On this episode of the podcast, we have our first guest, comedian and friend of the show, Neil Tyson! We talk about how he got started in comedy, how he became one of the funniest people in the world, and how he and his team at Desquadtv are changing the game in a big way. We also talk about his new book, "The Most Requested Podcast in the History of This Podcast" and much, much more! This episode is sponsored by Onnit. Onnit is a company that is as ethical as is possible and still run a business. In all the supplements, there is a 100% money back guarantee of the first 30 pills for 90 days after you buy them. For 90 days, you can try it. Use the code "ROGAN" and you'll save 10% off any and all supplements. That's O-N-I-T. Don't forget to use the code ROGAN at checkout to get $10 off your first pack of supplements! If you don't feel like it works, you don t even have to return the product, you get your money back. You don't have to pay the full retail price! You can try whether it's AlphaBrain, AlphaBrain or ShroomTech, and you get 90 days worth of $10 back after you try it for free. If it doesn't work, you won't even be trying it again for another 90 days! Use code RAGAN and you can get an additional $10% off the first pack! It's $5 off your current purchase! Thanks for supporting Onnit! Brian and I hope you enjoy this episode, it's a great episode! XOXO-NUT! - Brian and the universe aligning. XO, Brian & the universe is aligning - The Magnetic Force of the universe - Thank you for aligning! xO-IT! -- Brian -- Neil Tyson. -- Neil DeGrasse Tyson -- "The Universe is going to explode" -- The Universe aligning? Thank you so much, Neil De Grasse Tyson, I think this is the most requested episode of this podcast in the history of this Podcast ever? -- The universe aligns. I think the universe will explode. - I think it's going to be a blast!
00:02:43.000Try whether it's AlphaBrain or whether it's ShroomTech.
00:02:47.000You can read the science behind all of this, all of it on it, and if you have any questions about it, there's always someone who can answer questions about that on forums.
00:02:55.000But the most important thing is, if you don't feel like it works, you get your money back.
00:02:59.000You don't even have to return the product.
00:04:13.000I don't want the authority of my academic pedigree to be what makes it bullshit.
00:04:19.000I want to arm people intellectually so that they can then deduce that there's nothing to it.
00:04:27.000So 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?
00:04:35.000And then you get the answer every year.
00:04:37.000So you don't even have to do the calculation.
00:04:39.000Well, 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 Relignment, which is so dangerous because when people are bullshitting, which is most of the conversations we get into,
00:04:55.000we don't get into serious academic discussions with people who have actually done the homework.
00:04:59.000You're just bullshitting with a dude at work, and he's like, yeah, I heard the fucking planets are going to align.
00:05:04.000And it's like, they don't even know what's going to happen.
00:05:08.000Then you go back to your cubicle, shitting your pants, going, are the planets going to fucking align?
00:05:12.000Is something going to happen that's going to...
00:05:14.000I tweeted recently that if you're really successful at bullshitting, it means you don't hang around enough people who are smarter than you.
00:05:23.000I 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.
00:05:36.000You're very enthusiastic about distributing the information, but you're not casting a judgment while you do that.
00:05:43.000And 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 experiences.
00:05:52.000There's a sort of a condescending sort of a carrying of that knowledge that you don't have.
00:05:57.000You 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.
00:06:14.000And if that's how you interact with people, why would anyone want to be that?
00:06:19.000Well, it's a problem of associating with shitty characters.
00:06:25.000And unfortunately, you're associating something that's incredible, like the actual measurement of the universe itself, you're associating that with annoying people.
00:06:35.000Yeah, you've got to detach the content from the deliverer of the information.
00:06:39.000I dated a girl and she loved Duran Duran, okay, when I was in high school.
00:06:43.000And, you know, after the breakup, which always has in every high school relationship.
00:07:38.000There's a guy who's like seriously geeked and his girlfriend is not interested in him and he says, what he does then shows her videos of me celebrating the universe and she says, oh is that what you do?
00:08:46.000Some people are only happy when they're sad.
00:08:49.000Yeah, there's a thing where people are trying to uncover mysteries, and it becomes more important than the actual mysteries of the universe itself.
00:09:17.000I 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.
00:09:55.000About every 10 years, somebody comes up with an end-of-the-world scenario.
00:09:59.000And keep in mind that end-of-the-world scenarios, no one says, the world's going to end in 150 years, right?
00:10:05.000It doesn't work, because you can't gain adherence to your cult that you're building.
00:10:09.000It'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.
00:10:17.000And it's really good if you can base it on some old shit that very few people can read.
00:10:21.000And everybody thinks that the old folks really understood the universe when in fact they did not.
00:10:25.000Well, they understood the 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.
00:10:35.000To think that way, I don't understand what's going on in those minds.
00:10:38.000It's the same sort of thinking that wants to uncover mysteries and conspiracies.
00:10:44.000It's a weird excitement to, like, hidden things.
00:10:48.000Now, you were a moon guy for a while, right?
00:10:49.000Yeah, 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.
00:10:59.000And this guy was convinced that there was no way to do it.
00:11:02.000And he said they were so far away from doing it that the fact that they did it, and they did it seven times...
00:11:08.000Since 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, like the Gemini photos.
00:11:56.000But 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.
00:12:04.000I mean, that's how they got into the Gulf of Tonkin.
00:13:55.000The time where it happened, he was working with a carpenter.
00:14:00.000Well, 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.
00:14:19.000So I take it as a compliment that people stand dumbstruck, awestruck, that it is beyond their capacity to believe it.
00:14:26.000I don't think it's beyond their capacity to believe it.
00:14:28.000I think if you had shown them documentaries that...
00:14:34.000Didn'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.
00:14:48.000You can get on a long downward spiral.
00:14:51.000And 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,
00:15:07.000beating by five months President Kennedy's goal of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade.
00:15:12.000The old carpenter asked me if I believed it happened.
00:15:15.000I said sure, I saw it on television, and he disagreed.
00:15:18.000He said that he didn't believe it for a minute, that those television fellers can make things look real that weren't.
00:15:26.000During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that made me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time.
00:15:33.000Yeah, 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.
00:15:41.000You read something like that and you go, what the fuck does that mean?
00:17:00.000The 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.
00:17:12.000Take 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 and the moon, you see a full night sky of stars, even with the sun in the sky as well.
00:17:27.000You 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.
00:17:36.000If you take away the atmosphere, the sun will still be there, but the sky goes dark.
00:17:40.000That's what the folks get when they go to the edge of the atmosphere, and they're calling that the edge of space.
00:17:44.000But 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.
00:18:06.000And these are people who've never taken photography.
00:18:09.000If 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.
00:18:25.000If you turn the camera to the sky, A much longer exposure with sensitive film.
00:18:30.000You'll get the stars, but then you overexpose the stuff in the foreground.
00:18:34.000So Photography 101 answers that question.
00:18:38.000But there are huge websites given unto this.
00:18:40.000And so what that told me was that people simply wanted to believe that it was a hoax.
00:18:46.000And 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.
00:18:59.000So at that point I said people just believe what they want.
00:19:02.000And so my task was not to debate moon hoaxers as an educator.
00:19:07.000My task is 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.
00:19:19.000Or you get duped by someone who's exploiting the laws of physics for their own financial gain.
00:19:27.000They're exploiting your ignorance of the laws of physics for their own financial gain.
00:19:32.000So 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.
00:19:43.000Certainly with things that can be easily explained, like you're talking about the light and the setting of the camera, all that stuff.
00:19:50.000Yeah, but they led with that, and I explained that.
00:19:52.000Oh, well, then, okay, well, then how about...
00:19:53.000And they start going down a list, and, you know, time to go to dinner, you know?
00:19:57.000So that is a huge problem where, you know, and certainly when I watched my first documentary on the Fox one, when the moon landing, it was a big, the moon did we go...
00:20:09.000There was all sorts of compelling evidence that was really weird, like photographs from different spots on the moon, but they had the same backdrop.
00:20:16.000And using this idea that they had done these inside some gigantic sound studio.
00:20:23.000And when you see something like that on television, you saw Brian O'Leary, who is an astronaut.
00:20:28.000And once again, it's on TV. Yeah, of course.
00:20:30.000So there's the authority built into the medium.
00:20:32.000And 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, we know they lied about that, they lie about things all the time.
00:21:29.000Was 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?
00:23:21.000A lot of people got away with some secrets.
00:23:23.000Yeah, but I didn't tell it to 10,000 people and say, keep it a secret.
00:23:26.000Well, the idea is that if you're talking about NASA, the idea about the moon landings was that it was compartmentalized.
00:23:31.000And, you know, the big one is that Stanley Kubrick was the...
00:23:35.000There's actually a documentary, a fascinating documentary.
00:23:37.000Again, fucks with my head because, as I've always said, it's terrifying when you're too stupid to know who's dumb.
00:23:43.000And that is often where I find myself when I'm watching these things.
00:23:47.000And there was this documentary that was all about the different sort of techniques that Kubrick used in 2001. All brilliant and pioneering.
00:23:57.000Yeah, he had changed the way you re-shot gigantic scenes by some new process called something about...
00:24:39.000It'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, and that's to hide either the trampoline or hide the movement of their feet,
00:25:43.000I 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?
00:26:36.000If 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.
00:26:51.000By then, for me, I don't have the energy to fight all of that.
00:27:19.000He's got good analogies and he can present to you the psychological evidence of why we're susceptible to this.
00:27:26.000He's got a whole book called Why We Believe Weird Things.
00:27:29.000Do you think it's weird to look at that video and think it looks odd?
00:27:33.000It'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,
00:27:49.000the back side of the moon, images from the surface of the moon.
00:28:12.000After you get to a certain point, I'm just saying it builds.
00:28:14.000And then someone shows you a video and says, well, maybe all of that was all fake.
00:28:19.000Well, you know, the idea is not even that it all didn't happen.
00:28:22.000The idea proposed in the Kubrick documentary was that the footage was fucked up and that they made a lot of extra footage.
00:28:29.000And 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.
00:30:15.000So you mean like the Lunar Rover dust?
00:30:17.000Yeah, or every time they stepped, the dust came up.
00:30:20.000So 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...
00:30:32.000To fool an expert who knows what they're looking at.
00:30:55.000What 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.
00:32:40.000So what I'm confusing is what would happen in an Earth's environment.
00:32:45.000That's your life experience, so this is the bias you bring to it.
00:32:48.000It's an understandable bias, and that's what makes the moon an otherworldly place.
00:32:53.000So 70 pounds, you literally could spring up as if you were pulled by a cord, like you would look like.
00:33:00.000You 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.
00:33:08.000I really enjoyed Mythbusters' version of it.
00:33:10.000They 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.
00:34:33.000There's a famous quote by Arthur C. Clarke, who, at one point I had tweeted this, where he said, in space, where there is no air, a flag cannot wave.
00:34:45.000So maybe space is not a place where flags belong.
00:34:55.000It'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.
00:35:03.000There you can see clearly that the shaft is over the top of it.
00:35:05.000No, he had just stuck it in the ground.
00:36:49.000It 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, or that might not have been even real Apollo footage.
00:36:57.000I 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.
00:37:37.000And 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.
00:37:48.000Or, there's something that didn't make it into this photo.
00:40:04.000No, I look for, you know, they can't control the sun.
00:40:08.000So 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 ten minutes later.
00:40:30.000I swear to you, it's easier to just go to the damn moon.
00:40:33.000I understand exactly what you're saying, but it sounds crazy if you think that people actually couldn't get to the moon, then no.
00:40:40.000If 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.
00:40:54.000And this has sort of been kind of acknowledged by NASA that they rolled the dice with solar radiation.
00:40:59.000So 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.
00:41:17.000Intensity plus time gives you total dose.
00:41:19.000Right, 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.
00:41:26.000And every single space station flight, every space shuttle flight, all of them are within, what, 400 miles?
00:41:54.000And the reason why you can't get out there is because of solar flares and radiation and all this jazz.
00:41:59.000So if they're right, then it would be easier to fake it.
00:42:03.000You say they're not right because Van Allen says it's safe to go through the belts.
00:42:07.000And then they went through the top, the donut hole.
00:42:09.000But realistically, when people look at human beings that have actually been through, the last time someone did it was 1972. Because the last time a human being has been more than 400 miles from the Earth's surface.
00:42:38.000Or the computing power that's in a singing birthday card.
00:42:43.000So what Kubrick got wrong in 2001, in the midst of all the rest that was visionary, was the assumption that the future...
00:42:51.000would be one big computer controlling the one big ship.
00:42:55.000The notion of distributed computing where you would have the power of a mainframe sitting on your hip was unimagined at the time.
00:43:04.000So yeah, things got systematically more powerful, but that's a natural progression of technology that's been going on since the Industrial Revolution.
00:43:42.000Yes, that's the clean, clear answer, but there's a more subtle answer.
00:43:46.000When 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,
00:44:03.000a civilian space agency, and The World's Fair in New York, 1964, was all about inventing a future.
00:44:18.000What 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.
00:44:29.000If you don't 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,
00:44:47.000you cry foul and you say, well, wait a minute, how about the future?
00:45:12.000And 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.
00:45:25.000I understand what you're saying, and 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,
00:45:41.000whether it's building better bombs or faster planes.
00:46:30.000We 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.
00:46:37.000There is no—once you understand that, it allows you to understand why we stopped.
00:46:43.000I 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.
00:48:07.000They're astronauts and aerospace engineers and scientists and entrepreneurs who say, you know, an asteroid the size of The size of a football field has more mineable Rare elements than have ever been mined in the history of the world.
00:48:23.000And if you tow that thing to Earth, there you go.
00:50:31.000They're going to be heroes that 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.
00:51:25.000In these smooth layers that slide off one another.
00:51:28.000That's why a pencil, as you touch a pencil to the page and drag it, what you're doing is you're dragging layers of carbon lattice off of the graphite.
00:54:40.000It is the same stuff that's in coal, except treated differently.
00:54:45.000There 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.
00:55:00.000I don't anymore, but in my tenure as host...
00:55:04.000We 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 They're just building diamonds.
00:55:41.000Now, here's what's the real weird thing about that.
00:55:44.000Oh, by the way, wait, then I took some of the samples of diamonds that they made and went on 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.
00:56:18.000Because they want to know that it was forged in the fires of the belly of the earth and not just out of somebody's back lab.
00:56:26.000And I said, okay, but, you know, these are pure diamonds than anything Earth is creating because we can do a better job making diamonds than Earth can.
00:56:34.000And so, for me, I'd take the artificial dynamite.
00:56:49.000Does 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.
00:58:00.000Carbon is the fourth most common ingredient in the cosmos.
00:58:04.000And the cosmos is full of places where there's high temperature and high pressure and a lot of time.
00:58:10.000And 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.
00:58:22.000How long does it take to create a diamond in the earth inside?
00:59:42.000Yeah, I think there's not a pure market.
00:59:44.000I think in the lingo of economics, if there's 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.
01:00:00.000And it presupposes that there's full access to supplies and demand And nothing is being withheld.
01:00:08.000So, yes, De Beers is withholding, if not De Beers, someone else, is withholding diamonds from the marketplace to assure a certain price.
01:00:16.000If they flooded the market, the price would drop.
01:00:18.000Goddammit, Mrs. Rogan, you listening to this shit?
01:04:30.000I said, okay, this is driving me crazy.
01:04:32.000When 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.
01:04:39.000They're fucking spraying us with shit, man.
01:05:47.000They 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.
01:05:54.000That's why there's lithium in the water supply, Neil Tyson.
01:05:57.000I had a conversation with someone who said, do you know there's antidepressants in the water supply?
01:06:01.000I go, well, that's because people flush their antidepressants and they pee.
01:07:16.000There was a National Geographic piece on Yellowstone where it was right when they sort of figured out that Yellowstone was a caldera volcano.
01:08:49.000So the count of earthquakes is not interesting.
01:08:51.000You want the number of earthquakes above seven, above six and a half, above...
01:08:56.000Five, they start getting interesting, but not lethal yet.
01:09:02.000Set your threshold, then give me the number.
01:09:05.000So are those earthquakes, those small ones, like the Yellowstone ones, are they going on everywhere?
01:09:09.000It's just they're measuring it in Yellowstone?
01:09:11.000Some places are more geologically active than others.
01:09:15.000Places 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.
01:09:35.000And 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.
01:10:46.000Some of that was retained in Central Park.
01:10:48.000They left some geologically interesting features there.
01:10:51.000But the point is, they're Earthquakes down to level two, what were measurable, they happen all the time in most places.
01:11:00.000And they happen often in most places and practically continuously where you are geologically active.
01:11:07.000And 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.
01:11:15.000It leaves like a gigantic, I think it's 300 kilometers wide or something.
01:11:19.000In a supervolcano, you basically repave major...
01:11:23.000You know, Venus has very few craters on it.
01:11:27.000And 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?
01:11:39.000And further analysis shows that Venus completely repaves its surface at regular intervals.
01:12:29.000When 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.
01:12:40.000And you know the seas happen very late because they have fewer craters than adjacent areas.
01:13:03.000Where 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.
01:13:17.000So Venus is just constant supervolcanoes all the time.
01:13:20.000When you see something like the moon, which is completely covered in meteor impacts, it's one of the things that really sets into my mind or gives me a reference point for time.
01:14:03.000The 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.
01:14:15.000And it had a trajectory that was headed straight for Jupiter.
01:14:20.000And the Hubble telescope was in place and everybody was aiming.
01:14:24.000And each one of these blobs of comet that fell into Jupiter...
01:14:29.000Plunged into the atmosphere and exploded with more energy than all the bombs in the American arsenal.
01:14:36.000And so a better way to say that is it plunged with more energy than the impact that rendered the dinosaurs extinct on Earth.
01:14:47.000And so to get a sense of the energetics of the solar system is extraordinary.
01:14:52.000So the solar system, to get to your point, is a shooting gallery.
01:14:55.000And 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.
01:15:06.000And we are protected by our atmosphere from most of it.
01:15:10.000And my other point was that when you see that, you see all the impacts.
01:15:38.000Our minds interact with it in very terrestrial ways.
01:15:43.000With 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.
01:16:00.000And 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.
01:16:10.000And 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 of the cycle of life.
01:16:45.000How much time did it take for all those rocks to fly out of space and hit that?
01:16:50.000And 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.
01:17:27.000Were it not for the methods and tools of science, we would have no clue about the universe of time and the universe of space that exists beyond The physical accessibility of our biological form.
01:17:42.000So 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.
01:17:55.000But we've all seen time lapse of clouds, particularly rain clouds.
01:19:23.000The 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.
01:20:44.000The 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.
01:20:55.000So I don't want to blow this thing into six pieces and still have all those six pieces headed towards Earth.
01:21:01.000So the kinder, gentler solution is to deflect it from harm's way.
01:21:06.000And there's something called a gravitational tractor beam, essentially.
01:21:10.000I mean, that's the poetic way to say it, the sci-fi way to say it.
01:21:13.000But really, you put a space pod out there that has a gravitational field that attracts, slowly, attracts the asteroid into a slightly different orbit.
01:21:24.000And if you get there early enough, you don't have to deflect it by much because that deflection accumulates.
01:21:29.000And all you need it to do is miss Earth.
01:21:32.000Now, 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.
01:21:47.000And Jupiter protects us from most asteroids, right?
01:23:05.000As 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.
01:23:17.000That most solar systems, most star systems, have a Jupiter-sized object much closer to their host star than our Jupiter is.
01:23:25.000So then we say, well, why is our star system different from theirs?
01:24:00.000Oh, 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.
01:24:21.000And is the atmosphere stable enough to support life?
01:24:24.000That would be a concern no matter where the planet is.
01:24:27.000But here's the challenge with a multi-star star system.
01:24:31.000As 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.
01:24:44.000If you have an unstable orbit, You're likely to eject the planet forever into interstellar space.
01:24:53.000And 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 systems than there are stars within planetary systems themselves.
01:25:51.000It doesn't care if it comes from the sun.
01:25:54.000Volcanic vents at the bottom of the sea with no sunlight.
01:25:57.000For 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.
01:26:25.000The fact that we've discovered exotic life on Earth has broadened the net.
01:26:31.000that we have cast into space in our search for life in the universe.
01:26:36.000No longer do we need to look for the 72 degree pond in an oxygen atmosphere planet in our search for life.
01:26:44.000So this Goldilocks zone where everything had to be perfect, we've got life thriving in places that would kill us.
01:26:51.000And we are not the measure, the ultimate measure, of what the conditions that life requires to survive.
01:26:59.000So 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.
01:27:11.000And 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.
01:27:25.000So these planets could essentially be spaceships filled with life forms headed our way, and they might even slam into us.
01:28:03.000So this is an astronomer mid-20th century who hypothesized...
01:28:08.000That beyond the outermost planet, there would be sort of the leftovers of the solar system that didn't collect into a bonafide red-blooded planet.
01:28:18.000But the residue should still be out there.
01:28:20.000Because if you're residue in an orbit where a red-blooded planet exists, you're going to collide with that planet eventually.
01:28:26.000You're going to merge with the planet and make that planet even bigger.
01:28:30.000This is one of the failed criteria for Pluto.
01:28:35.000Being classified as a planet because it is in a zone in the solar system that has not cleared its orbit.
01:28:40.000It is in the Kuiper belt, in the inner edge of it, yes, but it is joined by countless thousands of other icy bodies.
01:28:51.000Earth, yes, we plow through crap in our orbit, but the ratio of the mass of the stuff we plow into to Earth's mass is like gnats flying into an elephant.
01:29:08.000Anything that could still possibly collide with us, Earth won't even care.
01:29:13.000We'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.
01:29:22.000We have basically cleared our orbit of anything dangerous.
01:30:07.000That 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.
01:30:14.000I 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.
01:30:26.000What you might be remembering is the Nemesis object.
01:30:40.000Let the record show the man's eyebrows moved up into his forehead.
01:30:46.000So there was an analysis of the extinction episodes in the history of the Earth that suggested that perhaps they were episodic or periodic.
01:30:57.000Every 20 million years or so, there was a little dip in the fossil record.
01:31:25.000But 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.
01:31:36.000And they did that long before they knew what the hell happened there.
01:31:40.000We would later learn that an asteroid struck, and there surely were some supervolcano activity in what are called the Deccan Traps.
01:31:48.000And so there was a lot of bad stuff going on in the Earth at that time.
01:32:34.000So it was imagined that maybe there's an object out there that's so far away you can't see it.
01:32:40.000But it's on this huge looping orbit that comes by the sun every 20 million years.
01:32:47.000Because that's the cycle of these extinction episodes.
01:32:51.000And if that's the case, no, it doesn't hit us.
01:32:54.000It has to stay around for the next cycle, so what does it do?
01:32:57.000It 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.
01:34:03.000If you go much beyond that, your gravitational allegiance is uncertain and you could fall into the next star rather than fall towards the Sun.
01:34:11.000The guys were, I don't know if you 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.
01:34:22.000They 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.
01:34:34.000Is this just a random theory that these guys put together that wasn't completely accepted?
01:34:42.000What 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.
01:34:54.000There's some observation that was never repeated.
01:34:58.000There's something you've got to come up with.
01:35:00.000And so you say, well, we know the Oort cloud exists.
01:35:02.000We know you can perturb those orbits and send them careening down towards the inner solar system.
01:35:10.000And those that Jupiter doesn't bat away, like batting practice, those that get through Jupiter's gravitational shield could wreak havoc on Earth.
01:35:18.000Yeah, but it's inventing a lot to explain something you don't know.
01:35:25.000So it's inventing more of what you don't know that could be true to explain that which you don't have any other evidence to support.
01:36:30.000And by the way, the universe is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine.
01:36:38.000And so to say I need your creativity and...
01:36:47.000No, we've got black holes that are flaying stars layer by layer.
01:36:53.000Do you realize that if you fall into a black hole, you'll 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?
01:38:46.000I 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.
01:39:05.000If Mars was fertile and formed life Microbial, though it may only have been, it's microbial life that can survive dehydration, high radiation,
01:39:22.000We have found what we call extremophiles on Earth, like I said a moment ago, that thrive under conditions that would kill us.
01:39:31.000High pressure, low pressure, high temperature, low temperature, high radiation.
01:39:36.000All of these conditions the microbes would have encountered On Mars, being thrust into space and making that journey.
01:39:45.000Well, 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.
01:40:00.000More importantly, why do we have bacteria that could survive high radiation in the first place?
01:40:08.000What business does that have here beneath Earth's protective atmosphere, thriving in places where there isn't high radiation?
01:40:18.000We have life forms that can survive what that trip through space would have been subjected to by a trip through space.
01:40:32.000By the way, life does not evolve the way anyone typically thinks it does.
01:40:38.000You're not some organism that then adapts to a new environment.
01:40:56.000Nature is selecting that subset of the variation in a generation that has survival properties for that next assault in the environment.
01:41:07.000So, 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.
01:41:25.000Does a planet need any sort of an atmosphere in order to support life or they just need water?
01:41:32.000All we know is what can support life as we know it.
01:42:24.000Well, recent evidence suggests that possibly more than half of the mass of biology, the biomass of Earth...
01:42:36.000Lives and thrives beneath Earth's surface, not on its surface.
01:42:43.000If that's the case, what's going on in the atmosphere is relatively irrelevant.
01:42:49.000If you're thriving deep within a nook and cranny of a rock a mile down, But don't they have some air down there?
01:42:55.000Yeah, there's some air, but it's not cycling with what's going on in our air.
01:43:01.000So the rules become broader or altered from what you would presume the life requires.
01:43:10.000So to talk about a planet being habitable, we should no longer think only of what the surface of that planet supplies.
01:43:20.000We need to think more broadly about What could go on deep within its surface as well?
01:43:25.000We'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.
01:43:36.000No, there's no evidence that we have huge creatures.
01:43:39.000The pressures and the behavior of The material doesn't allow there to be huge cavities that haven't, over the billions of years, completely been filled in.
01:43:50.000When I say huge, I mean hundreds of miles large.
01:43:55.000No, the system would collapse into that rapidly.
01:43:59.000You can get smaller cavities like Carlsbad Caverns, that sort of thing, but nothing staggeringly large.
01:44:08.000Now, when you consider all the possibilities for life in the universe, which are, you know, almost infinite, right?
01:44:16.000Yeah, 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, you know, here on Earth.
01:44:27.000You 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.
01:47:25.000So 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?
01:48:26.000Well, we don't need to smell nitrogen because it's not going to kill us because it's 78% of what you breathe anyway.
01:48:35.000We have evolved a hypersensitive sense for the smell of hydrogen sulfide.
01:48:46.000If 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 ten minutes later, no longer able to propagate the gene that liked the smell of hydrogen sulfide.
01:49:04.000We 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.
01:49:21.000That's why it comes out of your lower intestine, not only where the sun don't shine, but where oxygen doesn't exist.
01:49:27.000The microbes that thrive down there, they are anaerobic, and hydrogen sulfide is one of their byproducts.
01:49:35.000It has been theorized that there have been places and times on Earth Where the ocean currents stopped.
01:49:43.000And when ocean currents stop, oxygen at the surface of the ocean never makes it to the bottom.
01:49:51.000So you can't sustain oxygen life forms at the bottom of the ocean.
01:49:57.000There wouldn't be any fishes down there if the ocean currents stopped.
01:50:02.000Because the ocean currents not only go from one place to another in the world, they circulate top to bottom.
01:50:08.000So it's a two-dimensional thing going on, three dimensions actually.
01:50:12.000So if something happens on Earth where you stop the oceanic cycles, you can create a condition in the lower ocean Where anaerobic lifeforms thrive.
01:50:46.000Therefore, the nose theory, that if we didn't have a nose, we could all just fart.
01:50:51.000If 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.
01:50:59.000I agree with you and disagree with you at the same time.
01:51:05.000What you're saying involves real people and real life adaptation to our environment.
01:51:10.000What I'm talking about is aliens that are just like farts.
01:51:16.000This 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.
01:52:10.000When 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.
01:52:16.000Maybe a hundred billion people are dead.
01:53:07.000So 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.
01:53:18.000This is really the first steps to enhance our senses beyond what our human biology endowed us with.
01:53:29.000And upon doing so We discovered things about the world that were previously oblivious to us.
01:53:51.000The little things, paramecia and protozoa, thriving in a drop of water.
01:53:58.000That was a nose fart, keeping with your vocabulary.
01:54:02.000That was something that previously no one had any idea was there.
01:54:06.000And my point is, beginning in 1600, And with an ever-improving march forward, the methods and tools of science have served to enhance our senses, increase our senses, increase the range of our senses,
01:54:22.000but 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.
01:54:39.000Yeah, we don't have sensors to detect magnetic field at all.
01:54:45.000That's why you can sit in an MRI chamber and sit there and, you know, whistle Dixie, and you'll have no idea the strength of the magnetic field that's being cast across your body.
01:55:24.000So the point is, the radio waves are part of the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
01:55:30.000We have access to some of that, and we call that For obvious reasons, visible light.
01:55:35.000But outside of the range of visible light, you have ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays, radio waves, microwaves.
01:55:41.000So 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.
01:55:51.000That visor allowed him to see the entire...
01:56:03.000Well, that visor enabled him to see the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
01:56:07.000If we were thusly equipped, you'd walk down the street and the microwave towers would be ablaze with microwaves.
01:56:14.000And you tune into sort of ultraviolet and you think twice about going to the beach because that's the stuff that gives you skin cancer, especially people with lighter skin.
01:56:24.000If you want to see if there's a burglar entering your house, just shift over to infrared.
01:56:32.000If the burglar is warm-blooded, they will show up even if all the lights are out.
01:56:41.000So science has broadened our senses and given us senses that our human biology could not have even thought of or invented.
01:56:52.000So 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.
01:57:11.000Right now that frontier is at the energy extremes of the CERN accelerator in Switzerland.
01:57:17.000That 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.
01:57:25.000These are the extremes Of our measurements of nature today.
01:57:31.000The biological limitations of human beings, 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?
01:58:13.000So now some of the creative ideas are quantum physics, which is the most successful theory of physics there ever was, quantum theory.
01:58:22.000tells 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,
01:59:12.000Some universes might be created without any matter at all.
01:59:15.000So you have a universe with no one to contemplate it.
01:59:18.000We happen to have a universe where the matter and energy within it assembled and achieved consciousness.
01:59:26.000So a universe where there's no matter at all, but it's infinite and self-comprised, like it is the universe, so you can't get here from there.
01:59:36.000Not 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.
01:59:46.000Because 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,
02:01:15.000When you point that finger I get nervous.
02:01:18.000So there's cogent physics reasons to think that there's a multiverse and quantum physics takes us there.
02:01:26.000There'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.
02:01:38.000When we thought Earth is it, no, Earth is just one of many other planets.
02:02:35.000So maybe there are multiple multiverses.
02:02:46.000And then it's turtles all the way down, as they say.
02:02:53.000Like 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.
02:03:00.000There was a time when we didn't know how the Earth began.
02:03:02.000We have a good idea of that now, and how the moon formed.
02:03:08.000No, we weren't around five billion years ago to watch it, but you don't need to be.
02:03:11.000There are very clever ways to know what happened in the past.
02:03:14.000Geologists have been doing it ever since the field was born.
02:03:19.000There'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.
02:04:04.000We watch them explode and we date them from when we see them explode.
02:04:08.000But hell, they'd exploded long ago, depending on their distance.
02:04:11.000If they're a thousand light years away, they exploded a thousand years ago.
02:04:15.000But you had no knowledge of it until today.
02:04:17.000There 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.
02:04:32.000So 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, there's the old military credo,
02:04:48.000We said, all right, we'll sign this treaty, but we're going to keep an eye on you.
02:04:52.000So we got together, the engineers and the physicists, and we, my brethren of the day, He invented a kind of detector that was sensitive to gamma rays.
02:05:03.000That's one of these bands in the electromagnetic spectrum.
02:05:06.000The highest energy band for which we have a word to describe it.
02:07:19.000It takes 150 to 100 billion galaxies...
02:07:23.000Each with 100 billion stars to give you eight of these a week.
02:07:30.000Yeah, so by the way, there's an interesting way that this will render us toast.
02:07:35.000So the first wave of gamma rays will take out our ozone layer.
02:07:39.000The ozone absorbs high energy radiation.
02:07:41.000That's what protects us from – it's what absorbs most of the ultraviolet from the sun.
02:07:47.000Otherwise, 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.
02:08:00.000The ozone is oxygen, and it's O3. The air you breathe has O2 in it, the molecule O2. Ozone is O3. An ultraviolet photon comes in, slams into O3, it breaks it apart into O plus O2. There you go.
02:08:16.000It took the ultraviolet light out of the picture.
02:09:48.000But 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.
02:09:58.000Because 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.
02:10:09.000Well, no, the average life expectancy of a mammal species is about 3 million years.
02:10:15.000And 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.
02:10:22.000And then there are people who are saying, well, we better learn how to terraform Mars because Earth is about to be completely messed up.
02:10:30.000And those folks, I think, are misguided in their thinking.
02:10:59.000If we have the power to convert Mars into something that looks like Earth, then we have the power to fix our own oceans and our own atmosphere, right?
02:11:30.000With 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.
02:12:06.000Even understands what's going on when you get online.
02:12:09.000Yeah, just think about what's going on in your car's GPS, right?
02:12:14.000So it's talking to a satellite and mixing your location on Earth's surface with information that's in the later versions of it in your car updated from the internet.
02:12:24.000About what direction the traffic flows on a street you happen to be driving on.
02:12:31.000And whether the Dunkin' Donuts is open late.
02:12:34.000Yeah, as long as there's money in fixing the environment, we're going to fix the environment.
02:13:09.000But 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.
02:13:18.000It seems to me that if you fly over just the United States alone, God, there's a lot of space to do shit.
02:14:01.000In any time that civilization has been concerned about this.
02:14:05.000And so 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.
02:14:52.000And there's good evidence to say that 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.
02:15:07.000I forgot the exact time that they've been...
02:15:09.000It's geologist plus, you know, 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,
02:15:26.000how high the temperature is versus what Earth is doing with the energy it received.
02:15:33.000When you're a snowball, most of Earth's, the sun's light is reflected rather than absorbed.
02:15:49.000It 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 It gets kept, and then it freezes up a little more.
02:16:04.000So you can have a runaway ice ball just as you can have a runaway greenhouse.
02:16:10.000That's interesting that these two possibilities exist.
02:16:14.000And 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.
02:16:27.000And they're happy and nobody's disturbing them.
02:16:29.000Then you maintain your atmospheric temperature and the energy balance of sunlight hitting the earth, some getting absorbed, other parts getting reflected.
02:17:58.000So, the issue is not will Earth survive it.
02:18:00.000It's whether we, as we have set up culture and civilization and economies, and it's all been set up assuming a certain constancy of the conduct of nature.
02:18:11.000And 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.
02:18:29.000Much like your analogy of the clouds in a time-lapse fashion, the idea of living by the beach would be so fucking ridiculous.
02:18:36.000If you ever saw the actual, like, Pangea change into continents...
02:18:42.000It's like, why would you live near the water?
02:19:00.000Are you concerned about Sandy and the impact that it had?
02:19:03.000It 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 entire underground parking garages were flooded.
02:19:15.000Cars were bobbing out of the exit doors of these parking garages.
02:19:19.000Have you thought about Utah or maybe perhaps the Colorado mountains?
02:19:24.000Because if you plan for the end of the world, I'm going where you're going.
02:22:20.000In the way we have come to understand the universe and our methods and tools, deep down within that 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.
02:24:00.000And the level of expertise in that analysis is above my pay scale.
02:24:05.000So it's got to go to peers who do exactly that kind of mathematical physics.
02:24:10.000And if they come out with a consensus and they agree, then I'm good to go.
02:24:14.000And I'll invest more energy in coming to understand it.
02:24:17.000But 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.
02:24:27.000And so I have to allocate my energies and my budget of time.
02:24:33.000And 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.
02:25:09.000That's why it doesn't have all the information as the same universe, because it only takes the base so it can back up to that.
02:25:14.000He's going to make you dumber if you keep going.
02:25:16.000If you keep listening to him, he will propose some things that will ruin your brain.
02:25:21.000The 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'll be able to create a reality that is indiscernible from this reality.
02:25:34.000And once that is done, how will we know when we're in it?
02:25:57.000Because 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, you know, it doubles every 18 months or so, in capacity and speed and all the metrics that matter when you're in information technology,
02:26:16.000The 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?
02:26:28.000I mean, here in LA, the actor's version of that is they've just digitized your body in every angle, doing everything.
02:27:55.000Your passion for knowledge and your passion for distributing it.
02:27:59.000It's so infectious and it's so fascinating.
02:28:01.000I got a lot of Twitter messages today about you coming on.
02:28:04.000A lot of them were from people who said that you ignited their passion for science and you made them pursue specific career goals.
02:28:14.000There was a guy today who sent me this message about He's an engineer.
02:28:17.000I became an engineer because of listening to you.
02:28:19.000Well, I'm deeply appreciative of that, but let me pose that and let me analyze that in a slightly different way.
02:28:25.000I already know that the universe is an extraordinary place, but not everyone else does.
02:28:31.000So 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, AKA,
02:30:31.000And 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.
02:30:40.000No, I was like lunchtime entertainment forum, and it was like the science advisor episodes.
02:30:45.000One of the greatest things about creating this podcast has been the opportunity to have these kind of conversations.
02:30:49.000I could have never corralled you and said, hey man, yeah, the guy who hosts the UFC in Fear Factor wants to sit down with you for three hours.
02:30:56.000He'd be like, yeah, tell that dude I got shit to do.
02:30:59.000But the fact that I could pick your brain for this long.
02:31:01.000Well, the fact that you even have this curiosity and you've nurtured it in your fan base is great.