In this episode, we talk with comedian and stand-up comic Neil Patrick Harris about being fat in the 80s and early 90s, how he got into standup comedy, and what it's like to be fat in today's society. We also talk about how he went from being a heavy slob to being a bulimic, and how he managed to keep his weight in check, even though he weighed over 200 pounds at one point in his career. And, of course, he talks about his new book, "Bigheads: The Biggest Thing I've Ever Loved: The Story of a Big Headed Man." This episode was produced by Riley Bray and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Will Witwer Additional Compositions: Jeff Perla Editing: Ian Dorsch Mixing: Kevin McLeod mastering the art of the mind and the mind of a big head Thanks to our sponsor, and our producer, Kevin Mclean Thank you for the use of the theme song from Fugue Records by my main amigo, John Kimbrough for the intro and outro music from our theme song "Goodbye Outer Space" by our main man, Justin McElroy by our artist, Evan Handyside, and thanks to the beat of the band "I'm Too Effortless" by my good friend, . and , and by & , by the band, and the rest of our ad agency, , we hope you enjoy this episode is great! and we'll see you next week! thanks to our sponsors in the next episode of the podcast "The Big Dawgs" and (featuring our ad man, The Big Dawg we'll be back next week, by John Rocha & , "Mr. and "The Little People" by , thanks to -- is from ! - and . , of AND with our new ad man "The Realest Thing" by the Big Head & "The Fat Head"
00:00:49.000So if you measure the circumference of your head, just get a tape measure, like you're measuring your waistline, but do it around your head.
00:00:55.000And take that number, divide it by pi, then that's your hat size.
00:01:14.000So what that means is, if you're dividing by pi, you're getting the diameter of the circle That has the same dimension as the circumference of your head.
00:01:25.000So if you have an oblong head, then what it's doing is finding out what the circle is, the diameter of the circle that has that same circumference as your head.
00:01:37.000That's what that's doing, for whether that helps the hat maker.
00:01:41.000So, immediately I started thinking about Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live as a conehead.
00:07:20.000Actually, he did it by the time he was 26. So, yes, it's provocative, because you're expecting that Jesus is going to end that.
00:07:28.000But I thought I'd share some actual truth with people.
00:07:31.000And so, some people celebrated it, deeply religious people.
00:07:35.000One had a headline saying, Neil deGrasse Tyson's trolling Christians on Christmas Day.
00:07:40.000And I said, Newton at least has the benefit of actually having been born that day.
00:07:45.000Then later on, it's actually more subtle than that with Newton, because he was on the Julian calendar, which is 10 days shifted from the Gregorian calendar.
00:07:55.000So if you ask what would his birthday be today, it would be January 4th, not December 25th.
00:08:02.000But when he was born, his mother was celebrating Christmas, so that's really what matters for that tweet.
00:08:07.000Well, it's such a bizarre thing anyway, because if you're a real Christian, you would understand that the birthday was shifted in order to comply with pagan religions.
00:09:48.000And you put celebrations that match theirs just so that the shift is not as hard for you.
00:09:54.000And the unknown birthday of Jesus was then assigned this pagan day of celebration to make that transition easier for the pagans to become Christians.
00:10:03.000And sure enough, it remained Christmas Day ever since then.
00:10:40.000Do you think that it's possible that maybe you could even offer up a Flat Earth Believer tour where you take them, like at the very least, take them up to Alaska where it's light for 23 hours a day?
00:10:54.000Do you have Flat Earthers calling into you?
00:12:45.000Holding aside the fact that I'm a little scared that in this 21st century United States of America, we have people walking among us afraid of the number 13. What does that mean?
00:13:31.000So they go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. And then you have to go to the next row to begin for the 14. So you don't see 12 right next to 14. And some modern buildings will put their...
00:13:45.000The heavy machinery, like the HVAC, on the 13th floor, so that there's no residency there, right?
00:13:54.000But they could still say it's the 13th floor, and then there's the 14th floor.
00:14:25.000Yeah, they leave the store floors, and they all go up to 11, and they have a cocktail party, and they vote which one of them is going to go out and become human for a day.
00:17:03.000She's the she's the giant where they're saying there's a giant attacking us, but the whole show you have her point of view these aliens are trying to hurt her when they're just it was our space probe just trying to explore its environment But isn't it possible that it's like another dimension?
00:17:21.000It's us in another dimension and they are landing on Earth?
00:17:30.000But couldn't they have just parallel evolution?
00:17:33.000Well, isn't that the definition of infinity?
00:17:36.000That somewhere, if there is really an infinity, there is not only a you and an I, but there's a you and an I and everybody else we've ever met and all the exact events and the exact same order have gone down an infinite number of times, including this conversation.
00:19:14.000So that's a number that you'll never find as a solution to an algebraic equation.
00:19:19.000So pi is a transcendental number, e is a transcendental number.
00:19:22.000These are magic numbers that show up in mathematics.
00:19:25.000And there's turns out there's like an even bigger infinity of those Than there is of these other two classes of numbers.
00:19:33.000And they use the Hebrew letter Aleph in ranking.
00:19:41.000So Aleph 1, Aleph 2, Aleph 3, Aleph 4. I think there are five levels of infinity.
00:19:45.000So my point is, just because there's infinite universes to me doesn't mean there's infinite conversations that have happened.
00:19:52.000And I'd want to really explore the depths of infinities before I say and agree with you that this conversation has happened a million, you know, an infinite number of times in just this way, except you have a different engineer sitting next to us.
00:20:06.000And an infinite number of times where it's been Jamie, too, right?
00:20:54.000And so it makes sense to you that the universe is under no obligation to make sense.
00:20:58.000So it's okay if your brain hurts when I say there's a ranking of infinities, but you shouldn't say that doesn't make sense, therefore it is not true.
00:21:07.000But what confuses me is the word infinity, because I had always taken the word infinity to mean something that has no end.
00:21:13.000So how can something that has no end be larger than something else that has no end?
00:21:16.000So the way they do that mathematically, the way to demonstrate that mathematically is you map one item in the set of this infinity to corresponding items in the set of the other infinity.
00:22:30.000Here's some things it could be, because NASA is saying that it's a stunning new announcement.
00:22:36.000Well, what could be more than the fact that we already know that there are Earth-like planets orbiting in the Goldilocks zone of the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri?
00:22:48.000Can you do better than that for me, NASA? I don't think so, unless you've got some extra stuff you're going to tell us, like What's been a cottage industry in the last couple of years is the observation of planet atmospheres as the planet passes in front of the host star.
00:23:06.000Light from the host star passes through the atmosphere and the light signature is altered by the chemistry of the atmosphere.
00:23:15.000So depending on what the chemicals are, it'll influence the spectrum that you get.
00:23:20.000And when you do that, you can say what the chemical composition of the atmosphere of that star is.
00:23:25.000There's certain There's certain combinations of elements that we would call biomarkers.
00:23:32.000No, we can't look down to the surface of the planet and look at cities, if there are any.
00:23:36.000But there are consequences in the atmosphere to there being life on the surface.
00:23:43.000I used to think when I was watching Star Trek when I was a kid, because I saw it in real time, that's how old I am, when it first came out, original series.
00:23:52.000Star Trek characters never wore spacesuits.
00:25:10.000Yeah, because oxygen feeds combustion, and so you could basically burn all vegetation in the world if the oxygen went above certain thresholds.
00:25:18.000So you need it high enough so that you can still have oxygen metabolism, but not so high that it's bad for lightning-triggered forest fires.
00:27:57.000We made it one of us, one of the nine, and its size didn't settle out until the late 1970s, where we had better and better, more accurate ways to measure its size, and that's when we learned.
00:28:08.000It's small even compared to our own But, granted, we have a big moon, but if you're not going to think our moon is a planet, you're certainly not going to think that Pluto is a planet.
00:28:17.000So this object, let me just tell you how they did it.
00:28:19.000So they found these other objects out there, the same team, Constantine Batingen and Mike Brown, both at Caltech.
00:28:31.000And they found these objects in the outer, the Kuiper belt, of icy bodies, of which Pluto is a member.
00:28:43.000They move another way, a different way.
00:28:46.000So either Newton's laws of gravity are failing in the outer solar system, or there's some object out there whose gravity you have yet to reconcile with the motions of these objects.
00:28:55.000So they said, let's assume Newton is right.
00:28:58.000What object do we have to put out there, at what distance and at what size, to influence the movement of these Kuiper Belt objects in the way we see it?
00:29:06.000And did they do this through Bode's law?
00:30:20.000Yeah, so now we have advanced computer programming, very high precision modeling, and they're saying there's got to be a planet somewhere here in this arc.
00:30:49.000And they say, well, let's assume it works and ask what would have to influence it.
00:30:53.000And by the way, it's a difficult mathematical calculation because you're not saying, here's the object, what's the gravity field?
00:30:59.000You're saying, here's the gravity field I need.
00:31:03.000Where must the object be and how massive must it be?
00:31:07.000That's a much harder mathematical problem to solve.
00:31:09.000And so once the errant orbit of Uranus was known and calculated, they started looking for another planet, and that's how they discovered planet Neptune.
00:32:15.000It's like six times the mass of the Earth?
00:32:16.000Yeah, I forgot what mass they were assigning it, but if that were in our solar system, there'd be no question you would label it as a planet.
00:32:24.000And it wasn't their one-time speculation that it was some sort of a burnt-out star that existed?
00:32:50.000Could there have been some flux of comets raining down periodically on the Earth, wreaking havoc on the ecosystem, rendering species extinct in these periodic intervals?
00:33:01.000If there is, maybe there's some double star to the Sun.
00:34:17.000That was another thing I really enjoyed, is you're taking a part of Gravity, the movie Gravity, and how many people got mad at you for that?
00:39:34.000Because if you look at any picture of somebody with hair, okay?
00:39:38.000In space, in zero-G, their hair is flying everywhere.
00:39:41.000It's the first thing you notice about them.
00:39:43.000It is so obvious, like, wow, that's the cool...
00:39:45.000You're not thinking about the spaceship or the TIE technology.
00:39:48.000You're looking at the hair doing stuff you will never see happen on Earth, unless someone is, like, underwater and they're jiggling their head.
00:39:55.000So they would have to film it all in Zero Gravity.
00:39:57.000They would have to film it all in one of those drop things.
00:41:35.000It went into the third dimension, and the ant, bound to, it obviously is a three-dimensional thing, Imagine it only lives in two dimensions.
00:41:43.000You would have made that paper disappear into a third dimension.
00:41:47.000And it will have no clue where it went.
00:42:29.000That is a portal to a fourth dimension that can hold vastly more content than what you're stuck storing in the three-dimensional space of your room.
00:42:41.000And even though it has monsters that don't exist, that all speak English, and one of them is a cyclops, and one of them is a, you know, I'm not judging the biophysiology of these creatures, but they got the physics of four-dimensional portals completely accurate.
00:42:55.000Now the concept of dimensions is where it gets really abstract with people.
00:43:02.000And that's why you let the math take you into those higher dimensions.
00:43:07.000Because our intuition will fail for us.
00:43:10.000Right, but that's where it gets weird when you say take the math, or let the math take you.
00:43:14.000So like when quantum physicists use these legal notepads, those yellow pads, and write all that crazy stuff down that nobody but you and maybe them understand, and when you look at all those equations...
00:43:24.000No, it's them, maybe me, not me, maybe then.
00:43:51.000And so you take some leaps, some philosophical leaps, some mathematical leaps.
00:43:57.000You say, all right, maybe all particles that manifest as an electron, a proton, a neutron, maybe quarks, maybe they're just strings of energy vibrating at different frequencies.
00:44:13.000And we sense these different frequencies as different particles.
00:44:57.000We've got a sun sitting out there with a surface temperature, a mass, a certain luminosity.
00:45:03.000And we say, what must be going on down in the core?
00:45:06.000Let's bring our best physics, our quantum physics, our chemistry, our nuclear physics, bring it all together, and we have a complete understanding of what's going on in the center of the sun, and we're on to other problems now, even though we've never visited there.
00:45:20.000So when they're going over the mathematics, observable things that we have right now are at the atomic and subatomic level.
00:47:51.000However, and people, by the way, in the 1920s, when we discovered the atom and its structure and that there's an electron in, quote, orbit around a nucleus, everyone said, wait, we've been there before.
00:49:12.000Its energy levels are predetermined and quantized.
00:49:15.000Hence the word quantum, the prefix quanta in quantum physics.
00:49:20.000So if it was a continuum of matter and energy following the same laws of physics, Then I would say then it's solar systems all the way down.
00:49:36.000And so things can, on the surface, seem similar, but when it comes time to understand them and to analyze them and to manipulate them and to exploit their conduct and their behavior for other means, as we have done with atoms and molecules for the entire IT revolution,
00:49:55.000No longer are they the same, and you abandon this romanticized concept.
00:49:59.000So now, with the neurons, the network of neurons, and the clusters of galaxies and galaxy superclusters, that would be on the right, neurons on the left.
00:51:33.000But now, when you're looking at subatomic particles, and you're looking at these, like, when they observe particles in superposition, where they're moving and stationary at the same time, where they blink in and out of existence, like, when you get down to that...
00:51:48.000And I repeat the opening page of the book.
00:51:53.000The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.
00:55:49.000While we're on this subject of subatomic particles and weirdness, I wanted to, if you could, illuminate this often misused explanation for the observer effect.
00:56:00.000Because you know the particles, waves, and you watch them, observe them, and it changes the reaction?
00:57:43.000Well, it doesn't look as cool as it could be.
00:57:45.000And you're not in a completely cavernous recording studio.
00:57:47.000Well, what I want to do in the future studio, I want to actually build a glass ceiling and have a full-scale image, high-resolution image of the stars.
01:00:30.000You ever, I don't know if this still happened, a quarter spills out of your pants pocket in the backseat of a car, and it's there in the wedge between the bottom and the backseat.
01:01:11.000But when it's described in the woo-woo way, they show these particles going through these slots, and then observing them changes the pattern that they go through with.
01:01:22.000And there's a horrible cartoon that you see in that movie, What in the Bleep?
01:03:32.000So, for example, let's say you're walking and you didn't know that you were walking over this huge burial mound because the slope was really shallow.
01:04:08.000Now, they're not the best data-taking devices, but if there's come time to tell you whether there's a ship or not a ship that you've never seen before, it's a ship.
01:05:30.000They think it's real and genuine, and they're very sincere, because they've duped themselves.
01:05:35.000So what you need is some foundation of science literacy so that you can inoculate yourself against those who would exploit Your absence of knowledge of how the science works for their own gain.
01:05:52.000Well, not even for their own gain, just YouTube videos.
01:05:54.000I mean, someone could make a very compelling YouTube video where they get you convinced that, oh my god, dinosaurs aren't real.
01:06:00.000They start playing these things for you, they tell you about the- Or cell phones can pop popcorn.
01:06:17.000We'd be like, what are we doing with these phones?
01:06:19.000But there's a ton of those out there where people...
01:06:22.000See, it's one of the problems with a lack of dialogue.
01:06:25.000With someone who just has one narrative.
01:06:28.000Like, you sit down, you edit something, and you just talk.
01:06:32.000You know, it's very similar to, like, even if you write a blog.
01:06:35.000I mean, it's one thing if you're writing a blog, like, say, if you're an expert in electronics, you write a blog about how a television works.
01:06:40.000But if you're just a person, and you don't really understand what you're talking about, but you write something, and you use the right words, and you say it in a very compelling way, like an attack piece on someone that really has no basis in reality, you can have someone convinced this person's a terrible person just by writing something.
01:06:57.000Without them having to respond, like, hold up, stop, never did that.
01:07:24.000They say, oh, this is right, oh my gosh, but they don't know enough to know why it's wrong.
01:07:27.000Well, this is what I want to talk to you about.
01:07:28.000What is it about people that there's this very compelling need to find something out that other people don't know, like the world is flat, like dinosaurs aren't real?
01:07:41.000Like, that kind of stuff is very compelling to people.
01:07:47.000So what I do is I would say, instead of debating them, and some of your listeners are listening to this right now, all I would do is say, what is your best single bit of evidence for what you're claiming?
01:08:05.000And what would it take to show that you're wrong?
01:08:41.000Here's a website where we sent, in fact, it wasn't West, it was the Chinese, I think it was the Chinese or Europeans, sent a probe, an orbiter, to the moon so that it was close enough, because ground-based telescopes are not, they don't have the resolution to see the landing sites.
01:08:56.000But if you get close enough to the moon, you can.
01:08:58.000It photographed the entire surface of the moon, and there were the landing sites, and you saw the rover tracks and the base for the lunar module.
01:09:08.000And so that night, he went home and found it.
01:09:11.000Then he came back and says, well, NASA could have faked that.
01:09:33.000Conversation with that's a singular event which you could say in one way or like it is Possible that someone could fake a singular event.
01:09:41.000They can't fake whether or not the world's flat Right like that to me is the scariest one that there's so many people out there that believe the world is flat because You could you could literally see the curvature of the earth from a plane I mean you can get to parts of the you look at the images from the space station where they circle the moon and Or they circle the Earth,
01:10:35.000And when we went to the moon, the moon missions, when they're coming back, think about it.
01:10:39.000To get full earth, means the Sun is behind the astronauts on the way back to Earth, which means the side of the moon facing Earth is not lit.
01:10:49.000But that's the side of the moon they came from.
01:10:52.000So they want to visit the moon while it's sunlight there.
01:10:55.000They don't want to need flashlights when they get to the moon.
01:10:57.000So they visit the moon while there's sunlight.
01:11:00.000Earth, the view of Earth, at that time will not be full.
01:11:04.000So Apollo 17 was there long enough so that by the time they left, The moon was basically a new moon, Earth was full moon, Earth was full Earth, and then they got a full Earth photo.
01:11:16.000Those packs that they have on their back that regulate their temperature, that allows them to walk on the surface of the moon when it's 250 degrees above zero?
01:11:23.000Well, the side that's facing the sun is more than 200 degrees, and in the shadow it drops.
01:12:24.000A difference in temperature to itself, equilibrating it across the whole room.
01:12:28.000If you don't have air, then your temperature is measured by where's the energy coming from that's hitting you.
01:12:35.000And if the sun is hitting you, all that energy will be raising your temperature, and the side of you that's not facing photons, that temperature will drop.
01:12:42.000So you could survive it if you put yourself on a rotisserie, figure out the right rotation rate.
01:12:49.000And even then, you'd have to spend pretty quick in order to balance it all out.
01:13:31.000And so he showed a picture from Bear Mountain, which is a mountain in slightly upstate New York, where Manhattan is in the sightline of the summit of this mountain.
01:13:42.000And he says, given the curvature of the earth and this formula, you should not be able to see Manhattan at all.
01:15:18.000But don't leave out the physics, because that's where the fundamental operations of nature are to be found, of the physical universe are to be found.
01:15:26.000So what you have is, you have a gun at one side, It's like a thing that shoots out a projectile, and we'll call it a gun, at one side of the stage.
01:15:34.000And then you have like a little stuffed animal at the other side of the stage, held up with an electromagnet at the top of its head.
01:15:40.000And these two are exactly the same level.
01:15:42.000As the projectile comes out from this mini cannon, it trips an electric circuit that releases the electromagnet at the top of the stuffed animal.
01:17:36.000It's not like someone who really understands astrological charts and can plot it, and the moon's in retrograde, and you were born, and Celsius is rising, and all that crazy crap that they tried.
01:18:14.000And, you know, this is a very checkable statement.
01:18:17.000She just says this and everyone's listening and believing and says, wow, that can't be by accident.
01:18:21.000Well, I don't know when other Kennedys died, but I know when...
01:18:25.000Jack Kennedy died, and it was November 22nd, 1963. So I don't need to know if there's an eclipse then, I just need to know what phase the moon is in.
01:19:50.000He wore a NASA shirt at the Academy Award group photo.
01:19:57.000So I've got to give him some props for that.
01:20:00.000So I just say I have nothing more to say here.
01:20:04.000Hence, my argument with her lasted less than five minutes.
01:20:07.000Now, when they're trying to decide what your personality would be and what you can dictate from your birth date and what time you were born, what are they exactly trying to connect?
01:20:21.000So, I had a deeper awareness of this recently when I learned that people take the names of things very seriously.
01:21:46.000By its effect on the motions of objects.
01:21:50.000So a certain strength of gravity will force you to move at a given speed as you near it and as you pull away.
01:21:56.000And we see this in galaxies, galaxy clusters, binary galaxies.
01:22:02.000And they've measured entire galaxies that are made completely out of this FRED. At least 80% of the force of gravity manifested in these galaxies is FRED, yes.
01:24:18.000Then you go to the astrologers' tables, and they say, oh, this is the rain sign, or this is a drought sign, and they take the names of things, and those names are what they interpret, based on where the moon is, the sun is, where the planets are, and whatever the angle configurations there are,
01:24:36.000and each angle has a certain latitude over which they'll count it as a hit.
01:24:59.000But they did have this real fascinating connection with these certain constellations and all of the different things that they thought were attached to these certain constellations.
01:26:26.000Be more awake next time you take the data.
01:26:29.000Bring a friend to observe it with you.
01:26:30.000Whatever it takes to minimize the chances that you will misinterpret what you're looking at so that you don't think something is true that is not or think something is not true that is.
01:26:43.000Do whatever it takes To support that mission statement.
01:26:48.000That's what the scientific method is, and that's what we do as scientists, and that's why when you bring all of these things that people do, so it's the astrology and the crystal healers and the therapeutic touch people.
01:27:23.000And if you don't, and you want something to be true, even if you're surprised by something that might have been true, that you were against, Still, you need someone else to check it.
01:27:32.000And you only get an emergent scientific truth when you have agreement among different people's experiments.
01:27:39.000So even if you get a result that you're happy with, it is not yet a scientific truth until you can confirm it by other people who have no investment in you, who don't care about you.
01:27:50.000In fact, we're trying to show that you're wrong.
01:27:53.000This is what made Einstein so great, because no one believed his relativity, and they kept devising ever more accurate experiments to show he was wrong, and it ended up showing that he was right by ever higher precision.
01:28:05.000Do you think that we're doing ourselves a disservice by not teaching people how the mind works, how confirmation bias works?
01:31:27.000Well, I think also it would be really beneficial to teach people how to manage perspective and how to look at life in a way that's going to be beneficial to you.
01:31:37.000We're not really given very many tools to manage the mind.
01:32:13.000Well, anytime you talk about alternative schooling, people look at you like you're some sort of a hippie freak who wants your kids to eat granola and live in the mountains and get their own spring water.
01:38:31.000The rotation rate of the space station.
01:38:35.000I calculated that, and I calculated what g-force would you have on the outer perimeter of the space station in 2001. And I did the math, and I forgot the exact number, something like between two and three g's.
01:39:05.000Because the Strauss Waltz, as the thing turns, and the space shuttle that's approaching it matches its rotation rate with the opening in the center of the space station.
01:39:16.000This whole ballet, this entire ballet...
01:40:13.000It's zero G because it is in free fall towards Earth.
01:40:17.000So it's constantly in free fall, but it's just going around the...
01:40:20.000Yeah, it's in free fall towards Earth, but it's going sideways so fast that the amount that it has fallen equals precisely the curvature of the Earth.
01:41:18.000Who came back from space and was talking about the excruciating difficulty he had readjusting to gravity after being in a zero-gravity environment for so long.
01:41:28.000He's just showing off because he's, like, setting records for being...
01:42:19.000And one of the female astronauts they send...
01:42:23.000That one there happens to be, they learn, is pregnant, and they can't bring her back, and so she gives birth on Mars, and the first person who is ever born on Mars.
01:42:36.000And then they keep it a secret, and then he comes back as a teenager that falls in love.
01:43:22.000So if you accelerate at 1G towards a destination, then you'll always feel Earth's gravity, and you'll get there awesomely fast.
01:43:31.000But you would have to have so much fuel or rely on something new.
01:43:34.000Well, you need filling stations en route, this sort of thing.
01:43:36.000And if you do this, you accelerate 1G halfway there, then you turn the spaceship around, then you decelerate at 1G, For the other half of the trip, so that when you get there, you're not whizzing past it in a flyby.
01:47:26.000So your concern for debris is well-placed.
01:47:28.000And we may be putting so much debris in space that we will close ourselves off from space travel because of the dangers it would take to get through our own garbage heap.
01:48:41.000Yeah, yeah, and they basically did a kinetic kill on a satellite.
01:48:46.000So a kinetic kill, for those who don't know, is you don't need explosives if the speed of the projectile and its kinetic energy is higher than the energy that would be in the explosive shell itself.
01:49:22.000I can calculate how much kinetic energy this thing has.
01:49:26.000There will be a point where I give it so much kinetic energy, the kinetic energy is greater than the chemical energy of the conventional explosive that I put in the warhead.
01:49:52.000The argument for the longest time that the craters on the moon were calderas from volcanoes and not asteroid impacts, the geologists argue strenuously these can't be asteroid impacts.
01:50:08.000They've got to be calderas, these thousand craters on the moon.
01:52:20.000So on impact, even at an angle, it is a singular point explosion.
01:52:24.000And that's why every single crater is a perfect circle.
01:52:27.000We call that a high-speed impact, where the speed is greater, the energy of the speed is greater than the energy that's holding it together.
01:52:36.000Now, you have experience in this, okay?
01:53:20.000So when you do it against the wall, you see the snowball completely disappear in a mini snowball explosion, if you will.
01:53:28.000So this works for any comparison of projectile speed and what we call the binding energy of the object itself.
01:53:37.000This is why the intercontinental ballistic missiles never carried conventional warheads.
01:53:43.000Because there's speed coming out of space, because they leave the atmosphere, go from one continent to the other, and then they fall out of the sky.
01:53:51.000That speed gives them more kinetic energy than any conventional warhead would have had.
01:53:56.000But then we figured out how to make small nuclear warheads.
01:55:56.000Well, that's a lot of atmosphere, because it's gas, and this thing is solid.
01:56:00.000However, the thing is going, what, 15, 20 miles per second?
01:56:05.000It's falling into Jupiter at 20 miles, whatever the speed was.
01:56:08.000If you go at 20 miles per second, you will cover that much atmosphere in a fraction of a second.
01:56:15.000So in a fraction of a second, you go from 20 miles per second to zero, or to a tiny fraction of that speed, all that energy has to go somewhere.
01:56:30.000That was another terrifying statistic that I read about the impact that hit the Yucatan and killed the dinosaurs, that how deep it had gone into the Earth's surface within the first second.
01:58:49.000They first thought it was volcanic, and the geologists thought it was volcanic again.
01:58:54.000But one geologist, in particular, Eugene Shoemaker, who was in line to be on one of the lunar missions, and then he had like a heart murmur, and then they sent Jack Schmidt in his stead, who was also a geologist-turned-U.S. senator from...
01:59:47.000There were iron miners who bought the land so they can get this huge meteor that they were sure was just sitting down there that they could mine for its natural resource.
02:03:29.000I had to get the Stephen Hawking's quote out for you.
02:03:33.000Stephen Hawking was talking about the possibility of alien life discovering us.
02:03:39.000And that it would be a terrible, terrible thing if it did happen.
02:03:43.000If you look at what has happened to other primitive life forms when we discovered them, primitive cultures when we discovered them, do you share that same opinion?
02:03:52.000That if something did find us, I don't have a strong opinion on that question, but I have an analysis of his comment.
02:03:59.000He is worried about the possibility of aliens enslaving us based on the reality that we've done that to ourselves.
02:04:19.000His fear of aliens derives not from actual knowledge of aliens, but from actual knowledge of ourselves.
02:04:26.000Any time a more advanced civilization has come upon a less technologically advanced civilization, it did not bode well for the less advanced civilization.
02:04:35.000And that happened in North America, South America, North America with Europeans, South America, the Spanish, Australia with the Brits.
02:04:46.000It never boded well for the less technologically advanced civilization.
02:04:50.000His factual knowledge of that Leads him to suspect that aliens would be exactly the same.
02:05:48.000We reach a point where expansion is not possible because we are warring with ourselves to gain the territory that each other has obtained.
02:06:01.000So it has been argued sociologically that That the very act of wanting to colonize is self-limiting against successful colonization of the galaxy.
02:06:14.000Because to colonize the galaxy has to be done in an organized way.
02:06:17.000You take this sector, I take this sector, but if I want territory and I want it now, and my kids want it now, I want that territory, not this other one.
02:06:36.000So it may be that the very kind of civilization that could peacefully colonize a galaxy It's not the kind of civilization that would colonize the galaxy at all.
02:08:28.000So you say, okay, whatever it takes to geoengineer Mars and ship a billion people there, it's got to be easier to create a perfect viral serum that makes us immune to all possible disease.
02:09:11.000And if an asteroid is coming that you can't deflect, which would surprise me if you could ship a billion people to Mars, you just let them all die?
02:09:21.000You're going to let all the Earth people die and the Mars people survive just so you can save the species?
02:09:52.000That whatever it takes, it's got to be easier to put up some kind of net that finds any asteroid that could possibly harm us and zaps them out of the sky.
02:10:32.000There's no sign of intelligent life on Earth.
02:10:34.000Okay, but is there another possibility that civilizations don't ever get to travel like that?
02:10:40.000Because what happens is, as they advance, and as their technology advances, they become, instead of a biological entity seeking to spread its genetics throughout the universe, they become some sort of symbiotic artificial life.
02:10:54.000That as they create, as they advance their technology and as they continue to innovate, they reach a limitation in biology and then eventually create artificial life that sees no desire whatsoever to travel.
02:12:23.000And why would it limit itself to all of our emotions and sexual desires and jealousy and all the ridiculous things that are holding us back?