrons Brandon, Ikumi Nakajima, Vanessa Johnston, Thomas Weeks, Vicvegatw, M G, Vijay Kale, Anshuman Rai, Zach Kellogg, Marcus, Glenn Clark, christian mendez pagan, Felipe Rocha, John Olsson, Ralph Kewish, George Vailakis, Rick Stawicki, Stephen Bradley, Jeffrey Moore, matthew gilmer, Cheryl, Jeanne, Bishop PPB, Rob, Moose Polk, Daniel Rajski, Mila Gregory, Magnus, Paul Chatalbash, Koy Corwin, Max A, James Lott, Frosty, Stacy Hughes, Shay Collins, Darryl Barton, Graham Anderson, Akseli, James Bartram, Hacker Man, Dick Feynman, Theresa Hernandez, Shannon Pincombe, Arnab Mukherjee, James Rinker, (Not) Lord Kelvin, Daniel Smith, Rob Woods, Trevor Krumm, Joan Amelia Tarshis, Brendan Shrimplin, Joshua Sahner, Kalin Zlatinov, Jay2Serious, Marcus, Nathan Charland, ciana marie dolphin, Justin Jacob, Toilet machine, T P Hysmith, David Faulkner, Ernest Huntress, N.L. Peterson, Andrew McCall, Ondrej Pinter, Benjamin Froud, Jason Northrop, Sloopy55, Floris Kuik, Jan Leslie, Ameesa, Angi Brown, Mesa Kevin, Tars, Dk, thomas Appleby, StarlitFox117, Jessica Black, Jesse Lakeman, jbas2015, Ethan Stepp, Patricia J Clements, Emmanual Morales Rodriguez, Laura Michelle, Darwin Gregory, Michelle Man, Rebecca Wright, Helen Dahlberg, Franny R, Vassilis Bakosis, Lance Hoopes, Steven Savicki, Melissa Lange, and Riley Ruffin for supporting us this week. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of StarTalk Radio ad-free and a whole week early.Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We had to do an episode on the physics of monsters. We had to. Oh, my gosh. I've learned so much, and I don't look behind you right now, but I think there's something creeping up on you. And it's not just the physics, but the biology of monsters, the chemistry of monsters, all that coming up on StarTalk. This is StarTalk.

Talk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Today, we're talking about the physics of monsters. I got with me, Matt Kirshin. How you doing? Professional comedian? Yeah, that's the job title. That's a recital tax return. You're on tour now. I am on tour. I'm on a couple of tours at the same time. Well, I'm opening for Sarah Milliken, who's a fantastic UK comedian, and we're doing some lovely theatres around the country. And then I'm doing kind of off the back that I'm doing some club headlining sets where I'm telling, you know, her many, many audience members like, hey, if you enjoyed me for 15 minutes. So you're pilfering her audience.

I am shamelessly, I'm shamelessly siphoning off some of her success. Oh my gosh. So, yeah, maccursion.com for all of the dates. I'm going to be around the country. Plus you have a podcast, a sometime science. Probably science. Probably science. I know I know you do this on purpose.

I know you do this on purpose, but every time. I've only ever been on once I'm waiting for my next invitation I think we're talking about because you've always got another book coming out and I think we're going to try and again shamelessly piggyback off of your success on that one as well

call me Matt so we'll get you on for the definitely science episodes so this monster subject you know I have some interest in the physics of monsters but when we hit topics like that we've got to call the geek and cheese

I'll let you introduce him but I've done one other episode with our guest. With the geek and she. It's lovely to see you be topped on this subject. It's lovely to see someone outnergy on. I'm not worthy. Charles Liu, welcome back to Start Talk.

Thanks for having me, Neil. What a pleasure. Hi, man. Oh, it's lovely to see you. You're a professor at CUNY, Staten Island. Yes. CUNY City University of New York. Yes.

Many campuses in the city. 25. Oh, my gosh. A quarter million full-time students. Wow. Yeah, it's a great system. Wow. And you have a podcast that started a few years ago? Yes. The universe. The universe. I see what you did there. It wasn't me. Okay. My family did. I, I'm proud to have it as a name, but I always thought it was a little bit weird to put your name into the universe and claim that you had any real role. Almost everybody's podcast has their own name in it. So don't be afraid of that. Okay. Okay. But when I heard you how clever this was, the universe, I started thinking other, like, Unitick.

Oh, I could fit that description. There's a lot of lewd, you know. Oh, yes. And then there is... The loo. Yep. The Lou, yeah. The British.

Lude behavior. It's all that. Oh, jean. Lude behavior. Yeah. So the physics of monsters, gosh, that topic has no end. No, it has no end whatsoever.

And monsters, there may be actual animals in our environment that we didn't know much about. It only showed up at night. maybe had beady eyes and people they maybe they worked their way into legends as monsters yes and one of my favorite was is it the triceratops skeleton that was coming out of some eroded cliff face it was like what animal is this that's right is this a dragon before anyone had any understanding of dinosaurs or extinction or anything yeah there's a famous i don't know human nature makes us think about monsters because when we have something that's unknown and we fear it, we want to explain it. We want to put it in a context. And so with me, as a professional scientist, I still am driven

by the unknown and the creative and the strange things. As you must be if you're going to be a good scientist. Yeah. I love comic books. I love science fiction and fantasy and everything like that. And what we did as a species, centuries or millennia ago, anything we didn't know, didn't understand and feared, we tried to personify or put into this concept of a monster, make it more accessible to us. And then years later, as we have learned more about our natural world, we see that those monstrous aren't monstrous at all. In fact, they're very natural, and it's scientific, and that kind of connection and

learning about these creative things makes us feel cooler and makes us feel cooler and makes us feel better about the whole universe. So do you have a favorite monster? We all do, presumably. At the moment, my favorite monster is Godzilla. That's almost too easy. It is. Godzilla is classic.

It is the longest running movie franchise of all time. Is it really? The first Godzilla movie came out in 1954. So it's been 70 years of Godzilla. So you're not counting train coming towards you as a monster? Oh, in the original silent movie. The original silent movies. It's all slowly galloping that.

Well, those are monsters of a different kind, right? Those are the monsters in our imagination. Right. Things that we think are frightened and scary, they must be a monster. But then it turns out it's just a train. It can still smush you, but it's just a train. My niece, who grew up in Pennsylvania, all right, came to New York for the first time.

I think she was seven or eight. And we're about to take the subway. And we start walking down the stairs. and this sound of a train comes in and she doesn't know what it is but it's coming from that direction and she runs back up the steps

and would not go down the stairs it is a very the New York subway particularly is an aggressively loud sound and it rumbled and so that was her that was a train which she'd never seen before

a subway train but that why fear it unless you think it will arm you. And it's coming out of the darkness you don't see first there's the noise then the light

Right, right, and there's a tunnel and it's a, yeah, all of the above. And so humans will do that. Okay. Now, the thing about Godzilla, which is extra special to me, is that it can be that kind of subway monster, loud, scary, and it burns you with its atomic breath and everything like that, right? But culturally, when it came to the United States, it took on a different kind of life. You see, in Japan, monsters since time immemorial have not necessarily been these evil, scary creatures. They are just non-human creatures. And as a result, they can be different from humans in ways that you can find in literature, in stories, in mythology, that allows you to tell things, much like the gods of Olympus did, say, in ancient Greek times, about things that we don't understand and are trying to understand, not just of nature, but of human nature.

Going back to Greece and Rome, are you suggesting, for example, that in our 88 constellations of the sky, they're non-human human. human creatures up there that you might think of as a monster. We have centaurs and... Yes, we have Draco, the dragon. Draco the Dragon. This wrapped around the North Star. Yeah, and we have Minotaur, which is like half bull. That's right.

Those guys, that, be kind of, one of those showed up at my front door, I'd be scared. Those are pretty monstrous too, right? But they're not portrayed as scary. They're just non-human things. Yes. And that is precisely how I see monsters based on that kind of cultural thing, right? You have Asian heritage from Taiwan. Yes, absolutely.

So our exposure to the Asian, if I may group it that way, dragon, very different from the European dragon. 100%. The European dragon is a menace. That's right. Whereas the Asian dragon is just a playful thing that... Not only playful, but noble and very helpful and so forth. The constellations of the Chinese zodiac that you know, right?

The dragon is kind of in the middle. the story is very long but to cut it short the reason it's number six as opposed to number one because it's such a powerful creature is because it saw a rabbit in trouble crossing a river

and so he went back to help the rabbit cross the river and let the rabbit finish in the contest before he did so the rabbit comes before the dragon that is some kind behavior in real life by the way if any rabbits are listening to this

you shouldn't actually trust dragons because that is just a myth. Public service announcement. I just need to get that in before you get any good lawsuits from, well. But if I remember correctly, yes. From my Chinese zodiac, the dragon is the only non-actual animal of the 12.

It is the one truly mythological creature. That's right, in the zodiac. And indeed, dragons are considered particularly successful, particularly smart, particularly potentially wealthy. So people will actually change their birth dates of their children so that they are born in the year of the dragon.

They will delay C-sections, they will wait and so forth, just to make sure this is the kind of thing that I want people to think about when it comes to monsters, right? They're not necessarily good or bad unless we project those facts in. In fact, aren't the true monsters, we humans ourselves. I think it was a deliberate act of naming that on Sesame Street, the puppets, Muppets were all called monsters.

See is for cookie. That good enough. But they're lovable and playful and colorful. And so I think it was intended to de-scarify a monster in the eyes of small children. These are lovable monsters. And so now you're going to talk about a monster. I'm just going to laugh at you. That's right.

Because monsters are- Monsters teach you the alphabet. Yeah, absolutely. They save rabbits and they teach you how to count. 100%. No, no, that was the count who taught you out of count. Oh, that's good point. Get your character straight, dude.

You're from the UK. What do you know? Is a vampire not a monster? I don't know. There you go. Right. Is a vampire a monster? Absolutely it was, right?

When the original Vlad, right, the impaler, right? And was later on died and then people in Transylvania. area, not transplant itself, but that area of Eastern Europe wanted to scare their kids. They said, be careful because Vlad will come get you, even though he's dead, right? And the concept of the undead, which had been around for thousands of years in folk mythology, got embodied in this one guy, right, Count Dracula, which was then brought into modern times by Bram Stoker, and then into the movies with Bella Lagusi, right, and you kind of went from there. Oh, yeah, that guy.

Don't forget Tom Cruise. Interview with the vampire. There you go, Leshtat. Yes. So that kind of monstrosity, right, is literally a human being that has become something non-natural. So the evil comes from not the fact that he's not human, but because he used to be a really bad human. Right. The count, just counts.

Ah, ah, ah, ah, right? He wasn't scary at all, but he was a vampire. He was a monster I'm Joel Cherico and I support StarTalk on Patreon This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson I was simultaneously enlightened and disturbed when I came to this realization that Godzilla

in Japan within 10 years of the dropping of the atomic bombs shows up as a radioactively influenced... Created. The radioactivity created him. I was thinking to myself, Japan is the only country against whom

atomic weapons have been used. This is not a coincidence at all. That's why I want to affirm here. It became part of their storytelling culture. What are we going to do with this? How are we going to come to terms with it? Yes. So again, it's a way of sort of embodying your fears

and the worst things that have happened to you. Right. And personifying them. Think about environmental degradation, right? Godzilla was the result of, according to the mythology, atomic testing and the radioactivity that basically awoke a sleeping giant or transformed something that was large and powerful, but benign. You didn't even have to give the specific details of that. Just that it created this life form. And turned it into this terrible thing that destroyed humans.

other words, you know, what did we create? What had we done? Oh. They're city killer. Humans are collateral damage. That's a great point. Okay. We are, but minor.

But you see, what happened was other monsters like Gamera, okay, big giant flying turtle, by the way. Very cool. Very similar to Godzilla in size and shape, but different kind of thing. This is also from the Japanese. Oh, yes, from that Japanese tradition. What's the name of this one? Gamera.

How come I know, I don't remember Gamera? Oh. I remember Mothra. Mothra, yes, who attacked Gamera also, would sprinkle little things on to Godzilla and confuse him. But my favorite, can I say my favorite? Yes. But I want to keep telling me about Godzilla.

I just have to get my favorite out there. Get your favorite. My favorite was Rodan. Rodan, big flying guy. It was basically, there was basically a pterodactyl. Teradactyl is just flying around. Because it was supersonic. Okay.

It would like fly and trucks would tumble in its, in its weight. It's wake. That's right. And I said, if I were a super monster, I want to be. well before mothra became a butterfly mothra was a caterpillar who flew, you know, I thought mothra was a moth.

Mothra became a moth after, but originally mothra was larval and like nature, right? Butterflies come from caterpillars or moths come from caterpillars. But they're not to say, moth and a butterfly not the same thing. My bad.

My bad. Mothra is a moth. Thank you. Waterflya is a butterfly. But yes, Mothra before, achieving the flying state was a caterpillar. A silkworm literally that blew out

like lots and lots of stuff. That's right. That's right. And so there was actually one of the great monster movies of all time. It was a collab. They had Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan together to fight King Godora which had three heads and was very, very dangerous and was like brought in from

alien. King Godora was not a product of Earth. It was an evil monster. Wasn't there an episode? Wasn't there one of these movies where Mothra as a as a caterpillar spins a cocoon? Yes. To trap the enemy monster? Oh, many episodes.

Oh, many episodes. Many things like that. Yes. And in fact, there's episodes, we call only episodes, but they're just individual movies. But the franchises have become so huge that they're almost like individual episodes. But at least in one movie that I saw a long time ago, I don't remember the exact details of it. When Charles says he doesn't remember the exact details, it means he doesn't remember every single detail. I can't go to the syllable, but just has the kind of like broad structure.

Okay, yeah. Okay, just I'm going to clarify. And the eggs hatched, and there were two new mothruss. The scientist says knowingly, yes, multiple births are common in the natural world, or the insect world, or whichever world it was, was talking about. But that kind of connection between these monsters being representations of nature, something like King Gidora, which the representation of evil and conquest, right, wound up coming against each other. And monsters like Godzilla, which wiped out cities in early episodes or early movies, wound up saving humanity more than once, including, ironically, against humans creating a new monster because of environmental degradation, not nuclear, but pollution. famous movie Godzilla versus the smog monster

the smog monster why do you why do you know Charles there's also Godzilla agrees to bike to work a couple of days a week Godzilla cuts down on meat consumption

Godzilla Godzilla goes does vegan year that's right what Godzilla's difference from just a big dinosaur is his atomic breath right and the physics of the atomic breath have been retconned over and over again. How does he breathe fire, right? How does he breathe this term? Where's dragons breathing fire before Godzilla did? Yes. But here this is a

different account. And also presumably the myth of dragons of the breathing fire long predates any human knowledge of atomic energy. That's right. That's right. And so the idea that this fire comes from that is very important. And it's atomic in nature. But Gamera, that turtle guy, I was referring to earlier. A flying turtle. Yes, actually. Turtles must go to the drive-ins all the time to see this. Turtles are great. Yeah, they love that stuff. Because they're the slowest moving thing. That's right. If you have a flying turtle. They got flying, they got ninjas.

And master Ugui from Kung Fu Panda. They're doing that, they're batting above their average. Is that also a turtle? Yeah, yeah. Ugui is turtle in Mandarin Chinese. And master Uguet is the turtle. Stupid. Did you know that? Yeah. I'm more of a Cassany speaker. Are they different, like, they're different languages, right? I haven't screwed that one up.

It's linguistically different, even though they share the same written forms. Good. Yes, absolutely. It's nice to have my job fact checked. In real time, I like that. I'm just glad turtles get some love. That's right. Get some loving out there.

Gamra not only, like, catches a child that's falling. Like, he eats fire. It was figured out in the first Gamera movie that the reason he was destroying cities was because he was seeking fire. And he wanted to eat it because he needs that. That's his nutrition. And so when he knocked over a structure where a little child was watching and it was like the child was going to fall to his death, Gamra caught the child, put it down. It then literally was willing to leave the world to save Earth.

What happened was the humans said, you know, we want Gamma to survive. Gamera's obviously not evil, but he can't come around and knock down our cities and eat our oil refineries. And so they created something called Plan Z. You said he eats fires. Yeah. Yeah, they play Plan Z, okay? And they had him stalled at a train depot and just kept sending trucks and train cars full of gasoline onto him

so they would catch fire, so he'd eat the fire. And then they cut that off when they got Plan Z ready. They had all these flares that would slowly get him up a mountain, and they'd walk up the mountain. Okay, but unfortunately, a hurricane came, a typhoon, and blew out all the flares. and so he was like, oh, blasted typhoon. He was going to head back down to the city, but then the volcano erupted.

So he kept going up toward the volcano. Is this Fujima erupted? I don't remember which mountain was. How many volcanoes are there in Japan? Right. But, you know, this is just amazing coincidence. You have a typhoon coming and a volcano erupting at the same time. And then he slowly went up to the top, and then he got into an area, which had a lot of fire.

And then the area closed up and turned into the top part of a rock. rocket, which then sent him to Mars. Wow, okay. Yeah. Isn't that cool? So, in terms of the science of monsters, many of these are derived from actual life forms that are important to us, what we think about and care about. Dinosaurs, for example, in the case of Godzilla. One thing I've always had an issue with was to be that large, yet that nimble.

Can't do it. You can't do that. You can't do it. No, it's physically impossible. Yeah, so talk about that. Well, the scaling of volume and surface area and height, right, goes at different powers. Mathematical powers. Yeah, mathematical powers. Well, that kind of too, right?

So if I increase, if I double in height, I'll actually increase by a factor of eight in volume, right? Two times two times two, left and width and height. So I would be eight times larger in volume. And thus, presumably all of the stuff inside me is made of the same material. I'm eight times heavier. That means my legs have to support eight times the weight, right? Now, if I get bigger, it gets worse. If I'm 10 times taller and wider and thicker, then I'm a thousand times more massive.

My legs are increasing in surface area, in cross-sectional area, only by a factor of 100 in that case. Right. So my bones have to be 10 times stronger to support my weight. Oh, because your strength goes not as the volume, but as the area. That is generally true. That's right. So, so. And your muscles have to be 10 times stronger to propel them. That's absolutely right. So if Godzilla being 400 feet tall or so, uh, in the first movie, all will weigh a billion tons. Yeah. So much that all known bone would shatter, right? All known muscles would tear. He would just be a blob of protoplas.

make stuff because he couldn't support himself. Never mind walking with that cheerful little gate that he has. Right. Yeah, yeah, he's nimble. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Same way, like, actually with real things that, like, a cricket can jump many times its own height, whereas humans can... That's right.

And so... Yeah, if the cricket were outside, it would just collapse under its own. Right. Yeah, his legs would not be able to support it. It's spindly little legs. Because when you read about it as a kid, they'll say, like, oh, a flea can jump however many times its own height. And if that were a human size, then it'd be able to jump over your...

over the Empire State Building or whatever it is. I actually know it wouldn't it would just kind of lie flat on the floor like kill me kill me these are people don't know physics who are giving those answers this is this is where that creation of monsters like Godzilla get exciting to us because we do see animals uh insects uh things like that that are smaller than us do amazing superhuman things if they were scaled up to size right so we imagine that if they're even bigger than we are they'd be even more amazing and powerful but the physics prevents that right that doesn't make them any the less cool And so modern monsters, right, are looking more and more friendly and cuddly, right?

Less and less evil and scary. You're very helpful there. And so I just realized we had a monster earlier than our version of a monster earlier than Godzilla. And that would be King Kong. Yes. King Kong. That's now, that's 20 years earlier. That's right.

That's right. Uh-huh. And a giant monkey ape chimp type creature who was benign and perfectly friendly. and it was living on a Skull Island and doing great until humans decided to take him to New York and show him off as the eighth wonder of the world. And only then did he become bad and harm people. Right. The movie, now that I'd forgotten this,

it was quite sympathetic. It was, very much so. It was, some people think that it was a way that the movie makers were trying to say, hey, don't hurt the environment, that is. You know, take good care of nature, lest it comes back and bite you, or bite you in half, which was one of the scary scenes of King Kong,

where he actually had a human being in his teeth. Dangling, right? Dangling, and while he, like, bit down on it, and he was like, oh, yeah, that's scary, right? But that was sort of nature unfettered if humans messed up, right? And he wound up being in love with Faye Ray, the girl, climbed up the empire,

state building and then airplanes came and shot him and killed him and he fell down to earth and the last line of the movie t'was beauty killed the beast as he's laid their dead on the street it wasn't it was the airplanes right that's right or it was humans that killed the beast yeah the beast was this beast was actually very friendly guy i mean he treated uh the humans with perfect kindness and normal behavior until he was put in this environment. And, you know, one of the things also was the humans losing control of nature, right? Because when... Another repeating theme.

That's right. When the reveal of Kong happened in New York City and the flash bulbs were popping and he was getting upset and he was pulling against his restraints, right? Well, the impresario said, don't worry, ladies and gentlemen, those... shackles are made of chrome steel. There's no way he can break out of those, right? And then he breaks out of them. Because humans underestimated the power of nature in our hubris.

And we overestimated the power of our... Chrome steel. Which back then in the 1930s was like, oh, wow, chrome steel. That's why they made a car bumpers out of chrome steel. That's right. Before your day. I've seen chrome. Before my day.

I don't know about your day. But, yes. So another sympathetic monster. Yes. But you have to remember that you were sympathetic to him is Frankenstein's monster. Yes, absolutely. You know, I felt sad for the thing. Yes, considered by many to be the first true science fiction novel in the European tradition,

Percy Bish Shelley's wife. Mary Shelley wrote this book, Frankenstein. It went through several editions in the early 1800s. But the monster was the creation of Dr. Frankenstein who was trying to re... Frankenstein. That's the Gene Wilder version, which I liked very

much as well, yes, and Iigor instead of Igor, right? But it was an allegory about what happens when you try to violate nature because he was a man trying to reproduce, trying to create life. Trying to be God.

That's right. Trying to be a woman. Trying to give birth to life. And so the combination of just defying nature and defying God caused Mr. Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein, to lose control of the monster, and the monster winds up becoming this bad thing. So comment on the details of how he accomplished this. So he went to graveyard and got body parts that are long dead. That's right.

Which at that time was also social taboo. Of course. You weren't supposed to mess with people. Since Da Vinci's Day. That's right. Where else is he going to know where all the muscles are? He digs up cadavers in the dark of night. You're not supposed to do that.

Yeah, and would presume, and, yeah, they were grave diggers, grave robbers who they would employ on the fly. Well, they wouldn't care about your body. They wanted the jewelry. Right. But there were people who would then brave rob and steal for the medical, for the cadavers, right, for the artists or for the... Would they? Eventually. Yeah.

Eventually. They got a third party to steal. Well, that came later, sort of in the late, mid-late 1800s. So what I'm getting at is the idea that the body is absolutely. some life force. Yes. Okay. And you can't have electricity in your novel until electricity has been discovered as a thing

that you can harness. So do you remember the exact year of the... 1817, 1818, I think is the first edition. Okay. So Ben Franklin was active with electricity at the time. By then, Ben Franklin had already figured out plenty of electricity. Yeah, yeah. And at that time, guys like Galvani, right, Aless Hunter,

Volta. These guys had started attaching electrical connections to like frog's legs and things like that and made them twitch. Right. Yes. Yes. I therefore realized that there was a connection between human or animal movements and electricity. Correct. And so now you have Frankenstein with these body parts that no longer have a life force, whatever that was understood to be in the early 19th century. And then when he stitches it all together. Now you take the best source of energy you have available. That's right. That's going to be a lightning bolt. That's right. And it goes into the electrodes and he becomes animated. Even at that time in the 1800s, although folks like Benjamin Franklin had already figured out that lightning was electricity, you still had most of the people in Europe and America thinking

that lightning was an act of God, that it was the divine something. Right. And you can go back to the ancient Romans and the ancient Greeks who thought that Zeus or Jupiter was throwing thunderbolts down at us. But now that we know that it's lightning and so forth, you just kind of remove that monstrosity of Frankenstein being unnatural. It was perfectly natural for that to happen. Another idea of physics eventually informing monstrosity. Right. So what I'd like about it is given the other experiments, like you said with the frog leg, this is not such a far out idea. Not at all, not at all. At the time.

Yeah, that's right. And today, what do we do? Your heart stops, I throw electricity into it. That's right. To bring it back. To get it started. Mary Shelley was actually very prescient. Percy Shelley was the author.

Percy Bishelli was an author, a poet, actually. That's what I. Yes. But Mary Shelley was actually perhaps in sort of retrospect, the more talented of the two. And Mary Shell, aside from writing Frankenstein, also wrote. an apocalyptic novel about a pandemic that actually killed everybody except a few people. I think it was called The Last Man.

I have to check that. I'm sorry, I don't remember exactly. At that point, she was speculating about science fiction, about how people could travel from London to Cambridge in a matter of days by balloons that had wings attached to them that were flapping like birds, you know, really neat ideas. But then... A horse gets you from London to Cambridge.

Maybe it was to Glasgow Like somewhere far away About 60 miles Yeah, yeah So it was airships You know the idea of airships So she's, I mean really Because I knew of her as being considered

The sort of formation of science fiction Just from Frankenstein I didn't know that All these other Strings to her boat That's right, that's right So she has really good stuff And she did this all before

Jules Verne started doing things like journey to the center of the earth and 20,000 leagues under the sea and, you know. To the moon and journey to the moon. But he did it louder and in a deeper voice, so. That would help. That would have helped back then, unfortunately. Frankenstein comes back from the dead. Yes.

The undead is a, there is no end. A rich, rich area. Why is it so rich? I was never as enchanted by the undead as so many other people have been. That's right. And nowadays, just to sort of contextualize your question, zombies and undead things are indeed the monster du jour right on our right whether it's the walking dead from from past years now there's the last of us uh umbified by fungus

zombieified by fungus 28 days 28 years later and that kind of thing whether the causes a virus or fungus or whatever things that are not alive fascinate us simply because we're not dead right think about this things that are not alive fascinate us because we are alive and we don't understand them we have no idea unless you're religious and you have a strong belief that's right ethic in that that's right we have no idea what happens after death that's right nothing can be spookier that's right and and even those belief systems cannot be confirmed in any sort of experimental strategy people have tried as you know they're even expressed in fiction like dan brown's novel angels and demons they're supposed to

was an experiment where they had somebody who was about to die and weighed him and then he died and they weighed him again and it's a little lighter you know some sort of physical thing like a soul what right when and you got to give him credit for doing the experiment yeah yeah so if everyone thinks you have a soul and there's science that can test things why not test your soul so right after ronikin Wilhelm ronchin discovered x-rays x-rays can see through your body that no one else ever saw through your body. Right. Now x-rays. So they get somebody dying on the bench and they waited for him to die to see if they saw something leaving his body with the X, then they didn't. They did not.

That's right. So there have been continuous experiments to try to understand what it is that makes something alive versus not alive, right? Because a living person and a dead person seconds apart, for example, right? One moment, they're talking, they're breathing, they're whatever, they're holding your hand. Next moment, they're not. and we can't get into their brain to figure out how that works.

An important feature of the Walking Dead, in my judgment, was if you were dead for a long time, so your body was putrified, you're not going to come back to life. That's right. So they recognized that your organs... You have to be mostly dead. Most. You have to be not so dead that your organs would not be harvestable by the car. that you signed on your driving

license. And so, and that's where the transition comes when you become a zombie. And one other thing about the Walking Dead was that everybody was infected, whether they were dead or alive. The moment you died, you became a zombie. So

what's the point of even trying to stay alive when you know you're going to become a zombie anyway? But that's sort of the existential question of what makes a monster and what makes a human. If you've died, you automatically become a monster, or do you become inanimate? Are you different from a rock or a steak?

Did you see the Key and Peel skit with the zombies are taking over the suburban town? No. And it's like a Saturday afternoon, people are barbecuing. Yes. And there's a black family over on the side. Okay. And the zombies, like, avoid the black people. These are racist zombies.

Yeah, yeah. And, of course, you can do something like what happened in World War Z. where the author said we actually don't know why these zombies violate the laws of physics so completely and yet they do. I didn't like World War Z because the zombies ran. You can't, if you were a zombie,

come on, you got to drag a foot, drag something. Don't be chased me down the street. In the movie, they ran and they were very fast. In the book, they were actually quite slow. You read the book? Of course. The Battle of Yonkers?

Did you not see that? No. Oh, oh, incredible. story without ruining, uh, spoiling the story for everybody. Basically, the army wants to make a big show of force to stop these zombies. And so they bring the soldiers over and they like have all this firepower. Turns out that they're routed by the zombies because the army has not thought through how to stop them. And so again, humans in our hubris thinking that we can control a force of nature when in fact nature comes back and tells us, uh, it's not going to happen. So one,

feature of sci-fi, which is, I think, its finest feature when well done, is it's taking place in another place, and yeah, they're aliens and there's rockets, and it's in the future, but there's some story element that's a reflection of the time in which you live. Absolutely. So that there's a lesson in there, either a moral lesson or philosophical lesson. Yes. So in the zombie storytelling, the zombie genre, I'm almost fatigued wondering, is there more lessons that they can teach? And what lesson was there to start with?

Let's use The Last of Us, okay, which was built originally as a video game, but now has been turned into a very successful television. That's right. Remind me to tell you about Monster Hunter. Okay, that is a great game franchise. but that's in a moment. Right now, we would say that the reason that the last of us happens and humans are threatened, global warming is the culprit in the last of us. I did not remember that fact.

Mushrooms or fungi, particular group of fungi, cordyceps, there are hundreds of species of this particular fungus. Let me remind people, fungus is an entire branch in the tree of life. It's a kingdom. It's a kingdom. Yeah.

Yeah, the animal king. When I grew up, there were only two kingdoms. That's right, animal and plant. And plant. The fungus is its own kingdom. Yes. That's how badass they are. We now understand that's the case, right?

We see, fungi, they can't survive parasitically in humans because we are warm-blooded. We have a higher body temperature than most fungi can tolerate. So fungal parasitism or infection happens all the time in the cold-blooded world. Okay. ants wasps they are parasitized by fungus

all the time there's a famous zombie ant fungus that causes the ants to go up and then the fruiting bodies grow out of their

antennae and then they pop and then the fungi continue to reproduce that is nasty it is nasty stuff but it is actually

we believe I'll say that better that's nah right but it's natural right and we consider that to be very scary

because that doesn't happen to humans. When we get diseases from viruses from bacteria most of the time. Not from fungus. We get skin to skin fungus. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We get little things. Yeah.

But what happens in the Last of Us mythology is that because of global warming, funguses or fungi start to evolve to be able to live in warmer temperatures. And eventually one of those parasitic fungi, the corticeps, whatever and whatever. Jump species. There is.

Jump species. and is able to live in humans, even though our body temperatures are 98%. Not just on the skin. That's right. Where it's not inside body temperature. And so we basically become parasitized by this fungus. And the fungus is not evil.

The fungus is just a fungus, right? There are fungus. It's trying to make more fungi. It's a fungus among us. There is nothing of evil stuff. But what happens when humans are now threatened as a species by the fungus, you find out we humans do monies. monstrous things like kill and oppress and push away and isolate and so forth, because we are afraid of what we have created from the global warming and from the natural reaction of nature, fungus, evolving to create to thrive in what we create.

For whom the bell tolls? The monster bell, the monster bell tolls for us. Stop ringing that monster bell. We've told you so many times. I don't even know why we have a monster bell. to be honest, but the fact that, just stop it. Monster. grades for continuing this tradition of science fiction to hold up a mirror who and what we are. Absolutely.

Nowadays, right, we can't see these things, these biological monsters. They're microscopic. Unlike the macroscopic ones. It's smaller than we are rather than bigger. So they sneak in and they are as unknown and as unknowable as ghosts and spirits and so forth. So it's the frightening part of it is that what we don't understand and what we don't know. don't know. This has been true for all monsters throughout all of history. Okay, what about invasion of the body snatchers? Yes. That was interesting because the monster was just another spore, but it was a complete other human being. They didn't look weird, they didn't look scary,

but they were they had been co-opted by interstellar or non-human spores. So instead of a fungus that had evolved from our earth. They had dropped in from somewhere in space. But you would come out of a pod. Some have said those are some of the most terrifying scenes ever. Ever. Yes. Because we have the closeness

to humans and recognizable things but just a little bit off and we can imagine ourselves in that predicament. That's where it is. Well that also kind of reminds me a bit of the uncanny valley and that effect with humans if you certain animations,

or certain models of humans or like realistic human robots. Why are we afraid of dolls? They make us... Why are we afraid of clowns? Yeah, and it is that thing of something that if it's a long way from human, if it's very cartoony, we're fine with it. If it's completely human, fine.

But if it's just a little bit off, then we find that uneasy. If an animation of a human is just a bit too real but not perfectly real, that's creeps us. I haven't verified this, but I was told. this, that in the humans that are portrayed in finding Nemo are a little bit sort of clunky. Yes. But they did that on purpose, because if they were too real, it would just be weird.

And we wouldn't be able to sympathize with the fish. You could. Because that's the goal. And so the irony is, again, who are the monsters in finding Nemo? Not the fish, not the shark, the humans. One of the most, I'd say, top five famous episodes of the Twilight Zone has the word monsters in it. So this episode, I forgot the exact name, that monsters are due on Maple Street. Yes, that was it.

In one of the homes, the lights start flashing. Their car automatically turns on. And the neighbors wonder, what's wrong with the Joneses over there? Why are they, why is their house doing this? and, you know, are they, you know, they're monsters or they start to fear them because things are happening to them. We're your neighbors, where you're this.

And then it doesn't happen that goes to another home and weird things happening. The garage door opens and closes. And then they start turning on each other. And this continues and oh my gosh. And then it ends, I have to do it because it shows 60 years old I'm allowed to give us money.

It comes out to the aliens. It comes out to the aliens. And the two aliens observing Elm Street. And they said, does this happen every place we do these experiments? They said, yes, the humans will turn on themselves just by the... He says, so they will be easy to conquer. Yes. We don't have to.

A hundred percent. We are the monsters. That's right. That's right. Period. We are the monsters. The monsters in space, in monsters by Godzilla, the monsters that infect us with their fungal, mycelium spores and stuff.

Stop, don't say that. I know, right? They're just forces of nature. The thing that makes them bad is we, is us. And this is the commentary about monsters. Once we become familiar with monsters, not so evil anymore, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, right?

They have angel. They have monsters now that are friendly, or the Twilight books, right? The vampires are just love-struck teenagers and stuff. And they're friendly, and they glisten a little bit. And they're handsome and cute. That's right.

The real monster is unrequited love. You gotta watch out for those things. That's right. Bella will come for you if you're not careful. With the Monster Hunter video game, it's so popular that when it was coming out, other video game makers kept their new products off the shelf until there was enough time

for Monster Hunter to penetrate the market. The monsters coexist with the humans. with the humans. They're just part of the ecosystem. And that the monster hunters are just the people who have to keep the balance. Like the monsters go a little wild. They're a little too violent. They're a little too many of them. You have to take care of them. You have to like control them. But then you have to figure out why those monsters went out of control. And in almost all cases, it's because somebody who was not one of those monsters tried to do something unwise and lost control. So I'm reminded of Carl Sagan's one of his several famous books, The Demon Haunted

World. When I saw that title, I was like, oh my gosh. Yes. Tremendously important. It's the fears, the monsters embody our fears. Yes, very much so. And also, what Carl did in that book was to make very clear the difference between a scientific and a non-scientific monster, right? Something that that you could actually touch and feel and confirm and explain as opposed to when it didn't. That's right. Do you remember in that book, the parable of the dragon in my garage?

No, tell me real quick. The idea is that I tell you, I have a dragon in my garage. And so you say, oh, let me see it. It's like, oh, no, it's invisible. Like, well, okay, so I might be able to hear it, right? Oh, no, it's completely quiet. It's like, oh, well, it flies, right?

So I can hear wind, it's like, oh, no, it flies so quietly you can't tell. And you can keep telling you that there is a thing that exists there, but I keep telling you why you can't prove that it's there. Is it actually there? In that case, this is an attempt to obfuscate or to prevent you from actually learning reality. I felt the same way about the guys testifying

that they have aliens in a lockbox. If you're not going to show us the alien in your lockbox, that's the same thing as not having an alien in your locked box. That's right. It's the same thing. I'm feeling kind of embarrassed now about the amount of money I paid for a dragon. Well, it's on your shoulders right now. Yeah, yeah. And I feel comforted by that, but now I'm starting to feel maybe I've been had.

When children have imaginary friends, adults laugh at them. They don't laugh, but they know. They outgrow that. Yes, right. They will outgrow this. Right. Yet, as adults, we have a suite of things that are just... That again, reflect our fears and desires.

That's right. That things that we wish, you're exactly right, man. And we laugh to some extent, right? You can pray on them in your comedy shows, right? And you make people laugh at themselves at the kinds of things that we hold in our bodies that are not physics, that are not scientific, and yet they rule our lives.

And so there is nothing wrong with something that's unscientific, right? Like a ghost idea or a monster idea. It's only when you are trying to use that in a negative way or to control or to be otherwise whatever negative. toward people that those monsters become truly monstrous. And I find interesting that

just as a physicist there are fewer physics monsters than biological monsters. At the moment, that is true. At the moment, right, right. And I don't know what a physics monster would even be when I think about it. A black hole maybe. But it would have to have agency. When we first thought of black holes, we thought that they were like,

you know, ooh, scary. But now it's just like, oh, it's a monster like cookie. Right? Yeah, it's not that hungry, but as long as you keep your distance and there you know, that's right. That's right. And so. And he lives in its own trash can. You know, they're self-contained. Don't lift a live. You don't get eaten. But there's a litany of science fiction stories, movies, books, novels, etc. That had black holes as evil, scary places for a long, long time. And then now they're not so much anymore. Not they're benign. Because we fully understand them. Because we understand them. Yes. Yes. Because black holes really came. in in the 60s. That's right. And yeah, as long as you don't understand something, it's ripe for monsterizing. That's right.

And so the best way, I think, to help us all deal with the monstrous ideas or fears in our lives is just to learn more about them. Best song ever about monsters? Which one? You tell me. Otherwise, I'll tell you. Monster Mash. Come on, guys. They did the Monster Mash.

You need that one? Yes, that's true. The Monster Ash. The Crypt Keeper 5. Yes. Yes. Brilliantly. Yes, Wolfman.

It was very one-hit wonder, but all the rhyming was perfect for Halloween. So Charles, thanks for bringing your expertise here. What a pleasure. Man. We have so much left to talk about. Now, Matt doesn't respect me anymore because I'm his geek friend. Yeah. Oh, no, no.

No, but here's the real story here is that however geeky you think you are, there's someone geeky there's always another there's an infinity it goes to infinity okay so it says Charles is very far along that infinity scale

it's not linear okay you got lots of dimensions like a Hilbert's hotel of geeky there you go infinite number of human funny things so let me see I can reflect on this subject I'm a fan of science fiction storytelling

of how inventive a next monster can be as portrayed in that storytelling. And I value anything that can bring insights to ourselves, brought to you by others, brought to you by your own introspection. And it's pretty clear that if all you do is tell stories about humans interacting with humans, it's going to miss an important dimension

of how we might behave on the edges of our cell. And a monster will take you there. And let me add a little bit of bias. If you've earned the sci in the sci-fi label of your story and you put a little bit of biology, chemistry, physics, material science in your monster, take it wherever you want beyond that. And we're going to be watching

because in the end, the monster will teach us about ourselves. And that is a cosmic perspective. Matt, thanks for coming. Thank you so much. Visiting us from L.A. I really appreciate you having me. Yeah, yeah, Charles, I want you more often. I want you every every episode. I just like, I like you because I learn something every single time. Oh, the same is true for me too.

And I boost my geek street friend. I can say, I spend an hour with Charles today, back off. Thanks, Neil. Always happy to be here. All right, this has been another installment of StarTalk, Monsters Edition. Until next time, keep looking up.