The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Most Replayed Moment: Neil deGrasse Tyson On The Future Of Humanity! Will We Ever Go To Mars?

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist, author, and science communicator known for making the biggest questions in the universe feel human, funny, and deeply thought-provoking. In today’s moment, Neil dives into the unsettling possibility that our universe might be a simulation - and what that would mean for free will, meaning, AI, death, and humanity’s future in space. Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/ZlSXUS8gG2b Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/Rt2MvjnhG2b Watch the Episodes On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Neil’s Work: https://neildegrassetyson.com/

I spend so long these days thinking and talking to people about what all of this means. And I've got more and more, I saw you talking about the simulation theory once or twice. And I started to fall into that whole of thinking. Oh, yes. No, you got to, you know, step outside every now and then and, you know, smell the roses. But you said you wouldn't be surprised if people found out the universe is simulated by some sort of advanced life form. Yeah. Given what we can now compute, throw in quantum computing on top of that,

we don't have this power yet, but to make a world in our computer where the characters in that world believe they have free will. And then they conduct themselves, and then they invent computers, and then they make a world inside of their computer. And where their characters think they have free will. And then they, so then it's simulated universes all the way down. and close your eyes and throw a dart, are you going to get the first universe that invented the simulated universe or the zillion ones that followed?

The dart's likely to hit one of the others. But my escape hatch from that is since we do not yet know or have the power to make a perfectly simulated world, it means we are either the first universe, that's real that hasn't created one yet, or with a last universe that hasn't evolved yet to have created one of its own.

Because all the middles have the power to create one. So that takes it, you know, a zillion to one against us to maybe 50-50. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So I'm a little more comfortable that way. Comfortable? Yeah.

I sleep a little better at night. But I guess it wouldn't matter anyway Actually, it wouldn't matter. If we're completely simulated, what do you care? You're living your life. I know we don't want to believe that there are puppet strings on us. Part of me thinks that, though. You know, just when Earth is kind of, everything on Earth is kind of stable.

Oh, COVID shows up. Oh, so this is the programmer saying, you know, the Earth is too boring now. We've got to spice it up a bit. They've thrown a pandemic. Okay. Once in a century pandemic. Now we're entertaining for them. What do we do?

Who gets vaccinated? Who doesn't? Who's going to fight? Who dies? Who lives? Okay. So then we kind of get through that. We get the vaccine.

Okay? We're just calming down off of that. And they said, oh, let's make a billionaire real estate developer from New York City the most powerful person in the world that stir the pot again. And so now the whole other set of pot stirring that's going on. So that's kind of consistent with a snot-nosed alien kid in the parents' basement programming our existence. That's what I would do. I would throw in interest.

There's a game, SimCity. Yeah. I played that. That's how old I am. SimCity. So you're mayor of this city. And people can vote you out of office. So you have to do things that make them happy.

and there's an opinion poll that's there. And if you spend too much money here, you're not spending money on the schools. That's bad. But then there's crime goes up. And you're realizing, oh, my gosh, and even this simple simulation, so many interdependent phenomenon are taking place.

Then, things that happen, then Godzilla steps through and plows through the city. Okay, no, Godzilla's not real, but it kind of is, because that would be a disaster Is it a flood? Is it fires? It's a thing that nobody saw coming.

Okay? We are recording this interview on September 11th. I live four blocks from Ground Zero. That's Godzilla walking through the city. How do you respond to that? You know, you didn't know that was going to happen the day before. So realizing that in this game, it's only interesting to play when disastrous things happen, not too many in a row because you have to be able to recover. So when I look at our world,

I'm thinking the best argument I have for being in a simulation is how often some big disaster takes place when it was the first World War. And then after that, the peace? Oh, pandemic. Okay? The 1918 flu pandemic. And then we get out of that. Oh, no, second World War. Okay, we get out of that. The Cold War! Nuclear Holocaust! Okay? So, that's my...

That's me looking over the shoulder of the programmer. Oh, God. I think I prefer the world where I feel like I have free will and there's not... Does it make a difference if you believe you have free will even if you don't? No, because I'll never know. And, you know, the fun answer to that. Ask me, say, do you have free will?

Ask me that. Do we have free will? Do you have free will? What choice do I have? Well, if you don't have free will, then you don't even have an option to say you don't. So you just live life. Just live your life. So that the world is better off for you having lived in it.

And what does that mean for you? It means people are better off. The institutions are better off. People are happier, healthier, wealthier, safer, better fed. That rationality matters in politics and lawmaking. And that will help to ensure stability of anything you build going forward. But, yeah, that's all I mean. It's not complicated.

And you were talking about meaning before. I stopped looking for meaning decades ago because I realized I, we, any of us, has the power to make meaning in life. If you're going to look for meaning, are you looking under a rock behind a tree? It's as though meaning is sitting there waiting for you to find it. Oh, I found meaning. There it is. Now my life is complete. that feels so, so powerless on your own destiny.

Whereas I make meaning, I want to learn something today that I didn't know yesterday. I want to lessen the suffering of someone today compared with however that person was living yesterday. I want to use what I learn to well up within me and manifest. as wisdom. Because information is not really useful until it becomes knowledge. And the knowledge is good. You can show off if you have a lot of knowledge. That's what these game shows do. But in the end, the best use of knowledge is when it becomes wisdom. And wisdom, people say, I don't like getting older. I want to be young. I don't want to be young again. When I was 30, I was an idiot. Even when I was 30, I thought I was brilliant, right?

So don't get older unless you have wisdom to show for it. It's when you don't have something to show for your age, you want to be younger. You're just getting old with nothing to show for it. But I continue to learn things every day, passively and actively. Passively is you just notice, you know, open your eyes sometimes and see what's happening, where things are headed, what they're doing, you learn. Not all things you learn are good. And if they're bad or need adjustment or need help,

do something about it if you can. So that's how I derive meaning. Hence my tombstone. Be ashamed to die unless you've scored some victory for humanity. There's the meaning for you. There's a whole class of billionaires that are trying to live forever now. And I think we are on the verge of being able to extend life potentially indefinitely. Yeah, we're looking for the date.

It's called the escape velocity. Do you know about that phrase? It exists in astrophysics, of course. But the escape velocity for Earth, for example, is seven miles per second. So escape velocity in astrophysics is the speed that you launch something so that it never comes back, no matter how hard the gravity tries. Okay? So every object has an escape velocity. The escape velocity in aging is the idea.

is there is a generation yet to be born, but in the very near future, who will not only live longer than the previous generation. So here's a cleaner way to say this. Every year, you can expect to live one month longer because knowledge about human physiology has gotten better. Okay. Okay? Just think about it that way.

Yeah. And so we know what to eat, what not to eat, how to exercise, how I'm not over-exercise, how to maintain your health, well, your health and physiology. All right. There will come a day where every year that you're alive, medicine has figured out a way if you to live an extra year. That's the escape velocity. So every year you live another year.

And after that, it could be every year you live too. years. So that's the escape velocity. So it's not just everybody lives forever today. It sort of works its way into the population. And yeah, I don't want to live forever. I don't take me off this earth. Provide, I mean, I still have more to give, more books to write that in my judgment would make the world better than it currently is. So I don't want to die before I get. as much of that done as I can. But are you scared of death? No.

Although, that's easy to say because I'm not at death's door. And I had someone rationalized with me, which is, they made a potent argument. It's, I can say now with another 20 years life expectancy, 15, 20 years, that I don't fear death. But if I'm on my death bed and someone says, if I can wave my hand and you can wave my hand and could live another year, would you? The answer is probably going to be yes. And at the end of that year, if they, so I don't know if my sentiments about life and death will change on my deathbed. I know my mother, there's a point where she couldn't swallow and she didn't want to feed tube, and she said, my time has come. Put me in palliative care and then hospice. And she was dead.

10 days later. So she was in charge of her. They could have fed her with a tube. And she would have been completely healthy for another five years perhaps. But, you know, she raised two kids, three kids, you know, 50 year marriage, happy life, stable life. And yeah, I'm good with that.

So the billionaires, you know, that's ego, for sure. If you live forever, there are other people who you're taking resources from who would come behind you. That's one. But two, are you still contributing to the world? Should you give another person a chance who's in school now, who might be the next genius that'll figure out the energy problem, the poverty problem, the pollution problem? Are you figuring that out? No. You're in the last, you're 90 years old.

and you're just living on your yacht. So there's the problem that the last years of your life are not the most creative, the most ambitious, the most irreverent. It's irreverence that where new ideas come. You know, you've perhaps seen episodes of Shark Tank. You know, half or more of those people are 30 and under. They got ideas, fresh ideas.

Everyone else is entrenched. So if people start living forever, they're living forever in the part of their life that is least useful to the progress in advance of culture and civilization. And so all of civilization will stagnate. Do you think in your lifetime, you said you've got a 20-year-life expectancy? Well, 15 to 20. 15 to 20-year-life expectancy. Based on my age now and the age my parents died. Yeah.

But I mean, you've done a lot of neurological work and laid down a lot of good foundations with all these books you've written. So maybe it'll be the upper end of that. It's food for AI. It was true. It's food for chat GPT. What do you make of AI? What's your, what are you thinking? I love it.

Yeah. I love it. But I'm, it's, by the way, it's been here for a while. It really spooked people when it started writing your term paper and composing your painting and your set design. All right. The whole other category of people. got spooked by that. Meanwhile, AI has been harnessed and being fully used in my field and in most of the physical sciences. It's doing work. If you can do the work, and I can go to the Bahamas,

let it do the work. We have telescopes coming online that could not exist without the intervention of AI to access the data, reduce the data, analyze the data, make a decision about whether it should go back to the thing that it just observed because that was weird compared to the last time it was observed. This is the Veribin telescope that I'm... literally describing now. And so we're living with it. What it means is it'll have to up the game of people who say they are creative. And what I mean by that is I can say, chat, GPT, take this picture of us and say,

Chapit, GPT, paint this scene in the style of Van Gogh. It'll come back, the colors will be just right. It'll have the swirling lines. It'll be perfect. If Van Gog were standing, that's what Van Gog would have painted. If I say, Chet, Chept, Cheptupe T, paint us in the style of no artist who has ever lived. I don't know what it's going to give us, but it'll probably suck, okay? And so true creativity is not aping what has happened before and making adjustments.

True creativity, yes, you always build on others. I'm not in denial of that. But true creativity takes leaps that most people don't even know can be taking. And so the artist, so that gap, I think, is what AI in the arts world is going to force creative people to reach for. Otherwise, you're replaced by a simple request in the input line of a large language model or of an art. I was just wondering then, if I watched Cosmos in 30, 40 years time, say 100 years time, I was wondering if this is the moment where humans and computers in the story of humanity become one and intertwine. If you think about things like Neurrelink, which Elon's

working on to me, when he first made that company, all of the narrative that he put out there was about us being able to interface with AI, so we'd need like a brain chip computer interface. More recently, it's been about people that are paraplegic and disabled and helping blind people see, but I think that's a socially acceptable way to advance the technology. But in his early work, He said, super intelligence is going to arrive and we're going to need a way to basically keep up, where we have better sort of latency with the technology. And I'm wondering if that's like what we're seeing now. Yeah, super intelligence, you know, if that happens, then it becomes our overlord and we become its pet. Okay.

Now, that sounds pretty scary, but don't we treat our pets better? than we treat other humans in the world. Think about it. The pet is kept warm and fed and happy. And would you do that for a homeless person in the street? A person of your own species? Probably not. So if we're the pet for the superintelligence...

What about the chicken? How bad could it be? We used to have chickens when we were younger, and I watched my Nigerian mother chase that chicken around the garden, grab it, pull its head off and cook it. Wow, okay. Yeah. Oh, you worried that it's going to do that for us?

We can't run around. Not all my pets made it. And snap, but not all the pets survive. Yeah, it depends on whether it needs us to be alive or dead. We have to be relevant to it in some way. Maybe it will be court jesters. We'll be entertainment. Until then, I don't know that this is some special moment.

I do a lot of reading of history and throughout history. Most occasions, especially in the era of the Industrial Revolution, people think they're living in a special moment. So I'm not going to be that guy who says today is special because everyone has thought they were in a special moment. And what do you think is the probability of me getting to another planet in my lifetime? Zero. Zero. Really?

Yeah. You want to know why? Yes. Please. Yeah, it's just zero. I thought SpaceX going to go to Mars. I have an unorthodox view on this, so you don't have to, you don't have to, believe me, you know. But my read of history tells me that we only do big expensive things

if there's a geopolitical reason for it, either an economic reason or a defense reason, not just because it's the next thing to do. And when we went to the moon, you realize in 1961, May 25th, President Kennedy, it's a six weeks after Uri Gagam, Aaron flew around the earth in orbit. And we didn't have a ship that wouldn't blow up on the launch pad that could carry humans yet. He calls a joint session of Congress and says if the events of recent weeks couldn't even utter the man's name, the events of recent weeks. And I paraphrase, are any indication of the impact of this adventure on the minds of

men everywhere, then we need to show the world the path of freedom over the path of tyranny? It's a battle cry against communism, the godless Russians, everyone in the whole Soviet Union. We were losing a technological race. And that was the battle cry that prompted Congress to write the check. Oh, later on he says, oh, it'll be put a man on the moon and return him to safely Earth. Oh, that's so beautiful. Let's hold hands. That's so beautiful.

No one ever spent scads of money just because it was a cool thing to do. That has never happened ever. So we go to the moon. People forgetting why we went to the moon say while we're on the moon, at this rate, we'll be on Mars by 1985. That'll be the next ambitious goal we'll take on. No. Because we didn't just go to the moon.

because that was the next thing to do. We went to the moon to beat the Russians. And when we got to the moon, and we looked over our shoulder and the Russians weren't there, we canceled the Apollo program. 19-7. We haven't been back to the moon

in 53 years. We canceled it. Apollo 18 was ready to fly. It's now in captivity in Huntsville, Alabama, in a museum on its side. It's fascinating to walk the full length of it. All rocket flight-ready parts.

It never flew. We ended up. at Paul 17. No, we didn't go to Mars because we didn't have geopolitical reasons to do so, neither economic nor for defense reasons. Historically, people explored,

did expensive things for the glory of God and royalty. Very expensive. The pyramids, the honor of royalty, okay? The church building, cathedral building, all of these activities were in the glory of power, deity, and royalty.

There's none of that happens today. We're past that. The power of kings and gods that doesn't happen. Nobody dislodges major resources, capital resources of a nation in the interest of a god or a king anymore. Okay? It's secular. And secular means it's money or it's war because you feel threatened.

Okay. So, you know we're going back to the moon now. Yeah. Project Artemis. Did you ever think to stop and ask why? Why didn't we stay on the moon in 1972? Why don't we go back in 1980, 2000, 2010? Oh, all of a sudden, let's go back to the moon.

Wouldn't that be cool? Do you know when Artemis began? In the late teens? Right about when China says, we're going to put Pichonauts on the moon. Technos. Not your Chinese astronaut. Taekinot. All right?

That's when we said, let's go back to the moon. What a good idea. Let's do that. Really? Because it's just a good idea? Because we're a little bit spooked by a friendly foe across the around the world might get the glory of that exercise. And once again, it's a godless country.

Okay? Communism is godless. by design, by construct. So here we are, going back to the moon. All right. What motivation do we have to go to Mars? Are there oil wells there? Is there, you know, diamond mines?

We're not going to Mars. We're just not. Unless China says they want to put military bases on Mars. We're going to be in Mars in 10 months. One month's design, build, and fund the thing. and nine months to get to Mars. A geopolitical force operating. Oh, by the way, NASA doesn't have a rocket

that'll get us to Mars. They think they do, but I don't really have one yet. Time to do that. They'd say, well, do anybody have a rocket? Elon says, I have a rocket. So if Elon Rocket goes to Mars, it's not because he sends it there. It's because taxpayers sent it there.

By the way, he could go there on a vanity project, but there's no business case. He can fly to Mars. Team up with Jeff Bezos. They can send people to Mars. It's not a business case. And if you are an investor in his company, you would not agree to do that.

You wouldn't. But he doesn't need investors because he's very wealthy. He could do it on his own. Are you going to Mars as a tourist? Is that a business case? It's a trillion dollars to get to Mars. First, second will be a little less. I don't see that happening.

A trillion dollars? About that. Yeah. If Earth were a schoolroom globe, with your fist, show me where you think the moon is. This is Earth. Take your fist and put it at the distance the moon is. Your fist is about the right size compared. I mean...

Right there? Yeah. Okay, not too bad. It's 30 feet away. It's in the next room. Okay. 30 feet away. Okay.

That's the moon. Let's keep going. How far away from Earth did the Bezos Branson rockets go? Oh, not far. The thickness of two dimes above the surface of the Earth. How far away is Mars? It's a mile away. From here?

Yes. From this Earth. It's a mile away. The moon 30 feet away, Mars a mile away. Yeah, it's a trillion dollars to Mars. Yes. How long? Nine months.

And you have to wait until the planets are configured so that when you travel, you arrive where Mars will be when you get there. And that's a minimum energy orbit. If you have filling stations along the way, you can just fill up with fuel and get there as fast as you want. But minimum energy orbit takes about nine months. And then to come back, you have to wait until it's configured again a few years later. So a round trip to Mars is three to five years, easily. So there's not an economic case. I'm not saying we don't know how to get to Mars.

We have a SUV-sized rover there now, all right, discovering potential life from a billion years ago. It's not like we don't know how to get to Mars. This is not a technological statement I'm making. I'm talking about a practical statement. So no. My read of history tells me no. I thought you were going to also add to that, that even if Elon wanted to do it as a vanity project because he makes all this money and manages to use Starlink as a way to fund it, whatever,

that the problem is Elon's going to die. He's going to die in the next couple of decades, which means the vanity element that comes from his childhood situation where he wanted to get out there and explore the stars because he read that book, has got 30 years, 40, 50 years left on it. Well, that would make him want to hurry, wouldn't it? Yeah. Yeah, and plus he said, I don't want to die on Earth, I want to die on Mars.

I'm paraphrasing, but that's the idea. So that's a goal. Sure. But don't tell me it's a business case. I can see a tourist case going into orbit and even possibly visiting the moon. It's three days there, three days back. That's a week's vacation that you would take. And I would save up five years, ten years of vacation money.

If that was the amount that it would take to go to the moon for one week, that would be a really fun bucket list item. What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.