The Joe Rogan Experience - #310 - Neil Degrasse Tyson

Episode Date: January 9, 2013

Joe sits down with Neil Degrasse Tyson.

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night without that it would not be official neil tyson thank you very much for coming on here man this is an honor this is a blast i think the universe is going to explode you are for sure the most requested podcast guest ever in the history of this podcast. So Brian and I have been doing this for three years, and we have come full cycle with your appearance here today. I felt the magnetic force of your fan base pulling me in. Are you sure that wasn't what the Mayans were talking about? Are you sure that wasn't the universe aligning?

I was so happy when I saw you do this. I forget what the interview was, but someone was talking about the alignment of the stars and the galaxies the first time. You're like, no, it happens all the time. Yeah, it happens every year. I told my friend Eddie Bravo, who's a beautiful human being, but he loves himself a conspiracy theory. He loves that. When I told him, I go, dude, Neil Tyson says it's bullshit. He goes like this.

Oh, okay. It's probably bullshit then. I don't want the authority of my academic pedigree to be what makes it bullshit. Right. I want to arm people intellectually so that they can then deduce that there's nothing to it. So when someone says planets are going to align

and Earth is going to die, I want to encourage them to ask, how often do planets align like that? And then you get the answer, every year. So you don't even have to do the calculation. Well, it's that shallow sort of interest in a subject where it only allows you to regurgitate the really juicy shit you heard about the planetary alignment, which is so dangerous. Because when people are bullshitting, which is most of the conversations we get into we don't get into serious academic discussions with people who have actually done the homework you just bullshit with a dude at work and he's like yeah i heard the fucking planets are gonna align and it's like

they don't even know what's gonna happen and you're like whoa what then you go back to your cubicle shit in your pants going is are the planets going to fucking align? Is something going to happen that's going to? I tweeted recently that if you're really successful at bullshitting, it means you don't hang around enough people who are smarter than you. That's a very good point. That's a very good point. I think one of the cool things about you and your approach to science is I think it's very refreshing that if someone doesn't know something, you're not condescending about it. You're very enthusiastic about distributing the information, but you're not casting a judgment while you do that. And that is something that I think has freaked a lot of

people out about really intelligent people or scientists or someone who talks about anything where they have no experience. This is a sort of a condescending, sort of a carrying of that knowledge that you don't have. You make a really important point. And I, you know, there's the anti-intellectual movement in society. And I don't blame them entirely for feeling that way. Because we all know people, I have many colleagues, where you try to hang out with them and they make you feel bad for not knowing what they know.

And if that's how you interact with people, why would anyone want to be that? Well, it's a problem of associating with shitty characters. Like they're not fun to be around. And unfortunately, you're associating something that's incredible, like the actual measurement of the universe itself. You're associating that with annoying people. Yeah, you've got to detach the content from the deliverer of the information. It's like I dated a girl, and she loved Duran Duran, okay, when I was in high school.

And, you know, after the breakup, which she always has in every high school relationship. That was 80s, very 80s. Yeah, I was like, fuck Duran Duran, man. Duran Duran sucks. I could not enjoy their music because I associated it with this young lady. Oh. You know?

You were psychologically scarred. I fucked myself. I couldn't enjoy Hungry Like the Wolf, Bad Boys, all those classics. I removed them from the menu because of this one chick. But that can happen with music that you actually would enjoy. Well, forget about mathematics. Right, right. If it happens with that, it can happen with everything up the ladder from there.

Right, right, right. You're very important. I don't know if you know how important the cool guy scientist is. I can't tell you how many times. He's very important. So I have evidence of how important that is. I can't tell you how many emails I've gotten or tweets. They say, people say, there's a guy who's seriously geeked,

and his girlfriend is not interested in him. And he says, what he does is then shows her videos of me celebrating the universe. And she says, oh, is that what you do? Oh, and then they resurrect the relationship because she then sees the potential for what the guy can do. That's fascinating. Wow. Yeah, it's like by any means necessary, whatever it takes. Yeah, whatever it takes.

Whatever it takes to stimulate and inspire. So I'm happy to glue people back together if that's what matters here. Well, you were the most important person when it came to the 2012 movement because I was talking to so many knuckleheads. I had a guy on the... Remember Pinchbeck? I was on the show. Something's definitely going to happen.

It's like he's quoting all these reasons why things are going to happen. Well, people love them some end of the world. I mean, that's... They certainly do. I was at a party, and the person learned that I was an astrophysicist and walked up to me,

and, here, you're an astrophysicist. I said to me. And I hear you're an astrophysicist. I said, yes. And tell me, this is like a year ago, right? I hear the world is going to end in 2012. And then I explained why it's not. He walked away dejected. And I said to myself, what? It's like there's some people are only happy when they're sad.

Yeah. There's a thing where people are trying to uncover mysteries, and it becomes more important than the actual mysteries of the universe itself. And you can do simple statistics on this. So for example, the world has been here for like billions of years, and you think it's going to end in your lifetime? That's awfully hubristic of you. Yeah, it's pretty bold. And even if it does, your world's going to end eventually anyway. I mean, you're really, it's so silly to like fixate on. So what I think the most effective encouragement I gave people during the Mayan non-catastrophe was, I said, all right, between now and December 20th, just convince your Mayan catastrophe people to sign over all their assets into your name.

That's all. Well, what's really crazy? Very simple. If they don't do it, they don't really believe what they're saying. They don't believe. And if they do, you get fabulously wealthy. They're not going to give you that cash. Yeah, no one.

Well, I'm sure some people did go nutty and set up shelters in the desert and go underground and all that. There's a lot of people that went nutty. and set up shelters in the desert and go underground and all that. There's a lot of people that went nutty. Well, I did a little research on this. About every 10 years, somebody comes up with an end-of-the-world scenario. And keep in mind that end-of-the-world scenarios, no one says the world's going to end in 150 years, right?

That doesn't work because you can't gain adherence to your cult that you're building. It's got to be kind of immediate. But far enough in the future so that you can prepare, but near enough so that you're not going to forget about it at any time. And it's really good if you can base it on some old shit that very few people can read. And everybody thinks that the old folks really understood the universe when, in fact, they did not. Well, they understood a little bit of it, but to say that they knew more about the fate of the cosmos than modern-day astrophysics, you must have flunked your math class, your physics classes or something.

To think that way, I don't understand what's going on in those minds. It's the same sort of thinking that wants to uncover mysteries and conspiracies. It's a weird excitement to, like, hidden things. Now, you were a moon guy for a while, right? Yeah, well, listen, my issues with not believing that people went on the moon, a lot of it had to do with a friend who had an uncle who worked at Rocketdyne. And this guy was convinced that there was no way to do it. He was an engineer.

And he said they were so far away from doing it that the fact that they did it, and they did it seven times, but since looking at it, the weight of all the evidence, I reserve the possibility that some things were horseshit based on a lot of photographic evidence that they did fuck with. Well, here's the thing. Like the Gemini photos. Yeah, but here it is. Here it is. If you look at, like, the fuel that was loaded up into the Saturn V rocket, you can calculate where that fuel could take that rocket.

It's to the moon and back. So, it's not going to the Piggly Wiggly in the Saturn V. No, I'm a retard. Listen, if anybody has any real sense, they would look at it and say, there's no way that that was a hoax. There's no way. It would be harder. See, people think it was actually hard to get to the moon.

Yes, it was hard, certainly. But it would have been way harder to hoax it. Yes, today. But the thing about hoaxing things back then, the thing that was so compelling to me was that hoaxing things back then was really sort of the way they did it. I mean, that's how they got into the Gulf of Tonkin.

Oh, well, you fake news stories. Yeah, there was a lot of fakery going on back then. You're faking news. It was the height of the Cold War, and there was a lot of fakery going on back then. You're faking news. It was the height of the Cold War. And there was a lot of reasons why I thought some fuckery was afoot. And especially all these goddamn documentaries. Okay, so you're saying you felt justified just because of the landscape in which other things had been happening.

That and visual stuff. Because that was the decade where we lost confidence in our government. Yeah. That was what happened. Well, for good reason. I mean, it was proven with Watergate, and was proven well it was over and over no about the gulf of tonkin incident over and over over and over it was damaged and the idea that they were able to do that in 1969 but haven't been able to repeat it since of course makes it even more

delicious it makes it even more conspiratorial attractive um and then the fact that the the rock that they had given to Holland turned out to be a piece of petrified wood. There was a lot of weirdness to the moon landing conspiracy. And there was a lot of, not just people that admired it, but it was almost like a religious thing. My friend called it a technological Jesus. He said that if anything is scientific,

you should be able to question it and someone would give you an answer. But there's a bit of emotion and attachment and pride with certain historical accomplishments, like one of them being the moon landing, that forbid people from actually questioning it. Well, it went beyond science. It was a cultural achievement.

Did you ever read Clinton's quote? What was it? Clinton wrote a book, My Life. Clinton Man, not Clinton Woman. No, Clinton George. What's Bill? The guy who was the president guy. George Clinton. That's the other guy.

His opinion is equally valid, by the way. Those are two very different Clintons. Yeah. I'll find it here for you. The quote, was it in his book, My Life? Yeah, it was in his book. It was all on the time where it happened. He was working with a carpenter.

Well, while you're looking at it, the way I reflect on people who say we didn't go to the moon, I say what a compliment it is of our emergent culture, technological culture, that there are members of our society that are so impressed with what we achieved

that they can't believe it. Well, yeah. So I take it as a compliment that people stand dumbstruck, awestruck, that it is beyond their capacity to believe it. I don't think it's beyond their capacity to believe it. I think if you had shown them documentaries that didn't have any of the stuff that was in the shit that I saw, to believe it. I think if you had shown them documentaries that didn't have any of the stuff

that was in the shit that I saw, whether it was The Moon Did We Go, or there's another one, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, where they just show over and over again all this fucked up footage, and it's very confusing to a non-scientifically minded person. You can get on a long downward spiral. And this

Clinton quote, this fucks with me. Just a month before Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague Michael Collins aboard spaceship Columbia and walked on the moon, beating by five months President Kennedy's goal of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade. The old carpenter asked me if I believed it happened. I said, sure. I saw it on television, and he disagreed. He said that he didn't believe it for a minute that those television fellers can make things look real that

weren't. Back then, I thought he was a crank. During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that made me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time. Yeah, look, that's a horrible quote to hear from the president of the United States if you're a confused young man and you think we maybe didn't land on the moon. You read something like that, you go, what the fuck does that mean? Well, plus people in total give the government way more credit for organized behavior

than they actually ever deserve. I think they believe the government killed Kennedy. And I think a lot of people believe that if they did that, they could kind of do a lot of things. Yeah. I mean, so, okay. But, you know, science is going to move on while you're, you know, arguing that. And so, yeah, there's a point where you just say, all right, I got to move on.

That's the other thing that makes a conspiracy so juicy, is that science didn't move on when it came to manned space landings. That was the end. Well, the engineering of it, yeah. It was the political will. It's money at that level. Yeah. And what all conspiracy theories have in common is that there's a point where you have to bridge a gap

in the absence of actual data. And an assertion gets laced upon it to satisfy the claim that it's a conspiracy theory. So you say, well, they say, well, this is true and that's true. And the only way they can both be true is if this is covered up in between. So somebody always has to say there's a cover-up. But when there's actual knowledge about the world, nobody has to talk about covered-up information. It's just there and writ large and ready to be absorbed and embraced. I agree with you.

The reason why the moon theory is so juicy for people is because there's so much of this stuff that you could point to and so much of it that looks like evidence of fuckery. You know, whether it's... Well, take, for example, the assertion that the photos from the lunar surface, since the moon has no atmosphere, than a daytime picture. If you're there in the daytime of the moon, you see a full night sky of stars, even with the sun in the sky as well.

You don't see stars in the daytime on Earth, not because they're not there, but because the atmosphere is aglow with scattered light from the sun. If you take away the atmosphere, the sun will still be there, but the sky goes dark. That's what the folks get when they go to the edge of the atmosphere, and they're calling that the edge of space. But when you get to the edge of the atmosphere, the atmosphere is no longer between you and the rest of the universe, and the stars reveal themselves just as they would at night. So everyone knew this. So you'd see these photos from the moon,

and there's Neil and Buzz and the lander, and there are no stars in the sky. It's just dark. And they'll say, see, it's fake. And these are people who have never taken photography. If you are exposed for the bright reflective light of the astronauts in the lunar surface, that camera exposure, even in the Hasselblads that they carry to the moon and use,

is too short to take in the dim light from the stars of the night sky. If you turn the camera to the sky, a much longer exposure with sensitive film, you'll get the stars, but then you overexpose the stuff in the foreground. So Photography 101 answers that question. But there are huge websites given unto this.

And so what that told me was that people simply wanted to believe that it was a hoax. And then made all the information fit that need without actually caring about the scientific truths that with any evidence would disprove all of what they were thinking. So at that point, I said, people just believe what they want. And so my task was not to debate moon hoaxers as an educator. My task is to get people thinking straight in the first place so you're no longer susceptible to get people thinking straight in the first place so you're no longer susceptible to the kinds of thinking where you become selective about the data that you choose to believe. Or you get duped by someone who's exploiting the laws of physics for their own financial gain. Excuse me, they're

exploiting your ignorance of the laws of physics for their own financial gain. So I see science literacy as a kind of vaccine against all of the world around you that would just simply take advantage of your goodwill and good nature. Certainly with things that can be easily explained, like you're talking about the light and the setting of the camera, all that stuff. Yeah, but they led with that, and I explained that. Oh, well, then, okay, well, then how about, and they start going down a list, and, you know, time to go to dinner, you know?

Right. So that is a huge problem where, you know, and certainly when I watched my first documentary on the Fox one, on the moon landing, it was a big, the moon did we go, and there was all sorts of compelling evidence that was really weird, like photographs from different spots in the moon, but they had the same backdrop,

you know, and using this idea that they had done these inside some gigantic sound studio. And when you see something like that on television, you saw like Brian O'Leary, who is an astronaut. And once again, it's on TV. Yeah, of course. So there's the authority built into the medium.

And then talking to this dude's uncle, or him telling me what his uncle said, actually, it was such a, you know, it's one of those things where you go, okay, we know they lied about this, and we know they lied about that, and they lie about things all the time. The government lied all the time. Yeah, a million stories. But the government would have to lie as well as 10,000 scientists and engineers. I mean, think about this.

Just think about this. We knew more. I can't. If there were ever a state secret that the government wanted to keep, it would be the behavior of President Clinton's genitals. Okay? But that got out. That got out. And only three people knew this.

Three. All right? You're going to hoax a moon landing by telling 10,000 scientists and engineers to keep it secret for 40 years? That's not how humans behave. What was it? Who was it?

Lemony Snicket, who said, I forgot who the author was of this quote, who said, the only way you can keep a secret between two people is if one of them is dead? But that's not true militarily. I mean, we've kept big secrets for long periods of time.

Sure, but really delectable secrets don't last. I can keep a secret that there's a bunker that I'm going to run to, sure. But to keep a secret that there's a bunker that I'm going to run to, sure. But to keep a secret that aliens landed or DNA experimenting on us, that would get out. That's what people do. Stuff lesser, lesser stuff than that gets out. Well, when you hear things about Area 51 and the Robert Lazar interviews, have you ever heard any of that stuff? To be true requires that you say someone is keeping something a secret.

So you don't think that anybody's capable of keeping secrets? Not on that level. Oh, no. I don't. Oh, my gosh. I completely disagree. I think that friends can keep secrets. Oh, sure.

Wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait. Yes. I mean, the quote with the one has to be dead, that's an exaggeration. Right, of course. Of course. But beyond a certain number of people, the conduct of human beings,

if the secret is really juicy and really, really tantalizing, I think there's 0% chance that that's likely. I disagree. There'd be diaries, and there'd be people telling their families, like, we didn't go to the moon. Look at the secrets we already know. Look at the secrets that get out. Yeah. Listen, I mean, you know, like we didn't go to the moon. Look at the secrets we already know. Look at the secrets that get out.

Yeah. Listen, I mean, for sure, most secrets get out. However, I absolutely think it's completely possible for people to keep secrets. Actually, that's an experiment that you can't conduct. Right. To say. Make a fake event happen. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

The statement, most secrets get out. For all you know, that's 100% of the secrets. It could be. Yeah, you're right. It's just a simple, untestable fact. Well, don't you have any secrets in your past that you got away with? Sure, a lot of people got away with some secrets. Yeah, but I didn't tell it to 10,000 people and say, keep it a secret.

Well, the idea is that if you're talking about NASA, the idea about the moon landings was that it was compartmentalized. And the big one is that Stanley Kubrick was the... There's actually a documentary, a fascinating documentary. Again, fucks with my head because, as I've always said, it's terrifying when you're too stupid to know who's dumb. And that is often where I find myself when I'm watching these things. And there was this documentary that was all about the different sort of techniques that Kubrick used

in 2001 and how he had changed the way you reshot gigantic scenes by some new process called something about front projection, I think that was basically the name of the process

and then he showed all the evidence of front projection footage in the moon landings. And again, you're fucked because you're sitting here. And I'm looking at this. I'm like, okay, well, who's right here? Have you ever seen the video of the astronauts on trampolines? No, no, I haven't. I never thought in my life that I would be in the position to have a real astrophysicist watch a ridiculous video.

And so I want you to, Brian, pull up astronauts on trampolines. You're putting this up. Okay. You got to see it. It's beautiful. I don't think I've seen it. It's astronauts. And the conspiracy is that they are either on trampolines or they're on some sort of a wire harness because of the way they're moving.

And that they're moving behind the lunar rover. moving and that they're moving behind the lunar rover, and that's to hide either the trampoline or hide the movement of their feet, like the way the shot is positioned. And it's a motherfucker. This one drives me bananas. Check this shit out. It's playing now. All right, I'm checking it out. And watch this.

We were going to a bunch of exercise that we had made up as the Lunar Olympics. Show you what a guy could do. Doesn't that look like a guy just got yanked up in the air? Check this out. About 380 pounds. That's pretty good. They threw that out. Yeah, jump flat footed straight in the air.

About 4 feet. They fell down. Look at this. Whoa. I mean, what are they doing? That ain't very smart. Well.

I mean, obviously, if you're a person who's not scientifically inclined and you're prone to conspiracy theories, guilty of both, and you see something like that, you go, what the fuck is going on there?

Is that really the moon? Are they really jumping around like they're on trampolines? It looks like a guy's getting yanked up by wires on the moon. Well, I'm just saying you look at the trajectory of the Saturn V rocket. That's nice, but that doesn't mean a person was in it. When you watch that, doesn't that look weird, though? Well, okay, you're saying if you don't know what the laws of physics would do on the surface of the moon. One-sixth gravity, when you're watching this, doesn't that look weird, though? Well, okay, you're saying if you don't know what the laws of physics would do on the surface of the moon. Yeah, let's see one-sixth gravity when you're watching this.

Doesn't that look weird to you? Okay, so I understand how susceptible one can be when you're confronted with what is given as evidence. Yes, yes. And if I don't otherwise come across that way, I am sensitive to that. And if I don't otherwise come across that way, I am sensitive to that. If you don't otherwise have the tools to analyze information, then one is susceptible to all manner of forces of thought that go on around you. And like I say, by then, for me, I don't have the energy to fight all of that. I just teach people how to think about information and then I walk away. And then they make a life of it. They vote for whoever they want. But they've got intellectual defenses.

So there are other people who take them on head to head. Like Michael Shermer, big skeptic. Yes. And more power to him. He's got the patience and he's got good analogies. And he can present to you the evidence, the psychological evidence of why we're susceptible. To this he's got a whole book called Why We Believe Weird Things. Do you think it's weird to look at that video and think it looks odd? It'd be weird if

you otherwise knew that a 33-story rocket filled with fuel launched from Cape Canaveral took several orbits around Earth, went to the moon, took pictures from the front side of the moon, the back side of the moon, images from

the surface of the moon. A week later, it comes back. An aircraft carrier goes into the Pacific to pick up a capsule out of the ocean. People get out of the capsule, get on the spacecraft. The president meets them. Life magazine writes profiles. That's all emotional. But it all builds.

After you get to a certain point, I'm just saying it builds. And then someone shows you a video and says, well, maybe all of that didn't, you know, that was all fake. Well, you know, the idea is not even that it all didn't happen. A lot of the,

the idea proposed in the Kubrick documentary was that the footage was fucked up and that they made a lot of extra footage. And then a lot of what you see is faked footage where they were worried that they weren't going to be able to do it. so they decided to fake it and some to see if they could fake it that there was two schools of thought okay that's a whole other thing that's a whole

other thing go but they just but they they needed a movie director to help out the the view well they see you ever see the the michael collins photos and these are really annoying but i'll show them to you where this was a gemini uh spacewalk, but it wasn't really a spacewalk. It was a simulation, and they just blacked out the background and NASA used it as press clippings. So when conspiracy people get a hold of that, they go, ah-ha, which is probably just they needed a photo. They didn't have one.

The fucking guy really did spacewalk. And they just decided to just say, just do a little fuckery. Just say the fucking guy really did spacewalk duh you know and they just decided to just say just do a little fuckery just say the guy's walking around space when you see the closest photo on the shelf

yeah and it's pre-photoshop so that's quite a job pre-photo yeah it's like they painted it right

so you see something like that with your knowledge of physics and with your understanding of vacuums and zero gravity that doesn't look

oh it's completely straight it's completely it. It's completely... It looks totally normal. Well, yeah. It depends on how quickly they return to the ground. I mean, these are... You have to sort of judge that. And so...

But, you know, I'd want to see more. I mean, this is a pretty tight shot. Right. And other things. You want to look at how far away the horizon is. Of course. Earth is smaller. The moon is smaller than Earth.

So I want to see if dust was kicked up. And does the dust fall at the slower rate that the astronaut falls? I don't see the dust in this. So I'd say this is not enough information. If I was cold, present it to this. So if somebody made this. Because you can't put wires on dust. Right.

And suspend the dust and have it descend as slowly as an astronaut bouncing dust. So you mean like the lunar rover dust? Yeah, or every time they step, the dust came up. So you'd look at all of these cues, and there's so many cues that would happen naturally, if it actually happened, that you'd have to think up and get perfectly to fool an expert who knows what they're looking at. If they know what it's like in a vacuum. That's why it would have been easier to simply go to the moon than to fake all of that. That's my point.

This is the one where it looks like the guy gets yanked up by a wire. Have you ever seen this? Check this out. The guy's on the ground. Look at this. Yeah, he fell forward and just popped back up. Yeah. And now what people, I think, especially people like myself,

would have to wrap their heads around, I guess, is that this isn't just a vacuum, but it's also a vacuum and one-sixth Earth gravity. Precisely. So you're dealing with a completely alien environment. So how much do you weigh right now? 190. 190. You're packing it in there, huh? You're saying I'm completely alien environment. So how much do you weigh right now? 190. 190.

You're packing it in there, huh? You're saying I'm fat? How rude. Neil Tyson just said I'm fat. Don't make me show you my six-pack, son. The Budweiser on the side of the table. How rude again. This is damaging to my confidence.

So you have muscles to accommodate your 190-pound body. Fuck yeah yeah I do So now Let's add a 200 pound pack on you Backpack So now you weigh 400 pounds Well he said 335 but I'll give you that Just get big round numbers

Okay So let's say You now weigh 420 pounds You're slugging your way You're sluggish here on earth I put you on the moon Okay? So let's say you now weigh 420 pounds. You're slugging your way. You're sluggish here on Earth. I put you on the moon. Your muscles that normally are accustomed to 190 pounds now are carrying, are maneuvering, are alighting, manipulating one-sixth of 420 pounds, which is 70 pounds.

Right. Imagine how awesome you would be, how awesome you would look. If you weighed 70 pounds. If you have this musculature and you weighed 70 pounds, you'd be Superman. You couldn't crack an egg, though. You'd hit people.

They'd laugh at you. You would be Superman. You'd have to have really good technique. You would up you would just on your toes you'd jump to the ceiling so it's cool so what what um what i'm confusing is what would happen in an earth's environment that's your life experience so this is the bias you bring to it it's an understandable bias and that's what makes the world that the moon an otherworldly place. So 70 pounds, you literally could spring up as if you were pulled by a cord, like you would look like.

You could spring better because the cord has to make you feel like you're 70 pounds, but now you are 70 pounds, so you just do it. I really enjoyed MythBuster's version of it. They went into depth about flag waving, and I thought it was really fascinating to watch where they actually created a vacuum and had the flag wave in a vacuum. And it's weird because it doesn't...

You know, we have an idea in our head of what it looks like when a flag waves. Well, that's obviously the wind moving that flag. But there's wind here. There's nothing. There's zero atmosphere. Now, when someone would run by a flag in zero atmosphere, does it create any wind? No, not at all.

Is there anything? Nothing. So if a guy hops by a flag and the flag blows in the breeze, what's causing that? Is that a fake footage or is it a fake video? Yeah. Yes. If you walk by a flag in – no, it has nothing to do with zero G. It has to do with no atmosphere.

Right. Yeah. So you walk by a flag. There is no breeze that is left behind you in the wake of your steps. And depending on how much air you displace, things next to you might respond to that. If there's no atmosphere, no. There's no way to get that information to the flag. So, Brian, pull that up.

Pull that up. Flag blowing in the breeze. I'll tell you the video it is. No, so what you have here is with the American flag that's set up there, there's sort of residual stiffness to the flag. On my YouTube. There's residual stiffness to the beam that has to hold the flag. Otherwise, it would hang limp.

Yeah, there's a shaft through the top of the flag. There's a famous quote by top of the flag. Exactly. There's a famous quote by Arthur C. Clarke who, at one point I had tweeted this, where he said it's in space where there is no air, a flag cannot wave. So maybe space is not a place where flags belong. Whoa. Yeah. Apollo 15, this is the one. It's really fascinating because they stick it into the ground, and then the dude hops

by it, and when he hops by it, it wiggles in the breeze. Like, there you can see clearly that the shaft is over the top of it. No, he had just stuck it in the ground. Yeah, exactly. No, no, I'm saying the shaft is in it, and it's in place, and it's still sort of reacting to the environment. Sure. Now watch what happens when the guy gets behind it.

Now he's sort of moving along, and he gets in front of it, and when he hops in front of it, the flag follows him like it goes in the breeze. Maybe his leg is touching it. No, nothing touches anything. Pull it ahead. Well, if it does move, the evidence would suggest that something touched it. Right, you would say.

Right. So something, see how close his foot is to the base of the... Yeah, that's not where the video is. Keep going, though, Brian. Keep going. Get it to the part where the guy goes around. He's taking some pictures here. Right, so here...

It would have been much better if we queued this up. Queue it up to like right there. Okay. Okay, but I can make... So watch. Okay, back it up. You missed it.

So now it's wiggling. Just get it to right when the guy hops in front of it. Dude, you suck at YouTube. You really suck at YouTube. You just... You missed it again, you fuck at YouTube. You really suck at YouTube. You just, you missed it again, you fuck. Jesus Christ. The guy goes hopping in front of it.

Here it goes. Can you see it wiggling in the wind? No, I missed it. Can you do that? You had stuff on the screen there. Fucking ad popped up. See that? Yeah, yeah.

It looks like a breeze blew it. Yeah. So you think it's possible that that's fake? Yeah, yeah. It looks like a breeze blew it. Yeah. So you think it's possible that that's fake? Yeah, so either all of this got faked or something touched the flag that was not obvious. No, that's not true. No, but that's my point. But it's not either. It's not either.

It could have easily been that some of the footage didn't come out well, or they faked some of the footage, or that was faked. That might not have been even real Apollo footage. No, no, no. I mean, that might have been something that someone made and then put it up as a goof, and then everyone like me is saying that's Apollo footage. So here's my point. So here's my point. So there's a lot of fakery out there, official and otherwise. Right.

All right? And the most susceptible field of investigation to fakery is ufology, right? Okay. Sure. So here's my point. We're ghosts. Okay? You're looking at a picture that's relatively low quality, that doesn't see the entire zone

around the flag, that you don't have full information. So someone goes by and the flag wiggles. Either this was faked and there is air and the flag is responding to air or there's something, and the whole Apollo 15 mission didn't happen, if you want to take it to an extreme limit, or there's something that didn't make it into this photo.

And that's all. It's not... It could have been like as he jumped maybe a piece of dust kicked up and hit it. Precisely. And we don't see it because it's such low res. Or his equipment touches it. He looks like he's pretty far away from it. No, no. You have no depth

cueing. But look, the thing's in the ground right there. Let's see the guy go by. You do have depth if you watch the whole thing. It's not good depth. And he's got a backpack. So I can't lose sleep over that. Yeah, I just... No, I'm definitely not losing sleep over it.

I just wanted you to look at a guy hopping in front of a flag blowing in the breeze on an atmosphereless moon. I mean, these videos are one of the reasons why these conspiracies exist. So I sympathize with some of that. But it doesn't necessarily mean that no one, I mean, if some piece of footage is fake, it doesn't mean the whole mission was fake.

Yeah, not only that, but I would say that it is so hard to fake every little thing that would need to happen. It's just, it's easier to just go to the moon. Really? Would it be? Why would it be so hard to make video footage and photographic footage and then release it? I'll give you another reason why.

You can't put, the sun, for all intents and purposes in a photograph, is at infinity. Which means all shadows are parallel. all intents and purposes in a photograph is at infinity, which means all shadows are parallel. So if you photograph them in the correct way so that you don't have a foreshortening of an angle, you'll see that shadows are parallel. They reference one point at infinity. You can't fake that. In fact, that's how I know in Hollywood if they've artificially lit a scene and pretend that it's the sun because they can't actually put their life source at infinity. And so I let it go because it's Hollywood and they pretend that it's daytime when they're filming at 3 o'clock in the morning when there's no traffic. That's a hilarious statement, though. I let it go.

I pretend. I have to equate in my head. The sun's at infinity. All right. They want to bullshit people. Well, because they're trying. But you want to talk about suspension of disbelief.

With me, I'm like, eh, maybe she really couldn't kill that dragon with a sword, but fuck it, I'm at the movies.

With you, it's like, the sun. No, I look for, you know, they can't control the sun. So,

if they film one part of the scene in the morning, another part in the afternoon, the shadow is pointing in a different direction, and they want you to think it just happened 10 minutes later. They can't control the sun. So, So if they film one part of the scene in the morning, another part in the afternoon, the shadow is pointing in a different direction. Right. And they want you to think it just happened 10 minutes later. They can't control the sun.

Right. So they fake the sun in a sound studio, and they have the right color temperature of the sun, so it feels like sunlight, and it has that sort of brightness that you get. So I let that go. There's so much you'd have to fake. I swear to you, it's easier to just go to the damn moon. That sounds, I understand exactly what you're saying. But it sounds crazy if you think that people actually couldn't get to the moon, then no. If they actually physically couldn't survive out in the atmosphere of deep space, couldn't survive what the talk is, the solar radiation, any solar flares, any solar activity would be instant death.

And this has sort of been kind of acknowledged by NASA that they rolled the dice with solar radiation. So the people that are believing that it's impossible to get through the Van Allen radiation belts, for you to say to them that it would be just – It is false. It's just – yes. However – You don't spend much time getting through them. So radiation dose is not simply is it there, it's how much time. Exposure to it.

Yeah, it's time exposure to it. Intensity plus time gives you total dose. Right. But these people that believe that no humans have ever done it before, because the only people that did it were the Apollo astronauts, and no one's been able to do it since. And every single space station flight, every space shuttle flight, all of them are within, what, 400 miles? Easily.

Yeah. I mean, space station is two something. Hubble is a within, what, 400 miles? Easily, yeah. I mean, space station is two something. Hubble is a little higher, about 360 miles. Right, but these are the only times where human beings have ever been past that, was the Apollos program. So for the conspiracy minded, of course that comes up. Well, no, you can't survive in deep space. No one's ever done it except some people in the 60s. And no one believes that today. And the reason why you can't get out there is because of solar flares and radiation, all this jazz. So if they're right, then it would be easier to fake it. You say

they're not right, because Van Allen says it's safe to go through the belts. And then they went through the top, the donut hole. But realistically, when people look at human beings that have actually been through, the last time someone did it was 1972. That was the last time a human being has been more than 400 miles from the Earth's surface. That freaks people out. Because every single technological achievement from 1969

is easier, cheaper, and faster to reproduce today. Well, no, no, it had its own trajectory. I mean, in 1969, the computer was still half the size of the room. And that's one thing. The same computer that's like not even an iPhone, right? Right, exactly. Or the computing power that's in a birthday, singing birthday card. So what Kubrick got wrong in 2001, in the midst of all the rest that was visionary,

was the assumption that the future would be one big computer controlling the one big ship. The notion of distributed computing, where you would have the power of a mainframe sitting on your hip, was unimagined at the time. So, yeah, things got systematically more powerful. But that's a natural progression of technology that's been going on since the Industrial Revolution. Right. That alone shouldn't surprise anybody. No, that doesn't surprise anyone.

The argument is that the manned spaceflight is the only thing that hasn't advanced. If you watch these movies from the 1970s, they talked about 2010. My God, there's going to be space stations on the moon. And there was Space 1999. Do you remember that show? Yeah, of course. Yeah. God, I mean, but the reality is our manned space exploration ended.

I'll tell you why. Money. Yes, that's the clean, clear answer, but there's a more subtle answer. All right? When we went to the moon, everyone assumed, because of the way it was marketed, there was the profiles in Life magazine of each of the astronauts. And you saw their families. And the president said we should do it.

And it was this grand mission from NASA, a civilian space agency. And the World's Fair in New York, 1964, was all about inventing a future. So we were living that romance. All right. What we were not reminding ourselves is that the only reason why we went to the moon is because we were at war with Russia, with the Soviet Union. That is the only reason at all. If you don't carry that motivation with you and you're only thinking that this is

simply the next technological thing to do, that when we learn that Russia is not going to the moon, therefore we have no reason to continue and we stop, you then, you cry foul and you say, well, wait a minute, how about the future? How about Mars? And how about the rest of that? Well, the rest of that was not ever in the plan unless Russia had planned to do it. And so it was not a natural flow of what our technology would have done because it didn't flow out of our economic creativity. It came out of our urge to not die. And so when you have that scenario, of course we didn't go past the moon after 1972. We were no longer competing with Russia to do that. I understand what you're saying. And if I was more conspiratorially minded, I would argue if I was more conspiratorially minded,

I would argue that that's a nice, convenient thing to say, but the reality is we still kept up as far as other avenues of military, whether it's building better bombs or faster planes. Of course. And it was all about military superiority. Of course. Wouldn't we be the first to set up a base on the moon? Wouldn't we be the first to... It's not necessary unless Russia does.

Right. In fact, most of what we did in space was reactive to Russia. We were not the first in space. Russia was. We weren't the first to send a life form into space. Russia was. Russia sent a dog.

We weren't the first humans in space. Russians were. Russians even put the first black person in space. It was a Cuban cosmonaut. black person in space It was a Cuban A Cuban cosmonaut The achievements in space What we did, we got to the moon first And then we said we win And so we have repainted

That era in our memory As we are the pioneers And we did it because we explore No We did it because That's a nice after the fact window dressing You can put on that achievement But we did it because... That's a nice after-the-fact window dressing you can put on that achievement, but we did it because we were at war. There's no...

Once you understand that, it allows you to understand why we stopped. I completely hear what you're saying, but you are fueling the conspiracy fires, and the people right now are thinking, Neil Tyson is working for the man. This is what's going on. He's come on this show to try to explain things in a very logical way.

Look at him with his tricky facts and logic. Information about history. I agree with you, but I still see room. I still see room for fuckery. It means Mars is not in our future. No, it doesn't.

Unless one of two conditions are satisfied. Either China says they want to put military bases on Mars. We're on Mars nine months, ten months after that. One month to design, build, and launch a Mars-worthy craft, and nine months to get there. That's if China says they want to put military bases on Mars, we're there tomorrow. That's one way to get there.

Another way, we find some economic justification for doing it. We're motivated by I don't want to die, and I don't want to die poor. But aren't there massive resources just on the moon? I mean, haven't they found titanium? Entirely. So that's a frontier. And space, what's the name of this new venture? Space Resources?

Terraforming? No, Space Resources Incorporated. I think that's their name. I think I got it wrong. But just do a Google on it. You'll find it immediately. This is a group of folks. They're astronauts and aerospace engineers and scientists and entrepreneurs who say, you know, an asteroid the size of a football field has more mineable rare elements than have ever been mined in the history of the world.

God damn. And if you tow that thing to Earth, there you go. The size of a football field? Or less. Less. Size of a barn. There are platinum group. See, nature already did the sorting of the elements for us.

All right? There was something called planetesimals, objects that didn't quite grow big enough to become planets. And then they were susceptible to being shattered back into asteroids. So when you make a planet and it's still molten, the heavy stuff goes to the middle. Right. Because it sinks and the light stuff floats. Well, what's heavy? Iron is heavy.

Platinum is heavy. Iridium is heavy. Uranium is heavy. All the heavy stuff is heavy. So nature then sorts it. The geologist calls it differentiation. It sorts it. Now you have this cosmic object that later on gets shattered.

You now have asteroids made of crust and asteroids made of core material. And the core material has got all the elements and all those rare Earth metals that we value in industry, that we value in jewelry. It is pre-collected for us. So if you get one of these platinum group asteroids and bring it back to Earth, there it is. It's a whole new marketplace. So you need like a Wonder Woman jet with a net. Remember when she was the net shit? Yeah, I remember that.

Or you corral the asteroid and use it for other operations in space which is a much more financially feasible thing to do with an asteroid. So that would involve deep space travel. Deep space. Not only that.

Man deep space travel or robotic? Warp bubbles. Would they be able to do it? You can do it. Robots, sure. If we can perfect robots, let the robots do it. That's the best way to do it anyway, isn't it? You don't have to feed them.

They don't want to come home after that. Yeah. Unless we flee this planet, like unless we have to go all Battlestar Galactica, most likely we're not going to need to send people to explore things. If we have something like the rover, why take a chance on human biological life, right? Now, I want humans to go to Mars. I think that's a good thing to do because you build heroes that way. There's no ticker tape parades for robots. They're going to be heroes if they go that far without jerking off,

because you're on that thing for like nine months, there and back, and you're all being video-camered the whole time. We're going to find some real heroes. We're going to see some real people that really weep the first time they get into a tent on Mars. What you might do is just send couples, and then you get rid of that problem altogether. Then they fight.

You can't have that. That's a terrible idea. You can't have sex in space. You send new couples. No. That's even worse. You don't have that that's a terrible idea sex in space you send new couples that's even worse you don't have any history together what are the odds they're gonna work out how many new couples stick around for nine months yeah yeah it's a hard one it's a hard one they have found uh planets that are made entirely of diamonds yeah so diamond is pure carbon if if anyone didn't remember that a diamond comes in in like... Carminated compression, right? Yeah, five or six varieties.

And one of them is what's in your pencils, the graphite. It's very soft and smooth. That's a diamond? No, no, no. But it's carbon in a... The lattice is layered in these smooth layers that slide off one another. That's why a pencil,

as you touch the pencil to the page and drag it, what you're doing is you're dragging layers of carbon lattice off of the graphite. Wow. I never thought of it that way. It's actually pretty cool. It's very cool. Yeah, it's almost sensual, right? Yeah. Layers of graphite. Yeah, it's like a sculpture almost. Lay to the page. A 2D sculpture. Obeying your every command, allowing you to communicate with other humans. Yeah. There is a pencil.

That's what's going on inside what we call the lead pencil. Lead is just the term for what the graphite that's in a pencil. It has nothing to do with the element lead. So other forms of carbon. Lately we discovered the buckyball. It's carbon 60. 60 carbon atoms that make a sheet that has curved into a sphere.

The shell of a sphere. And it's essentially the lattice points of a soccer ball. There's 60 of them, if you do it right. And then you get what we call a buckyball. Because buckyball is named after Buckminster Fuller. And he... Remember the

geodesic dome? Yes. Remember those? Okay. So the lattice of this is caused to image that what the Bucky, let me say that again. I'll follow you. Yeah. So the geodesic domes, which Buckminster Fuller made popular, I guess, in the 1960s. They predated him, by the way.

He's credited with inventing it, but he didn't. It was invented by Zeiss, the planetary manufacturers in East Germany. There were some engineers there. They invented this. This is an aside, but I think it's a pretty cool aside. They invented a new way to project stars on the ceiling. It's the first optical projector. And they put it on their ceiling and say, you know, this would be cooler if the ceiling were round.

You know, do we have any round ceilings? No. Okay, well, here's a couple of dollars. Go build one or invent one. And they invented the geodesic dome just for the purpose of showing a dome where the stars would fit. And this was in 1923. Wow. Yeah, it was pretty cool.

That's amazing. So anyhow. Carbon. Carbon. So you put the carbon atoms at the intersection points of a geodesic dome, and you basically get something that resembles the buckyball. It's a new form of carbon. It's one of the forms.

And one of them is diamond. And diamond, the lattice is very tightly bound. So no part of a diamond will slide off of any other part. And diamond is the hardest natural substance known. And that's why you have diamond drills, you have diamond anvils. And a diamond, because it's transparent, and it's also very very dense light actually slows down inside of a diamond it is only 40 percent as fast in a diamond as it is in the vacuum of space and because of that it bends so severely in the cuts of the diamond that you can get double and triple reflections inside so light from one direction comes out in a different direction, making the diamond look like

it's radiant on your finger. It's pure carbon. It is the same stuff that's in coal, except treated differently. There was a man who, they wrote an article about him in Wired Magazine a few years back, where he had acquired

some sort of technology from the Soviet Union where they had figured out how to make diamonds. Oh, they're making them now. I hosted Nova, Nova Science Now. I don't anymore, but in my tenure as host, we visited. They blindfolded me because they don't want De Beers to know about it. And took me to a secret factory, a manufacturing plant, where they're layering carbon onto a lattice in just the way a diamond is created, and they're just building diamonds. They blindfolded you.

Oh, yeah. In fact, they took away my iPhone because my iPhone has the inertial memory of where it has been. So that had to be turned off, and I was blindfolded. And then we did the interview in the factory, and we looked inside the special patented devices where they make it. Now, here's what's the real weird thing about that. Oh, by the way, wait. Then I took some of the samples of diamonds that they made

and went out to 47th Street in New York, which is the diamond capital of the world, and I showed it to the guys there, and they were purer than any other diamond they had that had been hauled from Earth. This is how ridiculous chicks are. This is what I'm going to get to. My wife says she wouldn't want one of those diamonds.

Why? Because they're artificial. Well, so I spoke to the merchants. How crazy that is. I spoke to the merchants, and I said, what are you going to do if there's a flood of these diamonds on the market? They said, people are not going to do if there's a flood of these diamonds on the market? They said, people are not going to want them. He sounds like your wife.

Exactly. Because they want to know that it was forged in the fires of the belly of the earth. Yeah. And not just out of somebody's back lab. And I said, okay, but, you know, these are pure diamonds and anything Earth is creating because we can do a better job making diamonds than Earth can. And so for me, I'd take the artificial diamond.

Fuck yeah. And you know some poor African kid doesn't have to chip it out of a rock with his hands. Good point. It's a very important point. This is technology replacing human labor once again. Isn't that a weird thing?

Does it freak you out when, I mean, obviously you're very technologically minded, but when you realize where these conflict minerals come from and the actual stuff that's in your iPhone, someone might have dug it out of a hill in a poor community in Africa. I mean, it's incredibly ironic. Yeah, but it's not uniquely poor as a community that's exploited for some economic gain. So my issue wouldn't be, oh, I'm concerned about these minerals.

I'm concerned about all the places where that's happening. And so, you know, how many lives... But it is ironic that the most technologically advanced shit we have needs to come that way. You know, that that's where in 2012, you know, until they started reform in these areas, that's where it was coming from. That's how it was getting to us. I wouldn't call a diamond technologically advanced.

When I think of technology, I think of machines. No, I meant conflict minerals. That are in lithium ion. Oh, yeah, yeah. Right, right, right. So, yes, getting back to what started this. Blood diamonds, yeah.

Getting back to what started this, carbon is the fourth most, carbon is the fourth most common ingredient in the cosmos. And so in the cosmos is full of places where there's high temperature and high pressure and a lot of time. And we are delighted but not entirely surprised that there are places in the universe even entire planets where a large part of their composition would be pure diamond how long does it take to create a diamond in the earth's inside i i i'm not up on the very uh because pressure matters here as well. And you can change one and that affects what you need for the other.

And I don't have that map memorized in my head. But it takes a long time. Way longer than your lifetime. So once you run out of diamonds in the earth, you're not getting any more diamonds. You're going to have to make them yourself or find them elsewhere in the universe. And how long does it take their machines to make them?

You can make one in about a week. Whoa. Oh, yeah. You just lay it down. You're done. How big is it? take their machines to make them? You can make one in about a week. Whoa. Oh, yeah. You just lay it down. You're done. How big is it? Like a quart? It's hard to make a big one.

They make one, yeah, I'm not carrot fluent, but the size of a BB. So one that could easily fit in a post earring. Oh, so that's it? They can't get a big, fat, crazy,

Jay-Z type rock? And Elizabeth Taylor. No, no, they're not there yet. No, no, they're not there yet. Kim Kardashian type rock. Those are rare anyway. Those are extremely rare anyway. And their most common diamonds are small. So, yeah, they can certainly compete in that marketplace.

Doesn't De Beers have, like, the rumor is the conspiracy theory is? We should play that. Keeping the theme going throughout the podcast. The theory is that there's a warehouse that they keep. There's so many diamonds that they artificially inflate the price by slowly releasing them to the marketplace. Is that true? Yeah, I think there's not a a market in something, it means it is traded often enough so that the price at any given moment is the actual price, the actual valuation of that object in the world at

that time. And it presupposes that there's full access to supplies and demand and nothing is being withheld. So yes, De Beers is withholding, if not De Beers, someone else, is withholding diamonds from the marketplace to assure a certain price. If they flooded the market, the price would drop. God damn it, Mrs. Rogan, you listen to this shit. You don't need a real diamond. Well, here's the scary part. It's ridiculous. Here we are killing each other over resources buried in the ground and in the sands,

including sources of energy, chemical energy in that case, whereas the universe has an unlimited supply of everything, including energy. Why isn't that reflected in the budget that we put into space travel? It seems ridiculous and short-sighted. It seems like you could take all this military industrial money and say, listen, you fuckers want to get really rich? Let's get crazy. Let's go space cowboy style and go lasso some rocks the space resources

company is doing exactly that they're targeting resources they they they're targeting asteroids for economic exploitation how does that work like is space is eventually going to be like the homesteaders back in the 1800s where you would move there and get a plot of land are you going to be able to claim plots of space currently space law which is an interesting frontier in in you know at the un and in other places space law has certain rules and regulations one of them i think is unrealistic and it has to do with the waging of war and i'll get to that in a minute. But the other one is... War with aliens? Like space war? No, it forbids warfare. It forbids space from serving as a platform for war.

For war. Oh. But I think that's completely naive and unrealistic. And I'll tell you why in a minute. And people say space should be a peaceful place. I think that is naive. That's naive bordering on stupid. They obviously haven't seen Battlestar Galactica. So,

in space, so the way the laws, the books now read, it could change with emerging consensus. The way it now reads is you cannot own anything off the Earth. However, no one can stop you from putting

a flag on it, and no one can stop you from mining resources from it. You just can't claim to own it and require that someone else pay you to use it. Okay? So, in other words, there's no private property, there's no

private objects in space. But if you do acquire an object and you bring it back, can you use it for profit? That hasn't been fully explored legally yet. Yeah, if you invested all the money, I think the laws are going to go in the favor of free market capitalism. And this is why conspiracy theories will step in and say that's why Obama's moving towards socialism. They're trying to control all the resources in space. They want to pull in all those minerals and diamonds and ruin the

Jews in their marketplace stranglehold on the diamond industry. Except the rate at which Obama's plan to return to space is not commensurate with that as a viable conspiracy plan. Unless you take into account the

conspiracy theory to keep the elites alive forever and start killing off people with eugenics and wars. There's a lot of people that that's another very fine conspiracy theory. Crop circles and chemtrails. I don't know if you're familiar with either one of those. I don't know about

chemtrails, but certainly crop circles. Everybody knows about crop circles. You don't know about chemtrails, but certainly crop circles. Everybody knows about crop circles. I mean, come on. You don't know about chemtrails? No, what are chemtrails? I need to introduce you to Eddie Bravo. No. What chemtrails are is one of the, easily the silliest conspiracy theories.

There's something, there's validity to it, unfortunately, in that, first of all, cloud seeding has been done in many cultures. It's done on a regular open basis in the United Arab Emirates. In Abu Dhabi, they made it rain 50 times last year. They're doing it every week. You can do it. We know that scientifically. But what they're claiming is that the government is spraying shit out of planes. And these are not regular planes. And those contrails that last forever, those are actually chemtrails. Those those are fake clouds and there's all sorts of different things they're spraying that

control the populace through uh yeah how spring what is it telling what is how in what way is it controlling us well i mean so what is it asking for too many facts you've already gone too far with this i had to talk to a pilot i said okay like this is driving me crazy you know because we were like when we were kids, man, those clouds in the sky, when a plane would fly over, they would dissipate really quickly. But now they stay forever. They're fucking spraying us with shit, man. This is how crazy people

are. So then I talked to a pilot and I said, okay, what is, why is it, how come sometimes the clouds go away and sometimes they don't? The persistence of contrails. It's how much atmosphere, how much water is in the atmosphere, which varies. Yeah. And I go, thank you.

That's all I need to know. So when the jet engine flies through, it makes an artificial cloud. It really does. It spirals up the water and the wind, and in its wake, it leaves this temporary cloud. And it has to cool in order for it to condense. And if you look immediately outside of the engine, there's an interval where it is not clouded. It's completely transparent. Right. And if you look immediately outside of the engine, there's an interval where it is not clouded. It's completely transparent.

And then it cools, reaching the temperature of the surrounding air, and then it condenses out. But the levels of moisture are different at different altitudes. So a plane will not leave the same contrail at all altitudes from near an airport up to 41,000 feet. Exactly. Just as like some areas it rains and some areas are desert. There's areas that should be it, but people get really wacky with that one. That's a weird one. And it's another one where there's very little looking into the possible answers. It's like they want it to be spraying. Yeah, you want it to be that.

They want it to be cancer-causing things that the government is spraying on us in order to lower the population numbers because there's too many of us. That's why there's lithium in the water supply, Neil Tyson. I had this conversation when someone said, do you know there's antidepressants in the water supply? I go, well, that's because people flush their antidepressants and they pee and some of it's – I go, but the amount is so tiny. I go, this is nothing that you could ever – it's not psychoactive amounts. He's like, how do you know that, man? How do you know that? I'm like, I don't know is nothing that you could ever, it's not psychoactive amounts. He's like, how do you know that, man? How do you know that?

I'm like, I don't know, how do you know, man? Go get some water and bring it to a fucking testing facility. Yeah, test it. You can test this stuff.

Stop freaking me out. There's enough real shit to freak me out. What drives me nuts is like, end of the world people, I would have conversations with them

and they were convinced this Mayan thing and society's all headed towards a certain thing. It's really obvious. And I'm like, do you ever pay attention to super volcanoes? Yeah, they're real issues to be contended with here. There's some real shit going on in Yellowstone. Yeah.

Like, Yellowstone, every 6,000 to 800,000 years, essentially kills half the continent off. Do you know that when we were growing up, Old Faithful was called Old Faithful, and it was faithful to the clock, and then there was some geologic stuff that happened, and now it'll still blow, but it's not regular anymore. I saw this National Geographic piece. I don't know if they read it. Yeah, sometimes faithful, you know.

Well, he held it together for a long time. Yeah, you got to get some credit. Yeah, yeah. There was a National Geographic piece on Yellowstone where it was right when they sort of figured out that Yellowstone was a caldera volcano. They figured out how large it was. And they were talking about the frequency of earthquakes.

And it was over like a six-month period or something like that. There was 2,000 earthquakes in Yellowstone. Oh, yeah. Well, it depends on what your threshold is for measuring an earthquake. Most earthquakes in the world, if they happen right under your feet, you wouldn't notice it. And so because their energy level is so low that they don't even get past the absorbers in your knee.

You got new knees or new hips? What did you get? Well, ligaments. Oh, new ligaments. The knees are essentially the same. Yeah, almost no matter the condition of your knees, you wouldn't feel an earthquake up to two or three. And in New York City, with the subway rumbling underfoot where I live,

that's like 4.5 on the Richter scale. Is it really? Yeah, it's something. In fact, when the World Trade Center collapsed, that triggered. I was four blocks away when it happened. That triggered. I paid very close attention to everything that was happening, including what kind of vibration in the ground it caused.

And it was about like the A train going 30 miles an hour just below your feet. So when the train goes, you feel it. Oh, yeah. And you ignore it because it's the normal vibrations of life and of city living. Yeah, it's three and four. So you look at the earthquake counting. There are tons of these. And so they don't really matter until it can structurally hurt something.

And then you talk about it. It becomes a news item. So the count of earthquakes is not interesting. You want the number of earthquakes above seven, above six and a half, above five. They start getting interesting but not lethal yet. So, yeah, you want to set your threshold then give me the number. So are those earthquakes, those small ones like the Yellowstone ones, are they going on everywhere? It's just they're measuring it in Yellowstone?

Yeah, well, some places are more geologically active than others. Places that are geologically active, where you get the occasional 7, 8, 9, or 7 and 8 on the Richter scale, or whatever the scale is called today, those places, you're getting these low ones practically all the time. Yeah, all the time. Okay, so freaking out about Yellowstone having 2,000 earthquakes, like really you should freak out about 2stone having 2,000 earthquakes, like really you should freak out about 2007s. Yeah, that's exactly right. And this is another one of these things where it's partial information

scaled up into a catastrophe scenario that feeds people's fears and the kind of fear that people delight in. People say, oh, you know, Manhattan has a fault line running right down the middle. Manhattan, where three million people live and work. And, yeah, it does. And it's been dead for a million years. That's a geologically dead fault, okay? So it hasn't moved in a million years.

No, I don't know the number, but it's dead. I mean, there's nothing happening there. We've got, you know, play swings on it. And part of it is what created Harlem mean, there's nothing happening there. We've got play swings on it. There's not... And part of it is what created Harlem Heights, which overlooks Harlem. In fact, when Columbia moved in, they renamed it. It's actually called... They call it Morningside Heights, but it's actually Harlem Heights. And that's a raised part of Manhattan. It's well above the lower areas where the rest of Harlem is. It's cool. So Manhattan has some remnant geologic features.

Not all of it has been bulldozed over to put skyscrapers. That's fascinating. I didn't know that it was actually above it because of a fault. Yeah, it's a fault line, a fascinating fault line. Some of that was retained in Central Park. They left some geologically interesting features there. Central Park. They left some geologically interesting features there. But the point is, earthquakes down to level two, what were measurable, they happen all the time in most places. And they happen often in most places and practically continuously where you are geologically active. And for folks who don't know what we were talking about earlier when we said a caldera

volcano, essentially what it is is a volcano that when it blows, it leaves almost like a crater. It leaves like a gigantic, I think it's 300 kilometers wide or something. And in a super volcano, you basically repave major land areas of Earth. You know, Venus has very few craters on it. And given its age and the fact that there is no rain or weather systems that could erode them, you can ask, well, what's going on there? And further analysis shows that Venus completely repaves its surface at regular intervals. That if you can pull enough lava, which is just liquid rock, right? It's liquid rock. You can pull enough lava, which is just liquid rock, right? It's liquid rock.

You pull it out of the liquefied layers of the planet and put it on the surface. It'll spill out, spread around, and cover up all craters that might have been there before. Do you know the Sea of Tranquility? What is that? Tell everybody. Spot on the moon. It's a place on the moon. It's called a sea because back before we knew anything about the moon it was a large dark area flat dark area of the moon and we imagine

that maybe there's water there and if there's water there and so there's there are regions called seas you know what these actually are they're they're volcanic basins when the moon was geologically active lava spilled out spread all over the surface When the moon was geologically active, lava spilled out, spread all over the surface of the moon as far as it could reach, and these became what today we call seas. And you know the seas happen very late because they have fewer craters

than adjacent areas where the lava did not spill in. So you could date the surface of the moon based on how many craters there are within a given area. Do you ever feel like, I mean, since your fascination is space. Wait, wait, wait. To finish that. So on Venus, where there are very few craters when we know there should be many, that tells us that the entire surface suffers from freshened volcanic flow.

Unlike the moon, where the last time it laid out these seas is billions of years ago. So Venus is just constant supervolcanoes all the time. Essentially, yeah. When you see something like the moon which is completely covered in in meteor impacts it's one of the things that really sets into my mind or gives me a reference point for time. Because we aren't seeing these big impacts on a regular basis. And in fact, we've only recorded a few of them. The recent one in Jupiter, this massive one, which was by an amateur astronomer, right?

Caught it. And the one that... There was a flash of light on Jupiter just by accident. Caught, yeah. Yeah, and then there was the other one, the one that was observed in, was on jupiter just by accident caught yeah yeah and then there was the other one the one that was uh observed and it was 94 yeah the big one uh yeah when was that yeah so that one was comet shoemaker leaving nine yeah yeah and that one it was a comet that the tidal forces of jupiter on a previous pass had broken that solid comet up into two dozen

smaller but still significant chunks of comet material. And it had a trajectory that was headed straight for Jupiter. And we were ready for it. And the Hubble telescope was in place. And everybody was aiming. And each one of these blobs of comet that fell into Jupiter plunged into the atmosphere and exploded with more energy than all the atomic, all the bombs in the American arsenal. And so the, sorry, a better way to say that is

it plunged with more energy than the impact that rendered the dinosaurs extinct on Earth. And so to get a sense of the energetics of the solar system, it's extraordinary. And so the solar system, to get to your point, is a shooting gallery. And the moon, which is sitting right in front of our nose, it's our nearest neighbor. That writ large is the evidence of what Earth plows through daily. And we are protected by our atmosphere from most of it.

And my other point was that when you see that, you see all the impacts, that there's so many impacts. When you try to wrap your head around how many years a million years is, how many years a billion years is. People have, it's one of the hardest things. Our brains are wired for understanding whether we'll be eaten by a tiger or a lion, right?

Or whether, you know, that space and time, our minds interact with it in very terrestrial ways. With the advent of the telescope and our understandings of the laws of physics, we've had to come to an understanding of the depth of time and the expanse of space that completely transcends what it is natural for us to contemplate. And so you have to almost grow accustomed to these facts rather than take them into your heart

because they fall so far beyond anything we've been trained to think about. And that's why it's so hard for anyone to believe that you can go from a microorganism to a giraffe or a human being over the billions of years in the cycle of life. Wait, do you believe in evolution? Is that what you're trying to say? It's not a matter of belief. It's what the evidence shows. And when I'm given the choice, I'm going with the evidence. Listen, that's silly.

That's a ridiculous way to live. What I was going to ask you so this depth of time is the depth of time just like a piece of rock like the moon where you see all those impacts you think how long is that what am i looking at yeah i mean how much how much time did it take for all those rocks to fly out of space and hit that. And as a temporary organism, you being a human being who has this sort of terrestrial fascination, it's got to be almost like a mad race to collect information in an infinitely impossible universe. We are like mayflies in the cosmos.

Yeah, and not even that. Think about it. A mayfly, not even that. That's right. What does a mayfly know of a change of seasons or a change of years? These are unfathomably long time scales to the life cycle of a mayfly. Generations. Yeah.

Calendar months. And so here we are. We're not for the methods and tools of science. not for the methods and tools of science, we would have no clue about the universe of time and the universe of space that exist beyond the physical accessibility of our biological form. So an interesting analogy to this, I think, is when you look up at a puffy cloud, to you it's just a cloud sitting there, and it has a shape. But we've all seen time-lapse of clouds, particularly rain clouds. That's a turbulent place. The bubbles of clouds, particularly the cumulonimbus, they're just

gurgling up. They're boiling up through the center, and it keeps keeps regenerating and rain is coming out the bottom. That doesn't take much of a time-lapse video to capture. 10 minutes? 15 minutes? But that's not our understanding of clouds. Our understanding is that there are just these things peacefully floating there.

Right. And that's just human perception versus a 15 minute time-lapse video. just human perception versus a 15 minute time lapse video imagine human perception versus the billions of years of cosmic evolution then it really is a shooting gallery we don't stand a chance

when you see the you alright over there fella? what happened? when you see the potential hazards and catastrophes of space and you think about the temporary lifespan of the human being, does it frustrate you at all? Does it seem like, God, I'm going to miss a lot of shit? Well, there's several consequences. One of them is we don't know how to understand those dangers.

If I say a killer asteroid is going to come every 100 million years, you'll say, oh, don't worry about it. But when it comes, it'll render you extinct. And we don't know when it's going to come between now and 100 million years from now. Do you even have the temerity to say, well, I'd better build a protection plan on the possibility that it comes in my lifetime or in the lifetime of all my loved generations that follow. We don't know how to react. We're not wired for that thought. Let me tell you how badly we're not wired for that thought.

What happens after a hurricane devastates a coastline? We rebuild. We rebuild. Oh, it's not going to happen to me. That's the stuff within your lifetime. Right. This is the 20-year hurricane, the 30-year hurricane, not the 200-year, 500,000-year hurricane. So unfortunately, our brains aren't wired for this.

So it's a good thing that we have methods and tools that can compensate for this shortcoming. Do we have any sort of scientific plan to handle asteroid impacts? On paper? Oh, yeah. We've got a total solution worked out on paper completely unfunded at the moment. When you say on paper, is it for like... You can do the engineering.

You can do the engineering, and it'll work. The physics and engineering. What do they do? They knock it out of orbit or something? No, if you're macho. If you're... If you blow the sucker out of the sky.

Is there a Sylvester Stallone approach? Yeah, okay. And then there's like a Stephen Hawking approach. I forgot I'm speaking to an MMA guy here, right? Or jujitsu. So there are different solutions. The problem is, yeah, we could conceivably blow the thing up. But as Americans, we're really good at blowing stuff up.

And we're less good at knowing where the pieces land afterwards. Good point. So I don't want to blow this thing into six pieces and still have all those six pieces headed towards Earth. Right. All right? So the kinder, gentler solution is to deflect it from harm's way. And there's something called a gravitational tractor beam, essentially. I mean, that's the poetic way to say it, the sci-fi way to say it.

But really, you put a space pod out there that has a gravitational field that attracts slowly, attracts the asteroid into a slightly different orbit. And if you get there early enough, you don't have to deflect it by much because that deflection accumulates. And all you needed to do is miss Earth. Now, it's still out there to harm you another day. But if you get good at this, you just have, you know, just like you have the block protection, nighttime protection force, you know, in the neighborhood.

Well, you'd have the asteroid protection force. And that would be protecting Earth from asteroids. And Jupiter protects us from most asteroids, right? Well, for most of the things that haul their way in from outside the solar system. Comets. Most asteroids are within the orbit of Jupiter, so Jupiter doesn't need to protect us from them. Well, we would want it to. It just doesn't.

Because their orbits don't reach Jupiter for enough to Jupiter to bat it into a new place. But comets that come from far, far beyond the orbit of Jupiter, Jupiter's, they, when they come near Jupiter, they feel Jupiter's titanic gravitational field. And Jupiter basically bends them into a new orbit. And so many of them don't even make it past Earth's orbit on its way towards the sun. I mean, they, so these new orbits clears the space for our survival here on Earth. And so Jupiter is our friend. It's our friend that takes care of the bullies in the schoolyard. Do we know enough about other solar systems to know whether or not this is a typical setup?

It was our urge, given what's called the Copernican principle, to say that we're not special, we're average. And if we're average, then other solar systems should look like us because the sun is kind of average, and we're not on the littlest planet or the biggest planet. So you make some assumptions. As the star systems came into the catalogs, as our techniques and methods to observe other planets in the solar system arose we started to learn that our solar system is not typical that most solar systems most star systems have a

jupiter-sized object much closer to their host star than our jupiter is so then we say well wait well then why is our star system different from theirs and so it's a frontier it's an active frontier and no one is putting their bets on any one kind of solar system as being the most representative. And we're building the catalog now. So the catalog that has 700 or so exoplanets in it, that's only 500 star systems.

We're now building the catalogs of the secondary tertiary planets in the star systems that we've already discovered. We've discovered a lot of binary star systems. We're now building the catalogs of the secondary tertiary planets in the star systems that we've already discovered. We've discovered a lot of binary star systems as well, right, where there's more than one sun? Oh, well, first, if you look up at the night sky, almost half of all the dots of light you see, if you pull out a telescope, will reveal themselves to be binary or triple star systems. It is as common as the breeze in the universe. The challenge here is, what happens to a planet in orbit around a binary or multiple star system?

That's the challenge. And is the atmosphere stable enough to support a lot of... Well, that would be a concern no matter where the planet is. But here's the challenge with a multi-star star system. As the planet orbits, maybe it'll get really close to one star and really far from another. And maybe the orbit is entangled between the two of them trying to do figure eights. If you have an unstable orbit, you're likely to eject the planet forever into interstellar space.

And in fact, data are now showing that interstellar space may have more rogue planets that have been ejected for having misbehaved orbits from their star system than there are stars within planetary systems themselves. Dude, you just blew my fucking mind. And they're called rogue planets. No, no, let me... No, I didn't even... No, no, I'm just beginning here. So watch.

So, we also know that many planets have still retained their heat of formation long after they've come into existence. Earth still has heat churning, a source of energy that is not traceable to the sun. This is what creates the magma that's sitting below Earth's crust. The sun didn't heat that. That's heat generated within the sun. This is what creates the magma that's sitting below Earth's crust. The sun didn't heat that. That's heat generated within the Earth. Some is left over from formation. Others is created from radioactive decay of elements.

But we've got an energy source. And our biology books from decades ago said life needs sunlight. No, no, no, no. Life needs energy. It doesn't care if it comes from the sun. Volcanic vents at the bottom of the sea with no sunlight. No, no, no, no. Life needs energy. It doesn't care if it comes from the sun. Volcanic vents at the bottom of the sea with no sunlight. For example, the Juan de Fuca Ridge off of the coast of Washington is a vent in the bottom of

the ocean that is releasing the heat from below. And it's an energy source. It's at the bottom of the ocean where the sun don't shine, where the sun don't reach. And yet there's life form thriving there, existing on a form of geochemical energy. It's got nothing to do with the sun. The fact that we've discovered exotic life on earth has broadened the net that we have cast into space in our search for life in the universe. No longer do we need to look for the 72 degree pond in an oxygen atmosphere planet in our search for life. So this Goldilocks zone where everything had to be perfect, we've got life thriving in

places that would kill us. And we are not the measure, the ultimate measure, of what the conditions that life requires to survive. So now that we're looking with this very broad net, we can say to ourselves, for these vagabond planets, if they still have their source of energy churning within, maybe there's life there. And if that's the case, the galaxy could be teeming with

life. And the fact that we're focusing our search on planets around stars may simply be limiting all that we can discover in the cosmos. So these planets could essentially be spaceships filled with life forms headed our way, and they might even slam into us. Well, metaphorical spaceships, yeah. And the problem is, since they're homeless, there's nothing to illuminate them. So they're pitch black flying through the galaxy. Now, if some of the heat reaches the surface,

you can use infrared telescopes that might pick them up, but we wouldn't even know where to look. Well, isn't that the thought about the object that they believe is somewhere outside of the Kuiper Belt? Is that what they say? Yeah, Kuiper, Kuiper, yeah. Yeah, so this is an astronomer mid-20th century who hypothesized that beyond the outermost planet, there would be sort of the leftovers of the solar system that didn't collect into a bona fide red-blooded planet. But the residue should still be out there.

Because if your residue in an orbit where a red-blooded planet exists, you're going to collide with that planet eventually. You're going to merge with the planet and make that planet even bigger. This is one of the failed criteria for Pluto being classified as a planet because it is in a zone in the solar system that has not cleared its orbit. It is in the Kuiper Belt, in the inner edge of it, yes, but it is joined by countless thousands of other icy bodies. Earth, yes, we plow through crap in our orbit,

but it is the ratio of the mass of the stuff we plow into to Earth's mass is like gnats flying into an elephant. It doesn't knock over the elephant. It is of no concern to the elephant. Anything that could still possibly collide with us, Earth won't even care. We'll care because it'll affect the ecosystem, but Earth, the planet, is so much more massive than anything we would ever collide with from now to the end of the solar system. We have basically cleared our orbit of anything dangerous.

Pluto has not. So that was a damning fact in the ruling that got it demoted from planet to planet. So meaning that it doesn't have enough mass to attract all the other objects that are nearby? And neither does anything else. And so it's just the swarm of comets, the Kuiper Belt of comets. So now, if you go beyond the Kuiper Belt,

you're so far from the sun, if you're going to talk to us, it would be through reflected sunlight, but you're so far away. Nothing reflects. And these things are really dark objects to begin with. So how do they find them? Well, it would be hard.

So it's possible you can have a big object well beyond the Kuiper Belt. It would just be really hard to find. And I can say without hesitation that if there's a huge object out there, its gravity is of no consequence to anything that's going on between us and the Kuiper Belt. I just thought it was fascinating because the idea was that there was a Jupiter-sized planet so far outside of our solar system, or what we consider our solar system, that it was causing some sort of a gravitational effect on the Kuiper Belt. What you might be remembering is the Nemesis object. What is that?

Okay, now I'm feeding your... My doom and gloom? Don't do it. Let the record show, the man's eyebrows moved up into his forehead. So, there was an analysis of the extinction episodes in the history of the Earth

that suggested that perhaps they were episodic or periodic. Every sort of 20 million years or so, there was a little dip in the fossil record. And we said, well, all right. You know, by the way, geologists look for indicators in the fossil record and in the rock record to demark where one era, one period, one epoch begins and another one ends. So, for example, the dinosaurs croaked at the beginning, 65 million years ago, at the K-T boundary. It's got some other name lately.

I haven't kept up with that. But that boundary, they knew it was a boundary, so they dated, they called that a different geologic zone, that which followed 65 million years ago compared to that which came before it. And they did that long before they knew what the hell happened there. We would later learn that an asteroid struck. And there might have been, there surely were some super volcano activity and what are called the Deccan traps. And so there's a lot of bad stuff going on in the Earth at that time. So it was hostile to life.

We lost 70% of the world's life species in that period of time. Right there, 65 million years ago. It was devastating. But awesome for us because that's how we're here, right? Flowering plants. So asteroids are our friends. Yes. They reset

the world. We had a fucked up environment. It was a bad neighborhood. Dinosaurs were everywhere. Bad for us. We couldn't make it. We were just rats back then. We were scurrying underfoot as early rodents. Yes. And we were just hors d'oeuvres for T-Rex basically. And you take them out of the

ecological niche, we can then aspire to evolve to something more interesting than a tree tree. Something that can consider the Kuiper Belt. Yes. So it was imagined that maybe there's an object out there that's so far away you can't see it. But it's on this huge looping orbit that comes by the sun every 20 million years because that's the cycle of these extinction episodes.

And if that's the case, no, it doesn't hit us. It has to stay around for the next cycle. So what does it do? It has a gravitational field that perturbs these outer comets and sends a rain of comets down into the inner solar system, creating impact extinctions on a cycle of every 20 million years. This was proposed back in the 1980s. But it's not an object that anyone has ever seen. It's an object whose existence was inferred or asserted based on the record of extinction in the fossil record.

A further analysis of the fossil record doesn't actually hold up this cyclical extinction pattern. It's more erratic than that. And so you can't really... So it's evaporated as an idea. But it was clever and intriguing and got a lot of headlines at the time. I don't think it's the same thing that what I read. What I read was from 2010. It was something about the Oort cloud, O-O-R-T cloud.

Yeah, that's a swarm of comets, not quite halfway to the nearest star, but very far out there. That is sort of the outer reaches of the gravitational grasp of the sun. If you go much beyond that, your gravitational allegiance is uncertain, and you could fall into the next star rather than fall towards the sun. The guys were, I don't know if you've heard of these guys, astrophysicists John Matisse and Daniel Whitmore from the University of Louisiana came up with a theory that said that something smaller than a Jovian mass would not be strong enough to perform this task. They believe that there's something up to 25% of them,

okay, four times as big as Jupiter, could be responsible for sending these objects in our direction. Is this just a random theory that these guys put together that wasn't completely accepted? No, no, no. There's no known such object. What people are doing, and I don't fault them for it. It's creative. It would make awesome science fiction storytelling.

Is there's something you need to explain here on Earth. Somebody went extinct. There was some wave of comets. There's some observation that was never repeated. There's something you've got to come up with. And so you say, well, we know the Oort cloud exists. We know you can perturb those orbits and send them careening down towards the inner solar system.

And those that Jupiter doesn't bat away away like batting practice, those that get through Jupiter's gravitational shield could wreak havoc on Earth. Yeah. But it's inventing a lot to explain something you don't know. So it's inventing more of what you don't know

that could be true to explain what you don't that which you don't have any other evidence to support what you don't... Right. That which you don't have any other evidence to support. So it's fun speculation. Fun speculation, exactly. But beyond that, to say, oh, it's real, it must be happening, no. No, it's just...

Let someone write a good sci-fi story on it. Here's what's fun about it, and this is why I bring it up. Most people, I've talked about this subject to many, many people, and I myself, personally, I'm not immune to this. I find it very fascinating. However, how much have I looked into the actual planets that we absolutely know are real? Not that much, but I'm worried about this fucking fake planet

that may or may not exist. Dude, they might have found another planet. It's this idea of something hidden and mysterious, which is so compelling and attractive to people. That's a fascinating psychological observation. It's a idea of something hidden and mysterious which is so compelling and attractive that's fascinating Psychological observation. It's a weird thing. We want to believe there's something Mysterious that we don't understand and could be there, but we don't know anything about yet where there's plenty of things We do know something about but we want to know more. Why don't you help? Yes All right, and by the way, the universe is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine.

And so to say I need your creativity to keep your life interesting, no. We've got black holes that are filleting stars layer by layer. Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you will see the entire future of the universe unfold in front of you in a matter of moments, and you will emerge into another space-time created by the singularity of the black hole you just fell into? You just broke the internet. You just broke the whole internet right there. So let's talk about that. Jesus. All right? why are we wasting time talking about whether the saturn 5 rocket i mean

because we're fascinated by shit that's unproven mysterious shit look i got a broken brain okay there's a reason for me you want some more cool stuff all right mars once had liquid running water coursing on its surface unquestionably it right. It has geologic, marsologic features that correspond in every way to the geologic features you see when you fly over the Mississippi River. You see tributaries leading to larger rivers. You see meandering pathways. You see river deltas at the end of the river basin. You see dried lake beds. You see all of this. But Mars is bone dry today. Something happened to the water. We don't

know what. We're pretty sure it sunk down beneath the surface in a kind of permafrost. My point is, if any time in the past, Mars had liquid running water, every place on Earth there's liquid running water, there's life. There's evidence to think that Mars was habitable with liquid running water before Earth was. Well, see, then you just started up another conspiracy theory. That's the Richard Hoagland group of people that believed that there was pyramids and a face on Mars and there was

civilization. I have something better than that, all right? That if Mars was fertile for life before Earth, something we learned recently in the last 10 years, that asteroid impacts on a- Past Spermium. There you go. Can be strong, can be violent enough that they can fling surrounding rocks with escape velocity into interplanetary space where they will drift until they are attracted by the gravity of some other

planet and they will then fall and land on its surface if mars was fertile and formed life, microbial though it may only have been, it's microbial life that can survive dehydration, high radiation, absence of, we have found what we call extremophiles on earth, like I said a moment ago, that thrive under conditions that would kill us. High pressure, low pressure, high temperature, low temperature, high radiation. All of these conditions the microbes would have encountered on Mars being thrust into space and making that journey. Well, if that's possible and if that's the case, then life on Earth could have been seeded by life on Mars, making every life form on Earth a descendant of Martians. More importantly, why do we have bacteria that could survive high radiation in the first place? What business does that have here beneath Earth's protective atmosphere, thriving in places where there isn't high radiation?

We have life forms that can survive what that trip through space would have – what a trip through space would have – what it would have been subjected to by a trip through space. So you have an... Now, by the way, life does not evolve the way anyone typically thinks it does. You're not some organism that then adapts to a new environment. No, you just die. The variation in organisms allows some to thrive in conditions that would otherwise kill you, and it's my genetic offspring that continue. Nobody adapted to anything. Nature is selecting that subset of the variation in a generation that has survival properties

for that next assault in the environment. So if Mars is teeming with life and microbes are flying into space as stowaways in the nooks and crannies of rocks, then that population will be selected for those microbes that can survive that journey through space. Does a planet need any sort of an atmosphere in order to support life or they just need water? All we know is what can support life as we know it. Right. I don't know if we're inventive enough to invent other kinds of life form. But life as we know it requires liquid water because that allows nutrients to move through

our vessel that we call our bodies and right on down to microorganisms. We all thrive and use liquid water, and we need a heat source and more specifically a heat gradient. There has to be a place where there's more energy in one place than somewhere else. When you have a gradient, then you can create and sustain life as we know it. Without that, there's no known way to do it. So the entropy laws work against you to make life. There's no known way to do it.

So the entropy laws work against you to make life. So your point is that it's possible that organisms could be growing even on asteroids then. Oh, sorry. So your point was do we need an atmosphere? Yeah. Well, recent evidence suggests that possibly more than half of the mass of biology, the biomass of Earth, lives and thrives beneath Earth's surface, not on its surface. If that's the case, what's going on in the atmosphere is relatively irrelevant. If you're thriving deep within a nook and cranny of a rock a mile down,

you know... But don't they have some air down there? Yeah, there's some air, but, you know, it's not cycling with what's going on in our air, you know. So the rules become broader. Right. Or altered from what you would presume the life requires.

So, to talk about a planet being habitable, we should no longer think only of what the surface of that planet supplies. We need to think more broadly about what could go on deep within its surface as well. We're pretty sure there are no large macroscopic organisms lumbering around like in Journey to the Center of the Earth of Jules Verne, where there are creatures down there. Hollow earth. Yeah, hollow earth. No, there's no evidence that we have huge creatures. The pressures and the behavior of material doesn't allow there to be huge cavities

that haven't over the billions of years completely been filled in. When I say huge, I mean, you know, hundreds of miles large. No, the system would collapse into that rapidly. And you can get smaller caverns, like Carlsbad Caverns, that sort of thing. But nothing, you know, staggeringly large. Now, when you consider all the possibilities for life in the universe, which are almost infinite, right? Yeah, there are probably more ways to make life than we haven't thought of than the way to make life that is, that we know of here on Earth. We're just not imaginative. We just don't, you know, I'm reminded of, if I get a little literate on you for a moment, in the late 18th century, there's a book published called Cosmotheros by Christian Huygens.

And he was a polymath. He was great at math and physics and biology. He wrote a book exploring what life might be like on all the planets. And listen to this reasoning. This is hilarious. the planets. And listen to this reasoning. This is hilarious. He said, Jupiter, well, it's clear it's got an atmosphere because through a telescope, you see bands of gas moving across its surface. Well, if it has an atmosphere, then life forms there would probably exploit that atmosphere the way we do. Because it has an atmosphere, it means it probably has rain,

because we get rain out of our atmosphere. If it has rain, it must have oceans. If it has oceans, they must need a means for traveling. So they would build ships with sails. And if those ships have sails, they would need rope. So they probably have hemp. Wow. So this was obviously extrapolation to an extreme. Right. But just analyze that for one split second. Every supposition was founded, rooted in what we do as humans. And there's no greater hubris than to presume that what we find somewhere else would be just like us or act just like us or have the same needs as us. I always felt that way about...

Or even have the same number of senses as us. They could have fewer. They could have more. Think about how much of our lives are influenced, how much of our society is built on services that bring pleasure to our senses. Our sense of touch, where you can go get a massage. Damn right you can, if you know the right place. Our sense of taste. There is food brought to high cuisine. Our sense of hearing. Sure. We make beautiful music. Our sense of sight.

We make great art. So much of what we do is to satisfy our five traditional senses. Imagine if we had 10 senses or 20. I have a theory on that. It's called the fart principle. I have no understanding of how that principle could relate to this, but I'm all ears. Well, this is why. If you did not have a nose and you could live your whole life without a sense of smell in the year 2012, it's very possible.

If someone farted in front of you, you would have no idea that this terrible gas is you're inhaling. It's in your nose. You wouldn't have that sense of smell. Okay. So you could exist and not have any idea because gas is invisible. Okay. That's a bad example, and I'll tell you why. That's a good example.

No, no, I'll tell you why. Could be alien life form all around us all the time that we don't have the sense to, like, it's like worms can't see. Joe, you'll be able to taste it. But we can. So two things. So first, it's a good example in the sense that,

no pun intended, in the sense that without, who knows what senses we're missing and therefore who knows what there is to measure in our world around us that we are completely missing. Right. All right. I'll get back to that in a minute.

Regarding your fart theory. Yes. Here's the problem. All right. My theory's up for peer review right now. Yes, it is. It is totally getting peer reviewed. It's the right thing to call it too.

It's a legitimate hypothesis. Thank you. It's out on the table. Now, here you go. You ready totally getting peer-reviewed. It's the right thing to call it, too. It's a legitimate hypothesis. Thank you. It's out on the table. Now, here you go. You ready? It's my last one. One of the active ingredients in the smell of a fart is hydrogen sulfide. It turns out hydrogen sulfide is extremely lethal.

It's one of the most lethal gases that exists. Well, why do we have such a good sense of smell for that? Why don't we smell other gas? Why don't we smell nitrogen? Well, we don't need to smell nitrogen because it's not going to kill us because it's 78% of what you breathe anyway. We have evolved a hypersensitive sense for the smell of hydrogen sulfide. If you gave birth to someone who said hydrogen sulfide smells beautiful,

and let's smell more of it. Let's get canisters of it. They're dead 10 minutes later, no longer able to propagate the gene that liked the smell of hydrogen sulfide. We had to not like that smell. Otherwise, we would not have survived. By the way, hydrogen sulfide is a byproduct of the digestive activity of anaerobic microbes. That's why it comes out of your lower intestine, not only where the sun don't shine,

where oxygen doesn't exist. The microbes that thrive down there, they are anaerobic, and hydrogen sulfide is one of their byproducts. It has been theorized that there have been places and times on Earth where the ocean currents stopped. And when ocean currents stop, oxygen at the surface of the ocean never makes it to the bottom. So you can't sustain oxygen life forms at the bottom of the ocean never makes it to the bottom so you can't sustain oxygen life forms at the bottom of the ocean

There no fish there wouldn't be any fishes down there if the ocean currents stopped Because the ocean currents not only go from one place to another in the world. They circle they circulate top to bottom, right? So it's a two-dimensional thing going on three dimensions actually So so if something happens on earth where you stop the oceanic cycles, you can create a condition in the lower ocean where anaerobic life forms thrive. And if they thrive, they outgas. And one of the outgases is hydrogen sulfide. It will gurgle up from the bottom of the ocean, rise up near the shores, turning shorelines into the smell of cesspools.

If you were alive at the time and didn't run away from that, you would have simply died from it. That is all well and good. Therefore, the nose theory, that if we didn't have a nose, we could all just fart. If we didn't have a nose,

we wouldn't have noticed hydrogen sulfide, and humans would not have survived it, and some other creature would be having this interview right now. I agree with you and disagree with you at the same time, and here's why. What you're saying involves real people and real-life adaptation to our environment. What I'm talking about is aliens that are just like farts. And this is why you gave me a crazy, long-winded, really in-depth explanation, but you still don't discredit the possibility

that just like the sense of smell, it exists, but it is invisible. There could be many things around us that are also invisible, but we have not developed any means to detect them. You were being metaphorical. It works, right? Wi-Fi. So you're being metaphorical with your

fart theory. Yes, I'm not saying that you could live, no one would have had to have a nose to know Earth farted. So I overanalyzed your theory. You went crazy with it man you beat it down i like it though that was cool it was cool oh by the way one global warming scenario is the currents yes did you see the day after tomorrow did you see that unbelievably horrible yeah yeah that one was was that went to no good yeah so good it was bad when there was the cancer

baby and everybody else is dead outside but she's surviving with the cancer baby and she's going to stay there for the kid. Meanwhile, 100 billion people are dead. It's an awesome movie.

Right, exactly. But let me get back to your nose, your fart nose. He's crazy. Okay, so now, here's why you're probably not right.

Well, I'm definitely not right. Look, it's a ridiculous idea. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. But there's a reason why you're probably not right. Okay. it's a ridiculous idea. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. But there's a reason why you're probably not right. Okay. Okay? Because beginning in the 1600s, we learned that our senses are not only, they not only

fool us, they, and occasionally don't work, they're not all that the universe tells us. They don't have the capacity to recognize all that's going on in the universe. Well, certainly at a microscopic level. Well, that's my point. That's my point. So in the early 1600s, two important advances,

actually late 1500s, you had the invention of the microscope and you had the invention of the telescope. This is really the first steps to enhance our senses beyond what our human biology endowed us with. And upon doing so, we discovered things about the world that were previously oblivious to us. We discovered nose farts. When Leeuwenhoek brought his telescope, his microscope, to a drop of pond water and saw what were called animicules. What else were you going to call it? The little things, paramecia and protozoa, thriving in a drop of water. That was a nose fart, keeping with your vocabulary.

That was something that previously no one had any idea was there. And my point is, beginning in 1600, and with an ever-improving improving march forward the methods and tools of science have served to enhance our senses increase our senses increase the range of our senses but more importantly give us whole kinds of senses that your five senses could have never even imagined, that our human biology couldn't even approximate. So what's an example? Yeah, we don't have senses to detect magnetic field at all. That's why you

can sit in an MRI chamber and sit there and whistle Dixie, and you'll have no idea the strength of the magnetic field that's being cast across your body. We don't have sensors for it. You don't have sensors... For radio. For radio waves. Well, the difference there is we do have sensors

for one aspect of the electromagnetic spectrum. We have sensors for infrared, visible, and a delayed sense for ultraviolet. Is that me? Oh, wow. Sorry about that. It's pretty loud and a creative ringtone, just like mine. I learned that cleaves aren't dangerous. He goes old school. Yeah, yeah. So the point is, radio waves are part of the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

We have access to some of that, and we call that, for obvious reasons, visible light. Right. But outside of the range of visible light, you have ultraviolet, X-rays, gamma rays, radio waves, microwaves. So, yes, we can't see radio waves, but that would just be an extension of our senses in the way Geordi in Star Trek, the next generation, had his visor. That visor allowed him to see the entire... Did you just go Star Trek on? I had to go there just because I had to. And my sideburns are Star Trek

sideburns. I don't know if you... So he puts the... That visor enabled him to see the entire electromagnetic spectrum. If we were thusly equipped, you'd walk down the street and the microwave towers would be ablaze with microwaves. And you'd tune into sort of ultraviolet.

And you'd think twice about going to the beach because that's the stuff that gives you skin cancer, especially people with lighter skin. If you want to see, what would be a good example? If you want to see if there's a burglar entering your house, just shift over to infrared. If the burglar is warm-blooded, they will show up even if all the lights are out. Like the predator. Exactly. Exactly. It's another way to detect the light.

So science has broadened our senses and given us senses that our human biology could not have even thought of or invented. senses that our human biology could not have even thought of or invented. So the notion at this day and age that something is happening on this tabletop that is eluding us, I think is just simply unlikely because we're so good now at finding things that previously escaped our notice right in front of us. Right now, that frontier is at the energy extremes of the CERN accelerator in Switzerland. That frontier is at the James Webb Space Telescope, where we're going to look at the earliest formation of matter in the history of the universe.

These are the extremes of our measurements of nature today. The biological limitations of human beings uh the birth and the death you know the fact that we are all born and we all die do we apply those to the universe for a reason or do we know that there was a birth is that is that a hundred percent sure that it before the big bang there was no, there was something? Was there anything? Do we know that? Yeah, so we don't know what happened before the Big Bang. So that's my first and highest level answer to you.

That doesn't mean some people don't have some creative ideas, but the only real answer is we don't know, and we have top people working on it. All right. So now some of the creative ideas are quantum physics, which is the most successful theory of physics there ever was, quantum theory, tells us that the early universe may have been a fluctuation in the laws of physics, allowing other fluctuations at the same time, so that we are but one bubble of many, comprising an infinite set of bubbles, deserving the retrospectively obvious name multiverse. The multiverse theory is a scary one.

The multiverse. And so if there's a multiverse, then we're just one bubble, and this multiverse is just churning them out. Some of them, by the way, we're on a one-way expansion trip. Other universes, the laws of physics might be slightly different, or the conditions, the initial conditions might be slightly

altered from ours, and it would expand and then re-collapse. They'd have a big squeeze at the end. Some universes might be created without any matter at all. So you have a universe with no one to contemplate it. We happen to have a universe where the matter and energy within it assembled and achieved consciousness. So a universe where there's no matter at all,

but it's infinite and self-comprised. It is the universe. You can't get here from there. Not that we know of, but there could be a way. We might be able to invent a multiverse transport kit where you leave your universe and enter another, but I don't recommend that. Because if the laws of physics are even slightly different,

the charge on the electron, the mass of the neutron, if any of these are slightly different, then everything that holds you together, all the physical laws that come together to make you, including all the forces of nature, they would just completely collapse in the existence if you stepped into the zone of this other universe. Or they take on some other form or shape that we can't even imagine. So, yeah, I don't want to... You know, that's when you flip... You send in a probe or something, but you don't send yourself.

So that's why I joke about this half seriously, that if an alien comes to visit, I want to make sure in advance that they're not made of antimatter. So I flip them a coin, and they catch it. If they don't explode together, annihilation, then I'll shake their hand. So when matter hits. And say, welcome to Earth. Wouldn't they explode just touching the ground then?

Yeah, well, they might have hover glide or something. Oh, they could be gliding and shit. Well, plus they're touching the atmosphere, which is matter. So if I meet them in space, let's say. So if they're made of antimatter and you shake hands, everybody dies. You completely annihilate. That's correct. Jesus.

Yeah. So that's what happens in our own universe. Imagine some other universe. There's no telling how our laws of physics would interact with each other. So you ask what's before the universe? It may be the multiverse. But now. Now. Now. When you point what's before the universe? It may be the multiverse. But now? Now. Now.

When you point that finger, I get nervous. So there's cogent physics reasons to think that there's a multiverse and quantum physics takes us there. There's also good philosophical reason to think that there's a multiverse. Because in our experience discovering the cosmos, the universe never makes anything in ones. When we thought Earth is it, no, Earth is just one of

many other planets. Well, the sun is... No, the sun is one of a hundred billion stars in the galaxy. Well, the Milky Way... No, no, there's a hundred billion other galaxies in the universe. Well, the universe? Well, we've been there before.

Right, right. Am I going to say there's one universe? I'm a little... Well, ultimately, isn't there just one universe? The universe consisting of billions and billions of infinite... I'm getting there. So watch the vocabulary. So we have this one universe, but I don't want to think there's one universe because the trend line says differently all right so maybe there's this multiverse

well that just continues to push the question a little deeply if the universe never makes if the if the this entity never makes anything in ones then why would it only make one multiverse? Jesus Christ! So then... So maybe there are multiple multiverses. Okay? So that would... And then it's, you know,

turtles all the way down, as they say. So, like I said, we don't have a handle on it yet, but we've solved other origin problems, because what started this was your question about birth and death. There was a time when we didn't know how the Earth began. We have a good idea of that now, and how the moon formed. We've got that. How the sun formed, we got that. No, we weren't around five billion years ago to watch it, but you don't need to be. There are very clever ways to know what happened in the past. Geologists have been doing it ever since the field was born. There's a record writ for geologists in the rocks telling you where they've been, what temperature they were exposed to, and how long they've been sitting there.

We look at the sun. No, we can't go back in time with it, but we can look at other stars. We look out in the galaxy. There's so many stars. We're catching some being born. We're catching others dying. We're catching some in orbit around each other.

And we're seeing some that don't exist anymore because by the time their light reaches us, they've already faded out. There'll be some of them that, in fact, at this instant no longer exist, and that information has yet to reach us. Isn't that

that's insane. And by the way that happens several hundred times a year. We observe what are called supernovae. Yes. I was going to ask you about that.

Stars that explode. We watch them explode and we date them from when we see them explode. But hell they'd exploded long ago depending on their distance. If they're a thousand

light years away they exploded a 1,000 years ago. But you had no knowledge of it until today. There was a fantastic documentary on hypernovas, and it was so mind-boggling because they went back to the birth of the discovery of hypernovas, and when they initially were theorizing that it was warfare in space. Yes, I'll tell you what that story was. So in the 1970s, after the United States and Russia, the Soviet Union, signed a surface test ban treaty where you couldn't test nuclear weapons on Earth's surface,

we, you know, there's the old military credo, trust but verify. We said, all right, we'll sign this treaty, but we're going to keep an eye on you. So we got together, the engineers and the physicists, and we, I mean, my brethren of the day, invented a telescope, a kind of detector that was sensitive to gamma rays. That's one of these bands in the electromagnetic spectrum, the highest energy band for which we have a word to describe it, gamma rays. By the way, that's what dr banner was exposed to that made oh don't you think i'm not aware big green and ugly so actually that's not actually

what would happen to you if you're exposed to but we'll give the comics the the the scientific latitude so so you have this um so so what happens so they launched launch this detector. And seven, eight, nine, ten times a week, this satellite with this detector on board detects bursts of gamma rays. And the Pentagon scrambled, and they said, what's going on? Are they actually detonating these weapons? And they looked at other satellite secondary tertiary information. Soviet Union was silent. There was no evidence of any nuclear testing at all. And that was the birth, that day to the day

of the publication of that paper that reported on these daily bursts. That was the birth of the field of astrophysics called gamma-ray astronomy. And we now have other gamma-ray telescopes out there studying these. They are explosions, and they're happening at the edge of the universe, and their sources are hypernovae. We needed a word bigger than supernovae,

and these are the biggest explosions known in the universe, so we call them hypernovae. And the amount of power produced by a hypernova. Oh, yeah, it's extraordinary. What matters more than that it's a lot of power is that it's very focused. It comes out in two beams, one in one direction and one in the other. And if we happen to be in the beam, that's all she wrote. You're done, son.

That's it. Yeah, if there were a hypernova anywhere in our galaxy. Everybody's done. In the entire galaxy and it was beamed towards Earth, we're toast. Literal and figurative. Wrap your head around that, kids. There's a hundred billion stars at least, right? In this galaxy. Yeah, but most, I mean, a hypernova is a very special and rare kind of star. Eight times a day? Well, no, in the universe. Yeah. No, eight times a week. Eight times a week. Yeah, yeah. Between seven and ten times a week. Once a day.

In the entire universe. Wow. So that tells you how rare it is. It takes 150 to 100 billion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars, to give you eight of these a week. Duh. Yeah. So, by the way, there's an interesting way that this will render us toast. So the first ray of gamma rays will take out our ozone layer.

The ozone absorbs high-energy radiation. That's what protects us from, it's what absorbs most of the ultraviolet from the sun. Otherwise, ultraviolet is hostile to life, to life on the surface. And there wouldn't be life as we know it without this ozone layer on Earth. All right. But you can overrun the ozone layer. The ozone is oxygen. It's O3. All right. The air you breathe has O2 in it, the molecule O2. Ozone is O3. An ultraviolet photon comes in, slams into O3, breaks it apart into O plus O2. There you go.

It took the ultraviolet light out of the picture. It's gone. That's why it protects us. Okay? So if there's a gamma ray burst, more high energy photons will hit us than there are O3 molecules in our ozone layer so they all hit and they break apart

the O3's and it's like the first wave of of what are the cavalry who are the first ones in the battle the first ones they get all shot up right I mean in the old fashioned battles they run in they get shot up, right? I mean, in the old-fashioned battles, they run in, they get shot up, okay? The first wave comes in,

it protects us from some of it, but it overruns the ozone layer. The rest come in and basically starts breaking apart the molecular, the complex molecules that exist on Earth's surface. That's how high energy the light is. And generally, we think of life as complex chemistry and the most complex

form of chemistry we know and so we would not survive that that would be an extinction uh episode for all life on earth and now now if you could burrow underground that'd be cool go there i wouldn't want to i would rather just stop i think it's just too much to ask to survive something like that. Grab a beer, get out your lawn chair, and watch it come. Yeah, it just doesn't seem like anything you want to survive. It seems like you have to sort of give in to the reality that the greater good of the universe will be fine. It's time for the rats and roaches to rise up in our place.

Or whatever. But it's like our own consciousness is so strung up on the idea of staying in this form, you know, physically alive and keep this thing, whatever this is, going. Because of our survival instincts, it really sort of confuses and dilutes the whole idea of perception that the universe itself is not just infinite, but infinitely fractal. Yeah, well, no, the average life expectancy of a mammal species is about 3 million years. And I'm sure there's some of us out there who are thinking that we'll live for billions of years and planet hop and star hop.

And then there are people who are saying, well, we better learn how to terraform Mars because Earth is about to be completely messed up. And those folks, I think, are misguided in their thinking. Can I tell you why? Sure, please. Who doesn't want to terraform Mars, okay? I don't want to.

They did it on... I got kids. You don't want another planet to visit? It'd be a fun vacation spot. I have no issues. But don't do that because you want another place to live to escape the fact that we're destroying our own Earth. All right?

The environment and the oceans and the atmosphere. Here's why. It's a very simple argument. If we have the power to convert Mars into something that looks like Earth, then we have the power to fix our oceans and our own oceans and our own atmosphere. Yes. Right? Of course.

If you have the power of geoengineering, you don't have to leave the planet your arm, turn another one into Earth and move there. Fix Earth. Yes. Thank you. It seems like just a step in the stage of innovation. As long as human beings have access to energy,

we're going to figure out how to get energy from pollution and get energy from... There's going to be... With the massive amounts of progress that have been made just in the last 200 years, I always like to describe to people, if they really have a hard time wrapping their head around it, that 200 years ago, if you wanted a picture of something,

you had to draw it. Just stop and look at that. That's a great, great observation. And it's such a small amount of time that a massive amount of stuff has happened. And if you stop and think about what we're capable of like man who know i mean i don't know the answer to overpopulation i don't know the answer but i do know that i would have never figured out wi-fi on my own okay i would have

never figured out how to send a satellite signal who the fuck even understands what's going on when you get online yeah just think about what's going on in your car's GPS, right? So it's talking to a satellite and mixing your location on Earth's surface with information that's in the later versions of it on your car, updated from the internet, about what direction the traffic flows on a street you happen to be driving on, and whether the Dunkin' Donuts is open late. Yeah, as long as there's money in fixing the environment, we're going to fix the environment.

Well, that's the challenge. The trick is to make it so that people can actually find some benefit. In a capitalist, free economy, that's the driver of it all. Yeah, it pushes things and it also leaves a lot of bullshit in its wake and a lot of pollution and problems. I mean, I hope we figure it out before we eat up the rainforest. I really do. But if we don't, we could probably make a new rainforest one day.

We could probably figure out some way. Just build one. Yeah. I mean, it's a fucked up way to look at things. Like, we'll figure it out. Don't worry. But I think the doom and gloom analysis of we're doomed, there's no way, we're going to run out of food, I think that's kind of a silly way to look at it, too.

It seems to me that if you fly over just the United States alone, God, there's a lot of space to do shit. Yeah, that's correct. And if you wanted to do some shit on the moon or on Mars, you could kind of do it in Nevada as well. You could find some spots in Utah that nobody's there, and you could put up a dome and grow some vegetables. Well, what will happen is Earth keeps warming. You saw the news that last year was by far the longest, the warmest year ever by far, 2012, the warmest year on Earth. The warmest year since when?

Well, I didn't read the full depth of the article, but certainly the warmest on record. The warmest that we've been keeping records of how warm the earth has been. But not since like... Jurassic. Right, right. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no.

In any time that civilization has been concerned about this. And so if that's unstoppable, for whatever reasons, political, cultural, economic, whatever, If that's unstoppable, for whatever reasons, political, cultural, economic, whatever, what that will do is simply redraw the map of what is arable and what is not in the world. We'll live in Antarctica. We'll be fine. It will redistribute where we think of as the heartland and the wheat belt. Well, we know now about Greenland and underneath all that ice. Yeah, stuff that the climate that once was.

There was a day when Earth had no ice poles and no ice caps at all. Well, there was a day just 15,000, 16,000 years ago that half of North America was covered in ice. I like the way you said just 15,000 years ago. It's kind of crazy in the version of the universe. Yeah, that was... Our silly lives.

And there's good evidence to say that Earth had... Early Earth was a complete snowball, where the ice caps were so large that the north ice cap met the south ice cap at the equator. Wow. And it's called Snowball Earth. When was this? Very cool.

I forgot the exact time that they've been... It's geologists plus, you know, some... If you look at the history of the sun, the sun wasn't always the same temperature, time that they've been... It's geologists plus some... If you look at the history of the sun, the sun wasn't always the same temperature, so you have to fold that into what's going on on Earth at the time and what the state of the greenhouse effect is on Earth, because that also influences

the tracking... how high the temperature is versus what Earth is doing with the energy it received. When you're a snowball, most of the sun's light is reflected rather than absorbed. See that? And so that's how you can get a runaway snowball, right? So the ice caps grow a little bit, and this is like global climate change in the other direction.

That's way worse, right? It grows a little bit, and then less sunlight gets absorbed by the earth because ice is white. And so it freezes up a little more. And then even less sunlight gets kept and then it freezes up a little more. So you can have a runaway ice ball just as you can have a runaway greenhouse. That's incredible. That's interesting that these two possibilities exist and the glaciers when

they melt and they create water and the water acts as a reflector and the light goes through the water and melts the glaciers quicker. So for example, if their greenhouse gas is dissolved in the rocks or in the oceans and they're happy and nobody's disturbing them, then you maintain your atmospheric temperature

and the energy balance of sunlight hitting the earth, some getting absorbed, other parts getting reflected. But if you tip that balance, by the way, that can shift, that's not like a razor edge balance. I mean, there's slop in there. Restorative forces exist. But if you go outside of what a restorative force can give you, then you overrun the capacity to bring you back to any place where you once were. And then you get a runaway phenomenon.

And so you heat, and when you heat something, it outgasses, right? If you heat your soda, the CO2 comes out of it. It doesn't stay in. That's why we like drinking cold carbonated beverages. So if you heat Earth and greenhouse gases are dissolved within it, then you start releasing those greenhouse gases. That makes Earth retain even more heat, makes it hotter, and it makes it hotter, even more greenhouse gases come out.

And so you can imagine a situation where you have a runaway greenhouse where everything goes really hot. Is that where we're at? No. Is everybody doing gloom? We're not runaway. Earth has been this hot before and has recovered from it. Over time scales much longer than anybody's lifetime.

That's another problem here. Right. Earth has been much hotter than this. It just was much hotter before humans or much hotter before human. Yeah. Before human history. Oh yeah. And so we have great evidence for this. So the issue is not, will earth survive? It is whether we, as we have set up culture and civilization and economies and, and it's all been set up assuming a certain constancy of the conduct of nature. And if we now become a force in nature's equation, creating a cycling of phenomenon that would normally have taken 10,000 or 100,000 years, and we're doing it on a scale of centuries, then we better be prepared to face those consequences.

Much like your analogy of the clouds in a time-lapse fashion, the idea of living by the beach would be so fucking ridiculous if you ever saw the actual Pangea change into continents. That'd be the last... Why would you live near the water? What are you, crazy? That's 80% of our population, right? Exactly, yeah. Because cities are based typically near water sources,

on river mouths where transportation was useful in the days before railroads. You live in New York City. In Manhattan, lower Manhattan. Are you concerned about, like, Sandy and the impact that it had that this might be? It flooded Zone A, and Zone A was four blocks from me, from my zone, which was Zone C. I walked four blocks, five blocks away, and the entire underground parking garages were flooded. Cars were bobbing out of the exit doors of these parking garages. Have you thought about Utah or maybe perhaps the Colorado Mountains?

Because if you plan for the end of the world, I'm going where you're going. I'm going to call you up, dude. You better be straight with me. Tell me where to hide. I've got to tell you a cute story. A friend of mine, Rick Benzel, who's a planetary astronomer, he also created the risk scale for judging the likelihood of an asteroid

that's recently been discovered. He created the risk scale that will tell you the likelihood of that hitting Earth. Now, he and I like to drink wine when we're together. So if he's thinking that an asteroid is going to come one day, what's the first thing you ask him about his wine collection? What's the first thing you ask him? What are you going to drink? Exactly.

What bottle of wine do you have that you're going to pull out the day you know the asteroid's coming? So he was thinking maybe he could attach a little sensor behind that bottle. And it goes into my place and other friends of his. So if he pulls that bottle out, a red light starts flashing and you know, because he would be the

first to know this. It's his calculation that gets sent to the media. That gets sent to the press. Okay. Speaking of calculations, I have to talk to you about the conversation that you had. The man's name, Claude Shannon? Was that the guy who was talking? No, I've never spoke to anyone named Claude Shannon.

I'm trying to remember what the scientist's name that was talking to you about the discovery of computer... Oh, Jim Gates. Jim Gates. Yeah, Professor Jim Gates. He's a professor of physics at University of Maryland in College Park. Self-correcting computer code found in the computations of quantum physics. What the fuck does that mean? Yeah, so he found...

And I don't claim expertise in everything he said. I had him on a panel. We have an annual event at the American Museum of Natural History. That's my day job there as director of the Hayden Planetarium. And once a year we have this panel, and I bring on my colleagues who are active on the bleeding frontier of some topic. And I put them on stage and we all just fight about who's right or is there enough data or where is it? Should I believe you? Should I not? And so it's the annual Isaac Asimov panel debate. And it's designed to expose an aspect of science that the public hardly ever sees.

They usually see the perfectly written paper and the news report on it and everything is tidily discovered. They don't see the bloody bleeding edge where the fisticuffs come out. And so on this particular case, he, Jim Gates, discovered that there's a certain, in our representation of the universe. Quantum theory. Yes, yes. In the way we have come to understand the universe and our methods and tools, deep down is necessary a code written in zeros and ones

that is a particular kind of error-checking algorithm that we invoke daily in the movement of data from one system to another. And it's called a checksum error. You might have seen that in an error code. Anytime an error dump happens on your screen, go look in there. You'll see the word checksum in multiple places. It's one word, checksum. And it's a way to, it's like the idiot check on, did this bulk of data get through this portal? All right? So,

you know, you're looking at sort of the gross thing you can check for. You know, how many total bits were there? I don't know if they're the right bits, but I know how many total bits should have come. So let me check for that. So that's the kind of thing you do in a checksum. So he asserts that this exists deep within what we need to represent the operations of nature at its deepest, most fundamental levels. It is the matrix written deep and so alright so that's so I was astonished by this and I paused and actually there's a YouTube video of me interrogating him

I'm interrogating him and now I don't know that it's seen peer review yet he's a friend of mine so I can just call him up but before you start getting excited about it or bent out of shape about it or disturbed about it, you want it to see peer review. And the level of expertise in that analysis is above my pay scale. So it's got to go to peers who do exactly that kind of mathematical physics.

And if they come out with a consensus and they agree, then I'm good to go. And I'll invest more energy in coming to understand it. But for every correct idea of how the universe works, there's hundreds and in some cases, thousands of ideas that end up in the trash bin of creative thinking. And so I have to allocate my energies and my budget of time. And so it's intriguing, and I'm happy to know that it exists. But to take it beyond that and wax philosophically poetic about it, maybe over a beer at a bar, but no, not in an actual setting where I'm talking about science. Or maybe when you're high.

It's great fodder for conversation when you think you're being deep. Right. When you get done with your chemtrails talk, it's time to talk about computer simulation. The universe is on a hard drive. The multiverse is on a backup drive, like a RAID drive. Oh, all the backup drives are the multiverse. That's right. That's why it doesn't have all the information as the same universe because it only takes the base so it can like back up. He's going to make you dumber if you keep going. If you keep listening to him, he will propose some things that will ruin your brain.

The computer simulation theory has been bandied about in a bunch of different forms and the idea being that one day we'll have infinite amounts of processing power and we will be able to create a reality that is indiscernible from this reality and once that is done how will we know when we're in it and could we be in it right now and this is sounds like more high horseshit nonsense but this is being bandied about by some of the smartest people on the planet yeah i remain unconvinced i mean of what i've read and you're talking about basically Kurzweil and the singularity hypothesis but it folds in sort of I guess it requires the acceptance that the day will come where our computing

power and our storage power because it's growing exponentially with Moore's law it doubles every 18 months or so in capacity and speed and all the metrics that matter when you're matter when you're in information technology, the hypothesis that one day we can just upload our entire brain into a computer or a computer can simulate your brain in some fundamental way, then what do we need you

for if we can now just simulate it? I mean, up here in LA, the actor's version of that is they've just digitized your body in every angle, doing everything. What do we need you for? Exactly. They don't. And we need to get rid of most actors. They need to be outsourced. I don't think the actors' union is happy about that.

They can suck it. They're unnecessary humans for the most part. Some of them are beautiful. And for every Samuel Jackson, you've got a million douchebags. That's reality. It's just a flawed institution. Blue cigarettes. What'd you say, buddy?

Blue cigarettes. You said blue cigarettes. Blue cigarettes. Oh, Steven Dorff. You ever seen those ads? No. You want to prove there's a broad spectrum

of intelligent life on this planet itself? You need to see the ad for blue cigarettes. It's a black and white ad where Steven Dor dwarf is telling you how cool it is to smoke electronic cigarettes it's the second douchiest commercial that's ever existed the first is brad pitt's chanel number five commercial have you seen that i've only seen

the stills and all of the you want to become a dumber person i can show you i can make you dumber just slightly dumber like one millionth of one percent dumber. Oh, we're running out of time? Just let's show them that. We'll end with stupidity. Listen, man, you're a brilliant person. Thank you very much for not just being here, but for what you do. You know, even Mrs. Rogan was excited that you were on the podcast today. Well, thank you.

No, I mean, it's a... She's not big on science. As you can tell, she wants real diamonds. Next time I'll smuggle one out under blindfold for her. I'll see what i can do your your passion for knowledge and your passion for distributing it and it's it's so infectious and it's so fascinating and i got a lot of twitter messages today about you coming on and a lot of them were from people who said that you ignited their passion for science and you made them pursue specific career goals.

And there was a guy today who sent me this message about he's an engineer. He became an engineer because of listening to you. Well, I'm deeply appreciative of that, but let me pose that and let me analyze that in a slightly different way. I already know that the universe is an extraordinary place, but not everyone else does. is an extraordinary place, but not everyone else does. So part of what I do is serve as a conduit between the curiosity in our culture that is embedded there even if you've forgotten it,

because I know it's within us all, because it's there in all of us when we're children. A.K.A. you're a bad motherfucker. No, no. That's what I'm trying to say. All I do is park the curtains for people to recognize the awesomeness of the universe that is there with or without me. Well, you have a beautiful way of looking at it.

And I really appreciate your humility in that respect. But that perfect storm of personality and knowledge is very rare. And I just appreciate you for being who you are. And I thank you very much for being on this podcast. Can I just say, you know why I'm in L.A. now? Because we're beginning to shoot. Oh, thanks. There's applause in the corner.

We are creating the next generation Cosmos. Cosmos for the 21st century. Yes. The Carl Sagan time was classic. I've watched them all, a hundred times over. But that was from 1980. It's been 33 years. So we're doing it now.

It's going to be another... It's 13 episodes. It's Cosmos, A Space Time Odyssey. Is it PBS as well? No, it's not PBS. They have a hugely larger market exposure because it's going to appear likely in primetime, but we're not sure of that yet.

But it's going to air on Fox. Holy shit. Fox. Strong. That's amazing. God, it's going to air on Fox. Holy shit. Fox. Strong. That's amazing. God, that's going to be so good. We've got Seth MacFarlane, who's our broker. He brought us to Fox and I became latter-day friends

with him. He's a fan of Cosmos and he loves Carl Sagan. He's a fan of my work. He's a fan of weed, too. You ever talk to that guy? Loves the weed. Powerful Seth MacFarlane. Does that one account for those conversations I've had with him? Perhaps. That's what counts for this conversation you had with me.

Smoking aliens. He came to me, Neil, I've got to talk to you. I said, let's have lunch. We have lunch. He asked me all these questions about the Big Bang and the cosmic microwave background and the early universe. And I said, okay, you're good now? He said, yeah, I'm good.

And then three months later, there was an episode where Stewie went back to the Big Bang and I get a full card credit at the end as science advisor. Oh, that's amazing. No, I was like lunchtime entertainment for him and it was like the science advisor episode. One of the greatest things about creating this podcast has been the opportunity to have these kind of conversations. I could have never corralled you and said,

hey man, yeah, the guy who hosts the UFC and Fear Factor wants to sit down with you for three hours. He'd be like, yeah, tell that dude I got shit to do. But the fact that I could pick your brain for this long. Well, the fact that you even have this curiosity and you've nurtured it in your fan base is great. So great to be on your show. Thank you, sir.

I really, really appreciate it. And you can follow Neil on Twitter. Thank you, sir. I really, really appreciate it. And you can follow Neil on Twitter. It's N-E-I-L, Tyson, on Twitter. And follow him, you fucks, and show him some love, please. Thank you very much for being here.

Thanks, everybody, for all the messages on Twitter and Facebook and all the various comedy shows. Speaking of which, this weekend, this Friday night, two shows here at the Ice House in Pasadena, 8.30 and 10.30 with Ari Shafir. Are you coming? You want it? I might not be around. Brian might have some pussy lined up.

That's what I heard. But me and Ari will be there, and we'll probably have some other local guys, whoever's in town. I think Callan's in town. I'll get him to come by. But we're here. We're going to have a good fucking time. Thank you very much for coming by and watching our podcast thanks to on it for sponsoring it go to o-n-n-i-t use the code name rogan and save yourself 10 off any and all supplements also thanks to death squad.tv the the

brian red band empire and uh go there and you can buy one of those cool cat t-shirts and you can also find out what podcasts he has and when they're going to be there and what what shows they have coming up as well always great comics great a lot of like previously unknown local guys that uh Brian uh gives a shot uh at uh big exposure and uh really good really good comics and tonight uh after this podcast is over he has one of my favorite podcasts on the internet today. It's Pointless with Kevin Pereira. And that will be also available

only on Death Squad on iTunes. And who's the guest today? We got Mike. Hey, Kevin Pereira's here, ladies and gentlemen. Science, bitches! Alright, this podcast is over. Go fuck yourself.

We'll see you soon. We love the shit out of you. Love you more than you love yourself. In the multiverse, bitches!