In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with astrophysicist and author Joe Rogan to talk about his new book, The Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, which has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 67 weeks in a row. In this episode, we talk about what it means to be a scientist and why it s so important to have a love of learning. We also talk about the need for a new kind of teacher, and why we should all be looking for a teacher who is willing and able to teach us how to be curious. And we discuss why the education system is failing us, and what we need to do to fix it. This episode is a must-listen episode, and you won t want to miss it! I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, please tweet me and tell me what you think of it in the comments section below! Timestamps: 1:00 - Why do we need a new teacher? 2:30 - What are you looking for? 3:20 - What do you need to learn? 4:00 5 - How do you want to learn more? 6 - What is the best teacher you can have? 7 - How to be more curious? 8 - How can we learn to learn better? 9 - Why is it important to learn the most? 10 - What does it mean to be interested in learning? 11: What is a scientist? 12:15 - How does it take a new task? 13: How do we know how to think? 14:40 - How should we learn better in the most efficiently? 15: What are we all have a better job? 16:30 What do we have a different kind of human being? 17:40 18:30 | What is curiosity? 19:40 | How can I learn better than a better human being in a workplace? 21:00 | What kind of person in a day? 22: What do I need to think about the world? ? 22 - What's the difference between a good thing to learn from a task I need? 25:00 + 15: How to learn a better thing? 26:30 How do I know that I m going to learn on my own? 27:10 | What I ve never been taught?
00:02:07.000So I think the educational system needs an adjustment.
00:02:10.000Forget whether or not you go to college, because you're going to spend more years not in school than in school, even if you do go to college.
00:02:17.000What you want, I think, are lifelong learners, lifelong curiosity.
00:02:52.000You spend the first years of a child's life teaching it to walk and talk, then you spend the rest of his life telling it to shut up and sit down.
00:05:12.000You bring a comedian like Chuck on with you, things get silly but they're also curious and you're getting these experts and everyone's talking about these various subjects.
00:05:22.000And as you know, not only yourself as an exemplar of this, stand-up comedians are some of the smartest people in the world.
00:08:12.000So I have one week remaining out of like 70 shoot days to finish shooting Cosmos.
00:08:21.000Possible Worlds, premiering spring 2019. That's the third installment of Cosmos, if you trace the first one to Carl Sagan back in 1980. I used your segment on wolves, on how wolves became dogs.
00:09:30.000My friend did a commercial with a wolf.
00:09:33.000And there's this commercial where he's running up this mountain and the wolf is there and at the end of the commercial they had to get the wolf to snarl.
00:09:40.000So what the trainer does is he shows the wolf some meat and then he pulls the meat away from the wolf.
00:09:47.000The wolf snarls and they're like and then the commercials over he's like no no there's no working after that like There's no you're not gonna be near the wolf right like that switch is turned on done Yeah, and it's it's crazy like once that thing snarled everybody just backed off and the trainer let everybody know like once I get to this point We're done like there's just no more and that thing Okay Everybody,
00:10:16.000All three of these Cosmoses, the original one with Carl Sagan, the one that the privilege of hosting in 2014 and 2019, are co-written by Ann Druyan.
00:12:22.000And you take these kids with so much energy and then you make them sit still and watch something that's not even remotely stimulating by a person who doesn't really care to be there.
00:12:52.000You know what I say when I address teachers?
00:12:54.000We all, by the way, I'll do this right now in this room.
00:12:57.000There's only three of us, but let's take a show of hands.
00:13:00.000In your life, with all the teachers you've ever had in every class you've ever taken, how many had like a singular influence on who and what you became?
00:13:28.000It was a science teacher that I had when I believe I was in seventh grade who told me that if you really want to hurt your brain, look up and recognize the fact that that goes on forever, that this is infinite.
00:13:40.000And then just think about what that means, infinite, that there really is no end to it.
00:13:45.000So, but how many teachers such as that were so influential on you?
00:13:49.000That one guy saying that one thing in that one class, he might be the one.
00:14:10.000And in every case, it wasn't because the topic was something you knew in advance you would like.
00:14:15.000It's because they're The energy for sharing their passion and love for the subject was palpable.
00:14:21.000And it just spilled out of them and went into course through your veins and your arteries.
00:14:27.000And you walk out of there thinking, wow, that was the most interesting thing I've ever done in my life.
00:14:31.000You don't even care what you get on a test after that because you got touched and you became an enlightened participant in that exercise, in that exploration.
00:14:40.000Yeah, it's just so hard for them to even get kids' attentions, though.
00:14:45.000I mean, there's just so many wrestling matches going on.
00:14:47.000Unfortunately, that could be, in some places, half the energy of the teacher is maintaining order.
00:14:52.000I think the success of your book, the success of your show, your podcast, and many of these other really intelligent podcasts are showing that there's an appetite for this stuff out there.
00:15:01.000Yeah, and I'm delighted to be a servant of that curiosity.
00:16:14.000And the astrophysicist, well, we sit at the end of a telescope and wait for photons to cross the universe and enter our detector, and we go into conferences and argue about them.
00:16:24.000So there is no obvious connection between what we do and military strength, hegemony, dominance, empire building.
00:17:19.000By the time of his third voyage, he had already planted enough Spanish flags that Spain had already begun to set up governments and infrastructures in these places that he had found.
00:18:12.000Columbus knew that one week hence, coincidentally, there was going to be a total lunar eclipse where the moon in its orbit around Earth enters Earth's shadow.
00:18:22.000The full moon enters Earth's shadow and disappears.
00:18:28.000The geometry of that event, it's just a simple lunar eclipse, but the geometry is such that sunlight passes around Earth through Earth's atmosphere and takes on sunset colors that leach into Earth's shadow, giving the moon, if you can see it at all,
00:18:44.000a deep red amber hue, almost the color of blood.
00:18:51.000Columbus said – and he knew about this because he had read the tables, the eclipse tables, all right?
00:18:56.000We had known enough about the solar system at the time to – we got that, okay?
00:19:02.000Actually, back then it was just the known world with Earth in the middle of the known universe.
00:19:07.000The rhythms of the universe were known.
00:19:09.000He says to the natives, if you do not give us food, My god, which is more powerful than your god, will make the moon disappear and it will turn blood red.
00:21:36.000The government doesn't always have the best people, but if you hire some of the best people to do whatever it is they want, and their calculations happen to relate to a military project, there you have a two-way street in progress.
00:21:52.000Why do you think the Hubble telescope, the The mirror issues notwithstanding, which were ultimately fixed when it was first launched.
00:23:08.000Earlier than that, but I don't know when.
00:23:10.000The real advance was putting two lenses in line with one another.
00:23:13.000Sounds trivial in modern times, but that was a huge leap, conceptual leap in what you would accomplish.
00:23:19.000And in so doing, depending on how you curve them and how you grind them, grind the shape of those lenses, you would get a microscope or a telescope.
00:23:30.000That's basically the birth of modern science as we now think of it and conduct it.
00:23:36.000Because you say to yourself, my senses, I don't trust them.
00:23:39.000To be the full record of what's going on in front of me.
00:23:43.000You pull out a microscope, oh my gosh, Lee Wenhoek, the microscope guy, he got a drop of pond water, puts it under his microscope, just to think to do this.
00:25:29.000He contacted the Doge of Venice, invited him to the clock tower, and said, look at what this instrument can do for you as we look out into the lagoon.
00:25:39.000You can identify a ship's intentions, friend or foe, by its flag ten times farther away than you can with the unaided eye.
00:25:51.000Venice bought a boatload of these telescopes in the service of their military defense.
00:25:57.000And this was a source of money to Galileo?
00:26:19.000Because of hijackings to Cuba, basically.
00:26:21.000They were armed hijackings of airplanes, of American carriers to Cuba.
00:26:27.000And Congress said, we've got to do something about that.
00:26:29.000Oh, by the way, there's a company in Boston called American Science and Engineering that was building an X-ray detector small enough to put on a satellite to observe the universe in X-rays.
00:26:41.000Because no one had – we've used visible light but not x-rays.
00:26:44.000That's a branch of the electromagnetic spectrum.
00:26:46.000We think if there are black holes out there, their region surrounding them will give us x-rays.
00:27:16.000Let's apply that technology to these detectors.
00:27:18.000Well, that's been a lot of the stuff with the space program, right?
00:27:21.000A lot of the stuff that they devised for use on the space station and many other technologies have trickled their way down into regular society.
00:27:27.000Well, that always happens, and even some simple things.
00:27:31.000Because people say, why spend money up there and we should be spending it down here?
00:27:34.000But there's an interesting fact here that is almost never discussed.
00:27:38.000The people who think about the universe and study the universe are hugely creative.
00:27:43.000And the creative energies cannot be pre-prescribed.
00:27:46.000You can't go to a – you might, but I don't know that you'll get their maximum creativity.
00:27:51.000Say, I need you to invent a cure for cancer right now.
00:27:57.000But the greatest discoveries, the greatest cures, the greatest of these comes from a cross-pollination of interest that people have where they were engaged because they were interested just for the sake of being interested.
00:28:22.000There's a little bit of brakes in the tires, but that's about it.
00:28:24.000When it comes in, How do you make sure the thing stays on track?
00:28:30.000Because they kept drifting and crosswinds and this sort of thing.
00:28:33.000And so they said, why don't we groove the road so that the rubber on the road, the runway, so that the rubber can align with the grooves and stay in a straight line?
00:28:43.000Because rubber doesn't slide well when you have – doesn't slide sideways very easily on grooves.
00:28:49.000When they realized how effective that was, it's now put on off-ramps to freeways.
00:28:55.000If there's a freeway off-ramp that's a little tight, not quite banked well enough, it's going to be grooved.
00:29:24.000We're invented to service satellites in orbit by NASA. Because you can't just plug it into a 120 volt socket when you're floating in space.
00:29:34.000So the engineer said, how are we going to solve this problem?
00:31:26.000So if you're going to tell me that if you can take that four tenths of 1% and spend it in these other problems and solve them, I would say, yeah, go right ahead.
00:31:37.000But is this where you really want to pull the money from?
00:31:40.000When it's the only thing that has us thinking about tomorrow, has us thinking about a future.
00:31:45.000Well, for a guy like you, that's super important.
00:31:47.000But for a guy who lives in Cleveland, who doesn't give a shit about science...
00:32:30.000Yeah, but it would take decades to really realize that.
00:32:34.000And of course, GPS is launched by the military, and it's now hundreds of billions of dollars worth of the American economy thriving on this space application.
00:32:43.000But it was a military intent, and it was to navigate...
00:32:51.000And the first Gulf War was the first big use of space assets in the conduct of military operations.
00:32:58.000I believe even when Hedy Lamarr created it with another scientist, the idea behind it was for encoded transcriptions or encoded information during the war.
00:33:15.000By the way, the future of this might It's still not clear.
00:33:20.000The jury's still out and they're sort of opposing views on this.
00:33:23.000But, you know, you've heard about quantum entangled particles where I can create a pair of particles that know about one another and now they're separated in space and in time.
00:36:14.000Trucks with GPS and with computing devices that invokes the quantum.
00:36:18.000But UPS predates the use of these tools.
00:36:22.000But you can look at profits relative to their efficiencies that are enabled by these technologies, as well as entire fields that didn't exist before computing.
00:36:32.000You add all that up, it's a stunning fact.
00:37:10.000That's an absurd claim to make in caveman days.
00:37:15.000I don't know if anyone did it, but that's a crazy thought because there are solutions to your problems that might exist and time has demonstrated likely exist by leaving the cave that you can then discover.
00:37:29.000So for me, exploitation is not just space.
00:37:53.000My physics professor in college Studied the universe, loved the universe, studied gas clouds between stars, and studied how would you detect a gas cloud if it's not radiating light?
00:38:05.000Well, they give off radio waves, all right?
00:38:07.000And he figured out what kind of radio waves they give off and why.
00:38:11.000And in this, he gained expertise in the nucleus of the atom.
00:38:14.000And he discovered that the nucleus can resonate.
00:38:20.000Depending on the mass of the nucleus, which means depending on what atom it is on the periodic table, it will resonate slightly differently when exposed to the same electromagnetic field.
00:38:31.000He discovered a new phenomenon in physics called nuclear magnetic resonance.
00:38:37.000It would then take a clever medical technologist to say, wait a minute, if you can distinguish one heavy atom from another, Let me make a machine out of that, put your body in it, and I can then distinguish one kind of tissue from another.
00:38:55.000And thus was born the magnetic resonance imager, the MRI, arguably the most potent tool in the arsenal of modern medicine where I can diagnose a condition in your body without cutting you open first.
00:39:09.000That is based on a principle of physics discovered by a physicist who had no interest in medicine.
00:39:15.000By the way, the real title should be Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging, but that's the other N-word.
00:39:26.000They're less likely to go inside the machine if the word nuclear was on it.
00:39:30.000My point is that was a cross-pollination of ideas with clever people on their frontiers looking over the fence at discoveries that are being made.
00:46:14.000There's something called an objective truth.
00:46:16.000An objective truth is something that is true whether or not you believe in it.
00:46:21.000And the methods and tools of science are uniquely conceived to seek out and establish objective truths.
00:46:29.000I'm referring to the invocation of the scientific method.
00:46:33.000No one scientific research result is true.
00:46:39.000Until it is verified by other people's research results using a different experimental method with different wall current from another country.
00:46:48.000When your competitor says, I think you're wrong, let me show how you're wrong, and they reproduce your experiment and get the same result.
00:46:55.000When you have generally the same results emerging, that is a newly discovered objective truth about the natural world.
00:47:03.000And when you have objective truths, they're not later shown to be false.
00:47:34.000The problem here is You can't convince someone else of your personal truth without some act of persuasion and in the limit, an act of violence.
00:48:18.000They feel that it's true, and it's true in their bones.
00:48:22.000I'm simply saying that because it's your personal truth, you cannot require that someone else share it.
00:48:29.000And in this country, because the United States, because God is not mentioned in the Constitution, itself a controversial thing in its day, by the way.
00:48:39.000Actually, God is mentioned, but in a very insignificant way.
00:48:42.000The Constitution is a God-free document.
00:48:45.000And because it's a God-free document, it protects your expression of religious faith, because it means the government has no say in who and what you believe or why.
00:48:59.000If the Constitution said, mention God and Jesus, well, there it is.
00:49:03.000There's Christianity built into the fabric of the country.
00:49:06.000And if you want to be some other religion, you're going to have a hard time because we can set laws against it.
00:49:11.000This is why so many religiously persecuted people came to the United States, to escape their country where they could not practice their religion a little differently or a lot differently from what was going on in their homeland.
00:49:25.000Is it a problem, though, to call it truth?
00:49:29.000I would rather not call it truth, but I'm a big word guy, and I respect what happens to words.
00:49:36.000I don't always like it, but I respect it.
00:49:38.000And so I'm going to say there's an objective truth, which is true whether or not you believe it.
00:49:43.000There's your personal truth, which is true to you.
00:51:14.000You can look up the dictionary definition of atheist, and it kind of applies to me, but What is the definition of atheist in practice?
00:51:23.000It is what leading atheists do and it's their conduct and it's their behavior and it's what they say and it's their attitude.
00:51:31.000That is what an atheist is today because they're the most visible exemplars of that word and most of their conduct I either don't agree with or simply don't engage in.
00:53:53.000I don't know the actual origin of space travel, of the term.
00:53:57.000I don't know how far back it goes, but I do know it became common after John Glenn, because they're not going to say it to Yuri Gagarin, because they were all atheists in the Soviet Union.
00:55:14.000It was invented by the Catholic Church, by Jesuit priests in the 1580s, assigned by Pope Gregory to fix the problems in the calendar because...
00:55:58.000But it turns out we're not actually tracking how long it takes Earth to go around the sun.
00:56:02.000We're tracking how long it takes Earth to repeat its seasons.
00:56:06.000And the year that corresponds to our seasons is slightly different from the year that corresponds to how long it takes to go around the sun.
00:56:38.000That's what happens if you don't match the cycles of things.
00:56:41.000And the Pope said, we're not having any of this, especially since Easter might land on Passover, and we're trying to distinguish ourselves mightily from the Jews, so let's fix this.
00:56:53.000They looked at the cycles of the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and they came up with a new calendar, the Gregorian calendar, a modification to the Julian calendar.
00:58:50.000So, the year 2000 was a century year, which normally would not have a leap day.
00:58:58.000Except it's a century year evenly divisible by 400, so they put the leap day back in.
00:59:04.000And everybody on February, almost everybody, everybody except the astronomers, on February 29th in the year 2000 said it's just a leap year because it's divisible by four.
00:59:17.000It is a century year divisible by 400. That corrects it back, and so now you have a stable calendar for tens of thousands of years.
00:59:29.000I gotta give props to the Jesuit priests.
00:59:32.000I'm not gonna say, no, I'm taking the Christianity out of this reference, because they figured out the calendar that we all use, and it's a fucking awesome calendar.
01:00:37.000Now, of course, in Islam and in China and in Hebrew cultures, Israel in particular, they have access to the Chinese calendar, the Muslim calendar.
01:01:17.000Do they use it constantly and consistently?
01:01:19.000Or do they alternate between the Gregorian calendar and something else?
01:01:22.000I'm not a Chinese expert, but from what I know of China and my friends and colleagues, for conducting business, the world's business is conducted on the Gregorian calendar with a 12-month calendar.
01:01:33.000With the year as referenced by everybody else.
01:01:37.000And does it have to be done that way in terms of, like, has anyone ever done a study on possibly creating a more effective, more accurate calendar that doesn't invoke leap years?
01:01:47.000The problem is the length of the day...
01:01:52.000Does not cut evenly to the time it takes Earth to go around the Sun.
01:01:56.000So there will always be fractions of days that you're accumulating.
01:02:23.000They do, and they want to believe that people who, you know, they want to believe that people 5,000 years ago somehow knew more about the universe than we do today.
01:02:52.000I don't want to take that away from them.
01:02:56.000Doesn't the physical, just the presence of these incredible buildings leave the possibility that maybe they had some knowledge that we lost?
01:03:31.000But if you look at the knowledge we have gleaned using the methods and modern methods and tools of science that go far beyond our five senses in our access to the world, to say that somehow they knew something that we don't using our tools, that's just false.
01:06:01.000Well, people love saying that kind of stuff.
01:06:03.000Yeah, and it makes for a great TV. But the fact that they didn't have steel and the fact that you're dealing with the very most recent 2500 B.C. You just have to be more ingenious, more innovative than we otherwise would have to be.
01:07:05.000They're lined with the solar solstice.
01:07:09.000They're holes that are not stones, but they're 56 holes, which is three times the Saros, which is the cycle of eclipses of the matching of the orbits of the sun and the moon in the sky, the paths of the sun and the moon in the sky.
01:07:23.000And when they match up, you get an eclipse.
01:08:29.000So I named that Manhattanhenge, sort of hearkening back to my early days, thinking about the alignment of the sun and structures that we might build.
01:08:39.000So twice a year, for those viewers or listeners who don't know, twice a year, the Manhattan street grid Which is not perfectly aligned north-south.
01:08:48.000The Manhattan street grid, the sun will set exactly on the grid.
01:08:53.000And what's up there now, that image, what's not obvious, is that picture is taken Along a street that is itself three miles long, and then you're crossing the Hudson River, and then there's New Jersey on the other side.
01:09:10.000So people try to zoom in on it, but what you really should do is zoom out from it, and then you get the vanishing point on it.
01:12:36.000Yeah, if you're in Thailand, it's 14 hours difference.
01:12:39.000So therefore, if you were to do it astrophysically, you would know the exact moment where we returned in our orbit, and everybody would celebrate that instant.
01:14:24.000You pick one, and then that's how you do it.
01:14:27.000And the Mayans base it on the moon, right?
01:14:30.000I didn't study their calendar as deeply as I should have and wanted to, especially back in 2012 when everyone said, oh, the Mayan calendar runs out, so therefore it's the end of the world.
01:14:49.000I also felt like that was back when, you know, before that had happened, it was, you know, George Bush was president in like 2007 and everybody was thinking, Jesus, this is going to be the end.
01:15:01.000So every decade there's somebody predicting the end of the world.
01:18:33.000It's constantly expanding and growing.
01:18:34.000But it's very frustrating for people that really don't have the time and maybe did get some outdated nutrition knowledge from 20 years ago.
01:19:48.000They don't fear the science or the technology.
01:19:50.000They embrace it because it has shaped the civilization that has enabled their social life.
01:19:55.000It has, but through this, like, one of the things that I tweeted, I think it was from Scientific American yesterday, maybe it was yesterday, that it's a little bit misleading, but one of the things they said is only 64% of millennials have a strong belief.
01:20:10.000These things, these coasters are terrible.
01:20:13.000They look great, but then things stick to the bottom of them.
01:21:45.000Do you realize if you took Earth with all of its mountains, valleys, and hills and shrunk it down to the size of a cue ball, it would be smoother than any cue ball ever machined.
01:23:57.000We talked about it, and we were going to have him on Skype.
01:24:00.000No, what we do is, and I think this is a diabolical plot, so that the next time we can ship people en masse into orbit, they all want to be the first in line because they know we're going to send them so that they can see the round Earth.
01:24:11.000They're going to be the first ones in space.
01:24:13.000Just so they can stop annoying the rest of us.
01:24:19.000You don't think it's a diabolical plot?
01:24:20.000I do have people that I've met that don't believe, because the problem with YouTube videos is, it's a problem with a lot of things.
01:24:29.000But one of the things about being unchecked while you're discussing things is you can say things, you can use big words, you can sound articulate and smooth, and you can do it in a very professional-looking manner.
01:25:05.000So people who don't have any education, and then they watch one of these YouTube clips, they start actually believing that this stuff makes sense because it's unchecked.
01:25:13.000And I would say it's not about whether they've had education.
01:25:15.000It's about whether the education they had teaches them skepticism of information and teaches them how to inquire.
01:25:22.000Do you realize it's just as intellectually lazy to believe everything you see as it is to deny everything you see?
01:25:33.000Why should someone know automatically that Earth isn't flat, yet I tell them in the next breath that the entire universe was once as small as a marble?
01:25:45.000Both of those sound equally preposterous.
01:25:48.000Except one has evidence to back it and the other does not.
01:25:51.000And very strong scientific, theoretical, and experimental underpinnings.
01:25:57.000So when you are trained to inquire, you don't either believe everything outright or reject everything outright.
01:27:18.000There's nothing I value in my mind, body, and soul so much in this moment that I want to indelibly etch it on my skin.
01:27:28.000Because I want to leave room For me to have a possibly more enlightening thought later that would override whatever was my decision in that moment.
01:27:39.000And since I count myself among the lifelong learners, I'm learning stuff all the time.
01:28:01.000Okay, here's something I learned recently.
01:28:02.000I think I knew this when I was a kid, but if you're playing basketball and you're shooting, okay, and you say, oh, that didn't go in, oh my gosh, well, you know, the rim, they should maybe make the rim a little bigger.
01:28:29.000No, it's not a cosmically mind-blowing moment, but that gives you perspective next time you watch a basketball game.
01:28:36.000It's how these guys can fly from the foul line in an airborne slam dunk and not miss.
01:28:49.000Because the area of this opening is four times, you do the math, it's four times as large as the ball itself.
01:28:56.000Right, because of the different positions it could be in.
01:28:58.000So there are multiple positions and they can still do it.
01:29:03.000So, it's not that that's easy to accomplish, but knowing this, you realize how much easier it is to score than you might have otherwise thought.
01:30:49.000And because they do it in tight quarters, it involves incredibly fast footwork and movement.
01:30:56.000And then these guys take that footwork and movement and it translates amazingly well to an open soccer field.
01:31:03.000I wonder if they calculated that because what you would do is, let's say the ball weighs twice as much, then it would only go half as far when you kicked it.
01:31:10.000So then you make a field half as large.
01:32:47.000I was captain of my high school's wrestling team.
01:32:48.000So I was a geek person who could actually kick your ass, okay?
01:32:53.000And I saw how my fellow geeks, because that's the community that I associated with, card carrying, were treated by the football quarterback and the popular kids and the kids who are all beautiful and the ones who...
01:33:05.000And I imagined my future as a superhero and Defender of the geeks.
01:33:14.000So that you put up a little, you know, bat signal, whatever, geek signal, put a few digits of pi, and I come flying in, and there's a wedgie in progress, right?
01:33:24.000I would just land, and I'd grab the bully and rip them off the encounter, and I would just save the day.
01:34:53.000I think it was the most significant event to happen in our species.
01:34:56.000Kind of amazing when you stop and think about the fact that at that point in time, other than the Native Americans who lived here who were living a nomadic tribal existence, Very few people that had the wheel, that had firearms,
01:35:12.000that had all these things that had already been achieved in the rest of the world had made their way to this place.
01:35:59.000An ice age means it is so cold that when the moisture evaporates from the oceans, goes to the clouds, the clouds go over the land, it doesn't rain, it snows.
01:37:55.000Those humans who made it across that land bridge and spread out into North America, Central America, South America, have only a few families as their parent genetic origin.
01:38:13.000Some research says it's like eight family lineages populated the entire North and South American continents.
01:41:02.000So Asians and the natives of North and South America have more in common with each other Because of this, then most other pairs of groups you might grab around the world.
01:41:16.000But my point is, obviously, there's a lot to blame Columbus for, but he just happened to be the guy who did it first.
01:41:23.000Europe was coming to the New World no matter what.
01:41:26.000Everybody was trying to find a faster trade route to the Indies.
01:41:30.000And so if it wasn't Columbus, it would have been Arnold Schmednick, whatever.
01:41:36.000And the rest is, as they say, history.
01:41:40.000So personally, I think it is the most significant thing to happen in our species.
01:41:45.000Otherwise, we'd still be two stranded branches of humans.
01:41:49.000It would be fascinating, though, like Australia is stranded, to see what would happen if this has gone on for hundreds of thousands of years.
01:41:57.000If hundreds of thousands, that would have been a different story, right.
01:42:49.000But NASA, regardless, has safeguards in place in the event that that happens.
01:42:55.000So it's called the Planetary Protection Program in NASA. It's got a whole division of NASA. It's protecting Earth from bugs that could be coming from space on our own spaceship that we bring back.
01:43:26.000Because it might have crashed into one of Saturn's moons that might have life.
01:43:33.000And if someone had sneezed on the spacecraft before it got launched, we don't want to contaminate the life that we are later going to one day want to study.
01:48:41.000If you're watching a Jane Austen period piece in 1870, whenever they took place, and someone gets out of the carriage and With tie-dyed bell-bottoms, you would cry foul!
01:48:55.000Could be a top hat instead of a derby.
01:48:57.000You would cry foul if you were a costume designer.
01:49:00.000And we would all be impressed by that level of knowledge that you exhibited.
01:49:06.000I am bringing a level of science to bear on a movie that is no different from anybody else's expertise who is out there that we have praised for that invocation.
01:49:17.000Yet people are not granting me that latitude to make those comments.
01:50:21.000So 20 assholes out of the millions and millions of people that follow you have decided to reach out and you're altering your behavior for assholes.
01:50:33.000I like when you break things down, because I didn't know those things.
01:50:36.000I like thinking about the hair and gravity.
01:50:38.000I was like, oh yeah, that fucking shit would be standing straight up in the air.
01:50:41.000And the only reason why I mention it about hair, because every photo of anybody with long hair, it wouldn't happen to you, but anyone with long hair in space, it's standing up on edge.
01:50:49.000It's a completely obvious thing that was omitted from the filming of Gravity.
01:50:55.000Yeah, but you have to have hair and makeup.
01:53:10.000We know what time of day, what time of night.
01:53:14.000So at the POV, the point of view of Rose, as she's looking up deliriously to the sky, there's only one sky she should have seen, and it was the wrong sky.
01:55:38.000Seth MacFarlane calls me up and said, I'm making a movie about a talking teddy bear and I need to know the sky over a town outside of Boston in 1985 on Christmas Eve looking north-northeast.
01:56:16.000So the point is people started thinking about it.
01:56:19.000And the highest compliment I ever got was Andy Weir who wrote The Martian.
01:56:25.000He said to himself, while he was writing the novel, he said – because he's an engineer, so he has the fluency and he also knows how to write creatively.
01:56:35.000He said, if Tyson were looking over my shoulder, would he tweet about this or not?
01:56:42.000And so that put him on notice to make sure that his calculations were accurate.
01:56:48.000And The Martian is one of the most entertainingly accurate explorations of how to invoke science to not die that there ever was.
01:56:56.000So for me, that was a very high compliment.
01:56:57.000And it was kind of worth it, all of the naysayers, to know that Andy Weir came through on that.
01:57:43.000It makes me a better communicator when I'm in front of an audience.
01:57:46.000I'll know what percent will think one way versus another and I can modify what I'm saying to be more precise and to, as we say in physics, to reduce the impedance between the signal and the receiver so that there's a better match between the communicator and the audience.
02:04:37.000They're clearly superior to you in ways that you don't even know yet.
02:04:42.000So just find another way to do your talking rather than sending bullets their way.
02:04:47.000But isn't that always the case in every film?
02:04:50.000I mean, it's always part of the narrative is that the primitive people fuck it up for the advanced civilization that's coming here to help us.
02:06:13.000Well, you look at his marching orders.
02:06:14.000It's, oh, there's what's called a transit of Venus.
02:06:17.000That's going to take place, visible only from the South Pacific.
02:06:20.000This is where Earth in our orbit and Venus in orbit are such that when Venus passes between us and the Sun, it actually is exactly between us and the Sun.
02:06:29.000You can watch it move, the circle move across the Sun's surface.
02:06:33.000And did they look at it through a device?
02:07:02.000While you're there, use these new navigation techniques that use the sun, moon, and stars and map every coastline you find and bring that information back to us.
02:07:15.000Within 10 years of Captain Cook navigating the South Pacific as well as the northern coast of Australia and New Zealand, within 10 years, Britain took control over those coastlines.
02:08:14.000Millions of dollars worth of commerce would be at the bottom of the ocean because they didn't know where a coastline was.
02:08:21.000The only way you can measure coastline is if you have good navigational tools and tactics, which involves an accurate chronometer, a timekeeping device for your, and knowing what the sun, moon, and stars are doing in your sky.
02:08:34.000So the astronomer in that day was crucial to the mapping of the Earth.
02:09:05.000Of all the sciences cultivated by mankind, astronomy is acknowledged to be, and undoubtedly is, the most sublime, the most interesting, and the most useful.
02:09:16.000For by knowledge derived from this science, not only the bulk of the earth is discovered, But our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it conveys.
02:09:29.000Our minds exalted above their low, contracted prejudices.
02:09:36.000So notice he lists mapping the earth first.
02:09:43.000Then he talks about how it exalts in our grandeur.
02:09:47.000So, yeah, it's an exercise in dominance, in hegemony, in power.
02:10:22.000Around a half of all stars that have names in the night sky have Arabic names.
02:10:30.000Because in the golden age of Islam, a thousand years ago, navigation was a big deal.
02:10:34.000And they navigated using astrolabes, which is sort of the Islamic counterpart to the sextant and the octant that were used in the rest of Europe.
02:12:46.000GPS is no different from the navigation tools, in concept, from the navigation tools that Captain Cook invoked for Britain to then take control over all the South Pacific that they did.
02:13:00.000It is where are we and do we know this information with precision?
02:13:05.000And so, and what happens if an enemy force takes out our GPS? And we have so much dependent on it.
02:13:15.000We've got people now working on using navigation by pulsars.
02:13:21.000Can't take those out because those are cosmic.
02:13:23.000They're sending highly timed pulses that reach Earth in different places on the sky.
02:13:29.000And by measuring them, and the time delay between one and the other, you can actually localize yourself on Earth's surface with extremely high precision and without any use of satellites.
02:13:42.000That's the future of navigation where you are insulated from a rogue nation that might want to take out your satellites.
02:14:18.000And then we realized that command and control in the air needs different kinds of soldiers because they have to be pilots.
02:14:25.000It's a different kind of decision-making, different kinds of tactical actions you would have in the theater of operations.
02:14:33.000And so it was sensible to spawn off a new branch of the military called the Air Force.
02:14:39.000No one today would question whether that was a good idea.
02:14:44.000You should know that operations in space, in the vacuum of the universe, is a different regime that you're operating in from moving through the air.
02:14:59.000Your decision, your command and control is different.
02:15:03.000So, just because it came out of Trump's mouth doesn't make it a crazy idea that you might want a Space Force.
02:15:09.000In fact, I had proposed a Space Force in 2001 when I was on a commission appointed by George W. Bush to explore the future of the United States aerospace industry, a commission of 12. So I put it on the table.
02:15:24.000We have Air Force Generals there, former members of Congress, people from Lockheed Martin, and People said, well, the Air Force is currently overseeing space, the United States Space Command.
02:15:37.000So everybody was happy with it, and so I'm fine.
02:15:39.000I said, okay, let's not worry about it.
02:15:42.000But as long as this needs of our presence in space grows, but more importantly, the size of our assets, as long as that continues to grow, what else would a military do beyond protecting your borders?
02:22:31.000So one of my sort of, now that I'm old and tired and I just am a realist, it's Why should we promise to not kill each other in space when we are not successful at doing that here on Earth?
02:22:47.000And we don't even promise to not kill each other here on Earth.
02:22:49.000We don't even promise to do it here on Earth.
02:22:51.000Who are we to say, oh, well, we'll kill each other here, but in space we'll all hold hands.
02:22:56.000I don't have that much confidence in human conduct.
02:23:02.000I've become cynical over my years, and I'm angry.
02:23:07.000Demonstrate to me that on Earth you know how to not kill one another.
02:23:36.000So the co-author sort of takes your stuff and stitches it together?
02:23:40.000In this particular case, there are a lot of ways we collaborated.
02:23:45.000Some of them I just dictated entire chapters to her, but leaving out certain details that would require a nitty-gritty Of sort of research just to get the right numbers and the right year and the right commander and the right this.
02:24:00.000But I know broadly how it happened and what sequence.
02:24:03.000And so then she would take that and shape that into a chapter.
02:24:06.000Other places I would say, you know, this happened, this happened, and that happened.
02:24:10.000She would say, well, that wouldn't fit the narrative as it's coming together.
02:24:14.000Let's drop the middle one and take the other two.
02:26:14.000Oh, now you break it into a million pieces, a thousand pieces.
02:26:18.000Now each piece is moving 18,000 miles an hour and put your own satellites at risk.
02:26:23.000That's the modern equivalent to in the First World War when they said, oh, we have a good idea because we can't shoot them in the trenches.
02:27:04.000Treaty aside though, what could you do?
02:27:07.000A rogue state could take out our GPS satellites and render the military blind and then you won't be able to pick up your Uber and you won't have anyone have sex with tonight.
02:27:16.000That's the range of stuff that GPS applies to.
02:27:19.000And so it'll affect our economy and it'll affect our security and then our Navy can't talk to the Air Force, the Air Force can't talk to it, and that would be bad.
02:27:29.000Wars are no longer fought just by how many soldiers have you lined up at the border.
02:27:35.000It's, what have you done strategically to render your opponent, just to weaken your opponent or render them incapable of fighting you?
02:27:48.000This is why the attacks on September 11th worked.
02:27:51.000Because we had a policy that if someone wants to hijack a plane, you follow their instructions.
02:29:18.000So you have to get out of your thing, charge the cart, and get through the cart and the flight attendant, who will be fighting for their life at this point.
02:31:03.000I said, if I was in a 767 and we're about to crash into a building, if I was in the last row of the plane, how much time would elapse before the front row crumbled and it met me in the back row?
02:31:25.000Given the speed of the plane going into the building.
02:32:30.000How about another task of a Space Force?
02:32:32.000Why don't you clean up Space Force so that we can have tourism and not risk our lives by a paint chip or, you know, going 18,000 or bolt or a nut moving at 18,000 miles an hour that'll put a hole straight through you.
02:32:48.000So, yeah, I would like to see the portfolio of a Space Force, if there is a Space Force, Broadened the scope of that to include protecting us from asteroids and figuring out a way to clean up the debris of space.
02:36:04.000Well, because they saw the light, and they got up from their table and went to the window to see what had happened, there's a time delay between the shockwave and the light, because light travels fast and sound travels slow.
02:36:18.000So we'll go to the windows, and the shockwave hits, and it blasts broken glass into their face.
02:37:01.000There's no better way to be warned than to have a band-aid cover your injuries that could have vaporized you or rendered your species extinct.
02:37:11.000What's crazy is the ones that don't even make impact and still do devastating damage like Tunguska.
02:39:20.000So, yeah, it's a part of history, and it's a reminder that if you want to think about the future of civilization, you have to include a defense plan against asteroids.
02:40:08.000We would have the power to tell you when you would die and what part of Earth it would hit.
02:40:12.000Yeah, so there's people that have very delusional ideas about what we can and can't do with asteroids, and that drives me crazy because I've heard that.
02:40:22.000They look very good, but there's nothing in place.
02:40:24.000There's Project Sentinel, you can look it up, that has tasked themselves with organizing world governments to protect Earth from species-killing asteroids.
02:40:33.000And you need the world because you don't know in advance...
02:40:37.000Until it's discovered what part of Earth it's going to hit and if it's going to hit in the Indian Ocean and if the surrounding regions don't have a space program, are the countries that do have a space program going to sit idle?
02:42:01.000So if you do that early enough, you do it enough so that it misses Earth, and it's still out there to harm you in another day, but it won't render you extinct on that passage.
02:54:56.000I mean, isn't it one of the things they decided to do to asteroids to change their path?
02:55:00.000Spray some goo on them, and it'll literally cause more friction in the air and cause them to deviate slightly from their path, which over a long period of time...
02:55:32.000By the time it hits Earth's atmosphere, it's too late.
02:55:35.000So there was a coating that they were planning on putting on some aspect of...
02:55:41.000Would it be the act of putting the coating?
02:55:42.000No, so what you would do is, you may be thinking of, there's a coating you can put on an asteroid that differently absorbs sunlight relative to the other side.
03:00:32.000You are exploiting three dimensions so that traffic can go in perpendicular directions simultaneously.
03:00:42.000That's what the flying cars would have given you.
03:00:44.000But we do that at intersections because it would be impossible to move 12 lanes of traffic through an intersection that crossed another freeway.
03:03:10.000I've just introduced a third dimension.
03:03:13.000So now I could have pages in another dimension sitting above the page that was previously occupying another place that I couldn't have put another sheet.
03:04:14.000Maybe a wormhole in Pasadena takes you to downtown LA. Boom!
03:04:19.000So, our storage needs would be, you could open a door, put it through this portal to the fourth dimension, and close the door, and look on the other side of the door, nothing would be there.
03:04:33.000Just the way on the surface of the desk, if you live in the surface of the desk, someone opens a door, they put the paper through the door, close the door, and you look around it, you say, where did it go?
03:04:41.000I have no idea, because you can't even see, you can't even imagine that third dimension.
03:04:48.000But if the world one day gets so crowded that even three-dimensional space has traffic, access to a fourth dimension would greatly help that.
03:06:13.000I've never fired a gun in my life, but the first time I ever used one, it's to shoot the drone that's going to be looking through my window at my apartment.
03:06:20.000Oh, yeah, there's this fucking asshole in my neighborhood.
03:08:15.000Engines got quieter and quieter which enabled people to build real estate closer and closer to airports and not have not have a sound problem It's poor Fox, but they didn't happen overnight.
03:08:27.000Yeah, I never I forgot I forgot that you had to stop talking when I remember it in fact Shea Stadium in New York City near near LaGuardia Airport The announcers had to stop any time a plane flew over it.
03:12:55.000I was in LA and I was in like a Prius and we passed a Lamborghini doing 40 miles an hour and that just seemed so embarrassing to the Lamborghini.
03:13:08.000We were doing 30 miles an hour and we passed the Lamborghini.
03:13:43.000If you had a car, if you lived in, if for whatever reason the planetarium decided, look, Neil, you're the best ever, and we opened up the most amazing spot ever, it's in Los Angeles, California, and we'd love you to relocate and bring StarTalk over here.
03:15:03.000If you can power things with a choice of a dozen sources of energy, then those sources of energy compete with one another for your business.
03:15:12.000And if the price of oil goes up, you say, I'm not going to generate power with oil.
03:16:13.000If I took away your salt reserves, you would starve over the winter.
03:16:18.000So everybody knew where their salt came from.
03:16:20.000Everybody knew how much their salt cost.
03:16:23.000Do you realize that Grant, General Grant, destroyed the salt reserves of the Southern Confederacy, knowing that that would force them faster to surrender because they wouldn't have food reserves to last through the winter?
03:16:39.000I, growing up, did not understand the phrase, you are the salt of the earth.