StarTalk Radio - Things You Thought You Knew – Billionaires in Space

Episode Date: July 19, 2021

Bezos? Branson? Elon Musk? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice break down why all these billionaires are going to space, how achieving orbit works, and how to wrap our heads around exponentially large numbers. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/things-you-thought-you-knew-billionaires-in-space/ Thanks to our Patrons dustin fenwick, Michael Borger, Gautam, Gayle Phillips, Stefanie Davis, Meghan Pearson, and Johannes Wagner for supporting us this week. Photo Credit: NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons 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. This is StarTalk. This episode is another installment in things you thought you knew. And today we're going to talk about billionaires in space. We're going to talk about how our brain is not wired to think in exponentials. And we're going to talk about what it takes to achieve orbit,

all in this episode of StarTalk. So Chuck, I haven't checked in on you lately. What's been eating you? Well, you know, I'm not sure if it's something that's eating me, but I'm curious because a little while ago you were on CNN and there was a lot of hoopla about man returning to space. No, no, billionaire returning to space. Billionaire returns to space.

Actually, no, it's like this Cro-Magnon man, now we have billionaire man. This is so true. Billionaire returns to space. Actually, no, it's like this Cro-Magnon man, now we have billionaire man. This is so true. Billionaire man going to space. Right. And now it looks like that's the new thing, is that billionaires in space, you know. Okay, yeah, so what's your problem?

So my problem is that. By the way, just to be clear, I was on Fareed Zakaria GPS. Right. Just to give him a shout out. Yeah, he's a good guy. We all love him. That's your buddy. But here's the thing.

So during that day on every single channel, the coverage was like the moon landing. Yeah. It's true. It was like, and I'm thinking. We interrupt this program. Right. They get a break in. So I'm thinking like, yo, that's kind of like,

we went to the North Pole and then we did a Sarah Palin, like, you know, I could see the North Pole from my house, but then we said that was like, we went there. Didn't we do better than this already? Okay, so what you mean, let me unpack what you just said. So on the occasion that I was on CNN, it was Richard Branson. Right. Who had a crew of six, including himself, who went into a suborbital flight,

had a few minutes of weightlessness, and then because it's a space plane, a rocket plane, it could come back and land on a runway. Okay. So you're saying, did we do that before? Yeah, kind of. We did it 60 years ago with Alan Shepard, America's first astronaut, basically. And he was launched from Cape Canaveral,

launched in due east, and plunked down in his capsule in the Atlantic Ocean, and we plucked him out with an aircraft carrier, as we did with all the astronauts who landed in the water. So we did that 60 years ago. So why all the buzz? Because this is now done by a private enterprise. Yeah. Okay?

Virgin Galactic. All right? So a private enterprise. Yeah. Okay? Virgin Galactic. All right? So a private enterprise. It's a billionaire. He's on the jet. Well, that's how you knew it was going to work. That's how you knew it was going to work. That's how you knew it was going to work.

So he has literal skin in the game. And for me, I'm not riding any billionaire rocket anywhere until they send their mother and bring her back or themselves, right? I mean, this counts. So this was remarkable publicity if you were thinking about signing up for the trip and the man gets on the trip himself. So I think all of that worked. And the man likes to live. What's the French? Joie de vivre.

Joie de vivre. Lover of life. What's the French? Joie de vivre. Joie de vivre. Lover of life. Yeah, lover of life. And so that was the celebration of the day. Now, so how far did they go? Because they kept saying, going to the space. Space. And I'm an astrophysicist.

I know what space is. And they called it the first commercial space flight. But I'm like... Well, except Elon has sent his own spaceships into orbit. And it was commercial in that sense. So I don't know what they would mean by that. So what do they mean by space? Well, he went up about 50 miles, something like that, around there.

And that's lower than the internationally agreed altitude, by the way, just so you know. That's okay. The Air Force recognizes that as space, but internationally, it's a little higher, 62 miles, which comes out to be a clean 100 kilometers. So wait a minute, you mean to tell me that he couldn't tack on 12 lousy miles? It takes a lot more energy to keep ascending away from Earth's gravity. He'd need a bigger rocket. We're going to need a bigger rocket. Okay.

Okay? You take a look at his size, the size of his rocket relative to Jeff Bezos' rocket. One is way bigger than the other. Okay. Just in terms of sort of launch mass. Okay? Somebody's compensating for something. Chuck.

I said, is Chuck going to go there? He went there. Of course. Chuck went there. I have no choice. So here's the thing. So what happens at 100 kilometers? You ascend high enough so that there's so few air molecules. I think we've talked about this on a previous explainer.

There's so few air molecules that there's nothing there to scatter sunlight. And the blue sky, sky blue, is scattered sunlight. If you remove the atmosphere because you're so high up, then there's nothing there to scatter it. There is no blue sky because there's no sky. And then the nighttime universe reveals itself while the sun is also in the sky at the same time.

So they classify that as space, the boundary between our atmosphere and space. If you get far enough out of Earth, far enough away from Earth, and you're like, yo, I think we're in a black neighborhood, you made it to space.

Oh, because the sky loses its oh because the sky literally goes black i'm sorry in a black neighborhood damn chuck i'm sorry everything got chuck chuck i thought you were in therapy for this i am i am all right but but anyway and for those of you out there, they're called jokes. Don't write me a thing. Stop being racial, Chuck. I live in America. What you want?

All right. So here's the thing, okay? So you're in space. That's what we want to call that space. Okay, 62 miles, 100 kilometers. You're not weightless, though. People equate being in space with being weightless. You're only weightless if you're in free fall.

Aha. Okay? So if at that moment he cuts off his engines and they fall, then you're weightless. Got you. For as long as you're falling. Right. Okay, but there's a point where the atmosphere gets thick enough again,

and in the case of Richard Branson's rocket, it was also an airplane. It had airfoil. So as it starts hitting atmosphere, then the control surfaces of his wings begin to take effect, and then it can actually do a descent as an airplane. But the moment it does that, you are no longer weightless. Right. Okay, so I no longer weightless. Right. Okay? So I just want to make that clear.

The weightlessness is simply for being in free fall, not for being in what people are calling space. It's not like you hit space, I'm weightless. Oh my gosh, I'm weightless. No, no. Are your rockets firing? No. Are you a plane?

No. You're just falling. You're weightless over that time. It's just like, what is it, the parachute drop or whatever it is at the amusement park. When they just drop the floor out onto you, you are weightless until some parachute opens. But over that time, you're weightless. Right. Basically weightless.

Okay? Now, if you fall long enough, then the air resists you. All right? But while you're accelerating, you're weightless. And so that's the experience. So now, here's the thing. Do you need to go up 62 miles, 100 kilometers, to see the night sky? No, you can just wait until the sun sets.

Oh, my God. That's terrible. I'm telling like it is, Chuck. I'm just so happy. This is why you have me as your man here. I am so happy that neither Bezos or Branson are watching this right now. I'm just saying. So to say, oh, I can now see the night sky. Right.

I'm in space. Right. After sunset, you're seeing exactly the same damn night sky. Okay? So then the next side of it is you're getting to be same damn night sky. So then the next side of it is you're getting to be weightless for a couple of minutes. Well, we have what's called the vomit comet.

Without going into space, but it goes to a high enough altitude, and then it just sort of shuts off its engines and then drops. Or there are ways to control it so that the engines can simulate a free fall, but in that period, you're weightless. In fact, they filmed all of Apollo 13.

Although I was told all of the weightless scenes in Apollo 13 were actually filmed in the Vomit Comet. Wow. So they were actually weightless. They were actually weightless, not on cables. That is the level of commitment that you have to respect. Yes. Yes.

Yes. And you only get like 20 minutes of pop, so you have to just keep going. You just keep doing that, right, to get all your footage, right? You can't say, oh, let's get another take just for safety. No, that's all you're getting because I'm ready to throw up all over your ass. That was perfect. Let's do it again.

Perfect. Let's do it again. All right, so the night sky you're going to get after sunset, the weightlessness you can get on a vomit comet. Right. So now how high up are they relative to the Earth? Are they going to see the curvature? I did a calculation. The answer is no.

Okay? So let's run this back again. So Chuck, schoolroom globe. Okay. About a foot across, right? Right. The space station. Okay.

If you're going to find that orbiting, it would be about a centimeter above the surface, about three-eighths of an inch. That's the International Space Station. Three-eighths of an inch. Wow. All right, that's 250 miles. So Branson went a fifth of that. So it's a fifth of a centimeter.

That's two millimeters, which is just a little less than a sixteenth of an inch above Earth's surface. So if you got a ruler, any standard American ruler, it doesn't even have the marking. There's no demarcation to say this is where we are. This is where we are. Well, because the first marker is farther away than the height that Richard Branson ascended above Earth. So, Richard Branson, you must be this tall to ride this ride. Sorry, buddy. Stop it.

No, so I'm just putting it out there. I'm just saying. It's truth and, you know, we can be honest about it. Now, by the way, if people want to do this and pay a quarter million dollars, I don't have a problem. Open up a whole new tourist industry. No problem. No problem.

Oh, by the way, Jeff Bezos' rocket, okay, you may have seen, does not land as an airplane because it's basically a capsule. So that has to be retrieved and brought back to its destination, just the way Alan Shepard did in 1961. But in each case, there's a period of time where they are weightless, and that's what people are paying for. And Bezos' cabin has bigger windows. So, again, there is this billionaire competition thing going on. I enjoy it on the sidelines

here. It sounds to me the way you have just described this is you could save yourself $249,990 by going to Six Flags and riding any one of them roller coasters. Okay, one other thing. So as you may remember, there's an airplane that's taking off that deploys the rocket plane. Right.

And they go up to like 40-something thousand feet, and the rocket plane takes off. All right. The rocket plane is in free fall until the engines kick in, so they'll actually be weightless for a little period of time there. And then the rockets kick in and they experience about three Gs.

Three Gs is sort of good housekeeping-approved G-forces on the human body. Okay. So that's the maximum you're going to get at an amusement park. That's what they subject the shuttle astronauts to. So they could accelerate you faster than that, but they don't need to, and so they don't. And so 3Gs is like, you know, nice.

That's Kingda Ka at Great Adventure. Yeah, yeah. So it's within the realm of what we have all experienced if you're a fan of amusement parks. So that's what it is. Wow. But more power to them. Somebody's got it. I'm glad somebody's doing it. Yeah. I'd rather watch them do it and that's why

I should put this. I never want to interfere with someone who is trying to advance a frontier. Right. Even if I have skepticism, I'll share the skepticism if you ask what you did. Right. But I'm not going to run in front of the line saying,

not necessarily. I just let it go because there's spinoffs. There's all kinds of things that overall historically have been good for civilization and for culture. And so I tip my hat to all of what they're doing. It's like, look, you're rich, right? You got to find something to do with your money. Somebody comes along and says, hey, you like motorcycles, right? You're like, I love motorcycles.

They're like, I got a brand new motorcycle for you. It's human powered. You get on it and you just pedal really, really hard. And it only costs $250,000. Chuck, that is not true. Damn, Chuck. Okay, by the way, Elon is not fooled by any of this, okay? Because you don't hear Elon saying, I want to just put people into suborbital paths.

Right. What is Elon saying? Go to Mars. Go to Mars. He's saying go to Mars. Yeah, and just to put this back in perspective, so Richard Branson went two millimeters above a schoolroom globe. Okay.

Jeff Bezos, a little higher. Okay. The space station is one centimeter above the globe. Okay. The moon, 30 feet away. Okay. Mars, a mile away. Oh, my goodness.

There it is. So on scale, yo. So when you say let's go into space, and you tell that to an astrophysicist, I have a different answer for you than 50 miles up. That's all I'm saying. Why you pull all this out of me? I'm sorry, man.

I was perfectly happy. I'm so glad. I'm minding my own damn business. I'm so glad we did this, though. Take that, billionaire. All right, Chuck, we got to take a break there. But when we come back, we're going to talk about achieving orbit. All that it takes on StarTalk.

I'm Joel Cherico, and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, CosmicMugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. We're back. Star Talk. The Things You Thought You Knew edition. And for this segment, we're going to talk about achieving orbit.

Chuck. Hey. You ever been in orbit? Okay. No, the answer is no. I'll answer for you. Okay. No, the answer is no. I'll answer for you. Okay. You know, I was just thinking about a couple nights where I partied really hard, man.

Party down. Yeah, but of course not. Okay, so I want to just tell you a little bit of the history of Orbitz. For me, it's fascinating. I don't know if you'll find it fascinating, but it's fascinating to me. And it's my show, so's fascinating I don't know if you'll find it fascinating but it's fascinating to me and it's my show so I get to do you get your own show you can edit this out

okay right alright so Isaac Newton my man alright he was around in the 1600s

early 1700s he an English scientist physicist natural philosopher they were called back then. Deepest thinker I've ever known, I've ever read on all of the operations of nature. And he's sitting there and sees an apple fall from an apple

tree in his backyard in Lincolnshire, which is in very outskirts of London. Sorry, of Cambridge. But it's in the countryside of England, okay? Okay. It's a childhood home where he grew up. There's an apple orchard there. All right. Did I tell you I was gifted a clipping from that tree?

I actually saw the tree. You saw the tree? Okay. Yes, yes. I actually saw the tree. Okay, yeah. That was a whole other thing. We've got to dig that out of the archives. I think we've thrown some of that. I saw the tree. You saw the tree? Okay. Yes, yes. I actually saw the tree. Okay, yeah, that was a whole other thing. We've got to dig that out of the archives. I think we've thrown some of that. I saw the sapling. It was a sapling, yeah, yeah.

I saw the sapling, which, by the way, is still being cared for. At the New York Botanical Gardens. I donated. At the New York Botanical Gardens. Up in the Bronx. Up in the Bronx. So, yeah. Okay, so he's there, and he sees an apple fall to the earth. Didn't hit him in the head. That in the Bronx. So, yeah. Okay. So he's there and he sees an apple fall to the earth.

Didn't hit him in the head. That's just tail. And in the sky is the moon. Okay. So he thinks to himself, is there some way to connect the falling apple with the orbiting moon? falling apple with the orbiting moon? Is there some single understanding that renders these two things that I'm looking at the same? Most people will look at it and say, well, there's something different going on in the moon than for the apple,

because the apple landed on Earth on the ground. Right. And the moon is not falling. It stays up there all the time. Okay, so clearly it's different. But we're talking about Isaac Newton. And so he said, let's do an experiment, a thought experiment. Let's go to a mountaintop and take the apple and just sort of drop it.

Okay, it'll fall to the earth the way it does in his backyard. But now let's sort of fire it from a cannon at ever-increasing speeds. So you do this horizontally. So you do this, it'll fall farther and farther away from you. That makes sense, right? Right. So the faster it ejects from the cannon, the farther it will go.

Well, just keep doing this exercise. And you keep doing it, and the apple starts following the curvature of the earth. And maybe it falls a thousand miles away, but then hits the ground. Well, how about, make it faster. How about 10,000 miles away, and it hits the ground? Well, let's keep doing this. Well, let's keep doing this. Oh my gosh, is there a speed where I can eject it so fast that it goes entirely around the earth and hits me in the back of the head? Boomer apple.

And wait a minute, if there is such a speed and it's about to hit me in the back of the head, and I duck, then it'll just continue. Nice. So he said, there must be such a speed. And so he invents the laws of gravity and calculus and all this, and he figures out that speed.

And that speed for Earth is about five miles per second. If you go sideways, neglecting air resistance, that's why you have to get high enough where there's no atmosphere, then you can go sideways at five miles a second. If you go five miles a second sideways, that's about 17,500 miles an hour. 17,500 miles an hour,

then you're actually falling to Earth at exactly the rate that the curve of the Earth curves away from you. So to drop an apple is for the apple to be in free fall, but to send an apple into orbit is also to be in free fall. Right.

It's just falling around the Earth. Well, no, no, it's falling towards the Earth. Right. But the Earth has a curve and it never actually hits the Earth. So the falling apple and the orbiting moon are identical. The moon just happens to have a sideways velocity that the apple did not. That is... Okay.

All right. And that's why astronauts are weightless. They're not weightless because they are in space. They're weightless because they are in free fall towards Earth in an orbit first described by Isaac Newton in 1687. Wow. Dude, that, first of all, I have a new respect for Isaac Newton in 1687. Wow. Dude, that, first of all,

I have a new respect for Isaac Newton. Because for you to look at an apple and say anything other than, I think it's lunchtime. And then take that apple and equate it to a celestial body

that orbits us, the moon itself itself i don't even know how you get to there yeah the man at every time you think about what he said what he thought what he calculated he goes higher and higher and higher on a scale of and by the way he there's a there's a plaque to him in the chapel at university of cambridge and there's a statue, and it's in Latin, and I loosely translate the Latin. It says, of all humans, there is no greater intellect. Wow. It's a loose translation of the Latin.

That's a big statement. It's a big statement. It's called the smartest man in the world ever. I'm saying the more I read about it, yeah. Yeah, I'm with, yes. Wow. Yes. I'm saying, the more I read about him, yeah, I'm with, yes. Wow. Yes. I'm going with this. Yes. So that's what an orbit

is, and that's why you are weightless in space. I think we talked about this before, but now it has context. There's a recent movie, what's that movie that had, like, moon pirates on it? Oh, God, yes. Ad Astra. Ad Astra. Ad Astra. Yes. Okay. movie that had like moon pirates on it um oh god yes ad astra ad astra ad astra yes okay had there were a lot of scenes where okay it took the astronauts three days to get to the moon

because what they do is not they get to five miles per second going in orbit around the earth now they want to escape the earth you have to go faster so you add another two miles per second to your speed you hit seven miles per second and now Earth will no longer hold you, and you escape the Earth. That's the escape velocity. That'll get you to the moon. You can coast to the moon at that speed. All right. The astronauts were weightless en route to the moon because they were falling towards the moon.

All right. Wow. In Ad Astra, they're always firing their rocket. It took them three days to get there. In Ad Astra, you can always firing their rocket. It took them three days to get there. In Ad Astra, you can get to the moon in three hours if you wanted to. You just have to fire your rockets, right? But then you're not in free fall to the moon. If you're firing your rockets, you have gravity artificially created by the rockets inside your vessel.

As long as your rockets are burning, you will feel that acceleration as though you created gravity. It creates like a source of gravity. And all the scenes where they're firing their rockets, everybody's floating inside their space. They got that wrong. They got it wrong. Plum wrong.

Because they think being in space equals being weightless. And that's just false. Speaking of Newton, that makes sense. Because you are the reaction to the action of the rocket being pushed. You were now against it. Correct.

So there you go. Oh, man. Your reaction to the action is manifested as your weight. As your weight and kind of an artificial gravity. And by the way, I like that movie. Thanks for ruining that for me. So, anyhow, I just want to make it clear what's going on if you want to think about

space as being a place where you are weightless. It is only so because we drift to our destination. You don't run your... So, when you're in orbit, you don't need rockets to sustain orbit. You just duck every time you come past Isaac Newton's head, all right? And you'll just keep... And so in order to come out of orbit, here's the difference now. To come out of orbit, you have to fire some kind of retro rocket to slow yourself down.

Slow down, yeah. Okay? And if you slow down, you can't maintain that orbit. You drop to a lower elevation, and eventually you start hitting atmosphere. And then the atmosphere drags you down to Earth. Wow. But how about the very high speeds that you have? That's kinetic energy.

You've got to dissipate that somehow. You need heat shields. We did a whole show on heat shields. Yeah, that was pretty cool. Okay? You need those heat shields to dissipate. The onion layers that come off. You remember, Chuck.

Good memory, Chuck. So you ablate the heat shield. This eats up your kinetic energy that you had for going 17,500 miles an hour. Atmospheric brakes. Brakes. It's aerobraking is exactly what it is. Yeah. All right, so let me ask you this.

Wait, wait, wait. So that means any spaceship where all you did was go up above the atmospheric line into, quote, space, and then come back to Earth, you don't need heat shields. Because you didn't go 17,000, 18,000 miles an hour. Right. Exactly. You don't need heat shields. So it's a completely different design of rocket to do a suborbital thing and land as an airplane as it does going into orbit. The shuttle pulled that off.

The shuttle landed on a runway, but it also went into orbit. And so what did it have? Its entire belly. The space shuttle pulled that off because it had wings and it landed like an airplane, but it also went into orbit. How did it get out of orbit? It had heat shields. It had heat shields. It's the entire belly of the shuttle.

It's heat shields. Of a new generation than the onion peel from the Apollo era. This is a special silicate material where I've played with it in a laboratory. Oh, my gosh. You can take a wafer of it, take a blowtorch, blowtorch it until it's glowing red hot. And in the time it takes you to put the torch back down and you go back to it, it's cool to the touch.

It's already cool. Wow. That's pretty cool. It's a brilliant piece of material science. I would love to have a pair of oven mitts like that. Okay. So that's why the shuttle had this very complicated design, and it took government money and NASA to pull that off.

Nice. Yeah. All right, so before we go, what is, right now I'm reading the life of Ulysses S. Grant, because a friend of mine loves Grant. So I said, all right, let me see what all this hype is about. So what's a good book to read about your man, Newton? Or do you have any suggestions? Oh, well, there's a lot. There's a lot of books.

There's an interesting one. Oh, well, there's a lot. There's a lot of books. There's an interesting one. Newton, the last alchemist or the last sorcerer, because he was really big into alchemy. He was the transition between old world science and modern science, basically. And he penned more words on alchemy

than he did on physics, for example. He was also deeply religious, and he wrote more on analyzing chronologies in the Bible. He has a whole book called Chronologies of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, all right, where he's thinking about the Bible and God and Jesus and the Trinity, and was the Trinity real? Because the Anglican Church and the Catholic Church,

and so there's all this other stuff that he did. I'm only talking about his science. So he's a very complex figure. Plus, he never had any romances of any kind that anybody has ever been able to figure out. So he has no descendants. We think he died a virgin, actually. Oh, wow.

That's how we have all that time. When did he have all this time to think of all this stuff? Now I get it? Are you kidding me? No wonder he could look at an apple fall and be like, I wonder how this relates to the moon. Yeah. That boy never even thought about it.

Shoot, you know how much I would think of if I never thought about sex? Are you kidding me? We wouldn't be sitting here right now. We're like, Nobel Prize laureate Chuck Nice. Five-time Nobel Prize laureate. Exactly. Once again, has come up with a design for...

I'm kidding me. What? Okay. Who knew this? All right. All right. Go ahead, Newton. There's another book, Newton's Philosophy of Nature, where they hand they cherry pick his best stuff and they talk about it um and uh i think bernard cohen i think is the author of one of them and uh there's another one written by an astrophysicist a nobel laureate

himself uh super hamanyan chandra sekar who wrote a book on on Isaac Newton, and it's like the Principia Companion. So Newton's famous book is The Principia, where he discovers gravity and all this. And this is sort of an analysis of that book. You get to bask in his genius. So there's a few books out there. All right, cool. I like the last one.

But you know, his real handiwork is our modern understanding of the universe. Absolutely, yeah. Maybe just read the book of nature itself, and you're reading Newton. Wow. You really like this guy. Chuck, we've got to take a break there, but when we come back, we're going to talk about exponentials on StarTalk.

We're back. StarTalk. The Things You Thought You Knew edition. And for this segment, we're going to talk about exponentials. Chuck, I want to tell you about how your brain is wired. Poorly would be the answer. Okay. Like a house with a bad electrician.

An unlicensed electrician wired this plane. Unlicensed, right. Okay, that's all I'm saying. With chewing gum and scotch tape. Right. So it's not how just your brain is wired, just the human brain. All right, so we evolved on the planes of the Serengeti, not literally, but that's close enough for this example,

where something's chasing you and it might harm you, you want to run away from it, it gets closer, you go up a tree, whatever. There's certain challenges that we face that require certain solutions. And in almost every case, the solution involves linear thinking. Okay.

Linear thinking. Got you. And by that, you mean sequential, right? Well, yeah. So linear, I'm using very loosely here. But sequential thinking, so I'll give an example. So the tiger is running towards you. Right.

Or the lion. Right. This would be Africa. So the lion is running towards you. Right. Or the lion. Right. This would be Africa. So the lion is running towards you. Right. And you say, this thing wants to eat me. Well, the first thing you say, I don't know how you say, oh, in whatever African tongue. Swahili.

Swahili. How do you say, oh, crap in Swahili? I don't know. Right. Go ahead. So the lion is chasing after you and it closed half the distance to you in about 10 seconds let's say okay so you do a calculation in your head say if i don't get completely out of range of the lion in another 10 seconds, I am lunch. Okay, yeah. Okay, okay, all right. So that's the kind of calculations we do. The lion is not 100 meters away,

and then in the next second, one meter away from you. Right. That's different thinking. Right. Right? If that were actually happened to us, we'd have a whole other kind of brain wiring. But everything that happens around us

happens in these increments, which when you add up the increments, leads to what happens next. Right. Okay? To the conclusion that we're trying to promote or avoid. So linear thinking is, it did this much in this amount of time,

it'll do a little bit more in more time, right? And a little bit more. And this is how you construct your interaction with the world. Right. Okay, that makes sense. We have hardly any experience thinking exponentially about the world. Okay. Hardly any.

Okay? So you can think, let's give some other examples. You can think back to your grandparents, all right? You surely met them or knew them. I did. Probably not your great-grandparents. I knew mine. You did, so you knew them.

They lived a very long time. Well, my great-grandparents. I knew mine. You did. So you knew them. They lived a very long time. Well, my great-grandmother lived a very long time. The grandfather, I think she killed him. Okay. But she was still here. I don't know why that's even plausible, you know? It's like, yeah, you can picture that, right? Right, right, right.

But she killed him, but she's otherwise doing fine. Other than that, she was great. And what's she doing now? Oh, six to ten and things like that. Right, right. So the point is, if I now say, all right, so that was like 50, 100, 150 years ago. Now imagine a million years ago. No, you can't.

There's no way to do that. In fact, we weren't humans then for that matter, okay? So so many things that range in size greater than just factors of a few are very hard for the human brain to comprehend. Right. And I group this all under the challenge of what it is to appreciate exponentials. You can go from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 5. In astrophysics, we go from 1 to 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000.

Okay? And the 10,000 is 10,000 times larger than the 1. Right. But if you're just counting 1, two, three, four, five, five is only five times bigger than one. So when you're in the world of exponentials, oh my gosh, what it takes to sort of wrap your head around it

and understand it. So Earth is big to most people. It's so big to flat Earthers, they think the round Earth is flat. So if you hollowed out the sun, you could pour more than a million Earths inside of it. That's insane. And still a million and still have room, not 10, not 1,000, not 10,000, not 100, a million. All right.

Now the sun will one day become a red giant. Right. And it'll expand and engulf the orbits of Mercury, Venus, and be on the doorsteps of the earth, okay? That sun, if you hollow that out, could fit a million of the suns that we started with. Oh, Lord. Okay, so in astrophysics, we confront this daily,

not only in size, but in temperature, in time, all these things scale. I'm going to be honest right now. I'm still trying to conceive of a million Earths inside of the white, yellow ball that I look up and see in the sky. Because that, I'm gonna I hope this doesn't make me stupid. Chuck, try not to start any sentence with that.

I know. Just Don't begin any sentence with that. No, but I can't conceive it's like saying i'm not racist but you know you know so true whatever comes out of your mouth is the most racist thing ever said right you know or i don't mean any offense but right you in other words listen i'm about to offend you, okay? But I cannot conceive. Now, okay, so you see these models of the solar system,

and you see the sun in the middle, right? Oh, yeah, you can't draw it the proper size. But you can't draw it the proper size. And so now my brain, as I'm trying to conceive of the actual size of the sun, unfortunately, I am thwarted by the parameters that have been set for me psychologically

by these stupid models that I've seen my entire life. Oh, the models are interfering. Right, right. So they do interfere. That's right. Because if you showed the sun sort of large enough to see in the middle of the solar system, the Earth would be too small. Right, you couldn't see the Earth. You to see in the middle of the solar system, the earth would be too small. You couldn't see the earth.

You wouldn't see the earth or the moon or Mercury or Venus. You'd see Jupiter. Right. Be a little bigger. So you exaggerate the sizes of the planets. But at that size, if you show the sun at its real size, it would be really huge. And then you couldn't fit it all on the same page because the distances are also exponentially separated. Wow.

So these are the challenges that you face, but as an astrophysicist, we are steeped in it. We are baptized in it. And so we have a slightly better facility thinking this way than most everybody else that doesn't have to confront it in everyday life. Okay. So here are examples of how this can mess with you. And I think you're smart enough. You might get the right answer to this. So you discover an algae growing on a lake. Right. Right.

And you learn that the algae sort of doubles in the area because algae is all about how much area. Right. It doubles every day. Okay. Every day there's twice as much algae as the previous day. Okay. And so you hear that this algae is, like, attacking the lake. Right.

And it began a month ago. 30 days. 30 days ago. And you go there, and you see that half the lake is covered with algae. So it took an entire month to cover that half. Okay? Okay. So then the question is, how long will it take to cover the rest of the lake? That's the question. Okay. So it took an entire month to cover half the lake. Correct.

Okay. So then that means that, oh no, but it's doubling. So that means, and it's doubling, that means it's going to double the next day. And that means the next day from that, it's going to double again. And that means the next day from that, it's going to double again. So no, I think to cover the whole lake, maybe two days? One day. Okay, there you go. Don't get too excited, Chuck.

That's what I said. You know what I said? I said one day, right? You went through one day, got to two days. Yeah, right. So the linear brain is saying, oh, it'll take another month.

But the exponential brain says it's doubling every day. In fact, it didn't matter how long it took to cover half the lake. If it's doubling every day, it'll take only one more day to cover the entire lake.

Oh, my God. In 10 days, it'll cover the earth. Yeah, yeah. Right. So it's two to day, it'll take only one more day to cover the entire lake. Oh, my God. And in 10 days, it'll cover the earth. Yeah, yeah. So it's two to the 10th power. And you do the numbers. I got another one for you, right? So, Chuck, I can hand you $5 million right now. I'll take it.

Thank you. Or. Thank you very much. I always knew I liked you. Okay. you okay or i can give you a penny a day but doubled every day for 30 days no i'm gonna take the penny yeah so you know now see i see i'm training as well just listen we just did an exercise we just did it without you you know damn well i'm not going to do it with money. We just did this with algae. Now we're doing it with money?

Oh, no. Give me the money. You're taking the money. So if you do this, on the 31st day, in a 31-day month, I'll be handing you $10 million. Nice. Now, but I've been handing you money every day up until then. million dollars. Nice. Now, but I've been handing you money every day up until then. Add all that up, it's basically the same amount as the amount I'm giving you on the 31st day.

So you walk away with $20 million, not $5 million. That's amazing. I like that. Okay, so now, an exponential means you have some number in the exponent of another number and you raise it to that power. This is how you calculate interest rates on mortgages. Tell me about it. It is time raised to some power and it's a factor on your monthly payments. If you have a floating mortgage rate, which floats with the moving interest rates, that can have a devastating effect on your monthly payments and your total debt. Yes. Had people been fluent in exponentials in 2008, they could have said when the bank says approved, you say, wait a minute. I'm going to go with a 30-year fix, not down interest only. Yeah, exactly.

I'm going 30-year fix because I can calculate with a exponential, and plus I realize you're exploiting me now. Right. So how much of that 2008 collapse of the real estate market and the rest of the economy might have been avoided had people been fluent in thinking about the effects of raising numbers to the powers of other numbers. Wow. And that is the that's an exponential for you. That is.

First of all, let me just say this. Two things. One, I need somebody to start off with a penny and give me double that every day for 30 days. That's the first thing I took from this. The second thing I took from this is I need to call a mortgage broker right now. Right now? Right now. Wait, wait.

That's the one knocking on your door right now, right? So there's much more about exponentials we could talk about, but I'm just saying you get the gist of it, right? Yeah. And when things, oh, it's why people have a hard time understanding the power of time over that much time, right? So you say, well, the Grand Canyon, how did that happen? You can't, well, given enough time, not hundreds of years, not even thousands,

but millions of years. Millions, yeah. And you think you understand a million, but you don't if you think it's just a little bit bigger than a thousand. Right. No, it's a factor of a thousand bigger than a thousand. Right.

We went from our mammal, shrew, rodent-like ancestors running underfoot of T. rex 65 million years ago to the entire presence of mammals in the world, including the primates, including humans, in 65 million years. That is even small compared with the time life has been on Earth, but it's way bigger than most people can wrap their head around. And the only mistake in all that time was human beings.

Everything else was running smooth. Everything else was running smooth, man, and we had to come along and mess it all up. So the people say that could never happen. How do you go from a reptile to this? Or how do you go from a bird to this? These are people whose brain wiring is linear,

and so they cannot possibly see the full effects of the depths of time. It's so true. And the depths of space to this, and we're hopeless. That's why in one of my books, The Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, you know how I began that book with one sentence? You know what the opening sentence was? I forget, but I did know. That's polite of you.

I never read the book. I once knew, but I didn't. Okay. I opened it by saying, the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. That's correct. That's very cool.

And that includes exponentials. Yeah. Somebody took that and made a T-shirt out of it. I hope you're getting paid on it. Seriously. I saw that as a T-shirt. You saw it? Okay.

I saw that as a T-shirt. I hope you're getting paid. Well, there's a new saying now. You can't say everything's big in Texas. Everything's big in astrophysics. Texas, you lose. Everything's big in astrophysics. That's all there is to it. Well, my wife is

from Alaska, and you can carve Alaska five times and get five different Texases. So, in terms of who's the biggest state, that's how that plays out. There you go. Anyhow, Chuck, we got to call it quits there.

All right. That was good stuff. Good stuff. Good stuff. This has been another edition of Things You Thought You Knew. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal

astrophysicist. As always, keep looking up.