StarTalk Radio - Visualizing Our Universe, with Dr. FunkySpoon – StarTalk All-Stars

Episode Date: August 30, 2016

Astrobiologist David Grinspoon and his guest, Carter Emmart, take us behind the scenes to see how Carter creates a virtual “Google Map” of our universe. Plus, Chuck Nice asks them Cosmic Queries about black holes, the Big Bang, and Star Trek’s holodeck. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

This is StarTalk. I'm David Grinspoon, astrobiologist. I go on Twitter as Dr. Funky Spoon. Now, some people have asked me, if your name is David Grinspoon, why are you on Twitter as Dr. Funky Spoon? And all I can say to that is, like... All I can say to that is like... Understand? All right. Where were we? We're going to do... Yeah, that's right.

We're on StarTalk All-Stars. Yeah. I'm David Grinspoon, and I'm with my awesome co-host, Mr. Chuck Nice. Hey, man. How are you? Tell us what's going on, Chuck. Well, you know, we're doing some cosmic queries here. And first of all, thank you for the blues riff. Yeah, well, there's a lot more where that came from.

Well, that's cool. Well, you know, we're talking about the virtual universe. And the man sitting next to me is pretty much responsible for the virtual universe itself. Yeah, we have. We're so happy, so lucky to have with us an old friend and a genius of science communication, Carter Emmert, who is the, get this, the director of astrovisualization at the American Museum of Natural History. How's it going, Carter? Thanks for joining us. Yeah. Great to be here.

So here's the cool thing about having Carter here is when I saw that we were going to do a Cosmic Queries for astrovisualization, and, you know, Cosmic Queries is where we take questions from all over the Internet and in whatever incarnation where we exist as StarTalk, and our fans ask us things that they want to know. And I saw that that's what we were going to be talking about. And the first question I had was, what the hell is astral visualization? Because I had never heard of it before. And of course, I had to go do some research. But Carter, this is fascinating stuff.

Explain yourself, sir. Exactly. Well, essentially, it's a way using modern technology and display and data visualization hooked into immersive theater, which the planetarium has always been as a recreation of night sky. But now with video control, controlled by computers, essentially you're staring up into your entire visible field a construction of the universe's best that we know of. In other words, to visualize essentially that information to move through it and do that accurately. And also through simulations of astrophysics that talk about the behavior or that simulate, try to simulate the behavior of the universe across time.

From what I've seen that you have done, I mean, it kind of, would it be kind of weird or crazy to call it kind of like a Google Maps of the universe? Well, that's exactly what it is. Okay, good. So I'm not, I am not crazy. You may be crazy, but you got that one just right. Well, you know what? That's, you know what? That's probably more the case, David.

I am still crazy, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. So, yeah. I mean, now here's one of the things, and we're going to get into the questions, the Cosmic Queries, you know, as we talk about it. But the Google Maps of the universe. But when you the Google Maps of the universe, when I saw your your TED talk and I saw your awesome display of this, the thing that got me was just like Google Maps and, you know, Google Maps, when they map an area, they send the Google Maps car that we all know is the big car with the dome on it, and it's got all the cameras, and it's taking a 360-degree view of everything that's happening all around. Okay. So now in your presentation, you take us outside of this, I'll call it the space-time containment, and you're showing the universe as contained in this bubble. So now how, one, how do you do that? Two, how accurate would that be? Or three, is that an extrapolation that is more theoretical? Well, the thing is we can, we can plot distances. And so if we know distances

and we know where they are sort of spherically around us, sort of, you know, like the old planetarium, it's a dome of stars over our head. And that's essentially what the sky looks like. But as long as we know distances to, you know, the solar system objects, and of course they move, but then stars, which are also, everything's in motion, but moving slower, and then to galaxies even farther away, that really the confluence of these technologies and computer speed, essentially, which has really enabled all of this from around the turn of the millennium, where all of this sort of came together. We were a millennium project in rebuilding the venerable Hayden Planetarium, which opened in 1935, is that the accuracy is there in some cases in certain interactive shows, not so much our movies that we tend to produce, is that we can show uncertainty.

And there are ways in which that uncertainty shows itself insofar as how we measure distances. And so we can talk about that accuracy. However, as you go farther and farther out, you're dominated more and more by this look back time, essentially. I mean, we see the sun eight minutes in the past. Right. But the farthest, you know, sort of utterance of the universe, the farthest radiation that we can see,

essentially, because it's behind everything. It permeates. It's moving through us right now. Right. It's this microwave background. By the way, it feels really good. I'm just saying. I like it. Yeah.

I'm digging on it right now. Part of that whole vibration of the universe, which even on the low ebb. Soaking in it. Exactly. We are soaking in it. But the odd thing is, is we know the universe is larger than that visible bubble that we see. Because what we're seeing is, some people call it the world picture as opposed to the world map.

And the world picture is essentially, oh, I take a picture. I see the sun eight minutes in the past. And say Jupiter is beyond that. So I see Jupiter maybe, you know, an hour in the past or something like this. But that's just the reality of light traveling at a fixed speed. But I love the fact that you represent the uncertainty, too, because science is not all just about what we know. And some of the best science communication also emphasizes what we don't know, because that's what's cool when there's still a puzzle. So I love that you can include that.

And another really cool thing about what Carter does is that his database is always changing when we learn something new. The New Horizons mission to Pluto, Carter and I did actually an interactive event, multi-location event while that was happening. And what is so cool is that as soon as we have the new pictures on the ground, I mean, that's our Google car out in the Kuiper Belt now. As soon as you have the new pictures on the ground, Carter can put that in his database, and now you go to his show, and instead of just this fuzzy blob

with the uncertainty of we have no idea, now it's these high-resolution pictures because he can insert that and improve his database as we learn more. So now as images come in, and what you just said, so your visualization and your, whatever, you know, algorithms and, you know, the programs that you're using to make this happen. So they would have to be dynamic in order to receive all this new information and change

along with everything that's happening. Yes. So as, as, as pictures come in, the idea is to be able to plot them, not only just to show the sort of updated map. So for example, the team of New Horizons have now synthesized and put together a very nice sort of global map that you can put on the ball and look at it, study it. Fantastic. One of the other aspects of the visualization that we were attempting to show and that David and other mission scientists during the event were actually there to comment on this. We did a global broadcast called Breakfast with Pluto, which we captured. It's on YouTube if you want to look it up. I went to one of those on a Disney cruise. There you go.

Breakfast with Pluto. It's like the jungle route. Yeah, it was awesome. It's probably similar. I fixed with Pluto. And I got a jungle ride. Yeah, it was awesome. Yeah, it was awesome. Probably similar. It's really different. But the point was to actually show a kind of engineering visualization to actually show this very complicated set of tasks that the spacecraft had to do. And because in that, we're showing the prowess of the ability by humans to actually think this up, plan this, and then carry this off. There was criticism during the time, during the actual encounter, that there was nothing to see

because we didn't have recent images. And I would take the counter argument that we could actually show the exact planned, because we weren't sure whether it was actually happening or not because the spacecraft went completely into action mode and was not in direct communication with the Earth. And even if it was, it takes four and a half hours to learn if the spacecraft's okay. Right, right. So we were looking at the planned sequence of observations, and so they're different instruments, and they're depicted in different ways, and in which that imaging campaign is going across Pluto.

In the case of the highest resolution images, because there's a set field of view of the camera effectively, that you see more by putting the camera closer to the object, and that's what was happening. We're streaming past Pluto, and about 14 kilometers a second. So that's like seven miles a second we're passing Pluto. So very fast. It's smaller than our moon. And so we got about a distance of one Earth diameter away from it.

And so we're in really close. And you could see those pictures being laid down about once every second they're coming in. And that's something to celebrate is this human ingenuity. Later, we get the pictures back. In fact, all the data coming back from that mission takes 16 months. So over a year of all the stuff coming back, we're still pictures coming in and we swap in, but we can update the visualization. So we can effectively ride along in the sort of simulation of this. I liken it to just a sort of updated and computerized version and rendering of what we had back in the Apollo program when we launched to the moon, the rocket would go out of sight of the cameras and then they would go to like artwork of showing like it's dropping a stage and it would

say simulation. It's like, of course it is. And I can he gets a drawing. In this case, we're seeing the computerized visualization of that prowess of having to calculate all that, which the team had to do and carry off. And they practiced it two times before we actually got to Pluto, which is amazing. Yeah, it was really cool, and it probably is the best way to get a sense of what the encounter was really like in real time for the spacecraft and for the people involved. So it's online, as Carter mentioned. Check it out. It's called Breakfast at Pluto, and you can look at it. Maybe we should go to some of our cosmic queries now and see what our listeners want to know about astrovisualization. All right, all right.

So this is from Sonia Swinya. It's kind of a this is from Sonia Swinya. It's kind of a cool name. Sonia Swinya. Sonia wrote into StarTalkRadio.net and said, How do you feel about white hole theory in relation to gravitational waves, black holes and dark matter? to gravitational waves, black holes, and dark matter. I'm not sure how that relates to visualization, but is there... There are a few things to say about that. Okay, good.

I think the white hole theory, if I think back to... Not racist at all. Unlike the Oscars. We're not breaking this down this way, people. We're not going like that. This is all science. It has nothing to do. So I started taking classes at the planetarium in the 1970s. I was like 11 years old. And I was in actually black holes if you pour some gas on them. So if you've got some gas and pour it on a black hole, it swirls around, creates this accretion disk. It's extremely bright.

And that these supermassive black holes caused by sort of collisions or accretion of black holes tends to happen in the center of galaxies at Cape Vine. So we saw these quasars and we had this theory of black holes we saw some x-rays and the constellation cygnus which is a summer constellation the northern hemisphere and um so we're this idea was maybe because black holes bend space so much that maybe that the stuff that goes into black holes comes out at a white hole okay I think that's been superseded as we've understood the processes of the astrophysics around black holes better. But I would love to see this be the case. But insofar as just black holes are kind of a natural process of gravitational collapse, after it's been held up by essentially the

nucleosynthetic chain of what a star does in its core, is that these black holes generate mass. They come together and our notions of space and time break down in a black hole. And also, our understanding of the beginning of the universe is fuzzy, because where did this come from? We know that it started at a certain time, but we can't really understand the conditions from which they come. So, if black holes, which are just a natural consequence of what we have in our universe, are the beginnings of new universes, and that, you know, if we were, you know, generated in some other, it's very much like, you know, sort of Brahma waking up. It's very much like a Hindu scriptures, sort of Brahma waking up. It's very much like a Hindu scriptures so far as this repeated notion of creation. I want an Asian verse, by the way. Yeah. I want one.

So, anyway, a friend, late Arthur C. Clarke, liked to say about gamma ray bursts, which are another very high energy event. I visited him in 2002. He said, well, how the Hulk came into being. He asked me, what do you think of gamma ray bursts? I said, well, I don't know, Arthur, what do you think? He goes, I hope they're not industrial accidents. Yeah, he would say that. But by the way, the actual question from the listener was, how do you feel about the theory? I feel pretty good about it. I mean, I don't know if it's correct, but I like it. There's also the question about dark matter.

But to bring it back just for a second back to astrovisualization, I imagine a challenging part of what you do. There's one thing showing what things look like, what we could actually see with our eyes. Here's what Pluto would look like if you were flying past it. But then there's this whole other set of phenomena that we could never see with our eyes that you can bring to light. And I think a black hole must be a good example of that. You can show ways to visualize things that we would never actually visualize with our senses. There are two really good examples of black hole visualization. One was done by the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

And it's Hamilton, your colleague or former colleague at the university of Colorado. Um, Alexander, is it, uh, anyway, Hamilton, um, Dr. Hamilton, Dr. Hamilton. And, um, they did a, he, he did sort of a sabbatical working with them on the visualization. It's very abstract. It's, it's very fantastical, but it was accurate. Um then also in Interstellar, where they worked on the visualization of the effects, as we can calculate, that surround a black hole. Yeah, one of the times when Hollywood actually made an effort to show things the way it really is, as opposed to just making it look cool. And so there's nothing wrong with that. But the effort to try to really calculate what one would see, which is now we're capable of doing that because we have greater and greater computing capabilities at our fingertips, is a worthy effort because, you know, what these things look like are of great interest to everyone. And so when you're making these simulations and you're taking into account all the data that is there, Is it something where you theorize mathematically along different tangents and then you create each one of those? Or is it you theorize a most likely case scenario and then you visualize that?

and then you visualize that. When we do our show productions, which will focus on particular sort of fundamental aspects of astrophysics or the known universe, we had a show on cosmic collisions. We had another show about what makes stars work. And then we have the show Dark Universes, which is about what we know about the universe, is that our curators, part of the Rose Center for Earth and Space,

our Department of Astrophysics, they decide amongst their colleagues what the world's leading research is. We actually convene a scientific symposium at the beginning of any one of these show production process. at the beginning of any one of these show production process. And so that we identify who will be the consultants for the project, but also who are the data providers, the simulations, sort of the best sort of simulations that around the table we discuss, who is likely to have that best simulation. In some cases, it's a simulation that will fit both that something is available,

it's available in the right amount of time, or in some cases, we've actually sort of pushed what was being calculated so that we would have a high-quality product to visualize.

So in some cases, we drive it. We're going to have to take a little break here. You are listening to StarTalk All-Stars, and we'll be back shortly This is Star Talk All Stars

I'm David Grinspoon And we're here with Chuck Nice And Carter Emmert Yes Carter, the astrovisualization guru If I can call you that From the American Museum of Natural History Carter was just telling us about all the brain power that goes into producing one of the planetarium shows.

You may go there and just think it looks neat and it's fun, but he was just telling us there's this big gathering of the nerds that they convene where all the scientists get together and talk about the latest theories and they decide what to show scientifically in all of their shows. The cool thing is, for those of you who don't have the benefit of watching us on video, and you're just listening to the podcast, the cool thing about Carter is that he's producing these shows that visualize the universe, but he looks like he should be producing a show that visualizes the Grateful Dead. So you know it's good. You know it's good. I was thinking more Burning Man. Burning Man, yeah!

I can see that. We did take the visualization out to Burning Man. Oh, did you? It looks like he just stepped off the playa and into the universe. Nice. We're all doing that. We're all in the universe. People will remember that. Let's burn right along here and

get back to Cosmic Queries. And Chuck, why don't you give us another question? All right. How about this? Let's go to a Patreon patron question. And this is from Dylan Hallahan, who supports us on Patreon, which you can do as well. And by doing so, you will be allowed to have priority given to your particular inquiries. So just keep that in mind. Dylan would like to know this. Are there any ways we can create a

virtual singularity where we can represent the beginning? Dylan is coming to us from Washington Township in New Jersey. So would we be able, is there enough information about you know, and of course the background radiation is always there and it's always happening, but the event itself, the singularity itself, could we, do we have enough information to recreate a visual representation of that singularity? To some degree, I would say a little bit after, you know, when the universe starts to expand yeah so we can't get the birth but we could maybe get the slap on the ass the baby slap on the ass we could get but

we couldn't get the actual you know pretty much you get that first cry out the first cry but not the actual you know it's crowning like that that i am totally freaking Carter out with my description of the birth of the universe. We don't know why. We don't know. We can sort of describe what. What? And back to a certain point. point but uh so that that very beginning uh is is something that that we extrapolate our physics right to the point of the the greatest pressure and temperatures that and then we test this and

the largest you know atom smashers in the world you know like at cern and and so forth to really kind of look at what those conditions are right um there's quite a bit of mystery when you try to go all the way all the way back. That's right. First tiny fraction of a second. Right. Very hard to get information. And so we're left with theory.

And theorists, of course, like to argue with one another. And then looking at how the universe expands and that we can track that to some degree. And that's a visualization of that by Tom Abel and his visualizer, Ralph Kaler, is in Dark Universe, if you come see that. Sweet. The evolution of essentially structure over time.

The universe is expanding, but locally it's contracting because of gravity. And so you end up with this giant sort of web, this cosmic web, which we actually observe. You can, even in a small telescope, you can go out. I grew up in New Jersey and you could look up in the constellation Virgo. That's why it's called the Virgo cluster. And you see galaxies, even in a small telescope. So you're looking at a local area of downtown, which we are not. And in the same way that we're sort of in the suburbs of the galaxy, it's probably a good thing. It's a good place to raise the kids about halfway out the galaxy. Why are we so uptight here on Earth? Because we're living in the suburb of the galaxy. Well, it's a little more stable than the raucous ride in the middle of it.

Maybe someday when we grow up, we can go downtown. Downtown, right. The center of the galaxy. Exactly. The really good radiation. But not by yourself and not unaccompanied, young man. And I mean that. Super cool. Well, you know, that's a great, great answer, man. That is a great answer. Let us take another question. And I like this one

from Jonathan Gallant from Facebook. And he comes to us from Edmonton up in the Great White Way. So this is what he says. How far away from a Star Trek-like stellar cartography room, or better known as a holodeck, thank you, Jonathan, for getting so technical, are we to creating something like that? So, you know, in other words. We've done it.

What? Oh, that's a great question. And it's, in fact. What? One of the great things about being Carter's friend, in addition to his colleague, is that sometimes he'll take some of us after hours into, and he basically calls it his spaceship, and he's even called it his holodeck. Nice. And it is, that is what he's even called it his holodeck. Nice.

And it's, it is, that is what you have. You have a holodeck. Well, it's, it's like, I kind of like to make a joke as if you can, if you have a holodeck, then you don't need the starship. But there you have it. The fine line. That's so true. Yeah.

But, um, in a, in a way, uh, that's really true. And that's, that's what, that's what the job is about. So you, you. So now what constitutes a holodeck? Well, it's just for the uninitiated. It's to give you a virtual. It's a Star Trek reference for the really uninitiated, which is the room they can go in and basically simulate any sensory experience. Sure, sure. And so I'd say, okay. And Carter's almost there. We're almost there. Visually, it's an immersion in the data, in the map, essentially.

So if you look at the traditional planetarium, it stars on the ceiling. You can point out the Big Dipper and Orion and the motion of the sort of the diurnal motion of the sky. The stars rise and set, carries the sun along with it, the moon and, you know, the phases of the moon and the planets and all that. And that's our view from the Earth. It's amazing that the ancients were able to sort of figure out at all that we go around the sun because the sun obviously goes around us every day, you know, and that the planets go around. And that we live in this broader geography called the galaxy, and then the galaxy is just one of many. Okay, so we sort of have all that information.

So plotting it accurately and moving out into the data and moving through it is that you see it three-dimensionally. So you feel as though you're in the presence of, you are, you're in the presence of that data, and that's what we do. So the dome is the immersive theater that surrounds us, and then we can move out, we can move away from the Earth. We can fly over the surface of planets that we have information for. Mars, we have tremendous information for. Moon, Mercury, certainly our own planet.

And Mars is something that's very interesting because we have this tremendous campaign in support of eventually humans going there and so forth. But we have a six terabyte data set that you can fly over. It's a big laptop right there. Of Mars. It's essentially about three quarters of Mars down to the size of a two car garage, six meters. Wow. And we can fly for hours over just one section of the canyon.

And you get lost. And you can also go to boring parts of Mars, you know, more flat. But the thing is- I love that, the boring part of Mars. Well, there are- As if. But you'd be surprised, a lot of it's just flat.

But coming back to the holodeck is just this notion that, you know, we have a tremendous, tremendous mountain of data that's on the ground. It's in NASA's Planetary Data Service, the PDS. And it's a matter of taking that information, contextualizing it. I've had an army of high school students who have taken basically the stereo images from the micro imager. It's on the arm of the solar-powered rovers. It's a spirit and opportunity, and opportunity is still going. We're not

messing with the Curiosity rover data yet, because it tends to be under scientific embargo. But you're able to take the dual images and use data or use software from NASA to synthesize that into accurate 3D models. And then we have to contextualize where they are. But in that sense, we're essentially looking so close, only like three centimeters, so just over an inch

of these tiny little targets on Mars, you can see all this incredible detail on a rock, on a planet that no one's been to. This is what NASA does, is it reaches out there, and the European Space Agency, the space agencies of the world, we're going to these other places and we're bringing this back. It's our job and obligation to put that into a context that everyone can see.

Now, let me tell you, I just said that what you just described really is like being there in a much more fundamental way than a planetarium show used to be. like being there in a much more fundamental way than a planetarium show used to be. That leads me to want to ask you a question that's slightly more philosophical, which is, I mean, you and I both are children of Apollo, and we grew up dreaming about space and going into space in 2001, A Space Odyssey, and that was going to be the future in our life. And neither one of us has gotten to go into space yet. We're getting a little bit older. Who knows what's going to happen?

Join me after the show, fellas, and I'll do something for you. Excellent. Look forward to that. But I guess what I want to know is, on the other hand, you've gotten more and more into this visualization and this ability to go there in this way that is not quite being there bodily, but it's more being there than just looking at pictures. bodily, but it's more being there than just looking at pictures. And I've heard you say things like, well, we don't need a spacecraft because we've got a holodeck. And you're kind of joking. But I also get the sense that there's a way in which maybe you feel that this is a valid way for human beings to experience space and that we can send our unmanned spacecraft, sorry, our unhuman, our robotic spacecraft, our unpiloted spacecraft. They're not our unmanned spacecraft there, sorry, our unhumaned, our robotic spacecraft,

our unpiloted spacecraft. They're not just unmanned, they're unwomanned too, so let's say unpiloted. But we can send our spacecraft there, and they gather the data, really good data, and then we visualize it, and it's as if we're going there, but we don't need to send our frail human bodies there. So do you feel like that is, in a way,

the space exploration of the future? To some degree, yes. Especially when you get beyond the solar system. Because as New Horizons, you and I were at the launch in 2006, and then we were together again, but virtually, sort of on this virtual networking, but then with the simulation of seeing exactly what was happening. with the simulation of seeing exactly what was happening. And that, you know, it's amazing that we got a spacecraft out there in 10 years. But when you leave interstellar-wise and you look and if you want to explore in that sense, it's going to be a long time before perhaps we're able to ever do that.

And so this information, once again, that's on the ground, that just needs to be put into a system like this to be visualized is a valid way of exploring at many different scales. And to see the beautiful images of, you know, like the plethora of images from now 25 years of the Hubble Space Telescope, that sort of thing, is that we can see this amazing work, but we see it contextually and how that fits into the rest of the bigger picture. Has it changed how you feel about wanting to go to Mars? Is it enough? Yes, it has.

Is it enough for you? Now you don't have to go? Is that what you're saying? Well, the thing is... You want to go more or you want to go less? I have to look at this in my own lifetime. It's just that, yes, I was eight years old when we walked on the moon. I could extrapolate and say, well, when we have a Mars incredible vistas that we can see of these other planets and put that together for everyone to appreciate and see, because not everybody is

going to go to Mars. Some people probably will. I think we're helping to train these, these young minds to sort of desire that perhaps they see it, they want to go. I totally understand that. But, um, this, this valid experience of it's closer to the science and how science has to explore and has to look at these analogs and things like this and pick out these details, this fine sifting. We can sort of cut through all of that and present that directly to the public and make them amazed at this tremendous amount that we have gathered and we have here that just is not being contextualized properly. So give me a percentage delta between the actual experience and experiencing virtually going to Mars. As this technology grows, I'm so sorry, as it grows, the closer we get to being able to send somebody to Mars, how much closer will that be to just experiencing it here on Earth? Well, the thing is, we only have about 30 seconds for you.

Obviously, we walked on the moon, and synthesizing what we can of the moon, which is something we're looking at doing, is not the same as being there, of course. We can to the moon, which is something we're looking at doing. It's not the same as being there, of course. But it's also one that allows us to pause and reflect and really think about these various things rather than being on this time scale, time schedule like the Apollo astronauts were. Go here, come back. And a lot more people can do it and they don't fry their gonads with space radiation. So there's that to be said. Radiation is a big, big issue. On that point, we're going to take a little break here.

You're listening to StarTalk All-Stars, and we'll be back shortly. Hello. This is StarTalk All-Stars. I'm David Grinspoon, sometimes known on Twitter as Dr. Funky Spoon, and I'm here with Chuck Nice. Hey, man. On Twitter as Chuck Nice Comic. That is correct. And our very special guest, Carter Emmert, on Twitter as Explore the Universe. No, Tour of the Universe. Tour. Tour of the Universe. And by the way, you may wonder what a self-respecting StarTalk host is doing with this piece of technology. I not only play with scientific instruments, sometimes I play with musical instruments.

And actually, I've got a little song that Chuck Nice wrote for me. Yeah, man. Astrobiology Blues. I saw that you play with the House Band of the Universe and other different groups. And I was like, hey, wouldn't it be kind of cool if you did a little something called the Astrobiologist Blues? And I really appreciate you indulging me by taking my stupid little words and putting some music to it. Yeah, we're going to give that a try. I mean, you know, to me, science, music, it's all waves, right,

interacting with the different forms of radiation in the universe. And so, yeah, I play in this group called the House Band of the Universe. Check us out online. We play in planetariums sometimes. It's a lot of fun. But right now, let's get back to enough about sound. Let's get back to vision. We're talking about astrovisualization here with our guest, Carter Emmert, and we're doing cosmic queries. So, Chuck, what other questions do we have

from listeners about astrovisualization? Oh, man, let's get back to the Cosmic Queries. And Lenny Waxdeck from Twitter, at Lenny B. Gwad. Oh, that's weird, Lenny. Lenny wants to know this. Will virtual reality help people truly connect with the cosmos? Do you see a greater connection when you watch people in this immersive effect? Good question. Yes. And that is that, you know, when we walk down the street, we don't really encounter aspects of the universe that are there, right? I like to say that people have sort of a Bugs Bunny view of the universe, sort of like all that stuff that's up there. And they know

Saturn's up there, it's got the ring, you know, ring, you know. But it's all sort of a jumble. They've seen pictures in their school books and stuff like that. But to the extent that you can put it together and you have the authenticity of a place like the American Museum of Natural History behind it, just as the dinosaur bones are properly referenced in the latest, you know, knowledge. We updated our dinosaurs when we found out they were hot blooded. And I seem to pull up the tail of the T-Rex and redo the exhibit. Is that that layout of the universe and the behavior of the universe that we're showing you is up to date on the latest knowledge. And so that you hopefully we're relating it to you in such a way that, you know, it pervades the importance of it. And it's just, we see the sun

come up every day and go down. Farmers know it has a lot to do with growing their crops and so forth. And at night, we can't see anything because it's dark and we see the stars and the moon before we had cities. And so that we understand we're sort of in this relationship. But to show you that and also to bridge from like the astronauts who went to the moon, we could see the earth rising above the lunar landscape, essentially, that the moon went from being a celestial object to being landscape where the earth was suddenly a celestial object is that we can emphasize that and we can amplify that insofar as our visual journey taking you out.

It's authentic. It's backed up by the data. And so it's as close to real as we can depict it. That's so cool, Carter. What you do for a living is really amazing. In some ways, what you show us is realer than real. We can see the universe better than we can see with our own senses, which is kind of crazy. We could talk to you all day.

It's so interesting. Unfortunately, we're basically out of time here. Yeah, I know. I would like to invite you to come play with the Mars band. We sort of put together a group of musicians to actually fly over Mars as we do this because we have so much information. Oh, we're going to do it. Yeah, you'll have to come. I'm there. All right. On that note, thank you so much for listening. This has been StarTalk All-Stars. I'm David Grinspoon with Chuck Nice and our guest Carter Emmert.

Until next time, thank you. This is StarTalk.